The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (6 page)

He finished the rough sketch with a burst of eloquence. It was oddly consoling, Darwin noted, that from the hard Malthusian struggle involving “death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature” had come a great good, the creation of the higher animals. “There is a simple grandeur,” he wrote,

He had made a big move toward putting his thoughts forward. But it was only a private memo to himself. And even in private he had fudged on one thing: no mention of the origins of man.

9

Late that summer London was a mess, more so than usual, with police and Guards units on alert against possible rioting by Chartist demonstrators. A radical editor was tried and convicted of publishing “impious doctrines” such as atheism and socialism, as flavored in his news rag with a vague, political version of transmutationism. Across the country, half a million workers had gone out on a general strike for the Chartist demands, and military units were moving north to restore order in mill cities like Manchester. Troops in London faced off, with fixed bayonets, against hollering protesters not far from where the Darwins lived. It seemed the right time to do what Charles and Emma had been contemplating for a year: buy a home in the country and get away.

After some careful house-hunting, they chose a place in a somnolent little village called Down, in Kent, sixteen miles southeast of central London. Sixteen miles then meant two hours by horse and carriage, distance enough to give them tranquility but allow Darwin to commute back on special occasions for scientific business. The property itself, known as Down House, had once served as the village parsonage; lately it stood vacant, musty and unsold. It was a big house with multiple bedrooms, a fixer-upper at a bargain price, and it came with 18 acres of land. Helped by a loan from Darwin's father, they grabbed it. By late September they were in residence, not knowing that this would be their sole home and treasured refuge for the rest of their lives. Darwin himself may have hoped exactly that. The
Beagle
voyage had sated his appetite for travel and he felt ready to be a homebody. His wife was less enthusiastic about this drab house and the flat Kentish landscape around it, neither of which were impressive to a young woman raised on a fancy Staffordshire estate; but she figured she could adjust to it. The first major event in the new location was cheery, when Emma gave birth to a girl, their second daughter, christened Mary Eleanor. The next came like a bad omen, three weeks later, when the baby died. They buried Mary Eleanor in the Down churchyard. Now, in a grim way, they were rooted here.

The village Down later became Downe, with a spelling change meant to make it more distinctive. Darwin transmogrified himself, too, though not in order to stand out. On the contrary, he settled into village life as though it were a witness protection program. Assuming the trappings of a minor country squire, he planted flowers, bought a few milk cows, started an orchard, hired a handyman, took a seat on the parish council, established his private workspace in a study filled with books and files, and commissioned renovations for the rest of the house. Outside one window he attached an inconspicuous mirror, angled so that he could see people coming up the drive before they saw him. Visitors were hell on his weak gut, plus they cost him time that he needed for work. He didn't want company, except in very limited doses and on his own controlled terms. Lively chat made him excited and excitement made him sick. His study included a little lavatory nook behind a curtain, where he could vomit. From now on, most of his scientific conversations would be conducted through the mail.

He'd always been an exceptionally good letter writer, in a letter-writing age. Telephones didn't yet exist, after all, and any literate Victorian necessarily scrawled lots of missives to family, colleagues, and friends. Having a dinner party? Invitations went by note. Gossip and professional chat were largely epistolary, even among those who lived not far apart. After the move to Down House, Darwin took that a step further. Self-sequestered inside both his home and his sense of frail health, he became very dependent on written correspondence and very disciplined in his use of it. He wrote letters for friendship, letters for business, letters for love (to his “dear old Titty” or his “dear Mammy,” as he variously called Emma, when they were apart), letters for good deeds and scientific politicking, letters asking parental advice and (later, with his sons away) giving it, letters for the sheer joy of prattle, and most of all, letters seeking scientific information. He peppered friends, acquaintances, and strangers with questions, requests for data, little assignments of experimentation that they might perform for him if, ahem, it wasn't too much trouble. He was unctuous and apologetic, but demanding.

