The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

by David Quammen

  He solved the availability problem for pigeons by setting up his own breeding operation in a backyard aviary. He was interested in the fancy breeds, the pouters and fantails and tumblers and English carriers and others, whose extravagant shapes and behaviors reflected hundreds of years’ selective breeding by proud, obsessive pigeon fanciers. “The fancy,” as it was called, wasn’t an expensive avocation and some of those fanciers were workingmen, who coddled and bred their birds in London rooftop coops and talked the subtleties of coloring, beak shape, carunculated eyes, and feathery decor in their local pubs. Having begun with the cold detachment of an experimentalist, Darwin found himself charmed by the pigeons and amused by this subculture surrounding them. He studied breeders’ manuals, corresponded with experts, read Poultry Chronicle, went on pigeon-shopping excursions in London, even joined two of the city’s pigeon-fancier clubs. At the height of his own fancy, he had sixteen different breeds. “I am getting on splendidly with my pigeons,” he told his son William, the one at boarding school. He’d just added some trumpeters, nuns, and turbits, plus a small pair of German pouters, given to him by a brewer pal in London. In the summer, Darwin confided to Willy, he looked forward to flying his tumblers. So much for the cold heart and the sharp knife of science.

  Late in 1855 he drafted a form letter, a generalized request he intended sending to overseas contacts and acquaintances. It was phrased like a classified ad under the WANTED heading. “Skins,” it began: “Any domestic breed or race, of Poultry, Pigeons, Rabbits, Cats, & even dogs, if not too large, which has been bred for many generations in any little visited region, would be of great value.” He was asking a sizable favor: Please ship me specimens. In addition to the skin with its feathers or fur, he wanted a humerus and a femur and as much as possible of the cranium, preferably all still connected by sinew. The part about “many generations” in a “little visited region” was important for his studies of how individuals within a given population vary. Darwin now recognized that this crucial phenomenon, variation, occurs constantly in wild species as well as in domestic stock—but what causes it? Huge question. He didn’t know. One possibility, he thought, was differences in external circumstance. So he hoped to see how domestic breeds might vary when raised in exotic locales such as Persia, Jamaica, or Tunisia. He would happily reimburse the costs of skinning and shipping.

  He made a list of the men to whom this request went. It included such figures as Rajah James Brooke (in Sarawak), Sir John C. Bowring (governor of Hong Kong), Sir Robert Schomburgk (an explorer of Guiana, and then British consul in Santo Domingo), the botanist G. H. K. Thwaites (in Ceylon), E. L. Layard (a museum curator in Capetown), and Edward Blyth (another curator, in Calcutta). Blyth would become one of Darwin’s most helpful and prolix respondents. Halfway down the list appeared an inconspicuous name, “R. Wallace,” unaccompanied by any geographical notation. Darwin evidently had a mailing address of some sort for Alfred Russel Wallace—possibly the one in Sarawak, Wallace’s temporary base—but at this point he couldn’t have guessed exactly where, within the vast Malay Archipelago, Mr. Wallace might actually be. And they barely knew each other. Darwin was just tossing a penny into a well.

  23

  Wallace’s paper from Sarawak, about the “law” regulating the “introduction” of new species, was published in September 1855. It created no sensation, but it did generate some murmurs. Wallace’s agent, Samuel Stevens, told Wallace about several London naturalists who had groused that he should stop theorizing and stick to collecting facts. Charles Lyell, on the other hand, found the paper intriguing. Out in Calcutta, Edward Blyth got his copy of the Annals and Magazine of Natural History and reacted similarly. In one of his long letters to Darwin, near the end of the year, Blyth asked: “What think you of Wallace’s paper in the Ann. M. N. H.?” His own answer: “Good! Upon the whole!” Darwin’s opinion was different. He read the paper around that time and made some notes for his own memory, as he routinely did with his eclectic research reading. That was Darwin’s way, methodical and thorough; he chewed through huge amounts of material, swallowed the good bits, spit out the rotten stuff and the husks. Wallace’s paper tasted like husk.

