*This was not a Charles Darwin–type concept of adaptation produced through natural selection—it was closer to Lamarckian ideas of adaptation in which disused limbs gradually atrophy.
†It eventually went into five American and three Irish editions and was translated into German, Italian, French, and Portuguese.
9
The Jardin des Plantes
PARIS, 1800
On the left bank of the Seine, beyond the wrought-iron entrance gates, the botanical garden of the Jardin des Plantes stretched back from the edge of the water, all straight lines and symmetrized borders, to the classical façade of the Museum of Natural History at the far end. Originally named the Jardin du Roi, a garden of medicinal plants created for a king, in the eighteenth century it had housed a community of eminent French botanists who flourished under the leadership of the Comte de Buffon, who had improved and extended it, adding greenhouses, a labyrinth, and new collections of rare plants. With the overthrowing of the monarchy in 1793, the French revolutionary government renamed the Jardin du Roi the Jardin des Plantes, established a Museum of Natural History in the grounds, and appointed twelve new professors, all of equal rank and with equal pay, to study nature in all its forms and to extend the boundaries of the known world for the glory of the French people.
During the months leading up to the eruption of violence that came to be known as the Terror, while mobs rioted in the streets, during the beheadings and executions and the savagery, as aristocrats fled France or were rounded up into the prisons of Paris and marched to the guillotine, wagons carrying crated-up natural history collections confiscated from country palaces and elegant town houses rattled in through these gates. The twelve professors and their assistants unpacked bones, fossils, stuffed animals, minerals, bottles of preserved invertebrates, rare shells and corals. As money poured in from confiscated churches and palaces, masons and carpenters marked out the ground plans of new greenhouses, museums, laboratories, and lecture halls; horses and oxen hauled stones on wagons from the quarries of Montmartre; masons dug and drained, ditched and leveled, lifted stone onto stone, set glass into frames, tiles into roofs; carpenters dovetailed joints for new shelves and display cabinets and ranks of polished seating in libraries, lecture halls, and museums.
The collections of the Jardin swelled with the spoils of war as well as with the confiscated property of the executed and exiled aristocracy of France. As French armies marched across Europe capturing country after country in the last years of the eighteenth century, they appropriated the finest menageries and cabinets of natural history objects in the newly conquered countries and sent them back to the professors at the Jardin. Live animals, including two elephants from Holland, and stuffed animals and crates of labeled bones and fossils piled high on wagons made their way across the French roads and waterways and into Paris, together with the vast confiscated collections of the princes of Condé and the stadtholder of Holland. When Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power through the republican army—as an officer to begin with, then as a general, appointing himself first consul in 1798, and then emperor of France in 1804—he employed experts to identify the most famous collections of paintings, books, and natural history specimens in Europe and then to cherry-pick the finest pieces and oversee their packing and shipping back to Paris. When French scientist-explorers went to sea in search of new landscapes, they also shipped thousands of preserved species—peeled off rocks, dug out of holes, caught in jungle traps—back to their capital.
In 1800 the Jardin housed fifty-six employees and their dependents. In addition to the professors who lived in the grand houses that were built or renovated for them near the museum buildings in which they worked, there were naturalists’ assistants, gallery superintendents, gardeners, animal keepers, custodians, taxidermists, carpenters, glaziers, and masons. They lived in apartments at the museum with their families, if they had families, and sometimes not just with wives and children but also with siblings, nieces, nephews, or parents. Some had housekeepers. Others kept small gardens and domestic animals. The Jardin des Plantes had become a world unto itself.
