The Philosophical Breakfast Club (55 page)

Owen—following the work of colleagues in Germany—argued that individual vertebrate animals could be seen as modified instantiations of patterns or “archetype forms” that existed in the Divine Mind—archetypes that functioned as a kind of blueprint that God used in creating the universe and its inhabitants. Homologies—similar structures that had quite different purposes, such as the wing of a bird and the fore-limb of a quadruped—were explained by Owen as being variations on the archetype used by God in designing vertebrates. Similarly, Owen was able to explain the existence of structures without apparent purpose, such as male nipples. In Owen’s view, such structures did not contradict the claim that all of creation was designed; rather they were the result of the application of general archetypes—all mammals, whether female or male, were given nipples by God, because He created all mammals on the same general plan or blueprint.
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In the
Plurality of Worlds
, Whewell referred to Owen’s work and his claim that seemingly useless organs were the by-products of a “general plan,” or “archetypes” of the Creation.
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Just as the presence of seemingly useless male nipples was no evidence against God’s intelligent design, so too, Whewell now argued, the existence of unpopulated planets was no evidence against it. The planets and stars were “brought into being by vast and general laws”—laws particularly aimed at creating earth as a seat of life, but that also resulted in the lifeless stars and planets. As Whewell put it rather picturesquely, “The planets and the stars are the lumps which have flown from the potter’s wheel of the Great Worker.”
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Whewell argued further that the existence of intelligent life on only one planet was not a “waste,” because man is a creation worthy of the whole universe. Not man as he is, surely, but man as he may be—with all of his moral and intellectual potential unfolded into actuality. “The elevation of millions of intellectual, moral, religious, spiritual creatures, to a destiny so prepared, consummated, and developed, is no unworthy occupation of all the capacities of space, time, and matter.”
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Whewell elaborated on this point in his final chapter of the
Plurality
book, which contained his speculations on the future history of man on earth. Here he suggested that the search for life on other worlds might blind us to the importance of working to make life better for those beings here on earth. He called for a “universal and perpetual peace” on earth, in which the full capabilities of men and women could be nurtured by moral and intellectual education. While finishing the book he
wrote to his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, admitting, “I believe, notwithstanding all the deeds of violence which we have seen committed, that a ‘project of perpetual peace’ is by no means a mere dream, if it be based on received International Law.”
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A few years earlier, Whewell had translated a classic work by Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist who laid the foundations for international law based on a theory of natural law. At the end of his life, Whewell would bequeath £100,000 for the first professorship in International Law and scholarships for eight students in the subject. The “Whewell Professorship in International Law,” established for the purpose of devising “such measures as may tend to … extinguish war between nations,” still exists at Cambridge today.
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Unfortunately, few people paid attention to the political program Whewell was endorsing. Instead, he was mocked; his argument for the special nature of man, and his worth as the sole end of Creation, invited the famous sneer that his book tried to prove that “through all infinity, there was nothing as great as the Master of Trinity.”
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J
ONES WAS
worrying more about the future of a man than the future of mankind. Just as the Tithe Commission’s work had finished, there were rumors that the Haileybury College was going to be shut down, and in that case Jones would be without any income whatever. Jones and his wife had not saved any of the money he had earned during the flush years of holding both positions—as always, Jones’s motto seems to have been
carpe diem
—and his fears about the future began to exacerbate Jones’s health problems. “Nemalgia,” severe nerve pain, especially of his face, was found to be caused by a tumor. One of his eyes needed to be surgically removed; Jones told Herschel after the procedure that he did not miss it as much as he had thought he would.
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Whewell and Herschel started lobbying their influential government friends to wrangle a pension from the government for Jones as a reward for his work on the Tithe Commission; Lord Monteagle, in particular, promised to do something for Jones. Finally, at Christmas 1854, the East India Company granted Jones a yearly pension of £400. Jones did not enjoy the fruits of this effort on his behalf, however; he died soon afterwards, on Friday, January 26, 1855, at the age of sixty-four.

