by A. N. Wilson
Preparing the book for press, rewriting and marking proofs was a nervous strain. The last chapter caused ‘bad vomiting’ and ‘great prostration of mind and body’.30 Luckily, for a couple of years now, he had discovered peace at the hands of Dr Edward Lane, a hydropathic practitioner who lived in the former home of Sir William Temple, where Jonathan Swift had been the household tutor and chaplain: Moor Park in Surrey. In this place, Darwin could receive the familiar water cures without the painful reminders of Annie which were excited by Malvern. The Lanes, and Mrs Lane’s mother, Lady Drysdale, were congenial company, who gave him his much needed solitude among their wooded walks, decorative lakes and Dutch parterres.
That year, 1859, brought not merely the tensions of work but also the domestic dramas played out by that volatile breed, the governesses. Etty was now sixteen years old, Annie would have been eighteen. Miss Pugh, who had sat at meals with tears streaming, left the house early in the year. Madame Grut arrived from Switzerland. Etty took an instant dislike to her. In a letter to her brother William, Etty reported:
Solemn events have happened. Mrs Grut is gone for ever. This is how it came about. On Monday at breakfast mama said very civilly that she wanted some alteration in Horace’s lessons. Mrs Grut was evidently miffed at that, & then I said I thought s’eloigner wasn’t to ramble very mildly & that miffed her again & she made some rude speech or other, ‘Oh very well if I knew better than the dictionary’ . . . Nothing more came of it then, & all went smooth till I went up to my German lesson in the evening. When I came in I saw there was the devil in her face, well she scolded the children a bit & then sat down by me, when I showed her my lesson (a bit of very bad French) she said, if I knew better than she did it was no use her teaching me & so on & so on, till it came to a crisis & she worked herself into a regular rage . . . I left the room then, & went down stairs to tell my injuries . . . When Papa and Mama heard all about it they settled she shd go at once, so Papa wrote a letter telling her she shd have her 33£ and nothing more . . . then Papa was to go upstairs & deliver the letter . . . Papa got such a torrent, telling him he was no gentleman, & white with passion all the time, wanting to know what she had done, what he had to accuse her of – telling him he was in a passion – she would give him time to think . . . We had a very flustered tea, & all evening we sat preparing for the worst, what we shd do if she refused to go out of the house, etc. However she did turn out much milder & sent us a letter to say she wd go on Wednesday.31
The lachrymose Miss Pugh returned, for a while, to take Madame Grut’s place. Then came the Miss Thorleys, who had been with them of old, followed by a Miss Latter, who left shortly after arriving, to become a teacher in a local school. The swift turnover of governesses suggests – though such an explanation never seems to have crossed any of the Darwins’ minds – that they were an intimidating group of children. It was with huge pride that Darwin noted the burgeoning entomological interests of Francis (eleven), Leonard (nine) and Horace (eight), and on their behalf he drafted a letter to the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer.
Coleopters at Down. We three very young collectors have lately taken, in the parish of Down, six miles from Bromley, Kent, the following beetles which we believe to be rare, namely, Licinus silphoides, Panagus 4-pustulatus and Clytus mysticus. As this parish is only fifteen miles from London, we have thought that you might think it worth while to insert this little notice in the ‘Intelligencer’. Francis, Leonard & Horace Darwin.32
The boys’ discovery was as welcome a distraction from proof-correction as the succession of governess crises was unwelcome. In October, as he was finishing his corrections, Darwin was persuaded by Murray to change the title to On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
The day after he had dispatched the last set of proofs to Albemarle Street, Darwin set off to yet another water-cure establishment, this time at Ilkley, at the foot of the moor immortalized in song. The whole family joined him there, the children remembering it later as a time of ‘frozen misery’.33
Ilkley Wells House was a huge neo-Tudor extravaganza on the edge of Rumbold’s Moor, looking over the windswept, sleet-swept Wharfedale. Autumn was blustery and furious that year in Yorkshire. The invalids were carried, a twenty-minute donkey-ride, from the comfort of the house across a rutted track, in pelting rain, to the healing springs and the baths, which had been constructed on a nearby hillside in a brick-built terrace.
While he was here Darwin sprained his ankle, but believed the treatment to be helping him. By 15 October, he could write to Hooker, ‘You cannot think how refreshing it is to idle away a whole day, & hardly ever think in the least about my confounded book, which half killed me.’34
All through the illnesses of the summer and the autumn, Darwin had busily corrected proofs. There were so many corrections and changes that the printers charged £72 and 8 shillings.35 Murray proposed printing 1,250 copies, which would yield £240, two-thirds of which he offered to the author – a very generous deal indeed by the standards of twenty-first-century publishers. The stout green-bound volume would sell at fourteen shillings.
