Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  *The first use of the word “dinosaur” was by Richard Owen in 1842; he coined the term Dinosauria to refer to the “distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles” that were being dug up from mine, canal, and railway workings and quarries around the world and assembled in museum galleries.

  12

  Alfred Wallace’s Fevered Dreams

  MALAY ARCHIPELAGO, 1858

  In a thatched hut on a volcanic star-shaped island rising leafy green from the sea off the coast of northeastern Indonesia, a young English specimen collector lay wrapped in blankets struggling with the intermittent fevers of a malaria attack. For ten years he had depended on the sale of the birds and insects he collected out on these remote islands; from dawn to dusk he had hunted, killed, set and opened traps, then stuffed and skinned, pinned and wired scores of rare specimens every day—butterflies, birds, beetles, lizards, small mammals—labeling them carefully and crating them up to be sent home to his natural history dealer in London. Now he could do almost nothing. Every day fever descended on him around the same time, like a visitation; for hours every afternoon he shivered, convulsed with cold, then burned up, dripping with sweat. Strange waking dreams tormented him. Cold, hot, wet. He waited it out, marking off the stages as they passed. He had the worst kind of malaria, his eighteen-year-old Malay assistant, Ali, told him, wiping his head, the kind people died from. He had to rest.

  Photographic portrait of Ali, Wallace’s Malay assistant, aged around eighteen, and a portrait of Wallace himself, aged around twenty-four.

  Alfred Kussel Wallace, My Life (1905)

  But Alfred Russel Wallace did not sleep. As the afternoon sun dipped, and as Ali continued to label and record a few insects and then slipped away for evening prayer, Wallace shook and sweated, pulling blankets off and on as his temperature rose and fell, his mind wandering over the set of questions that had been pressing upon him for years now, bringing him first to Brazil and now to the Malay Archipelago. Nothing else excited him as much as this great mystery: How did all these wondrously diverse species come to be?

  Sometimes in these fevered hallucinations Wallace talked aloud to himself, or to Ali, or to absent friends, acquaintances, and correspondents—to his fellow collector and friend Henry Bates, who was somewhere on the Amazon, or to the naturalists Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell as he imagined them back in England in their clubs or walking in their rose-heavy English gardens, or to Lamarck or the anonymous author of Vestiges. Imagined and familiar conversations branched off in all directions. All species have evolved, adapted, and mutated. All living organisms have descended from earlier forms. All of his work as a species collector and as a geologist had confirmed transmutation to be true, a self-evident fact. He had published a paper about the species question; it had drawn the attention of some important people. But the mechanism, the means by which evolution happened, still evaded him. It had, he believed, evaded everyone.

  Years later Wallace remembered the feverish bolt-from-the-blue moment of realization with absolute clarity. In the midst of a daydream, the air of his hut thick with the smell of dead insects and exotic birds, “somehow my thoughts turned,” he wrote, to a book he had read in a drafty public library in Leicester fourteen years earlier: Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. For some reason he remembered Malthus’s clear description of the “checks” that stopped populations from growing—disease, accidents, war, famine—“which keep down the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that of more civilised peoples.”

  A violent history of earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, malaria, and famine had left its scars on all the islands of the Malay Archipelago and had periodically decimated human and animal populations. “Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied,” he continued,

  it occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted survive. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive. Then at once I seemed to see the whole effect of this.… The more I thought over it the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species.

  Wallace had to wait until the fever began to pass before he could drag himself from under the mosquito net to his desk, put on his glasses, and try to get the idea down on paper in sentences that did not tangle. It is easy to imagine the young naturalist’s stupefaction, his hands shaking, inky words blurring on the paper in front of him, asking himself the driving question one last time: How had so many species come into being? The answer was breathtakingly simple: Only the fittest survived. The others fell by the wayside, destroyed in vast numbers in famines, plagues, and earthquakes. In this way, generation by generation, animal bodies modified, adapted to changing conditions, to hotter, wetter, or colder climates. New species came into being as the furriest, or the scaliest, or the tallest, or the individuals with the largest eyes survived and passed the thicker skin or fur or largest eyes on to the next generation.

  Did Wallace try to explain to Ali what he could now see? Could he explain it? Even in England there were only a handful of people who had read enough, thought and puzzled enough, to be able to understand the immense significance of his new idea. Wallace’s friend the entomologist Henry Bates would understand; so would the naturalist and explorer Charles Darwin, who was writing a book about the origin of species. Then there was the geologist Charles Lyell, knighted in 1848, who, despite his passionate opposition to transmutation, understood the species question. But out here in this hut in the Malay Archipelago, there was only Ali. Ali was smart, a fine collector, a hard worker. What did he make of his master’s ideas about species, this man who was also his friend and teacher? Ali was a Muslim, and Wallace’s ideas about the mutability of species would have contradicted the creation story in the Qur’an, that God created the earth in one breath and breathed life into man at the very beginning, marking him out from the rest of creation as special and divinely ordained. Man, Islam had taught Ali, was different from the animals. Did Ali challenge his master’s assumptions, or, if he could see the truth of Wallace’s arguments, did he find a way to square evolution with his belief in the Qur’an?