But despite the stories the French newspapers told about the utopia that the republic and then the emperor had made in the Jardin des Plantes, life was not entirely harmonious behind its high walls and iron gates. Three of the twelve professors were engaged in a battle of ideas here in the first decades of the nineteenth century. They were fighting about the nature and definition of life itself, and the idea, which by then was discussed widely in Europe, that existing species might have transformed from earlier species. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the French had no single word for species mutation, although they would eventually call it transformisme. Later, the English, looking across the Channel at what seemed to be an aggressive, hostile, and godless country, called the idea transmutation, using a word drawn from alchemy, and labeled it both inherently heretical and dangerously French. It struck at the heart of the Christian religion, clerics declared; it contradicted the biblical account of creation; it sullied the idea of a benevolent God who had designed the universe for the enjoyment of man; it belittled the position of man in the universe; it challenged belief in man’s divinely granted dominion; it contradicted biblically based estimates that the earth was around six thousand years old. It was not to be supported.
Three professors; three different versions of nature. In these opening years of the nineteenth century, as Napoleon began his war with Europe, Professors Georges Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire first set out their battle positions in the Jardin des Plantes. The three men, united by a common drive to discover nature’s laws, were profoundly different from one another.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in his fifties as the century turned, was the most senior. The eleventh son of a minor provincial aristocrat, he had served in the army in the Seven Years’ War and then scratched out a living as a botanist in Paris. Buffon, impressed by his work, had made him his protégé. With the reformation of the Jardin, Lamarck had been appointed professor of insects, worms, and microscopic animals, with special dominion over the enormous collection of invertebrates. Widowed twice, he now lived with his third wife and eight young children in an apartment on one floor of the large house Buffon had once occupied, adjacent to the Museum of Natural History.
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (known by his shortened surname, Geoffroy) and Georges Cuvier were both young men in 1800. Cuvier turned thirty-one that year; at twenty-eight, Geoffroy was the youngest professor in the Jardin. When Cuvier first arrived in Paris from Germany, he and Geoffroy had shared lodgings and collaborated on papers. It took Cuvier, who came from a German provincial town and had few high-powered patrons in Paris, four years to negotiate a position for himself in the Jardin. Ambitious by nature, he worked hard to get it. Soon after he took up his position, he appropriated the attics of a vast building adjacent to his lodgings that had been recently purchased for the Jardin. With plans to establish his own museum of comparative anatomy there, he purloined unused animal skeletons that he found “piled up like bundles of firewood” in the old galleries. He was certain that natural history could be turned into an exact science through analysis of the relationships between body structures. France would lead the way, he told friends, overturn old mistakes, old orthodoxies, remap the natural world; it was time to look inside animal bodies, to examine and analyze their internal structures rather than their external characteristics as earlier naturalists had done.
Soon Cuvier’s Museum of Comparative Anatomy, carved out of the attics of an old hackney-carriage building and former flour depot, had spaces for dissection, a study, a library, and rooms filled with the skeleton and fossilized body parts Cuvier had assembled and pinned together to illustrate his new and radical understanding of the relationship of animal body parts to each other.
Cuvier had to be careful in those early years. He was not yet a professor himself but only a stand-in for an elderly professor of animal anatomy. In the lib
rary and corridors of the Museum of Natural History, students and professors gossiped and whispered about one another, making and breaking reputations. To Cuvier, increasingly dedicated to measurement, fact, precision, and evidence, Lamarck, who roamed widely in his work, crossing the boundaries between meteorology, botany, chemistry, and physics, must have seemed an old-fashioned generalist, a man of science who belonged to the old century. Cuvier found Lamarck adversarial and obsessive, always pitting himself against experts in other disciplines. The older man rarely listened to new ideas; he seemed not to be interested in anything except his own theories and systems.
Cuvier’s comparison of the skulls and teeth of living and fossil bears.
Georges Cuvier, Ossemens Fossiles (1812)
By contrast, Georges Cuvier was a plain facts man, a smartly dressed professional with immaculately formal manners. He was a defender of rules, hierarchies, law, and political order. Grand theories and speculation were all part of the last century, he would complain to his brother, Frédéric Cuvier, and his secretary, Charles Laudrillard; they were part of Buffon’s century. The proliferation of “systems” in the previous century had muddled things, confused the picture. In the new natural philosophy, claims to truth must be based only on close observation and accurate recording. Buffon’s wilder and later ideas, his notions about flux and mutability in species, were not just unprovable, he would say, they were dangerous; they challenged the natural order and imperiled the reputation of natural history.
