There was no such grand procession for the Baron d’Holbach’s funeral cortège when he died four years later in January 1789 at the age of sixty-six. He was buried quietly in the presence of his family alongside Diderot in the same crypt of the Church of Saint-Roch. Four months later, the first wave of the French Revolution began with the convocation of the Estates-General; in July, thousands of insurgents stormed the Bastille; in August, the new assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and a group of women led the march on Versailles to force the royal court back to Paris under the protection of the royal guards. In November, only ten months after d’Holbach had been buried, the Assembly declared that the property of the Church was “at the disposal of the nation.” Four years later, in July 1793, during the Reign of Terror, priests were defrocked, sent into exile, or executed; the Church of Saint-Roch, where Diderot and d’Holbach lay entombed, was desecrated and stripped of its paintings, carvings, statues, stucco, marble, and votive objects. In October 1795, its cloisters became the refuge of freedom fighters and insurgents during a period of fierce street fighting; its façade is still riddled with bullet holes. Masons digging an air vent into the crypt a hundred years later found no bodies there.
The house on the rue Royale, the most important center of Enlightenment Paris, carries no plaque. The present occupants—a dental surgeon and a software company—have never heard of the Baron d’Holbach or his salon. “Who knows what breeds of animals will succeed ours?” Diderot asked in D’Alembert’s Dream. “Everything changes, everything passes, only the whole remains.”
*The street is named after a form of torture used on heretics in a nearby square. The word means “bucking,” a term used to describe the movements of the victims suspended by their arms.
*The term “biology” did not come into common usage until the nineteenth century.
8
Erasmus Underground
DERBYSHIRE, 1767
In late June 1767, three hundred feet under the rounded hills and grit-stone escarpments of Castleton, in Derbyshire, four men led by miners carrying lamps threaded their way through the narrow tunnels of a lead mine called Tray Cliff. They were the two mine agents, the brothers Anthony and George Tissington; John Whitehurst, a Derby clock and instrument maker who had investments in the mines and was writing a book about the caves and mountains of Derbyshire; and Erasmus Darwin, a doctor in his midthirties from Lichfield. Darwin’s friend Whitehurst had brought him here to show him the natural caverns the miners had only recently tunneled their way into. Tall, overweight, and ebullient, with pockmarked skin and a stutter, the doctor never stopped talking and asking questions. But when the miners raised their lamps to reveal the inverted forest of white stalactites in the first cavern, gleaming and dripping against the darkness, Dr. Darwin stopped talking. He was, like everyone who visited the caves, stunned into silence.
Under the flickering light of the lamps, the wet cave walls and the shards of white stalactites rippled like the sea. The seam of the rare fluorite rock called Blue John, found only in this mountain, forked through the limestone like veins, banded in yellow and purple. Tilting their lamps, the miners pointed out the shapes of marine creatures and plants standing out from the dripping rock here and there, as if carved in relief, excavated from softer rock by swollen underground rivers that had passed through these rocks for unimaginable tracts of time. Some men of a religious disposition had gone mad down here, the miners told the visitors, convinced that the gaping shaft openings that disappear into ink-black pools were the entrance gates to hell itself. But the rock shapes of Tray Cliff Cavern and the nearby Peak Cavern made Erasmus Darwin think of the capillaries and arteries and veins of the human body, of Greek and Roman creation myths, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of Orpheus and Eurydice. To him, Tray Cliff Cavern was not the gateway to hell but a temple of mysteries, the altar of the goddess Nature; it seemed to him to be lined with symbols—hieroglyphs and mystic scrolls; it was a place of revelation, of magical transformations and secrets. It held the secrets of time itself.
Tourists being shown the interior of the Gailenreuth cave, near Muggendorf in Bavaria, accompanied by guides with torches in or around 1816.