  Wallace knew it was Sir Charles Lyell he must persuade above all others. By vigorously rebutting Lamarck’s ideas, Lyell had persuaded British men of science that there was no more to be said on transmutation. He had become the gatekeeper of the species question. No one would listen or be won over until Lyell listened and was won over. Over the course of two nights, as Wallace waited for the fever to lift and his hands to stop shaking, he wrote his idea into a short essay that engaged in imagined conversation with Lyell in every line, an essay tailored for publication in a British journal of science. Then he and Ali sailed back across the sea to Ternate.

  Conversations with people in England were always behindhand. Although Wallace was thrilled to recognize Darwin’s handwriting on a letter in the pile that had arrived in Ternate in his absence, he knew the letter had been written three months earlier. Darwin’s letter was full of encouragement for Wallace’s work. If there were spots of occasional reticence and a slightly patronizing tone here and there, Wallace put that down to reserve rather than territorialism. Darwin reassured him that the right people—including Sir Charles Lyell himself—were reading and admiring Wallace’s work. He told him that his own book on species was going very slowly and that he had no plans to discuss the origins of man. Nothing could have been better news for Wallace. He wrote out the words “Ternate, February 1858” on the essay, addressed it to Charles Darwin at Down House, Kent,
and asked him to send the essay on to Lyell. “I said that I hoped,” he remembered later, that the idea “would be as new to him as it was to me, and that it would supply the missing factor to explain the origin of species.”

  Over the next fifty years, Wallace told that story so often that it became a kind of personal myth: the fever, the chills, the remote location, the sudden, searing understanding of how the fittest survived, how he had to wait for the shivering to pass before he could put pen to paper. There is no reason to doubt any of his story—Wallace was honest, careful with detail, and an accurate record and diary keeper; he had a sharp memory. It is certain that in February 1858 in the Malay Archipelago, the final piece of a fourteen-year-long piece of detective work had fallen into place for him. Once the letter containing his paper had been safely delivered onto the mail boat to England, Wallace knew he would have to wait months for a reaction.

  The consequences are well known. Receiving Wallace’s letter, Darwin was devastated; he was certain that though he had discovered natural selection twenty years earlier, Wallace would publish before him and claim the prize. He called on Charles Lyell and his friend the eminent botanist Joseph Hooker and explained the situation. Lyell and Hooker presented the two papers at the Linnaean Society, asking the assembled members to make a judgment as to which man had discovered natural selection first. On July 1, 1858, the Linnaean Society members considered the evidence and gave their verdict: though both men were to be congratulated, they declared, Darwin had first recorded the idea and had it witnessed by others in 1844 in an unpublished essay. A judgment had been made about priority; nothing more. No bishop lost sleep or denounced Darwin or Wallace from the pulpit. All of that noise and outrage would not begin until Darwin’s now-rushed-to-print book, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, reached the bookshops on November 24, 1859.

  Wallace always described his idea as a revelation, a road-to-Damascus moment that “flashed upon” him. But though the idea surfaced from his fevered brain all in one piece like a wreck from the sea, he had been diving for it for years. Remembering Malthus’s theories of natural population control had given him the missing piece of the jigsaw, the constellation point, but there had been other similar moments of startlingly new understanding along the way that had contributed incrementally to Wallace’s remarkable discovery.

  For as long as he could remember, Wallace had been interested in the differences between human races and in the geographical borders that marked the edges of those gradations. He grew up on the border between Wales and England. The hills ten miles off near Abergavenny, which he could see from his bedroom window, marked the beginning of “the unknown land of Wales,” a place where people talked differently and where they looked different, too, though it was always difficult to say exactly where one country began and the other ended because of migrations and intermarriages. Because he was tall and had strikingly flaxen hair, the people of Usk called Alfred, the youngest of the Wallace children, the “little Saxon.” When he asked about that word and what it meant, no doubt someone explained about the different races that lived in Britain—the Celts, the Saxons, and the Anglo-Saxons—and how they had arrived and settled in different places and how Scotland, Wales, and Ireland were mostly occupied by Celts and the rest of the country by Anglo-Saxons. The inseparability of geography and race impressed itself on him, just as it had struck Jahiz a thousand years earlier as he watched the Bedouins coming into the marketplace or the pilgrims on the road to Mecca or the black slaves working out in the salt marshes and wondered how these physical differences had come to be so closely bound up with landscape.

  Like many lower-middle-class families in the 1830s and 1840s who were forced to survive by following work, the Wallace family migrated from town to town, educating their children as well as they could along the way. With the best of intentions, Wallace’s father, a small-time lawyer, speculated on railways and other financial ventures, but he was neither lucky nor a good judge of investments, and the family income was always precarious. Wallace’s education was patchy. But as literacy grew, book clubs and provincial libraries flourished. Wallace’s father belonged to a book club for a few years through which, Wallace later recorded, “we had a constant stream of interesting books, many of which [my father] used to read aloud in the evening”: travel books, novels, poetry, Swift, Scott, Defoe.