Lamarck and Cuvier belonged to different traditions. Relations between them were, in early 1800, cordial enough, but they were about to come under strain.
By May 1800, the museums of the Jardin des Plantes, glutted with the spoils of war, had become the largest repositories of natural knowledge in the world. Hundreds of young lawyers, medical students, hospital administrators, and travelers signed up to attend the public lectures and to study alongside the professors. In the absence of censoring priests, students and their professors were free to engage in philosophically heady debates about the nature of life and creation, and their conversations spilled into the streets of Paris.
The lecture season in the Jardin des Plantes had just begun. Sixty-four young men, most under thirty and some as young as eighteen, sat in the ranked seats of the lecture theater waiting for the appearance of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the professor of insects, worms, and microscopic animals. They were mostly French, although there were also students from Italy, England, Ireland, Brazil, and Switzerland. They had come to study at the greatest center for natural history in the world, in the square mile where the great Buffon had lived and worked. None of them knew that this lecture would go down in history, that Lamarck, who had previously been a fixity-of-species man, had changed his mind about the origins of species. From years spent studying the relationship between living and fossil forms among the shells and invertebrates in his enormous collection, he had come to believe that all species had evolved from earlier forms and were continuing to mutate. And he was about to go public with that claim.
Lamarck began his lecture that day by declaring that natural history entailed a great deal more than the collection of facts. The naturalist had to be a philosopher who was prepared to take risks like the great Buffon, he insisted; he must always be searching for the larger picture. Then—extraordinarily—he began to describe nature as being in a state of perpetual flux, constantly producing new species and organisms in inexhaustible ways. Diversity of habitat, temperatures, actions, and modes of life, he declared, all influenced the development of living beings. As a result of these various influences, he continued, the limbs and body shapes of animals developed and strengthened with use and then diversified under the effect of long-preserved habits. And imperceptibly, over thousands of years, the nature, shape, and state of parts as well as organs were preserved and propagated by generation.
Lamarck’s new transformist ideas were hedged with perhapses and maybes, but his theory was simple and, no doubt for his students, astonishing: nature was on the move. He had used the expression la marche de la nature before, to mean the scale of nature, but now when he used it he meant something different; he meant it was was actually moving; it was on the march, progressing from the simplest forms toward the most complex. “Little by little,” he wrote, “nature has reached the state in which we see it today.”
Lamarck used birds—birds’ legs elongating, birds’ claws hooking, birds’ feet webbing—to give those students sitting in the auditorium that day a vivid but bizarre picture of the timeless and still continuing process he described. He asked them to imagine a species of water bird stretching out its toes repeatedly to move through the water and producing—generation by generation—webbed feet. He asked them to imagine a bird perching on a tree; might it not inevitably acquire, over time, longer, clasping, hooked toes so as to hold on better? Imagine, he told them, a shore-dwelling bird wading constantly in the mud. Generation by generation, over enormous tracts of time, might it not eventually develop longer, featherless legs? The wording he used was vague and evasive: the tree-perching bird “inevitably acquired” claws, he claimed; the mud-wading bird “finds itself raised” on long bare legs. It was a picture that would lend itself easily to parody, but it was also one that contained no God or divine plan.
It would not have taken long for Cuvier to hear the students of the Jardin discussing Lamarck’s new ideas. Cuvier was not a religious man; the fact that Lamarck’s ideas were at odds with the biblical creation story would not have seemed to him to be a problem in itself. To Cuvier it was merely bad science. It was preposterous, he had declared since 1796, to think that all quadrupeds had descended from a single species; such a theory “would reduce all natural history to … variable forms and fugitive types.” Convinced by years of painstaking comparisons between the physiological and anatomical internal structures of animals, he was certain that all organisms were functionally integrated wholes. Any change to that balance would make them unviable, unfit to survive. But though he found Lamarck’s ideas ludicrous, he kept his counsel, believing that if he refused to respond to them at all, others would follow suit. Besides, it was part of the etiquette of French science to avoid public controversy. He would let Lamarck’s ideas stand or fall by themselves.