Herschel, still hard at work at the mint, was so ill and exhausted that he could not make the trip to Haileybury to visit his friend while he was
dying.
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Two days before Jones’s death, Herschel had written to his daughter Caroline that he felt completely “broken down.”
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But he did rouse himself enough to join Whewell in attending the funeral, which took place in Amwell Village, two miles from the Haileybury College.
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The first of the Philosophical Breakfast Club had gone to his grave, breaking a circle of fellowship that had existed for nearly half a century. As a memorial to his departed friend, Whewell took on the task of editing a collection of his still unpublished lectures and essays, his “Literary Remains.” In his heartfelt preface to the work, Whewell recalled the qualities that endeared Jones to so many: “an extraordinary share of wit, fluency, good spirits and good humor.”
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Speaking of his later life, Whewell could not resist noting that “his personal appearance, in youth bright and vigorous, afterwards retained its vigor in a more massive form”; but one that did little to diminish his “intellectual gladiatorship.”
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Jones’s “inductive nature,” Whewell reminisced poignantly, “was nourished by the sympathy of some of the companions of his college days. The
Novum Organum
was one of their favorite subjects of discussion.”
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To the last, Jones would be remembered for being one of the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.

Whewell was not to be spared more suffering. In December of that year, Cordelia, who was only fifty-two years old, died. Theirs had been a happy marriage. Jane Carlyle would later recall Cordelia’s obvious adoration of her “Harmonious Blacksmith,”
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and this adoration was mutual: Whewell had once told Jones that he read poetry to Cordelia every night (“which at any rate prevents it from putting me to sleep,” he sheepishly admitted).
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Their marriage went down in history as a famously good one; it was even cited as an example of “happiness in wedded life” in a book called
The Art of Home-Making in City and Country
, published at the end of the century.
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Cordelia’s death, especially coming so soon after the loss of Jones, struck a hard blow for Whewell. He was so bereft that he asked Sedgwick, with him at Cambridge, to write the Herschels with the news for him. Life was now, Whewell admitted, “emptied of all its value.”
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Cordelia had been the moral example Whewell sought when he married her; he told her sister Susan that “we shared our thoughts from hour to hour, and if I did anything good and right and wise it was because I had her goodness and rightmindedness and wisdom to prompt and direct me.”
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Cordelia was laid to rest on Christmas Eve. Immediately after the
morning chapel service, her coffin was carried into the chapel of Trinity, and the funeral service read. She was buried in the College cemetery. Her will left £10,000 to Trinity, to be used as her husband saw fit.
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Whewell turned to poetry for comfort, as he had so many times in his life. He composed a series of elegiacs, a classical form of funereal verse famously employed by Ovid in the seventh century BCE. In lines describing his leaving the gravesite after the funeral, Whewell wrote, “And with leaden feet to our home, to our life, we return us; / Home that no longer is home, life that no longer is life.”

Within a few weeks Whewell had to return to his official functions as vice-chancellor of the university. In his highly emotional state, he feared the reaction of the undergraduates, who were prone to hoot and jeer at Whewell whenever he served in that capacity. The students were inclined to ridicule anyone serving as vice-chancellor—they were often ill-mannered in those days—but they particularly liked to bother Whewell, whom they saw as an ultra-authoritarian, requiring undergraduates to stand in his presence at the teas and other social events given by the master, and enforcing college rules against owning dogs and walking on the lawns. However, the students had an underlying affection for Whewell, and an appreciation of his suffering. On January 25, exactly one year after Jones’s death, when Whewell attended the Senate House for the conferring of degrees, the undergraduates “with instinctive good taste received him with profound silence, and then suddenly burst into enthusiastic cheering.” Whewell was overcome by this expression of sympathy, and he began to weep.
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I
T WAS THE MIDDLE OF
J
ULY, DURING A PARTICULARLY COLD AND
sunless summer.
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Babbage was spending most of his time in his candlelit study, poring over a letter written in cipher. Slowly the letter’s content began to emerge, like a message written in invisible ink gradually revealing its secrets when held in front of a fire. But having deciphered the missive, Babbage was still at a loss to explain it. “I have been informed by the lunacy man here,” it began, “that my letters are in my father’s solicitor’s hands and I am hurt and indignant at this further proof of the watin [wanton] way in which you act towards mio [me].…” It continued in a more peculiar, and threatening, manner:

