In 1827, as Bory continued to write his encyclopedia entries from a Parisian prison, where he had been incarcerated not for heresy but for debt, a giraffe arrived in the Jardin menagerie sent as a gift to France from the pasha of Egypt and accompanied on its journey across France by the fifty-five-year-old Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Bory, like most Parisians desperate to see the strange animal with his own eyes, called in a few favors from his friends at the Jardin and persuaded the warden to allow him to climb onto the roof of the prison. At a prearranged time, the giraffe’s Egyptian keeper walked the animal from the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes to the top of the domed hill called the Labyrinth. For half an hour, across the rooftops of Paris, Bory watched the movements of the giraffe through his telescope as it reached for overhanging leaves. Just think, he might have exclaimed to the guard who sat with him on the prison roof, how many thousands upon thousands of years of striving and stretching it must have taken for that neck to come into being!
In London, throughout the 1820s and 1830s, young medical students discussed Lamarck’s and Geoffroy’s theories, transposing their transformist ideas into a radical politics of reform. In the taverns and back rooms of student lodgings around Smithfield and in the pages of the new radical medical journals, they called for an appropriation of Church property, for working class suffrage, universal education, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the end of privilege. Transformism, as it had been called in France, transmutation or the theory of descent as it was beginning to be called in Britain, had always been political. In London in the 1830s it had become urgently so.
In 1836, in the state of Kentucky in America, boys threw stones at the window of a retired and increasingly eccentric elderly professor whom they called the French madman. Inside, in impoverished squalor, among thousands of books and cases of fossils and bones, Constantine Rafinesque was struggling to finish his life’s work, a poem called The World, or Instability, in which he proposed that the world had evolved through millions of years, species evolving one after another from simple early forms. If you had asked him, he would have told you, because he liked to talk, that he had been born in Constantinople to a German mother and French father, that his parents had been forced out of France by the French Revolution, that he had been raised and educated in Tuscany by his grandmother and an Italian natural philosopher tutor she employed to teach him, and that he had sailed to America in 1803 when he was in his early twenties to make his fortune, reading precious books and papers by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the botanist Antoine de Jussieu, and the Comte de Buffon as he traveled across state border after state border, thousands of miles on foot into mountains and swamps and creeks in search of new plants and animals, always aware that his ideas and manuscripts were incomprehensible to most non-Europeanized Americans and almost always heretical. He would tell you about the shipwreck he had survived when he returned to America from Sicily in 1815 in which he lost every one of his fifty boxes of belongings—his library and all his botanical and natural history collections, including six hundred thousand shells—and he would tell you that he had worked as a university professor, part-time tutor, inventor, curiosity dealer, and journalist in Philadelphia for the better part of his later years.
He would add that he had always been misunderstood, that in America, the country he called home, his botanizing was admired but his theories ridiculed. It was the great age of the fact, he would complain. The age of the visionary naturalist-philosophers like Buffon and Lamarck was over. He had tried arguing his transformist ideas in his book The Flora of North America; he had tried arguing them in specialist articles and in papers given at scientific societies, but no one would engage with him or take his ideas seriously. Poetry was the way to reach people, he had decided; in his poem he would challenge scientific orthodoxies, bring light to the darkness, forge the ideas of Swedenborg, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck into a unique synthesis, a vision of the world progressing from its smoky beginnings through great tracts of time and metamorphosing species.
In Kentucky, transformism, imported from Paris, gave Constantine Rafinesque a new way of understanding the American Declaration of Independence, a model for human striving, diversification, and self-improvement and a way of understanding his own sequence of metamorphoses:
Versatility of talents and of professions, is not uncommon in America; but those which I have exhibited in these few pages, may appear to exceed belief: and yet it is a positive fact that in knowledge I have been a Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist … by profession a Traveller, Merchant, Manufacturer, Collector, Improver, Professor, Teacher, Surveyor, Draftsman, Architect, Engineer, Pulmist [lung specialist], Author, Editor, Bookseller, Librarian, Secretary … and I hardly know myself what I may not become as yet.
As it had for many of the radicalized medical men of London in the 1830s, or for Bory on the run across Europe assuming ever new identities and disguises, transmutation had become not only a scientific theory about animal-human kinship and descent, but also a way by which these men might explain change—both how they had come to be and what they might yet become.
*This slab of stone, discovered by a French soldier working on strengthening a defensive wall, carried inscriptions in ancient Greek, demotic Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. It enabled the later decoding of the hieroglyphs.
*The Imperial University was not a physical place but rather a bureaucratic structure that organized all public instruction in France.
*Laurencet’s given name has been lost from the historical record.
10
The Sponge Philosopher
EDINBURGH, 1826
October 1826—a beach at the harbor port of Leith, near Edinburgh, in Scotland. Now that most of the summer visitors had returned to the cities, the bathing machines had been lined up in rows at the far end of the beach and covered in tarpaulins to protect them from winter winds and rain. Still work continued. Barefooted fisherwomen and their children levered mussels off the black rocks to bait their lines; in the fishermen’s warehouses, men and women packed fish or salt or stacked boxes onto the backs of wagons; in the six cone-shaped brick kilns of the Leith Glasswork Company, glassworkers poured molten glass into bottle molds. Whale blubber that was being boiled to make soap and candles in the boiling houses fouled and thickened the air. Beyond the Martello Tower, built to defend the town against French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars, the masts of moored whaling and fishing boats looked from a distance like a forest against the great expanse of the Firth of Forth, which stretched out to the horizon, gray and steely in the winter light.
