Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  20. Erasmus sent her unsigned love poems: King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 139–40.

  21. an experimental garden—“tangled and sequestered”: Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (London: J. Johnson, 1804), 125–32; the remains of the garden and bathhouse are still to be seen in the grounds of a school for children with dyslexia called Maple Hayes School on Abnalls Lane.

  22. “The Linnaean system … is unexplored poetic ground”: Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, 130–31.

  23. promoting Linnaeus’s ideas about plant sentience and sexuality: Ernst Mayr addresses the part that Linnaeus played in the development of evolutionary thought in Growth of Biological Thought, 340–41. He argues that though Linnaeus is often considered the archfoe of evolutionism, his consistent opposition to evolutionary ideas brought the problem into scientific recognition and his system drew attention to the discontinuities in the natural world.

  24. coining new words to describe the sexual parts of plants: For the coining of words, see Darwin’s letter to Joseph Banks, September 29, 1781, King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 189–91, and his letter to Josiah Wedgwood, October 4, 1781, ibid., 192–93. For a detailed study of The Loves of the Plants, see Janet Browne, “Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and The Loves of the Plants,” Isis 80, no. 4 (1989): 601.

  25. “manuscript has undergone as many alterations”: Wedgwood to Bentley, October 24, 1778; cited in Craven, John Whitehurst of Derby, 94–95; Wedgwood to Bentley, November 4, 1778, cited in Uglow, Lunar Men, 300–301.

  26. He was still thinking through his earlier ideas: See Erasmus Darwin, letter to unknown recipient [summer 1782?], King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 204–5.

  27. The Loves of the Plants was quickly taking shape: Erasmus Darwin to Joseph Johnson, May 23, 1784, King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 235. Erasmus wrote and published The Loves of the Plants first, although The Economy of Vegetation is the first volume in the chronology of the whole.

  28. “I would not have my name affix’d to the work”: Erasmus Darwin to Joseph Johnson, May 23, 1784, King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 235.

  29. “vast and massive, his head almost buried in his shoulders”: The Biography of Mrs Schimmel Penninck, 177; cited in Uglow, Lunar Men, 424.

  30. began to put together an ambitious fossil collection: Erasmus’s letters from 1788 onward are full of references to fossils.

  31. The critical response to the poem was rapturous: For a detailed account of the reception of The Loves of the Plants, see Desmond King-Hele, The Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 197–98.

  32. “You are such an infidel in religion”: James Keir to Erasmus Darwin, March 15, 1790, in James Keir, Sketch of the Life of James Keir (London: R. E. Taylor, 1868), 111; the term “oxyde hydro-carbonneux” is a reference to the work of the French chemist Lavoisier.

  33. “I have some medico-philosophical works in MS”: Erasmus Darwin to James Watt, January 19, 1790, King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 358. In February 1792 he wrote to Robert Darwin repeating his intention to publish Zoonomia: “I intend to write no more verse and to try a medico-philosophical work next, called Zoonomia,” ibid., 364.

  34. It was a dangerous time, certainly: For a powerful and detailed account of this time, see Uglow, Lunar Men, 440–44.

  35. “the highroads for full half a mile of the house”: Robert K. Dent, Old and New Birmingham: A History of the Town and Its People (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1972–73; first published 1879), 229.

  36. “I am now too old and harden’d to fear a little abuse”: King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 399.

  37. “This is the most important crisis in the history of British liberty”: King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, 292.

  38. Erasmus was no longer getting away with it: Ibid., 293.

  39. “one of the most important productions of the age”: Ibid., 291.

  40. “I have a profess’d spy shoulders us on the right”: Erasmus Darwin to R. L. Edgeworth, March 15, 1796. The spy was Mr. Upton—recruited to watch activities in the house by John Reeve’s Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers, founded in 1792.

  41. “America is the only place of safety”: King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 472.

  42. Prison beckoned: King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, 314–17; on Johnson’s imprisonment, see Jane Worthington Smyser, “The Trial and Imprisonment of Joseph Johnson, Bookseller,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 77 (1974): 418–35.

  43. the less provocative The Temple of Nature: Martin Priestman, “Darwin’s Early Drafts for the Temple of Nature,” in C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, eds., The Genius of Erasmus Darwin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 311.

  44. his evolution emerged from his medical knowledge: This observation was made in detail in Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

  45. There was not a single good review: Norton Garfinkle, “Science and Religion in England, 1790–1800: The Critical Response to the Work of Erasmus Darwin,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16, no. 3 (1955): 385.

  46. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Letter to William Wordsworth, May 30, 1815, in Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 4:574–75; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Notes on Stillingfleet,” Athenaeum, March 27, 1875, 2474:423.

  47. Mary Godwin, Shelley’s brilliant and intellectually voracious lover: Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” reprinted in George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds., The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 83–84.