For two years, between 1800 and 1802, the fifty-seven-year-old Lamarck worried that his poor health would not allow him to finish all the projects he had planned. He wrote frenetically, drafting and publishing several books simultaneously, taking the central tenets of his system in each subsequent book further and further across the border into speculative heresy. In Natural History of Animals Without Backbones (Système des animaux sans vertèbres) (1801), a systematic review of invertebrate animals accompanied by the text of his lecture of 1800 and a brief memoir on fossils, he claimed that fossils were traces of “the changes that living beings have themselves successively experienced” on the surface of the globe.
In the twinned books Hydrogeology (Hydrogéologie) and Researches on the Organization of Living Bodies (Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants), both published in 1802, Lamarck expanded and defended his transformist theories within a vast series of contemporary debates on anatomy, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, chemistry, and natural history. The earth’s surface had been shaped and modified, he argued in Hydrogeology, by the regular and ongoing action of water moving above and below the surface, producing continual changes to the earth’s crust. The same principles applied to the changing shapes of animal bodies: “It is not organs—that is, the nature and shape of an animal’s body—that have given rise to the animal’s habits and specific faculties,” he wrote. “On the contrary it is the animal’s habits, its mode of life, and the circumstances in which its individual forebears found themselves that, over time, have determined the form of its body, the number and state of its organs and lastly, the faculties with which it is endowed.”
There was a melancholy poetry in these books and in much of Lamarck’
s subsequent work. His transformism was a story of erosion and invasion, of organisms and landscapes pitting themselves against the destructive forces of nature caught forever in a balance between antagonistic processes: “In this imperceptibly slow process, the sea is constantly breaking up, destroying, and invading the continental coasts it encounters on its path,” he wrote; “meanwhile on the opposite coast, the sea is constantly falling, withdrawing from the land it has raised, and forming new continents behind itself, which one day it will return to destroy.” These processes were both mighty and slow, so slow indeed that the earth’s age, he wrote, “utterly transcended man’s capacity to calculate.” Lamarck told optimistic stories, too, descriptions of animals straining to survive and improve against all odds, including eventually the famous giraffe that his enemies would later use to mock his ideas. “To the examples I cited,” he added as an afterthought to his Researches on the Organization of Living Bodies, “I could add that of the shape of the giraffe (camelopardalis), a herbivorous animal which, as it dwells in a place where the land is arid and grassless, is obliged to browse on tree leaves and to strain itself continuously to reach them.”
As Lamarck’s books appeared through 1801 and 1802, the numbers of students attending his lectures almost doubled, rising from 70 in 1801 to 131 in 1802. These were mostly young pharmacists, doctors, medical students, lawyers, and hospital administrators, such as the idealistic forty-five-year-old hospital administrator at the Paris Institute for Deaf-mutes, Joseph Alhoy, who was also writing a book-length poem about reforming the treatment and education of abandoned children, or the Irish doctor John Butler, or the fourteen-year-old navy recruit and son of an engineer Christophe Paulin Fréminville de la Poix, who had been attending Lamarck’s spring lectures since he was twelve and had already determined to be an archaeologist and an adventurer and to dedicate himself to science. Although most of these young men would have attended Lamarck’s lectures simply to learn about invertebrate zoology, for some of them his account of nature’s process must have been radical and enthralling. Nothing was fixed in nature, it seemed. Everything was remaking itself, striving and stretching—like them and like Napoleon—toward a future in which human will would triumph and in which those with talent and adaptability, rather than money and an old name, would thrive.
Darwin's Ghosts Page 22