  It discussed geographical distribution, Darwin recorded, but offered “nothing very new.” It used the simile of a branching tree (“my simile,” in Darwin’s jealous view) to represent affinities and diversity in nature. It mentioned rudimentary organs, though to what point? And the Galápagos comment—about how those peculiar creatures and curious patterns had never received “even a conjectural explanation”—didn’t pass unnoticed. Darwin may even have winced, knowing it was true. He hadn’t risked any explanation in the Journal, but…give a man time. Well, all right, he’d had time. Still, not enough. And what did Mr. Wallace know of the complex considerations? Rather than arguing the point in his mind, or rising to this small provocation as a challenge, Darwin dismissed Wallace’s whole effort. He saw no real explanatory value to the “law” of juxtapositions and he heard nothing in the vague language except a rehash of old-fashioned natural theology. Now if Wallace had scratched the word “creation” and spoken instead about “generation” of new species, Darwin told himself, he could agree with the paper. So far as it went. But Wallace hadn’t used any such word. “It seems all creation with him,” Darwin judged, and went back to his pigeons.

  He sent off his letters to Thwaites, Layard, and those others on the list, including “R. Wallace.” I would be most grateful, he told them, for any skins of chickens, pigeons, rabbits, or ducks.

  24

  After a year in Sarawak, Alfred Wallace shifted onward in the Malay Archipelago to find new hunting grounds, beyond the range of previous British travelers and collectors. He caught a Chinese-owned schooner that stopped briefly at Bali and then deposited him on Lombok, a small island just thirty miles further east. Wallace stayed on Lombok for two months, shooting birds and observing the local culture while waiting for another boat that would take him to Macassar, a port on the bigger island of Celebes. Lombok is where he first encountered the sulfur-crested cockatoo, a gorgeous but noisy bird not found on Bali or any of the other islands westward. He also noticed the rainbow bee-eater, another pretty species common in Australia. Wallace would eventually realize from these signals and others that, just in bouncing from Bali to Lombok, across a narrow but deep strait, he had moved from one biogeographical zone into another. He was now in the realm of Australian fauna. That seemed odd. Why should there be such well-demarcated zones?

  From Lombok, he sent off a crate of specimens, to Stevens in London by way of Singapore, containing more than three hundred bird skins. Most of those, including as many cockatoos as he’d been able to kill, were intended for sale. The crate also contained something so ordinary that, coming from a commercial collector of biological exotica, it must have seemed peculiar: a local variant of the barnyard duck. Wallace’s note to the agent explained: “The domestic duck var. is for Mr. Darwin.” Please forward.

  It’s hard to say whether that duck ever reached Darwin. If so, he was presumably grateful but not surprised. He had come to expect a high degree of generous cooperation from the people (especially those below him in social status) he called on for research assistance. Around the same time, Wallace wrote to him directly. Sent from Celebes, traveling the slow mail routes of the day, this letter took six months to reach Down House. Like Darwin’s first note to Wallace, it hasn’t been preserved in the huge archive of Darwin correspondence; its existence and contents can only be inferred from the reply it evoked. “By your letter, & even still more by your paper in Annals,” Darwin wrote Wallace on May 1, 1857, “I can plainly see that we have thought much alike.” Choosing his phrases with some delicacy, he added that “to a certain extent” they had reached “similar conclusions.” Furthermore, Darwin said, he endorsed “almost every word” of Wallace’s paper and considered it rare for two theorists to agree so closely. Given Darwin’s cold dismissal of the “law” paper in his reading notes—�
�nothing very new”—this was spreading the butter a bit thickly.