Murray had known his business. The first print run of 1,250 copies sold on the first day of publication – 500 going to Mudie’s Circulating Library, with its 25,000 subscribers. There was no doubt that, despite its cumbersome title, this was a book for which the world was waiting. Rather than doing a simple reprint, Murray asked Darwin to prepare a second edition – that is, a reprint with corrections and emendations. Almost instantly, from Louise Swanton Belloc (an Irishwoman who had married a Frenchman, and who would become the grandmother of poet and controversialist Hilaire Belloc), there came the request to translate the book into French.36
Darwin had expected a repetition of the storm which had greeted the publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation fifteen years before. The fear of public exposure, of causing religious hurt to Emma, of falling out with old friends in the world of science – all these fears brought on his symptoms to excess.
The intellectual climate, however, was not the same as it had been in 1844. Vestiges had disconcerted Darwin because he feared it would steal his thunder, and because it had revealed, among his scientific mentors, the depth of hostility to evolutionary theory. Rough and ready as Vestiges had been, however, it had dug over fertile soil. If the professors of science were not yet ready to believe that species could mutate, the thinking public most definitely was ready. Vestiges had cobbled together the geological theories of Lyell and Agassiz, the evolutionary doctrines of Lamarck and the mysterious evidence of the fossils. The book was riddled with howlers, but those who read it with an open mind discovered that their world-view had changed. Hitherto, the world had been a place in which every species had been separately placed, rather as the plants in formal gardens are taken out of the hothouse and arranged individually in the soil. As with the plants, so with the animal species. But now palaeontology had shown that whole species arose and were apparently discarded. Versions of species visible upon earth in the nineteenth century, such as the horse, could be found in the old stones, and these fossil versions showed that nature was not in a fixed condition. It was in a state of flux. Nineteenth-century England, with its ever-expanding systems of transportation, its social flux, its population growth, its political upheavals, was ready for a theory of nature which revealed everything in existence to be in a state of becoming, rather than fixed arrival. What was lacking, after Vestiges, was a theory which could account for the mechanics of such becoming, the method by which molluscs, insects, fish, fowl, mammals developed into the species discernible by natural history. Darwin, with the authority of a man who had studied so many areas of science, and with the simplicity akin to genius, believed he had supplied an answer to that puzzle.
How the world would respond to his theory, this was to dominate the rest of his earthly existence, and, after his death, this would shape his place in history.
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12
Is It True?
DARWIN DESCRIBED HIS book as an ‘abstract’, which he had been ‘urged’ to publish, ‘as Mr Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay Archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species’.1
It is perhaps worth a brief recapitulation of the central tenets of On the Origin of Species, of what made it so distinctive. The reader who has reached this point in our story will understand that scientists since the end of the eighteenth century had begun to realize that life on earth had evolved, and was evolving. In a notebook of 1837, Darwin had written, ‘If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine – our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements – they may partake [of] our origin in one common ancestor – we may all be netted together.’2
Versions of this idea – that we are all descended from a common ancestor, that life is one – could be found in the writings of Goethe, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Cuvier, not to mention the Eastern religious philosophical writings in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Darwin’s distinctive contribution to the idea, shared in part with Blyth and almost completely with Wallace, was, first, to posit a very simple explanation for how and why this evolution from earlier forms occurs; and secondly, to conclude that we may indeed be ‘all netted together’. The Linnaean notion of taxonomy has to be radically revised, if not altogether scrapped, since there is not necessarily a hard and fast distinction between the species. Indeed, the origin of one species is to be found in the adaptive changes taking place in its predecessor (so to say) in the evolutionary chain.
So, first – the how and why. Species of plants and animals are very fertile. They produce far more than can ever survive into adulthood. Their population remains, in the opinion of Thomas Malthus who converted Darwin to this way of thinking, unchanged. So there is a fierce struggle for life. The large numbers of eggs, spores, offspring, seeds being multiplied by nature have to fight for limited amounts of nutrition. It follows, therefore, that the stronger and the better fitted to survive, the greater a species’ chance of survival. (This was the theory which Spencer would call the survival of the fittest, but Darwin did not use the phrase in the first edition of The Origin.)
Now, in the reproduction of species by means of sex, there is variation. No two individuals are ever completely identical. Therefore, in a world of stable populations where each individual struggles to survive, those with the most favourable characteristics will be the ones who survive. Nature chooses the best, and discards the weakest. This is natural selection. Plants and animals will adapt themselves to their environment.
There is another distinctive feature of the Darwinian theory which it is worth mentioning at the outset, because it is the one which caused Darwin very grave difficulties even within the body of the text of The Origin in its first edition. That is, for his theory to work, it has to be demonstrated that nature does not proceed by leaps. Every homologue in nature – all the various building-blocks, as we have called them in earlier discussions of this matter – have evolved from some pre-existent form. Those homologues which appear to have arrived from nowhere – cells, hair, features, pentodactyl limbs, eyes, angiosperm flowers – did in fact come into being little by little by little. Somewhere, fossil evidence will one day provide us with evidence of their having crawled into something like their present form by an infinite series of adaptations. This is the contention. For Darwin’s theory to be persuasive, it was necessary for him to demonstrate or show to be probable (a) that natural selection occurred by sexual means; (b) that progress in nature took place through struggle, through the strong eliminating the weak; and (c) that what appeared to be adaptations might all be accounted for by progressive adaptation – that some ur-form adapted itself into what we see as a cell, a hair, a feather, an angiosperm plant, an eye and so on. Behind this lurked another question, which is perhaps thrown into the highest relief when we ask about the origin of the most primitive building-block of life – the cell. To be fair to Darwin, he would have recognized such a question to be way beyond the scope of The Origin, but the failure of science, either in his day or our own, to come up with answers to this question is part of our story.