William Buckland, An Assemblage of Fossil Teeth and Bones (1822)
Over two days the four friends visited other caves in the Castleton area. They met rope makers who lived and worked in the enormous cave mouth of the Devil’s Arse Cavern and were led down into tunnels where they were ferried over underground rivers into spectacular cathedral-like caverns. The miners showed the doctor the fault lines and the sinking shafts, the strata twisting and snaking like petrified rivers, and the tiny shrimplike creatures that twitched and contracted in the pools that gathered at the base of stalagmites. Most of the strata contained only one kind of shell or marine organism, Whitehurst pointed out, as if each layer had been laid down separately with long intervals of time in between.
For decades Derbyshire miners had been chiseling shells and plant shapes out of the limestone, hoping to get a good price for them from the mineral and souvenir sellers in Castleton or the agents of the aristocratic collectors such as the Duke of Devonshire or Sir Ashton Lever. They called them petrifactions. Some people claimed they were magical, others that they were the wanton sportings of nature, nature’s freaks, rejected designs, like two-headed calves or seven-toed cats. Others declared them to be the remains of the deluge, God’s signs of his covenant, his promise to man.
But John Whitehurst had other ideas. He had read in the Comte de Buffon’s Natural History the extraordinary list of places in which shell fossils had been found: in mountains, quarries, and mine workings in every corner of the known world, hundreds of miles from the sea. The strata all around them proved that minute marine animals, entombed here in the lowest bands of rock, were the very first organisms on the earth, formed long before the first land had surfaced. He knew that fossils held the secret of the history of the earth. Erasmus Darwin’s head crowded with questions about time and the origins of life on the planet. Could life, he wondered, have started long ago, in the underground pools of an earth only recently lifted from the sea?
Living and working in the fissured, cave-laced landscape of Derbyshire, Erasmus Darwin had long been fascinated by fossils. Collections of fossils and colored, veined, and glittering rocks filled the display cabinets in the drawing rooms of the country houses of his patients and friends. Tiny shells flecked the stone walls of the Castleton and Derby shops. Fossilized shells, fish, and ammonites, and sometimes the bones of larger swimming animals with fins or jaws like lizards, surfaced in the workings of canals and roads, in the foundations of buildings, on the dripping walls of mines, in the foundations of churches. A rare fossil “crocodile” had washed up nearby in Nottingham in 1712 when workmen were rebuilding the well of a rectory opposite Erasmus’s father’s house. Robert Darwin sent the rock to William Stukeley, the antiquary, who wrote a paper about it published in Philosophical Transactions and put it in the Royal Society museum, calling it a marine reptile, perhaps even a survivor of the flood, “a rarity, the like whereof has not been observ’d before in this Island.”
Erasmus Darwin, aged around forty (an engraving from an oil portrait by Joseph Wright, ca. 1770).
Getty Images
Erasmus had forged a number of close friendships with like-minded local men such as John Whitehurst—printers, industrialists, manufacturers—who shared his interest in astronomy, geology, electricity, and meteorology. They had begun to meet informally at one another’s houses to discuss scientific matters, calling themselves fellow schemers or the Birmingham Philosophers; later, when their gatherings formalized into regular meetings held on the Sunday nearest the full moon, they came to call themselves the Lunar Society.
A slab of limestone with part of an “encinite,” or fossil sea lily, as illustrated in a popular eighteenth-century book on fossils. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, Histoire naturelle de la Montagne Saint-Pierre
de Maastricht (1799)
A few weeks before he visited the Derbyshire caves, Erasmus Darwin’s friend and fellow member of the group, the industrial potter Josiah Wedgwood, had sent him a box of giant fossilized bones and tree trunks and rocks. His navvies, he explained, had dug them out of the workings of the Harecastle Tunnel as they carved out the Trent and Mersey Canal. He hoped that, as Erasmus knew something about anatomy, he might be able to identify the bones. “These various strata,” Wedgwood wrote to another friend at the same time,
seem from various circumstances to have been in a Liquid state, & to have travel’d along what was then the surface of the Earth; something like the Lava from Mount Vesuvius. They wind & turn about, like a Serpentine River.… [But] I have got beyond my depth—These wonderful works of Nature are too vast for my narrow microscopic comprehension. I must bid adieu to them for the present, & attend to what suits my capacity. The forming of a Jug or Teapot.