  But something had changed. Wallace’s lost letter may have contained a declaration of transmutationist views, and maybe also a boast that his paper was just the first step toward an explanatory theory. Such news would have put Darwin on guard. In any case Darwin knew that Wallace, consciously or not, was noodling along the edges of transmutationism. How consciously, how fruitfully? Those were separate questions, which Darwin doesn’t seem to have asked. Seeing the younger man as a diligent but unsophisticated field naturalist and a possible but unlikely competitor, he was happy to share facts and vague musings, and careful to get more than he gave. Several other factors, in the meantime, had affected Darwin’s state of mind.

  First, he had grown more impatient to reveal his big secret. He confessed to his old chum Fox, a non-scientist, that his present work involved the question whether species are immutable or not. (He knew his own answer to that but pretended to be uncertain.) He hoped to produce a book on the subject within a few years, he told Fox. With several scientific colleagues he went further, admitting his conviction that species do transmutate and outlining his theory. Joseph Hooker was already in the know, having by now read Darwin’s unpublished 1844 essay, but early in 1856 Darwin revealed his thinking to Charles Lyell and two or three others, including T. H. Huxley, the brilliant anatomist and popular lecturer who taught natural history in London. Huxley and Hooker and their wives, along with one other scientist, paid the Darwins a weekend visit at Down House in April, during which the host spilled his beans about natural selection. Skeptical of religion, argumentative by nature, Huxley greeted Darwin’s wild idea with wild enthusiasm but managed to keep the secret when he went back to London. Lyell and his wife also visited the Darwins for a few days that month, and on the morning of April 16 the two men had a quiet talk. Darwin laid out his heretical, ingenious theory. He must have gulped hard first, given that Lyell had lambasted Lamarckian transmutationism in Principles of Geology. Lyell’s reaction was strong but complicated, reflecting both his intellectual courage and his attunement to the imperatives of a scientific career. He didn’t accept Darwin’s notion, not yet. He did recognize its power and importance. In a private journal of his own, devoted to the species question, Lyell faithfully summarized that day’s discussion. Remembering what Wallace called the “law” of closely allied species appearing adjacent in space and time, Lyell acknowledged that Darwin’s theory of natural selection seemed to explain it. He sensed that these two hounds were running the same hare.

  The second new factor in Darwin’s mental mix was that Lyell gave him some pointed advice: Publish. Enough delay, enough caution, enough perfectionism. Go to press. “I wish you would publish some small fragment of your data,” Sir Charles wrote shortly after the visit; “pigeons if you please & so out with the theory & let it take date—& be cited—& understood.” He was still a creationist himself, but also a loyal friend. Vicariously, on Darwin’s behalf, he felt the urgency to announce this great discovery—or anyway, this dramatic idea—and claim credit.

  Darwin promised to consider Lyell’s suggestion. But he was reluctant and, as he admitted, confused. To come “out with the theory”—that was easier said than done. How could he do justice, in a hasty synopsis, to such a provocative and complicated set of facts, inferences, and concepts? How could he make the theory persuasive without presenting all his evidence? How could he answer preemptively all the objections he expected? And what was the rush? He felt strung between scientific ideals and scientific ambition. “I rather hate the idea of writing for priority,” he told Lyell, “yet I certainly shd. be vexed if any one were to publish my doctrines before me.” That sentence captures it: He hated the idea of writing for priority, but dammit he did want priority.

  A week later he wrote to Hooker, his closest friend, with whom he could be even more candid. “I had a good talk with Lyell about my species work, & he urges me strongly to publish something.” A journal article covering part of the subject, for instance. Or I might do a very thin volume, Darwin said, except that it’s “dreadfully unphilosophical” to publish such a thing without detailed factual support and references. He didn’t want his work to look glib and racy, like Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. “But Lyell seemed to think I might do this, at the suggestion of friends,” he told Hooker, “& on the ground which I might state that I had been at work for 18 years, & yet could not publish for several years.” The special pleading had begun.