Charles Darwin, seventeen years old, his boots stained with salt, his coat pulled tight against the wind, stood among the black rocks on the sands. The red leather-bound diary he wrote in was full of notes on sea mice, cuttlefish, sea anemones, starfish, and the migration patterns of birds. Ever since he had enrolled as a medical student at the university a year earlier, he had skipped lectures to walk down the long Leith Road to the beach here every few days, first with his brother and now alone, to poke about in the rock pools along the shore, carrying sea creatures in glass jars back up the long road to Edinburgh to his rooms to put them under his microscope.
There were two other men on the beach at Leith carrying glass jars and dissecting equipment on this particular day. One of them was Robert Grant, a local doctor in his midthirties; the other was Grant’s protégé, John Coldstream, a nineteen-year-old medical student at the university. They were collecting sea sponges in buckets. Something—mutual recognition and interest, curiosity, good manners—brought these three men together. They introduced themselves, shaking hands, voices raised against the biting wind. It took Grant only a few minutes to discover that this well-dressed young man was the grandson of the great Erasmus Darwin, author of Zoonomia. He was intrigued and impressed, and he explained to Darwin that he was in the middle of experiments, trying to determine once
and for all whether sea sponges were plants or animals. His work was indebted, he said, to both Erasmus Darwin and Aristotle. Since the Greek philosopher had first examined sea sponges in the lagoons of the Greek islands, he added, no one had come to understand them any better. He showed young Darwin his dissecting equipment and microscope, explaining how important it was to be able to dissect and observe outside, right on the edge of the water, while the sponge was still alive. There were so many important questions to be asked, so many answers to be found, he declared. The men arranged to meet again.
Robert Edmond Grant aged fifty-nine.
Thomas Herbert Maguire (1852)
So began Charles Darwin’s friendship with one of the most remarkable men in Edinburgh; it was a relationship that would transform the way Darwin thought about the natural world. He was lucky. There was no one else like Grant in Edinburgh at the time, no one who had read so much, investigated so much, or thought so much, or so freely, about species, origins, and time. Cynical, clever, and reclusive, Robert Grant was a radical Lamarckian; he was absolutely certain that species had evolved from primitive aquatic organisms. The timing of their encounter could not have been better. Grant was coming to the end of an intense period of investigation, an attempt to discover the origins of life, a journey that had taken him from Edinburgh to Paris, across Europe and back to a boarded-up house a mile along the Edinburgh shore at the village of Prestonpans, where he had established a secret laboratory. By the time he met Darwin, he was turning his notes into articles and publishing them. Darwin claimed in his Autobiography that he was astonished by Grant’s Lamarckian conclusions. But if he was astonished, he was also wildly curious about them.
Within weeks, Grant had enrolled Darwin in the student-run Plinian Natural History Society, a group of students who met to discuss questions related to the new biological sciences, and recruited him as an assistant for his own research. Two years later they would fall out and lose touch with each other, and Grant would disappear into eventual obscurity in London.
As they walked along the shores of the Firth of Forth over the next few weeks and months and as Grant taught him dissection techniques, Darwin asked endless questions about his new friend’s work and travels. His great European journey, Grant told Darwin, had begun when he had read Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia. From a large local family, he had enrolled as a medical student at Edinburgh. He had attended the lectures of Robert Jameson, Regius professor of natural history, who, fascinated by the history of the earth, taught some of his classes in rooms in the Royal Museum of the university, rooms lined with the enormous natural history collections he had inherited from his predecessors and since expanded. Jameson took his students to the hills around Edinburgh to speculate upon their formation and introduced them to new Continental ideas about comparative anatomy and earth history. He urged them to think, to debate, to experiment. Men of science all around the world, he assured them, were on the verge of great new discoveries.
Then, as Grant prepared for his dissertation in 1813 on the circulation of blood in the human fetus, he had fallen upon Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life in the university library. He described to Darwin his excitement at discovering in those pages the chapter titled “Generation,” in which Erasmus Darwin had argued that the shared patterns of structure that Grant had seen in animal bodies were the result of common parentage and that all life had started out as aquatic filaments in a universal sea. It had revolutionized the way Grant understood the natural world. But when he had enthused about the brilliance of Zoonomia to fellow students and teachers, he discovered that most of them had not read it, and those who had dismissed it as mere speculation. The author was a poet and an inventor, they said, not a trained man of science. Grant took detailed notes from Zoonomia nonetheless and kept returning to those notes years later.
When Grant graduated as a doctor in 1814 and came into a small inheritance, Jameson encouraged his promising pupil to go abroad—Germany and France were the places to go with the questions that preoccupied him about anatomical patterns. Paris was the center of comparative anatomy, and in 1815, the year after Grant graduated, the Napoleonic Wars had come to an end when the Allies had defeated and captured Napoleon at Waterloo, making the great French capital accessible again. By way of preparation for his journey, Grant spent months improving his French, German, and Greek. He wanted to be able to read Aristotle’s The History of Animals in its original language.