  Of all the books his father read aloud by candlelight in the family living room in Hertford, it was Daniel Defoe’s History of the Great Plague that Wallace remembered most vividly later. With the shocking detail of an eyewitness, Defoe described the three weeks in 1665 when plague wiped out a third of the population of London. He described the anguish with which the survivors searched for a meaning for the devastation they had seen. “Nothing but the immediate finger of God, nothing but omnipotent power, could have done it,” Defoe concluded. “The contagion despised all medicine; death raged in every corner; and had it gone on as it did then, a few weeks more would have cleared the town of all, and everything that had a soul. Men everywhere began to despair; every heart failed them for fear; people were made desperate through the anguish of their souls, and the terrors of death sat in the very faces and countenances of the people.” Wallace would later come to understand this tragic account in Malthusian terms.

  The Wallace family attended church, but only once did Alfred find himself moved to anything he would have called religious fervor; churchgoing was nothing more than social ritual to him. Thus Defoe’s descriptions of plague as a divine punishment seemed both superstitious and inadequate as explanations for such violent decimations of life. When his father took a job in a local lending library, Alfred spent every spare moment of his days there, “reading, squatting down on the floor in a corner.” He read adventure stories, novels by Marryat, Cooper, Bulwer, Smollett, Godwin, and Fielding, poetry by Byron, Scott, Pope, and Milton. He was, like so many clever young men of his generation, self-educated and following his changing curiosities at his own pace.

  London gave the young Wallace a political education. Sent to the capital to live for a few months with his elder brother John in Hampstead when he was only fourteen, Wallace sat among the wood shavings in the workshop where John was apprenticed as a joiner making staircases and doors and windows, listening to the young carpenters talk and argue about change, reform, and class. It was 1837. The working classes of London would rarely be so actively radical and united again. The first Reform Bill of 1832 had granted the vote to the middle classes but not the working classes; now angry young men were demanding a further extension of the franchise. In meetings in the Hall of Science, off Tottenham Court Road, which the teenage Wallace boys attended most nights, young men passed around books by the radical social reformer and socialist Robert Owen; lecturers explained how Owen’s reforms would bring freedom for the enslaved masses and release them from the bigotry of religion. All men are products of their environment, they preached, responsible for their own destinies. Wallace was intoxicated.

  Such an itinerant early life, led among self-educated, politicized British working men, made Wallace a freethinker, highly moral, socialist, and secular. When he left London a few months later to be apprenticed as a land surveyor in Bedfordshire to the eldest of his brothers, William, Wallace found that there was “a pervading spirit of scepticism, or free-thought as it was then called,” in his elder brother’s circle too, “which strengthened and confirmed my doubts as to the truth or value of all ordinary religious teaching.” William borrowed controversial books from friends or from the local mechanics’ institute that Alfred read surreptitiously, including a book of lectures on David Friedrich Strauss’s scandalous book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, which argued that the miracles in the New Testament were no more than the myths that inevitably grow up around the lives of great men. The Earl of Shaftesbury would later call The Life of Jesus “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.” This was dangerous territory: although Wallace’s family were modera
te in their religious observance, “the word ‘atheist’ had always been,” he wrote, “used with bated breath as pertaining to a being too debased almost for human society.” By adulthood, all of the Wallace boys were religious skeptics or atheists passionately committed to some form of socialism and to the education of the masses.

  In Wales, where the Wallace boys picked up more land-surveying work in the late 1830s, they witnessed desperate struggles for land and for survival. Through the newly passed Enclosure Act and the Tithe Act, the government was systematically carving up and appropriating common land, land owned by the people, so as to tax its use, and they were using land surveyors like the Wallace boys to implement it. In Wales these new acts were putting impossible pressures on desperate people at a time of widespread famine after failed harvests, making them pay taxes for their land and tolls for access to roads and robbing them of their common grazing land. With the benefit of hindsight Wallace would later call the Enclosure Acts land theft, but at the time he and William were simply doing a job. As they worked, mobs of young farmers and agricultural workers across Wales smashed up tollgates at night, attacked workhouses, and set fire to the homes of wealthy landowners. Wallace, still not yet twenty, zealous and naive, drew up plans and procedures for bringing a mechanics’ institute and science library to Neath, convinced that these farmers needed education, not violence. Education is power, he would repeat to anyone who would listen.

  The two brothers read voraciously in the evenings, either in local libraries or workingmen’s clubs or in their lodgings, borrowing books from circulating libraries or buying cheap editions, when they could afford to, from local booksellers. A bookseller in Neath, Charles Hayward, charmed by Alfred’s boyish enthusiasm and curiosity, introduced him to books, journals, and magazines on all aspects of science. Alfred bought a book on botany and started identifying local plants in the streets and fields and on the banks of rivers, keeping notebooks, looking for patterns of distribution. Within a few months he had become a competent amateur botanist with a good broad knowledge of British flora. Soon he was reading William Swainson’s Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals, which made him think more precisely about the relationship of species to landscape.