Babbage had been asked by a barrister, Mr. A. W. Kinglake, who was working for the father of the letter writer, to decipher a stack of correspondence, which would be used as evidence in a court case involving the young man; the father hoped that the jury would recognize his son’s insanity, which had already been accepted by “18 medical gentlemen.”
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The case was notable enough that Charles Dickens covered it for the magazine
Household Narrative of Current Events
. A Commission of Lunacy
was convened in July 1854 at St. Clement’s Inn for the purpose of inquiring into the state of mind of Captain Jonathan Childe, son of Mr. William Lacon Childe, of Kinlet Hall, Staffordshire. The young man had been detained in various lunatic asylums since manifesting the signs of insanity in 1838, when he was in the Twelfth Royal Lancers, a cavalry regiment of the British army. At that time he was “seized with a delusion that the Queen had an affection for him; after her marriage he persisted in asserting that she loved him only—the marriage with Prince Albert was a ‘sham.’ ” The belief that one was going to marry the queen was a common enough delusion that it was mentioned in a textbook of the time outlining the “hints of insanity.”
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Childe had come to the notice of the authorities after he began to “stalk” the queen, in the sense of the term first used by William Makepeace Thackeray around this time: sitting opposite her box at the opera, following her around in the parks, and sending her anonymous letters.
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This lunacy commission had been instigated by the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, an advocacy group hoping to show that Captain Childe had been improperly confined. Their case was hindered, however, by the evidence entered into the court showing that, since being detained, the young man had spent much of his time writing letters in cipher, which, as Dickens delicately put it, “have been ascertained to be declarations of his continued love for the Queen.”
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(In fact, not only were they slightly threatening, but they were crude and pornographic as well.) Captain Childe’s father thanked Babbage for deciphering the letters and also for giving evidence at the hearing; as the solicitor of the family later told Babbage, their case was greatly strengthened by the illustriousness of his name, as well as “the clear and learned explanation which you gave of the principles by which you had arrived at the certainty of the discovery of the key to the cipher.”
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An editorial in the
Times
lauded Babbage for his brilliance in breaking the cipher in the Childe case.
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T
HERE WAS MUCH
talk in the newspapers in those days about ciphers. Certainly the topic was not a new one. Codes and ciphers have been used for thousands of years by kings, queens, and generals trying to keep their communications secret. Even men of science have resorted, at times, to ciphers, as a way of temporarily hiding their discoveries while ensuring themselves credit for their priority later on.

Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, codes and
ciphers are not, strictly speaking, the same. In a code, a word or phrase is replaced with a different word, phrase, or number or symbol. So, for instance, a general might receive the message “Go home,” which he knows is a previously agreed-upon code phrase for “Attack the enemy fortress.” A cipher works by replacing letters rather than words or phrases. One cipher might require replacing every letter with the letter that comes after it:
a
becomes
b, b
becomes
c
, and so forth. In this cipher the “plain text,” or the original phrase, “attack the enemy fortress,” would be translated into the “cipher text” “buubdl uif fofnz gpsusftt.” Another kind of cipher is the transposition cipher, in which plain text is encrypted by moving small pieces of the message around. A simple form of this is the anagram, in which the letters of a plain text are scrambled and need to be reassembled in proper order for the message to be understood. In 1610, Galileo sent an anagram to Kepler: “smaismanilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras.” Kepler, who was working on charting the movements of Mars, believed that Galileo had observed two moons of the planet, as he unscrambled the anagram to make this message in Latin: “salue umbistineum geminatum Martia proles.” (“Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars.”) The message, however, really conveyed Galileo’s observation of the rings of Saturn, which he did not recognize as rings, but believed to be bulges on either side of the planet: “Altissimum planetum tergeminum observavi”—“I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form.”
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