The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
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He hadn’t dissected them. It was a fancy, not a way of doing science. He hadn’t wondered about their geographical distribution or their morphological homologies—not in those days. He’d simply acquired them, identified them, and treasured them. Looking back from old age, he could still recollect particular species that had delighted him—such as Panagaeus cruxmajor, an orange-and-black ground beetle—and the rotting trees and dirt banks where he’d caught them. He told a story on himself that showed off his goofy zeal: Hunting beetles one day in some dead bark, he’d spotted a rare kind, then another, and grabbed one in each hand; then he’d seen “a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out,” allowing that specimen and the third to get away. A beetle-flavored pratfall.
Telling such stories was the easy, light side of autobiography. The harder part was asking himself: What sort of man, with what strengths and weaknesses, what convictions, what doubts, have I been? He did that, too.
None of this was intended for publication. After nine weeks of casual work, he tucked the manuscript away and returned to his plants. Several times over the next few years he pulled it back out and wrote more, inserting fresh recollections and afterthoughts, updating the section where he reflected on his published books. In finished form, with its artless candor and conversational tone, it offers a readable mix of personal narrative, portraits from memory, and philosophical self-examination. Its most revealing section (omitted from Darwin’s own careless table of contents, as though he halfway intended to leave this part invisible) is titled “Religious Belief.” He must have struggled with some tension between delicacy and bluntness, as he committed these thoughts to paper, because of the gap between his views and Emma’s.
Before the idea of transmutation occurred to him, Darwin recollected, he’d been a very orthodox young man. Aboard the Beagle he was teased for his Bible-quoting piety. While conceiving his theory in the notebooks, during the late 1830s, he had thought much about religion. But years of studying the fixed laws of nature had eroded his credence in miracles, and then he “gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as divine revelation.” There was no smugness and no hastiness to his loss of faith; it happened almost against his will. “Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.” The change came so slowly, in fact, that he’d felt no anxiety. And now that it was done, he harbored no doubts. He added sternly:
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
To Emma, that passage would be especially disturbing. (She suppressed it from the first published version of the autobiography, five years after Darwin’s death.) Darwin must have foreseen her reaction and felt badly about it, but in the privacy of the manuscript, once and for all, he was speaking his mind.
Beyond renouncing Christian dogma, he had given up any general belief in a personal God. What about the existence of evil, in a world supposedly run by a benevolent, omnipotent deity? That’s so illogical, Darwin wrote, that “it revolts our understanding.” What about the immortality of the human soul? That’s a comforting notion we tend to embrace by instinct, he suggested, because the alternative is too dark to contemplate. What about the ultimate origin of life? The birth of the universe? Is there an ethereal First Cause, an abstract and impersonal Ultimate Being that set the world and its laws into motion? “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems,” Darwin admitted. “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” His friend Huxley had invented the very word “agnostic,” and Darwin was glad to have it. He felt that the alternative, “atheist,” was too aggressive and confident.
The whole theme of this oddly titled section, “Religious Belief,” is his lack of any such thing. His early religious beliefs had all been supplanted by guiding convictions of another kind. He looked back at William Paley’s old argument from design, as given in Natural Theology and once admiringly absorbed by Darwin himself as a young Cambridge student. The design argument fails, he declared flatly, “now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.” The beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell, unlike the hinge of a door, doesn’t imply the existence of an intelligent designer. “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection,” Darwin wrote, “than in the course which the wind blows.”
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His first draft of the autobiography was finished and set aside by early September 1876, when Frank’s wife, Amy, went into labor. She gave birth to a healthy son but then spiraled away herself, probably from puerperal fever. After horrific convulsions and kidney failure, she died, with her husband and father-in-law both there to watch her go. Darwin hadn’t absented himself this time from the difficult scene. Frank buried Amy in Wales, among her father’s people, and then returned to vacate their little house, too grim with memories and emptiness now. He and the baby boy, named Bernard, moved back across the village into the big family home.