What color are the horses of Jamaica? he wrote to a bureaucrat who'd once owned an estate there. Can you help me with an identification of certain rock specimens? he wrote to a professor of mineralogy at Cambridge. Your ideas about classification are airy and confused, he told George Waterhouse, the Zoological Society curator who had agreed to work on his
Beagle
mammals, and who subscribed to a system of arranging similar species in neat circles, as though the deity had strung each genus into a closed loop like a pearl necklace. Darwin's language to Waterhouse was cordial, but his position was firm. The problem with those circles, he explained, was that they meant nothing and went nowhere. Darwin's own view, a controversial one he'd been keeping discreetly unspoken, was that “classification consists in grouping beings according to their actual
relationship
, ie their consanguinity, or descent from common stocks.” That is, the underlying principle is transmutation. Saying so to Waterhouse, who wasn't among his closest friends, reflected Darwin's impatience to share his secret with
someone
. And then, in late 1843, he exchanged his first letters with a bright botanist named Joseph Dalton Hooker, just returned from serving as assistant surgeon and naturalist aboard a British ship, the
Erebus
, on its expedition to Antarctica.

Darwin had met Hooker passingly back in 1839, before the
Erebus
sailed, and knew something of this younger man from mutual friends. Hooker knew more about Darwin, having read his
Journal
, carried it on shipboard for four years, and idolized the scientific traveler who wrote it. Now they connected more personally—though only by mail—in regard to Darwin's old plant specimens from the
Beagle
, which had never been properly studied. Despite the chores Hooker faced with his own haul of specimens, he agreed to do it. Darwin asked him to pay special attention to the Galápagos plants, which might bear comparison with the peculiar species of St. Helena, another remote island. That suggestion triggered an outpouring from Hooker about native plants he'd seen on various islands while the
Erebus
circled the southern oceans, stopping in New Zealand, Tasmania, the Falklands, Hermite Island off Tierra del Fuego, Auckland Island, Campbell Island, Kerguelen, South Shetland, Ascension, and St. Helena itself. Hermite Island, for instance, was rich in mosses. Ascension held eight species of fern, only two of which occurred also on St. Helena, the next island over. Tasmania and New Zealand were unusual in ways of their own. Hooker went on for several pages, his overall message clear: If it's insular floras you want to talk about, sir, I can oblige you with enthusiasm and data.

Darwin claimed to be ignorant of botany and waited for Hooker to see the
Beagle
stuff. Hooker wrote again soon, expressing particular fascination with Darwin's Galápagos plants, clipped and pressed almost a decade earlier. From having read Darwin's comments in the
Journal
, he'd been well prepared to see floral differences among the respective islands, and with the specimens in his hands, that expectation was confirmed. The island-by-island diversity was, in his words, “a most strange fact.” So strange, he volunteered, that it “quite overturns all our preconceived notions of species radiating from a centre.” He meant a center of special creation, presumably on a mainland somewhere. No, the Galápagos plants were flat-out puzzling. Their botanical geography didn't jibe with the received wisdom of natural theology, and Hooker was willing to say so.

Darwin perked to that signal. He barely knew Hooker, but suddenly he felt a dawning hope that he had encountered a kindred mind. Hooker was smart and well trained, a conscientious observer; he came from a respectable scientific family (his father was director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew), and had seen as much of the world as Darwin. Yet he was young (only twenty-six) and open to the possibility of junking orthodox tenets if empirical data so dictated. Darwin virtually grabbed him by the lapels. Early in 1844 he wrote again, asking Hooker's help with “one little fact” about endemic island plants. Then he ended his letter with an impetuous blurt of candor.