The first chapter, following Blyth’s original article of 1837, traces the patterns of variation in plants and birds and animals under domestication. He writes with authority of pigeon-breeding and of hybrid plants. What will strike any twenty-first-century reader, used to the vigour of contemporary debate about Darwinism, is how tentative he is in advancing his theory. He admits that variability ‘is governed by many unknown laws’. Chief of these unknown laws, of course, is genetics, the whole science of which was still waiting to be discovered.
Darwin’s next chapter applies the principles of artificial hybrid-breeding under domestication to the life of nature itself. This chapter remains, more or less, an abstract, as he called it. If you read it in conjunction with Chapter Nine, in which he very candidly lists the difficulties of his theory, it posits one which is, on one level, merely academic and on another fundamental to his whole thesis. It is this. ‘No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists’ as to what, in fact, constitutes a species. Linnaeus drew up his classifications, but almost immediately these were called into question, especially by botanists. If you arrive at a definition of a species which you find satisfactory, that species must, by that very definition, be different from other species. And, clearly, those genera which are polymorphic or protean pose particular difficulties for the taxonomist. Darwin cites Rubus, Rosa and Hieracum among plants, and several branchiopod shells, as well as a number of insects, as species which actually change their characteristics in particular circumstances. This, however, is not a difficulty which relates specially to protean genera – if Darwin’s thesis is maintained. For if his theory is correct, then every species, including humanity, is protean. We are all, from the smallest mollusc to the most brightly coloured cockatoo, from the spouting whale to the bewhiskered Victorian gentleman in his club, in a state of infinitely slow evolution into something else. This makes taxonomy at best a rough and ready sketch; all natural phenomena are ‘works in progress’, which makes the task of the Victorian natural historian different from his predecessors, who thought they were describing fixed phenomena.
In Chapter Three, Darwin expounds the Malthusian principle of life on this planet, applying what the economist believed about the human race to every life-form: namely, the ‘Struggle for Existence’. The chapter is a classic exposition of what we now call ecology. He cites a patch of land near Farnham in Surrey, extensive heaths with a few clumps of Scotch fir. In the previous ten years, large tracts of this land had been enclosed. Fir trees were beginning to spring up, unsown or planted by human hand, because their seedlings were being chomped by the cattle who grazed there. ‘Here we see that cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir; but in several parts of the world, insects determine the existence of cattle.’ Darwin had come to think that the dependency of one organic being on another was of its essence ‘parasitic’. Every organic being, therefore, owes its constitution to that of its near neighbours, and every organic being is either parasitic upon another or in competition with another. If the missel thrush flourishes in some parts of Scotland, it is at the expense of the song thrush. In Russia, the Asiatic cockroach ruled the roost against all the other cockroaches. The chapter ends with one of Darwin’s strangest sentences – one to which we must return later in this story. ‘When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is usually prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.’3 This sentence sounds like the sort of thing a father would say to his child, when telling a bedtime story which had become too frightening, and which had made the child cry. ‘There, there.
It all ended happily ever after.’ He had just spent the whole chapter telling his readers that nature was in an incessant state of war, only to assure them that it wasn’t, not really.
In Chapter Four, Darwin moved to the central platform of his thesis: ‘Natural Selection’, and how it would work. As often in his writings, Darwin anthropomorphized what he was at pains to demonstrate was an impersonal process. So, he wrote, ‘It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest: rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and whatever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.’4
What Darwin had to demonstrate was that the process of natural selection was a creative thing; that evolution is a consequence of natural selection acting on the variations within a species. It is easy to see how the process of natural selection would lead to the extinction of species, or certain forms of species. He asserted that ‘Natural selection acts solely through the preservation of variations in some way advantageous, which consequently endure.’5 It follows, according to Darwin, that those less well adapted to their environment, or simply rarer, will eventually die out. This dying-out process is observable in the fossil records. You can actually see species which have become extinct. Did Darwin, however, demonstrate that natural selection can be creative? This is a much harder thing to prove. And does there exist any evidence – any at all – of how natural selection might account for the appearance of the building-blocks, the basic homologues? Until such evidence is demonstrated, Darwin’s case remains, at best, not proven. Darwin was hurt to hear, on the grapevine, that Sir John Herschel, the astronomer and Master of the Mint, had called the theory of natural selection ‘the law of higgledy piggledy’.