So the first Darwin grandchild grew through his infant and toddler years in the close presence of a doting grandfather. Unlike so many of Darwin and Emma’s own children, Bernard was fat and healthy as a baby, “a prize article” with a sort of Buddha calm. “He has a pretty mouth and expression,” Emma thought, “and is particularly amused at his grandfather’s face.” Darwin was reciprocally amused. He didn’t turn Bernard’s growth and development into a research topic, as he had with his own firstborn son; he simply enjoyed the little guy. Emma and he ordered renovations on the house so as better to accommodate Frank (with his own working life, as Darwin’s assistant) and Bernard. The four of them went on a vacation together (with Etty and probably Bessy in tow also), traveling by private railway car to the Lake District. Bernard and Darwin developed pet names for each other—grandpa was “Baba” and Bernard was, for some nonsense reason, “Abbadubba.” At the age of five, Abbadubba was welcome to amuse himself quietly on the floor of Darwin’s study, drawing pictures, while Baba worked. They shared walks around the garden and stood hand-in-hand on the lawn during an outdoor concert. Within the next few years Bernard was destined to change quickly, of course, growing past the cute toddler stage into a lanky Etonian teenager, but Darwin wouldn’t live to see that.
By late 1881, he was feeling heart pains. And now it wasn’t some mysterious chronic ailment or hypochondria.
Unlike the butler Parslow, he never retired. Since he didn’t hold a job or a position—instead, he was held by a vocation—there was nothing for him to quit. His work was the heartbeat of his life. He hated idleness even more than he hated exhaustion. He needed a project, always. His last major research effort involved earthworms and their role in making soil, which led to that small, quirky book mentioned earlier, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, published the year before he died. He had first addressed the subject in 1837, when he was fresh off the Beagle, and then returned to it forty years later, after the more urgent tasks of his scientific destiny had been fulfilled. He liked earthworms. They met his standards for a good research subject: humble creatures, nearly ubiquitous, and more important than they seem, producing tiny incremental effects with big cumulative consequence. He kept some in his study, potted like plants, and performed all manner of dotty experiments. There was no aspect of earthworm behavior that didn’t interest him. “Worms do not possess any sense of hearing,” he wrote in the book.
They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and
loudest tones of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts, if care was taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet.
Frank was the bassoonist. Emma played the piano. Little Bernard, according to one reliable source, commanded the whistle. Worm research, Darwin style, was an activity for the whole family. He established, with their help, that earthworms aren’t musical.
The Formation of Vegetable Mould came out in October 1881, and, to the amazement of both Darwin and John Murray, all copies of the first printing and then the second were snatched up fast. Murray reprinted three more times, a thousand copies each time, before the end of the year. Readers evidently were ready for such a plainspoken, earthy volume from the formidable Mr. Darwin. Its brevity was another recommending feature. The book sold as though Darwin’s homey but effective brand of science, combining extraordinarily keen and patient observation with kitchen-simple experimental methods, was going out of style. As a matter of fact, it was.
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He died on the afternoon of April 19, 1882, of degenerative heart failure, at the age of seventy-three. Emma and Frank and Henrietta and Bessy were at his bedside. Bernard, in the nursery, knew only that Baba was somehow ill. The end wasn’t tranquil; he suffered pain, nausea, and spasms that left him retching blood. His white beard was streamed and sticky with red. Between the attacks he caught his breath weakly. At one point he said, “I am not the least afraid to die,” knowing people would wonder. At another moment, he whispered to Emma, “My love, my precious love.” After several hours, he muttered, “If I could but die,” and repeated the phrase like a plea, trying to let go. He dozed, he woke; they gave him a few spoonfuls of whiskey; he felt faint, and blacked out again. Then he was gone—gone in more senses than one. He left Downe in a horse-drawn hearse, headed for London.
The world had swooped in and claimed his body for history and posterity and the glory of British culture, et cetera, by way of a hastily assembled consensus among government officials and his scientific friends. The consensus decreed that Charles Darwin be buried in Westminster Abbey, like Lyell, like Newton and Chaucer, not in the village churchyard amid Erasmus and little Charles and Mary Eleanor and the good Kentish worms, as he might have preferred. If there was ever a funeral from which Darwin would have absented himself, given the chance to dodge out, it was his own. Too much fuss. Bad for the stomach. Queen Victoria skipped it herself, and so did Prime Minister Gladstone; but Parslow was there. The pallbearers included Hooker and Huxley and Wallace.
Before all this occurred, though, Darwin had finished one more small piece of work. The worms were his final book but not his final publication. In the weeks before his death, he had turned back to another early interest: means of dispersal, by which animal and plant species colonize new places.
It’s the first premise of modern biogeography, crucial to his evolutionary theory, that patterns of species distribution reflect natural dispersal from points of evolutionary origin, not whimsical geographic assignments from the hand of God. Darwin had investigated such means of dispersal, back in the 1850s, with his experiments involving saltwater immersion and other forms of simulated environmental travail. He had rafted asparagus across tiny seas. He had shoved seeds into the bellies of dead fish, fed the fish to pelicans, then collected the pelican poop and extracted the seeds to see whether they retained their capacity to germinate. He had dangled duck feet in an aquarium full of freshwater snails, inviting the adventuresome to take hold. And now he found fascination in a similar piece of data, derived not from experiment but from accidental observation. Somewhere near Northampton, in a stream or a pond, a small freshwater clam had clamped itself onto the leg of a water beetle.
