John Coldstream had decided to go to Paris to continue his medical studies and to follow Grant’s example; in fact, several graduating members of the Plinian Society set off for Paris in the summer of 1827, and Grant joined them there later in the summer on his annual visit to the Paris museums and libraries. Darwin also traveled to Paris in June and July of that summer. His uncle Josiah was journeying to Geneva to pick up his daughters, Fanny and Emma Wedgwood;* he offered to take Charles as far as Paris. While his uncle traveled on to Geneva, Charles was left in Paris to occupy himself for several weeks. Now that Grant had cut him adrift, he wandered on his own around the displays of the Museum of Natural History in the Jardin des Plantes thinking through a fascinating set of questions.
Darwin found Coldstream unhappy, even in that first summer of his Paris studies. Parisian science, Coldstream admitted, unsettled him even more than Grant’s ideas had. William Mackenzie of Mission House in Passy, in whom Coldstream confided, recorded that “he was troubled with doubts arising from certain Materialist views, which are alas! too common among medical students. He spoke to me of his doubts, and manifested anxiety on the subject of religion.” Soon Coldstream was in a Swiss sanatorium recovering from an emotional collapse. Convalescing, he made decisions. There would be no further Continental study, no further materialist temptations. He would return to Leith in 1828 and work simply as a local doctor, healing the sick. He would shun the company of heretical naturalists such as Grant and other members of the Plinian Society. “In our day the majority of naturalists, I fear are infidels,” he wrote in 1829.
A broken man, Coldstream moved back into his parents’ house in Leith, still haunted by festering bodies and moral corruption. “A fair exterior covers a perfect sink of iniquity,” he wrote of himself on January 1, 1830, blaming his mental weakness on lack of discipline and the temptations of the flesh. “My present condition of mind,” he wrote, “is much inferior in strength and solidity to what it might have been had I not given loose reins to my lustful appetites. I have been ruined and enervated by a life of effeminacy and slothful indulgence.”
From Cambridge, Darwin wrote to Coldstream expressing sympathy for his friend’s illness and grief that he had given up marine zoology, arguing that “no pursuit is more becoming for a physician than Nat. Hist.” Coldstream agreed, but added cheerfully that he had decided to dedicate himself to “useful knowledge.” He had also resolved, he wrote, to give up dissecting live creatures—it seemed to be against nature. Nonetheless he asked Darwin to pass on his regards to Dr. Grant, and he ended: “Be so good as to write me again soon, and tell me something of the present state of Natural History in Cambridge. Have you had any opportunity of studying marine Zoology since you left this?”
Darwin had done no marine zoology since leaving Edinburgh. In Cambridge, eighty miles from the sea, his attention had turned to beetles. The Reverend John Henslow, his new botany teacher and walking companion, was already remarking, “What a fellow that D. is for asking questions.” Passing his exams in 1831, Darwin was now ready to take on a parish and settle down like Henslow. Instead, his imagination full of the travel tales of Alexander von Humbolt in South America, his thoughts turned to tropical expeditions. He wrote to his cousin William Darwin Fox in 1831: “It strikes me, that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen wd know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.”
The answer was to leave the corner of the field and scratch elsewhere; but what would his father have to say to this? In September 1831, the opportunity presented itself in the form of an invitation to accept the position of ship’s naturalist on a mapmaking voyage of coastal South America on board HMS Beagle. His father, exasperated by his son’s apparent flightiness, refused to agree to the voyage, but when his uncle intervened, arguing that “Natural History … is very suitable to a Clergyman,” eventually Darwin’s father agreed. Darwin wrote one last time to Coldstream, asking for advice and information about deep sea dredging and techniques for meteorological observations. In particular, he asked his old friend to draw him a diagram of an oyster dredger in such a way that he could have one designed for the Beagle voyage. Coldstream drew careful instructions and diagrams and urged Darwin to contact Robert Grant in London for further advice.
Darwin and Grant met in London in late 1831 in the weeks before the Beagle sailed. What must Grant have felt as he drank tea with his old protégé? Grant had once been the great traveler, crossing European mountain ranges and walking Mediterranean coastlines in the footsteps of Aristotle; now, without the luxury of a private income like Darwin’s, and living a long way from the sea, he struggled to make ends meet, his days entirely taken up with writing lectures, marking essays, and giving tutorials. Darwin came to him, wealthy, twenty-two years old, asking for precise instructions on collecting marine creatures in exotic tropical seas.
Grant’s London University position had not turned out to be what he had expected. Though the university had given him freedom to teach what and how he liked, that freedom came at a cost. The university was badly organized and in poor financial shape. On his arrival, Grant had to put together a museum collection for his students single-handedly, prepare three lecture courses, give two hundred lectures a year, and even buy his own dissection materials. Comparative anatomy and zoology were not compulsory subjects in the curriculum, so he never had enough fee-paying students to make up a steady salary, nor could he practice medicine to supplement his small teaching income because the medical corporations in London stipulated that as a Scotsman, he would have to take a new set of exams in order to practice, and Grant absolutely refused to do that. He was an angry, tired, and disappointed man.