This is a famous moment. It appears in all nine of the Darwin biographies now piled on my desk, plus countless other studies, and it can't be omitted merely on grounds that the hands of previous writers and scholars have worn it smooth. The letter was undated, but the postmark said January 11, 1844. Darwin confided to Hooker that, besides his interest in southern lands, “I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work,” a work that most people would call downright foolish. He'd been pondering the odd patterns of plant and animal distribution that he had seen in the Galápagos and elsewhere; he'd been reading up on domestic breeding; he'd been collecting every bit of data that seemed relevant to the question of whether species are changeless entities. “At last gleams of light have come,” Darwin wrote, “& I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”

This was a daring admission, cast in sheepish understatement, and contradicting one of the fundamental tenets of British natural theology. Truth be told, he was more than “almost” convinced.

Less famous is the disclaimer he added immediately: “Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression' ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals' &c.” He was trying to distance himself from the discredited ideas of one particular precursor, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin knew well that his theory, besides being unsavory, might too easily be confused with other unsavory transmutationist notions that even he considered worthless.

10

Historians of biology have found intimations of evolutionary thinking in the works of philosophers and scientists long before Darwin. Books have been written tracking the concept back as far as Aristotle. Some of those early statements referred not to biological transmutation but to loosely parallel matters of cosmology and geology, such as the progressive physical history (from stardust to molten gob to rocky sphere) of planet Earth. Some involved the question of life's ultimate origin. Some were more closely related to evolution in the modern sense—that is, assertions about the diversity and classification of species, about continuity within that diversity, or about the tricky issue of just what a species is.

During the eighteenth century in France, for example, Maupertuis tossed forth the idea that vast numbers of living things come into existence by spontaneous generation, of which only a small fraction prove to be well organized enough for survival. Buffon articulated the hypothesis that apes, humans, horses, asses, and all other animals might be related by common descent—and then, having made it sound half-plausible, he backed away from that hypothesis. Diderot published dreamy speculations about living matter, generated in simple form but with a mystical sort of awareness, somehow assembling itself into complex creatures. In Germany, an anthropologist named J. F. Blumenbach studied skulls and suggested that the various races of humans had diversified from common stock in response to local conditions. In England, near the end of the century, Erasmus Darwin published his
Zoonomia
, with its casual suggestion about “one living filament” from which every sort of warm-blooded animal had arisen. All these bold musings added to an atmosphere of alternate possibility, offering at least some encouragement to anyone inclined toward challenging the rigidly scripture-based dogmas of creation. The likelihood of such challenges also increased with the arrival of new data: specimens and accounts of strange, unexpected species in remote places, sent back from the journeys of exploration and imperial conquest; volumes of biogeographical information, showing that new species and familiar ones are distributed around the planet in curious patterns; more and more fossils unearthed, revealing episodes of extinction and succession over time; the discovery, through microscope lenses, of tiny creatures swimming in every drop of pond water and saliva; the intricate adaptations seen in so many species; and the accumulating evidence of variation
within
species as well as differences among species. Despite all the restless speculation and all the new data, though, no one had proposed a comprehensive theory of evolution until, at the turn of the century, Lamarck did.

His full name was Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, reflecting a family lineage that gave him trappings of nobility but no inheritance. At age seventeen he dropped out of a Jesuit seminary and joined the army. After a taste of war and a try at medicine, in Paris, he made himself a botanist, publishing an excellent three-volume flora of France. The book was well received but didn't solve Lamarck's problem of making a living, so he served two years as tutor and traveling companion to Buffon's son. Then he got himself hired as a botanical assistant, for a measly salary, at the Jardin des Plantes (which was later subsumed within the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle). Lamarck's next metamorphosis, the most drastic one, didn't happen quickly. After twenty-five years as a botanist, he shifted to zoology, taking a museum position as professor of invertebrate animals and managing, throughout the Terror phase of the French Revolution, to keep his head down and away from the guillotine. His job was to lecture on insects, worms, and microscopic animals. Several years later the museum's mollusk collection fell into Lamarck's care when the malacologist, a friend of his, died. Studying that material, an assortment of fossils and recent shells, he saw evidence of variation within species and of sequential similarities among species found adjacent to one another in the column of time.