Erasmus Darwin could not identify the bones Wedgwood sent him. He was baffled and fascinated. To be able to make an accurate identification, he told his friend, he had to see the bones and fossils deep in the earth’s rock, as they surfaced, not in some dusty box or display cabinet. He needed Whitehurst to arrange a trip into the Derbyshire caves.
Erasmus wrote to Wedgwood excitedly when he returned to Lichfield after the two-day journey. “I have lately travel’d two days into the bowels of the earth, with three more able philosophers,” he wrote, “and have seen the Goddess of Minerals naked, as she lay in her inmost bowers, and have made such drawings and measurements of her Divinity-ship, as would much amuse, I had liked to have said, inform you.” A few weeks later he wrote to another member of the group, Matthew Boulton: “I want to see you and Dr Small much if you will fix a Day.… I have been into the Bowels of old Mother Earth, and seen wonders and learnt much curious knowledge in the Regions of Darkness.… And am going to make innumerable Experiments on aqueous, sulphurous, metallic and saline Vapours. Food for Fire-Engines!”
Erasmus Darwin’s friends in the Lunar Society were engaged in a series of collective investigations and experiments. They exchanged information, facts, questions, evidence, inventions, and objects by mail and at their meetings. They tested their knowledge on one another, experimented, took notes, mixed, distilled, and transformed. Many of their questions were practical and forward-looking, concerned with reform and progress: How do we fix this? How can we make that? How do we improve upon this? But some of the men, like Erasmus, were driven by questions about the past rather than the future, by theoretical and speculative questions as well as practical ones. How and when did life begin? How did species come to be?
Erasmus Darwin was a busy man. Every year he traveled thousands of miles across the potholed and sometimes nearly impassable roads that stretched across this craggy and spectacular landscape to visit patients in remote farms and country estates. To make his life easier he employed a carpenter to fit out his carriage like a small study with bookshelves, writing materials, and notebooks and spent long hours trying to invent suspension techniques that would protect travelers from the endless jolts, falls, and accidents.
In July 1768 he was immobilized for several weeks by a carriage accident. In the weeks of forced convalescence that followed, he appears to have begun work on a book that drew together his various developing theories on the relationship between mind and body, a book of medicine and medical theory that would also contain his emerging ideas on life itself, its generation and its origins. These ideas had arisen from questions formed in the Tray Cliff mine workings.
Immersed in the freethinking debates of the Lunar Society discussions, in which no line of questioning or proposition was prohibited, Erasmus could no longer quite tell whether his new book, now tentatively entitled Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, would be regarded as heretical in the wider world. To gauge this, in August 1768, he sent a copy of the most potentially controversial opening sections to his friend and theological interlocutor, the eloquent, philosophically inclined, and well-read vicar of Duffield, Richard Gifford, who had a keen interest in the relationships between the mind, the soul, and the body. Gifford’s reply seems to have been full and frank. He told Erasmus that it was “not pious” to inquire into the “living Principle of Life.” Though Erasmus protested in reply that surely “the Lord” would want his subjects to inquire into “the Wonders of his Works,” he also assured Gifford: “I do not mean to attack the Christian Religion; and that I do not mean to go up to the first Cause of any Thing, but endeavour to trace it one Step higher than others have done.” Gifford warned him of the dangers of being linked to the materialists and modern skeptics. “I believe I shall never publish these Papers,” Erasmus told Gifford with a degree of weariness. “I would not certainly if I could see any bad effect they might have on the Morals of Men.”