  He “could not publish” for several years. Why? Because he was cautious and methodical and hadn’t yet set himself to the writing. Because he had chosen to proceed slowly. Now he was of two minds: He wanted to put something on record, for the sake of claiming priority, and he wanted to delay publication, for the sake of better preparing his case. He wanted to do it for his own peace of mind, but he preferred to say that he’d been persuaded by friends. Over the full sweep of his life, Charles Darwin was a man of great integrity, great goodness, deep generosity, and considerable courage; this episode puts his strengths in relief by showing him in some of his weakest, least forthright moments.

  Hooker’s reply, which also hasn’t survived, argued against Lyell’s suggestion of a journal article, though not necessarily against a “preliminary essay” in the form of a separate volume. A journal article, even in those days, implied some level of institutional vetting. But a little book, published privately at the author’s expense, wouldn’t implicate anyone except the author in its wild-eyed ideas. It wouldn’t require editorial review or full citation of evidentiary sources. On the other hand, Hooker warned, releasing a slim volume now might undermine the impact of the big book that Darwin intended to publish eventually.

  So the two trusted advisers offered conflicting counsel, and Darwin himself was flummoxed. He did begin drafting a short version—call it another essay, an article, whatever—but he soon grew frustrated at the effort to select and reduce so severely. By late summer of 1856 he had brushed off Lyell’s advice and changed his approach, writing chapter by chapter on a scale that would eventually yield several fat, exhaustive tomes commensurate to Lyell’s own three-volume Principles of Geology. He failed to appreciate (or decided subliminally to ignore the warning signs) that young Wallace was following the same intellectual route at a pace not braked by caution.

  Toward the end of the year, Darwin wrote again to Lyell: “I am working very steadily at my big Book;—I have found it quite impossible to publish any preliminary essay or sketch; but am doing my work as complete as my present materials allow, without waiting to perfect them. And this much acceleration I owe to you.” It wasn’t acceleration enough.

  25

  Darwin and Wallace were now tenuously in touch but communicating at cross purposes through the international mails. Did the duck sent from Lombok ever make it to Darwin’s dissecting bench? My guess is no, because the bird goes unmentioned after Wallace’s cover note. Maybe the whole shipment of specimens went astray. Maybe it reached Samuel Stevens in a state of unpresentable rot. Anyway, no trace of a thank you appears in Darwin’s otherwise unctuous letter of May 1, 1857, in which he conveyed his compliments on Wallace’s “law” paper.

  There’s another odd comment in that letter, showing Darwin’s sensitivity about how long he had delayed. After noting the similarity of their views, and the rarity of such concord between two theorizing naturalists, he stroked a dash on the page, as though clearing his throat. Then he wrote: “This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first notebook, on the question how & in what way do species & varieties differ from each other.” At last, Darwin intimated, he had found the answer. Anyway he’d found an answer, a distinct and tangible idea. Others would judge whether it was right or wrong. He couldn’t possibly explain this idea in a mere letter, he told Wallace, too complicated. “I am now preparing my work for publication, but I find the subject so very large, that though I have written many chapters, I do not suppose I shall go to pr
ess for two years.” He was wheedling for time and consideration.

  Although he still didn’t take Wallace quite seriously—not seriously enough—he felt mildly wary. With its histrionic exclamation point, Darwin’s remark was an assertion of his own interests, precedence, and claims. A male dog makes the same sort of assertion, raising his leg to mark a tree. Wallace’s nose must have been off, because he didn’t get the hint.

  His Abominable Volume

  1858–1859

  26

  On or about June 18, 1858, another mailing from Alfred Wallace arrived at Darwin’s front door. It came, like the others, from somewhere in the Malay Archipelago. It had been four months in transit on a series of boats. This envelope was bulkier than usual, containing a manuscript as well as a letter. Darwin opened it. Scanning the letter, reading the enclosure, he felt a nauseating surge of emotions that began with surprise and swelled quickly toward despair. His big book at this point was still a work in progress, two-thirds written and growing more unwieldy every day. Meanwhile his young pen pal, Wallace, had independently conceived the idea of evolution by natural selection.