One beetle, dragging a miniature mollusk. Extracted from its scientific context—from the questions of dispersal and biogeography and evolution versus special creation—it seems utterly insignificant. Maybe it seems insignificant within its context. But it didn’t to Darwin. He described the beetle-clam connection in a short note to Nature, which appeared on April 6, 1882. Titled “On the Dispersal of Freshwater Bivalves,” it was his last published work. The point was simple but substantive: Here’s evidence of how a fertile clam might travel by air (since water beetles fly as well as swim) from one pond to another and establish a transplanted population in a new place. Dispersal, biogeography. Colonization, and then a fresh phase of evolution.
He had gotten his raw data, as he’d always gotten so much, through the mail. A young man named W. D. Crick had written from Northampton, bringing this little coleopterous discovery to Darwin’s attention. Mr. Crick (whose eventual grandson, Francis Crick, would play his own sizable role in the history of biology as co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) was a rising shoe-factory owner with a fondness for nature. The beetle was Dytiscus marginalis, a large diving predator. What species of clam? W. D. Crick didn’t know. When Darwin wrote back, asking further questions, Mr. Crick obliged him by sending the beetle itself, and the clam, by return post. But the two creatures were no longer attached. Being out of water was stressful for both of them, and the clam (the “shell,” as Darwin and Crick called it) had dropped away and slammed itself tight.
“I have placed the shell in fresh-water, to see if the valve will open,” Darwin informed Crick. He wanted to know whether, like the briny asparagus seeds, it was still viable after its travels.
There were matters of science at issue, and there were matters of life, common decency, mercy. “As the wretched beetle was still feebly alive,” he told Crick, “I have put it in a bottle with chopped laurel leaves, that it may die an easy and quicker death.” Any naturalist of his day knew that laurel leaves, when chopped, release prussic acid, containing hydrogen cyanide. Darwin didn’t want his last beetle to suffer. He was a gentle man, quite aware that he’d already caused discomfort enough.
Source Notes
For the sake of clarity and simplicity, Darwin’s writings are cited by abbreviated title. Correspondence indicates the series edited by Burkhardt, et al. A citation of “Correspondence 3:43,” for instance, directs you to page 43 of the third volume, covering the years 1844–46. CD’s Notebooks is the compilation by Barrett, et al. (1987). Autobiography refers to the Barlow (1969) edition. For citations from The Origin of Species, first edition, I’ve used a facsimile reprint of that edition (Harvard University Press, 1964, with an introduction by Ernst Mayr), cited as The Origin. Other sources are cited by author and year, or as descriptively necessary.
In quoting from Darwin’s letters and private notes, I have in a very few instances made small corrections to spelling, punctuation, or grammar.
Home and Dry
the face on the dollar bill: as it is, currently, on the Bank of England’s £10 note.
“People often talk”: CD’s Notebooks, 222–23.
“God created humans pretty much”: Gallup News Service, November 19, 2004, and earlier poll reports from Gallup.
The Fabric Falls
“a disgrace to yourself”: Autobiography, 28.
“Why, the shape of his head”: Ibid., 79.
“writing is most tedious & difficult”: Correspondence 2: 39.
“If there is the slightest foundation”: Beagle Diary, 357, note 1, quoting from CD’s ornithological notes.
“These facts origin (especially latter)”: Correspondence 2: 431.
called his notebooks on the “transmutation” of species: Ibid., 2: 431.
he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection: CD’s Notebooks, 170.
“all warm-blooded animals have arisen”: Ibid., note 1.5.
“Why is life short”: Ibid., 171.
One result: “adaptation”: Ibid.
“who will dare say what result”: Ibid., 172.
“According to this view animals”: Ibid.
“Each species changes”: Ibid., 175.
he drew a rough diagram of a lineage: Ibid., 180.
“Apteryx,” he wrote, “a good instance”: Ibid., 211.
“Species have a real existence in nature”: Quoted in Hull (1983), 68.
“Seldom in the history of ideas”: Ibid., 15.
“The changes in species must be very slow”: CD’s Notebooks, 242.
“all the change that has been accumulated”: Ibid., 248.