If certain beliefs could not be expressed outright for fear of offending the Church, Erasmus reflected, perhaps they might be implied instead. Three scallop shells adorned the Darwin family crest. The emblem of Saint James, worn by pilgrims traveling long distances to the great pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the scallop shell symbolized piety. In classical mythology it also symbolized fertility—Venus was supposed to have been born from a scallop shell; so were Castor and Pollux. Erasmus now added a new dangerous motto to the family crest: E Conchis Omnia—“Everything from Shells.” Though the motto was short and not exactly explicit in its meaning, once it was painted on Erasmus’s carriage door to be seen everywhere across Derbyshire, it seemed to some in Lichfield to be a flagrant declaration of his unorthodox views. Erasmus also had a seal made so that every letter he sent carried the motto on its envelope.*
It did not take Erasmus’s neighbor, the watchful Canon Seward, long to see what he was up to. Rather than confront him directly, Seward composed and circulated an anonymous satirical poem entitled “Omnis e Conchis” in which he denounced Erasmus’s “hodge podge of iniquity”; he wrote that, like Epicurus,
He too renounces his Creator,
And forms all sense from senseless matter;
Makes men start up from dead fish bones,
As old Deucalion did from stones;
Great wizard! he, by magic spells
Can build a world of cockle shells;
And all things frame, while eye-lid twinkles
From lobsters, crabs and periwinkles;
O Doctor! change thy foolish motto,
Or keep it for some lady’s grotto;
Else thy poor patients well may quake
If thou no more canst mend than make.
Erasmus understood the veiled threat in this satire penned by the influential canon of Lichfield: the doctor had better be careful, Seward implied, for if he lost the trust of his patients he would soon lose his practice and his livelihood.
It was a difficult time for Erasmus. His wife, Mary, had been suffering from an undiagnosed illness for years; multiple births, stillbirths, and addiction to opium had weakened her further. By the early summer of 1770 she began to have paranoid delusions, convinced that someone was going to kill her surviving children. Erasmus described how she would beseech the phantom repeatedly: “Don’t kill them all, leave me one, pray, leave me one.” She died in June that year.
Sometime in the months after his wife’s death, Erasmus—concerned for the reputation of his practice and family—had the motto removed from the carriage door and from his seal and went back to his less controversial inventions and canal-building schemes and to the care of his three children, Charles, Erasmus, and Robert, then only eleven, ten, and four years old.
Though Erasmus Darwin was wary enough of local gossip to remove his materialist motto from his carriage door and seal, he was not afraid to risk other kinds of gossip. Seventeen-year-old Mary Parker, nursemaid to his boys, who had joined the household a few months after his wife died, became his lover and was soon carrying his child. Everyone in Lichfield must have known of the liaison as Mary made h
er way around the town with the older Darwin boys. A year after her first child, a daughter, Susannah, was born in 1772, she was pregnant again with a second daughter, who was born in 1774 and christened Mary, after her mother. Mary Parker continued to live with Erasmus, to raise their daughters and raise and teach Erasmus’s sons for a short time; when the relationship came to an end around 1775, with no apparent animosity, Mary left the household, moved to Birmingham, married a merchant in 1782, and began another family. Erasmus’s two daughters continued to live with him, raised and educated openly alongside his boys.
Every natural philosopher that Erasmus Darwin knew who had big ideas about the origins of the earth seemed hesitant to publish. The Scottish geologist James Hutton came to stay with Erasmus in June 1774, using Erasmus’s house as a base for his geological expeditions. Like Erasmus, Hutton was a deist; while he did probably believe in a Christian God, it was a “caretaker” God who did not interfere in the operations of the cosmos. He did not feel a need to square his scientific theories with a literal interpretation of the Bible as his friend Whitehurst was trying to do. Hutton, too, believed that the earth was much older than anyone would admit and that the landscape was a complex composition still shifting constantly and imperceptibly from continent to continent. He did not, however, believe in species change. He had a book, a grand theory of the earth, which he had been writing for at least fifteen years, but, he told Erasmus, he had much more proof to gather before he would risk putting his ideas into print.
There are glimpses of Erasmus’s frustrations in his letters. In November 1775 a patient, Joseph Cradock, sent him a copy of his book Village Memoirs. Erasmus wrote to thank him:
What shall I send you in return for these? I who have twenty years neglected the Muses, and cultivated medicine alone with all my industry! Medical Dissertations I have several finished for the press, but dare not publish them, well knowing the reception a living writer in medicine is sure to meet with from those who wish to raise their own reputation on the ruin of their antagonists. Faults may be found or invented; or at least ridicule may cast blots on a book were it written with a pen from the wings of the angel Gabriel.
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