  9. THE JARDIN DES PLANTES

  1. the botanical garden of the Jardin des Plantes: For fascinating accounts of the Jardin, see R. W. Burkhardt, “The Leopard in the Garden: Life in Close Quarters at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle,” Isis 98, no. 4 (2007): 675–94, Dorinda Outram, “Le Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle après 1793: Institution scientifique ou champ de bataille pour les familles et les groupes d’influence?” in C. Blanckaert, Claudine Cohen, Pietro Corsi, and Jean-Louis Fischer, eds., Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire (Paris: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 1997), 25–30, and Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Science, Vocation and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); for the earlier history of the Jardin des Plantes, see Emma Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); for the politics of the Jardin, see Pietro Corsi, The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1790–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Toby A. Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), and R. W. Burkhardt, “Lamarck, Evolution and the Politics of Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 3 (1970): 275–96; for a contemporary account, see Joseph Deleuze, Histoire et description du Muséum Royal d’Histoire Naturelle, ouvrage rédigé d’après les ordres de l’administration du Muséum (Paris: Royer, 1823; translated into English in 1823). In writing, revising, and correcting this chapter, I owe a debt of gratitude to the generous scholars Dorinda Outram and Richard Burkhardt.

  2. Three professors; three different versions of nature: A. S. Packard, Lamarck: The Founder of Evolution (New York: Longmans, Green, 1901), 42–43. The key biographies on these three men are: on Lamarck—Raphaël Bange and Pietro Corsi, “Chronologie de la vie de Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,” Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (online); Ludmilla Jordanova, Lamarck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); R. W. Burkhardt, The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1977), and Pietro Corsi, Lamarck, philosophe d
e la nature (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006); on Cuvier—Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Science, Vocation and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France, and Toby Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate; on Geoffroy—Théophile Cahn, La Vie et l’oeuvre d’Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), and Hervé Le Guyader, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: A Visionary Naturalist, translated by Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  3. When Cuvier first arrived in Paris from Germany: See Outram, Georges Cuvier: Science, Vocation and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France, 166–68.

  4. his own museum of comparative anatomy: Ibid., 176.

  5. Soon Cuvier’s Museum of Comparative Anatomy: On Cuvier’s early years in the Museum of Natural History, see Dorinda Outram, “Uncertain Legislator: Georges Cuvier’s Laws of Nature in Their Intellectual Context,” Journal of the History of Biology 19, no. 3 (1986): 323–68.

  6. Lamarck … must have seemed an old-fashioned generalist: This portrait of Lamarck’s rather obsessive personality comes from Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Histoire des sciences de l’organisation et de leurs progrès comme base de la philosophie, rédigée etc. par F.L.M. Maupied, 3 vols. (Paris, 1845), 3:358.

  7. Georges Cuvier was a plain facts man: See Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 53–59, and Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France, 128.

  8. Lamarck and Cuvier belonged to different traditions: Corsi, Age of Lamarck, 64–65.

  9. Hundreds of young lawyers, medical students: Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 34–37.

  10. They were mostly French, although there were also students: For detailed information about the nationalities and biographies of the young men who attended Lamarck’s lectures, see Professor Pietro Corsi’s valuable database of auditors at www.lamarck.cnrs.fr/auditeurs/presentation.php?lang=en.

  11. Lamarck … had changed his mind: Various reasons have been proposed for Lamarck’s conversion from fixity to flux. See in particular Richard Burkhardt, “The Inspiration of Lamarck’s Belief in Evolution,” Journal of the History of Biology 5 (1972): 413–38, and Burkhardt, Spirit of System, ch. 5.

  12. The naturalist had to be a philosopher: Lamarck first defined his role as naturalist-philosopher in this lecture in 1800. See Burkhardt, “Lamarck, Evolution and the Politics of Science,” 285.

  13. he began to describe nature as being in a state of perpetual flux: Corsi, Age of Lamarck, 93.

  14. “Little by little,” he wrote, “nature has reached the state”: Cited in ibid., 100.

  15. It was a picture that would lend itself easily to parody: Ibid., 93–94. Corsi describes a discovery made by Richard Burkhardt in the archives—a passage that Cuvier had excised from a draft of Discourse on the Revolutions of the Earth in which he mercilessly mocked Lamarck’s description of metamorphosing birds.

  16. “would reduce all natural history to … variable forms”: Cuvier, “Mémoire sur les espèces d’éléphants tant vivantes que fossiles,” 12; cited in Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 51.

  17. his poor health would not allow him to finish: Burkhardt, “Lamarck, Evolution and the Politics of Science,” 287.

  18. Lamarck expanded and defended his transformist theories: See Corsi, Age of Lamarck, 122.

  19. “It is not organs—that is, the nature and shape of an animal’s body”: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants et particulièrement sur son origine, sur la cause de ses développements et des progrès de sa composition, et sur celle qui, tendant continuellement à la detruire dans chaque individu, amène nécessairement sa mort; précédé du discours d’ouverture du cours de zoologie, donné dans le Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris: Maillard, 1802), 50.

  20. “In this imperceptibly slow process, the sea is constantly breaking up”: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Hydrogéologie (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, Agasse et Maillard, 1802), 54; cited in Corsi, Age of Lamarck, 106.

  21. “utterly transcended man’s capacity to calculate”: Lamarck, Hydrogéologie, 88. Corsi explains the contradictions between Lamarck’s developing history of the earth and the history of life in Age of Lamarck, 115–17.