There were, however, compensations. Grant had found allies among the London medical reformers when he arrived in the city, radicals who were campaigning against the nepotism and the monopoly of the Anglican landed classes over the medical profession. They were a famously outspoken group, making their demands for reform in Thomas Wakley’s journal The Lancet, founded in 1823. Wakley particularly admired Grant’s support for Continental ideas and his lack of deference toward the Church; he defiantly promoted his friend as the greatest professor in Europe.
Grant’s course of London lectures promoting French materialist science, weaving together the ideas of Lamarck and Geoffroy, quickly became a thorn in the side of the Anglican scientific establishment in London. “While myriads of individuals appear and disappear, like passing shadows in rapid succession,” he declaimed from the lectern podium,
the species … are still prolonged on the earth. The species, however, like the individuals which compose them, have also their limits of duration. The life of animals exhibits a continued series of changes, which occupy so short a period, that we can generally trace their entire order of succession, and perceive the whole chain of their metamorphoses. But the metamorphoses of species proceed so slowly with regard to us, that we can neither perceive their origin, their maturity nor their decay, and we ascribe to them a kind of perpetuity on the earth. A slight inspection of the organic relicts deposited in the crust of the globe, shows that the forms of species, and the whole zoology of our planet, have been constantly changing and that the organic kingdoms, like the surface they inhabit, have been gradually developed from a simpler state to their present condition.
London was politically volatile in 1831; Britain was in a period of economic depression, high prices, and high unemployment. The uprising in the streets of Paris in 1830 had terrified British conservatives and excited the radicals and dissenters. In 1820, a group of British revolutionaries had planned to start a general uprising by assassinating the entire cabinet; in 1819, a large crowd at a reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester were killed by cavalrymen in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre.
Natural science in Britain in the 1830s, and particularly in Cambridge and Oxford, was fundamentally different from that in France or Germany. Most of the teach
ing of scientific subjects in the two major English universities was undertaken by ordained ministers; it had come to be dominated by the forces of conservative natural theology. British naturalists tended to write about the wonderful adaptations of living creatures, each designed by God to adorn and enrich the earth and man’s husbandry of it. This tradition of natural theology—nature study as both an act of worship and a means of proving the existence and bounty of God—was at its peak in the 1830s; William Paley’s elegantly written and widely read Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature could be heard quoted in lecture theaters and churches and found on the bookshelves of most undergraduates, including those of the young Charles Darwin.
Darwin knew that Grant was taking risks in this atmosphere. Infidel men of science before him had been mauled by the Anglican establishment. The radical young surgeon William Lawrence, a brash and sarcastic friend of Wakley’s and a well-connected companion of radicals including the Shelleys, had given a course of lectures in 1816 at the Royal College of Surgeons in which he had argued that life depended on physiological structures, not souls. When in 1819 he published those lectures as Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man, the Lord Chancellor declared the book blasphemous. When his job, practice, and hospital positions were threatened, Lawrence resigned from the Royal College of Surgeons and withdrew his book from sale, but when he failed to prevent radical presses from publishing pirated versions in 1822, he was suspended from his surgeon’s post and obliged to write a retraction. A combination of career threats and professional inducements over the subsequent decade deradicalized him. The German physiologist Carl Gustav Carus, visiting England in the 1840s, complained: “He appears to have allowed himself to be frightened and is now merely a practising surgeon, who keeps his Sunday in the old English fashion, and has let physiology and psychology alone for the present.”
Darwin may have wondered how Grant could hold his small dissenting platform against the Anglican-dominated medical and scientific establishment of London, but he was on board the Beagle in 1836 when Grant came under direct attack. The backlash came, perhaps inevitably, from close quarters, from the hands of the brilliant young comparative anatomist Richard Owen, eleven years younger than Grant and a devout Anglican. Owen had been impressed by Grant’s passionate Lamarckianism when the two men first met; they had lodged at the same hotel in Paris in the summer of 1831. Grant had introduced Owen to all the important French philosophers at the Jardin des Plantes; the two men had talked late night after night about homologies and evolution. At the same time, Owen listened to what Cuvier had to say about Lamarckianism and about the limitations of Geoffroy’s theories. The dangers of anticlericalism would also have been firmly impressed on him by the sight of the burned-out Archbishop’s Palace, next to Notre Dame, set on fire in the street fighting of the previous year. The first revolutions of France, some whispered, had much to do with the writings of infidel philosophers that should have been more aggressively suppressed.
Another young scientist learned the lessons of Paris during these years: Charles Lyell. After witnessing fighting in the Paris streets during the violent July Revolution of 1830, he wrote home about the immense ages that would be required for our “Ourang-Outangs to become men on Lamarckian principles.” Returning to Britain during the Reform Bill crises of 1831–32, and “distracted by the disturbed state of politics” in London, he began to write the pages that would become the two volumes of the groundbreaking Principles of Geology, the second volume of which, published in 1832, set out to demolish Lamarckian transmutation over forty eloquently argued pages.