Grant was twenty-two when he arrived in Paris at the beginning of the winter of 1815–16. The war was over; the Allies occupied the city, and Napoleon had been banished to the island of St. Helena. The city, with its wide boulevards and green parks, was full of men in uniform—Prussian soldiers, boastful and ebullient, filled the bars and dance halls; British soldiers, more sober and disciplined, had established camps down the Champs-Élysées; even Scottish soldiers in kilts were to be seen on street corners buying lemonade from the street sellers. Grant was one of only a few British medical students in the city. They shared lodgings and met in cafés, comparing notes, gossiping about the charismatic French professors or the surgeons who ran the wards in which they worked, improving their French, absorbing and questioning new ideas.
Reforms to medical practice, research, and hospital management in the wake of the French Revolution had made Paris the heart of the new medicine, characterized by systematic close observation of human anatomy. The vast Parisian hospitals, no longer in the hands of the Church but under the control and management of eminent anatomists, physicians, and surgeons, had been turned into centers of research and teaching; a new generation of young doctors was being trained to look more closely inside the human body to determine the structure and patterns of disease. Thirty thousand people a year were treated in the hospitals of Paris, and of those who died, four-fifths were dissected. In 1815, soldiers from Waterloo were still pouring into the city hospitals, many of them with limbs blackened by gangrene. That winter, all medical students had to learn how to amputate limbs without anesthetic. It was grueling work. The new generation of medical students was being trained to dissect, describe, and record, and to trust the evidence of their eyes above the authority of old medical textbooks.
Grant spent his first winter studying comparative anatomy in the Museum of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, attending lectures, reading everything he could in the enormous library, including Aristotle in Greek, and studying the great collections of bones and dried and bottled specimens. Letters of recommendation from Professor Jameson gained him access to the salon of the robed and magisterial Professor Cuvier. By contrast, Lamarck, professor of insects, worms, and microscopic animals, in his seventies in 1815 and completing his seven-volume Natural History of Animals Without Backbones, seemed a frail and shadowy figure. The old man’s controversial transformist ideas, mocked by the great Cuvier, were, Grant realized, remarkably similar to those of Erasmus Darwin. But the number of students attending his lectures was declining fast. Grant did not attend. Instead he read everything he could by the three men, in French and in translation.
Lamarck’s work, including the first volume of his Natural History of Animals Without Backbones, which had been published that year, made Grant think again about marine invertebrates. He returned to the extraordinary sea-sponge specimens and fossils arranged behind glass in the Museum of Natural History, admiring their strange, fanned, branched, and sometimes mysteriously bowl-like forms covered in tiny holes. He read Aristotle on sponges, then work by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists such as Zeller, Lamouroux, Gmelin, Peyssonel, Ellis, Montagu, Pallas, Guettard, Jussieu, Blumenbach, Lichtenstein, Schweigger, and Marsigli, translating and taking copious notes. “All facts known about the sponge,” he concluded with some amazement, “have remained where Aristotle left them, or rather, in this branch of study, mankind has gone backward ever since his time.” As he also remarked, “It is pleasing to observe that our forefathers, at such a remote period, were occupied, like ourselves, among the
rocks of the sea shore, experimenting on this humble and apparently insignificant being.”
If Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin had persuaded Grant that marine invertebrates were the key to understanding the origins of life, Cuvier and Geoffroy convinced him of the importance of dissection, of mapping and analyzing internal as well as external body structures in order to understand common patterns between apparently different organisms and life-forms. Trained in rigorous scientific experiment and observation, inspired both by Aristotle’s work and by Parisian speculation about the nature and origins of life, and in possession of one of the finest microscopes he could buy, Grant determined to solve the problem of the sea sponge and use it to build a theory of the origin of species.
To a disciple of Lamarck and Geoffroy like Grant, sponges were particularly intriguing because the surviving fossil forms were so similar to living species; they had changed little since they had first evolved as multicellular organisms. If they were ancestral forms, as Lamarck’s work implied, they might yield clues to the mutation of species in one of its earliest stages; yet, as Grant had discovered, they were so little understood. This was partly because, as Aristotle had found, they were difficult to observe and almost impossible to dissect, given that once they were taken out of the water they quickly lost their vibrant colors and died. No one in Grant’s time seemed able to agree on whether they were animals or plants. If animal life was to be defined by sensitivity, the ability to move and the existence of digestion, then the sea sponge appeared to have few discernible signs of being an animal. It was an enigma as unreadable as the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Grant reread Aristotle’s passages about sponges, copying out the original Greek words the philosopher used, trying to work out more exact and accurate translations so as to understand more fully what Aristotle was doing and thinking. He determined to bring Aristotle, the great collector and observer of marine invertebrates, together with Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, the great speculators on origins. He would do this by conducting his own extensive experiments until he knew everything there was to know about sponges. Once he had done that, he might be able to use the sponges as a way of opening up the history of species mutability.
Darwin's Ghosts Page 25