  22. “To the examples I cited,” he added as an afterthought: Lamarck, Recherches, 208. He used the giraffe much more extensively in his Philosophie Zoologique of 1809.

  23. the numbers of students attending his lectures almost doubled: See Corsi’s list of student numbers at www.lamarck.cnrs.fr/.

  24. In 1802 Lamarck was a rising star among these students: The largest audiences in the Jardin were for Desfontaines’ uncontroversial botany lectures. He regularly had audiences of between 500 and 600 auditors; these had a much higher proportion of women. In comparison, Lamarck’s audiences were small. Cuvier often attracted between 200 and 300 students to his lectures. See Deleuze, Histoire et description du Muséum Royal d’Histoire Naturelle.

  25. Following Lamarck, they claimed that the first life-forms: For a useful summary and assessment of Lamarck’s key ideas, see Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, 359.

  26. The idea of species change: See Pietro Corsi, “Before Darwin: Transformist Concepts in European Natural History,” Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2005): 167–83.

  27. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had been professor of vertebrates: Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 20–21.

  28. “It seems that nature is confined within certain limits”: Geoffroy, 1796; cited in Le Guyader, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, 21.

  29. “I have never seen such water birds”: Nina Burleigh, Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt (New York: Harper, 2007), 189.

  30. “demand no less than the throne of anatomy”: Geoffroy, Lettres écrite d’Egypte, 95–96; cited in Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 75.

  31. “I am so overwhelmed with business”: Burleigh, Mirage, 197.

  32. But in this atmosphere of political volatility: Robert Solé, Les Savants de Bonaparte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999), 160.

  33. “The bombing, the fires, the ambushes”: Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Études progressives d’un naturaliste pendant les années 1834 et 1835 (Paris), 149–51; cited in Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 78.

  34. a “very vast theory” that would revolutionize science: Geoffroy, Lettres écrites d’Egypte, 205; cited in Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 76.

  35. Geoffroy locked his manuscripts and his great theory away: Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 81.

  36. “One cannot master the transports of one’s imagination”: Burleigh, Mirage, 190.

  37. Three thousand years was nothing in the age of the earth: Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 82.

  38. “true science should be sought on a broader and higher plane”: Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Vie, travaux et doctrine scientifique d’Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Paris and Strasbourg, 1847), 116–17; cited in Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 83.

  39. Geoffroy … begged Cuvier to intervene on his behalf: Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 84.

  40. Isidore, who would become an eminent and important zoologist: Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire also promoted transformist ideas; Darwin included him in his “Historical Sketch.”

  41. Cuvier married a widow: On Cuvier’s four stepchildren and the four children he had with Madame Duvaucel, see Mrs. R. Lee, Memoirs of Baron Cuvier (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1833), 18–19.

  42. The baby lived only a few weeks: On the death of Cuvier’s firstborn son, christened Georges, see ibid., 19.

  43. his theatrical and flamboyant lecturing style: See Isidore Bourdon, Illustres Médecins et naturalistes des temps modernes (Paris: Comptoir des Imprimeurs-Unis, 1844), 116–17.

  44. only the beauty and goodness of the Creator were proper objects: François-René Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, 5 vols. (Paris: Migueret, 1802), Part 3, Book 2, ch. 2; cited in Outram, “Uncertain Legislator,” 335.

  45. geology need not be antireligious: On Cuvier
’s religious beliefs, see Outram, Georges Cuvier, 141–60; on his geology lectures, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones and Geological Catastrophe: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 74–88.

  46. When Lamarck died in 1829: See Packard, Lamarck, 57–61.

  47. There was very little money to spare in the museum coffers: For the history of the Jardin and specifically the history of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, see Deleuze, Histoire et description du Muséum Royal d’Histoire Naturelle.

  48. what Baron Cuvier now had to say in his obituary: An English translation, probably by Robert Jameson, was published in 1836: Georges Cuvier, “Elegy of Lamarck,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 20 (January 1836), 1–22. This elegy was read to the French Institut National in Paris by the Baron Silvestre (Cuvier had recently died) on November 26, 1832. It was intended to follow an elegy to M. Volta on June 27, 1831, but was postponed. It was published (after an unaccountable delay) in France in Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de l’Institut de France, vol. 13 (Paris, 1835), i–xxxi.

  49. every organism, he declared, belonged to one of four branches: Cuvier’s system demolished the idea of nature that had dominated natural philosophy for centuries—the Great Chain of Being, the belief that nature was arranged like a ladder with the simplest organisms on the bottom and the most complex at the top in a continuous sequence. For the classic text on this subject, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936).

  50. his stepdaughter and assistant, Sophie Duvaucel: Sophie Duvaucel was now his chief, but unacknowledged, collaborator on the Règne animal volumes and his senior assistant and illustrator. She managed the group of assistants assembled to help on the project, who worked in a room adjoining Cuvier’s study in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy. See M. Orr, “Keeping It in the Family: The Extraordinary Case of Cuvier’s Daughters,” in Cynthia Burek and Bettie Higgs, eds., The Role of Women in the History of Geology (London: Geological Society of London, 2007), Special Publications, 281:277–86.