The success of Lyell’s second volume assured a blanket opposition to Lamarckianism in Britain; but, ironically, by refuting Lamarck’s theories in such minute detail and across so many pages, Lyell also disseminated knowledge of those ideas much more widely. In Principles, Lyell distanced himself from French ideas in an attempt to depoliticize himself and his claims. Studying fossils and strata did not have to be blasphemous or support materialism, he implied; landscapes might have shifted infinitely slowly through long periods of time, but there was absolutely no reason to believe that species had evolved. Lamarck, he insisted politely and respectfully, had been quite wrong to “[degrade] Man from his high Estate.” But Principles was not strong enough, Lyell’s colleagues complained, to silence the transmutationists. Lamarckian ideas were proliferating wildly among the medical men of London while Robert Grant remained unchecked.
Richard Owen knew he had to put some distance between himself and his former friend Grant if he was to make a career for himself in London. Grant’s lecture audiences were growing in the early 1830s, and despite his ideas, he was also gradually making an inroad into institutional positions outside the university; he had been appointed to the Linnaean, Geological, and Zoological Societies. At the same time, the Medical Gazette in 1833 accused Grant and Wakley “of ribald jestings on holy things and blasphemous derision of the sacred truths of Christianity.” Owen bided his time. Any direct attack on Grant or his ideas, he knew, would only give the older man more publicity.
Things came to a head when Robert Grant and Richard Owen were both elected to the Council of the Zoological Society in 1832, just as Lyell’s second, anti-Lamarckian volume of Principles of Geology appeared in the bookshops. For two years the two men jostled for power within the council committees, attempting to undermine each other beneath a veneer of politeness. Grant, keen to build a wider platform for himself within the corridors of power in London, managed to talk his way into giving a course of lectures to the Fellows in 1835. Owen, exasperated by Grant’s audacity and by the weakness of the Fellows, launched a campaign to get him balloted out of the Society in the April elections. It worked. Grant was ousted. At one stroke he was robbed of credibility, of a platform for his ideas, and of the ready supply of specimens for dissection that he needed in order to continue his work. It was a very public humiliation, reported even on the front page of The Times. Grant in turn declared he would have nothing more to do with the Zoological Society.
In the 1840s, after Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage, he chose not to call on his former mentor. Grant was now in dire financial circumstances. He still refused to take the London medical exams that would enable him to practice in England. He had finally begun to publish his lectures as a book called Outlines of Comparative Anatomy, issuing it in parts, but the series stopped abruptly in 1841 with no conclusion and he never published again. When the number of his students declined dramatically in 1850, the university granted him a small stipend of £100 per annum. Wakley launched a campaign and awarded him a further annuity of £50. Grant continued giving lectures, but his students found him bitter and melancholic. In 1849, when one of his university colleagues, John Beddoe, visited Grant in London, he found him living in a slum in Camden Town. When he urged him to find new lodgings, Grant declared bitterly, “I have found the world to be chiefly composed of knaves and harlots, and I would as lief live among the one as the other.”
Through the 1840s and 1850s, Charles Darwin, who had locked away his species theory in his desk drawer and had turned instead to describing uncontroversial barnacle taxonomies, must have listened for further news of Grant’s decline and humiliation with considerable fascination and alarm. His transformist mentor had become, like Lamarck, virtually a recluse. No one listened to him. People described him flitting from his house near Euston station to his lecture rooms, dressed still in his old, worn swallowtail coat, both vexed and aggressive when spoken to. He was yet another ghost to be laid to rest before Darwin could publish. But there was much to be admired, too, in the man. Without a private income, Grant had forged a professional living for himself on the basis of his own merits. That was impressive. He was right to denounce privilege and nepotism, right to denounce the Anglican Oxbridge clique who controlled all the scientific establishments of London. But his failure to compromise, his aggressi
ve attitude toward the establishment, had been disastrous for him personally, for the reform cause, and for the reputation of Continental scientific ideas. Robert Grant had become a laughingstock. Reform would not come by these means. Other ways, Darwin knew, must be found.
*Darwin was seventeen; William Kay from Liverpool and George Fife from Newcastle were nineteen; John Coldstream from Leith and William Ainsworth from Lancashire were twenty; William Browne from Stirling was twenty-two.
*In another Wedgwood-Darwin alliance, Emma Wedgwood would later become Darwin’s wife.
11
The Encyclopedist
EDINBURGH, 1844
It was November 1844. In the city of Edinburgh, a man in a frock coat and top hat walked slowly along a wide thoroughfare in the new part of the city. Around him carriages clattered past; street sellers pushed handcarts piled high with fruit or flowers or fish past elegantly dressed men and women walking their dogs; students clutching books jostled one another, making their way to the anatomy theaters, lecture halls, or infirmaries in adjoining streets; high school boys darted through clusters of lecturers and professors in black gowns passing through the classical façade of the Medical Faculty of Edinburgh University. Opposite the entrance to the Faculty, the man stopped outside the shop front carrying the sign MacLachlan, Stewart and Co., booksellers to the university.
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