Darwin's Ghosts
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51. Cuvier rose to his feet and demanded a retraction: Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, 146.
52. the German school of philosophical natural history, the Naturphilosophie: On this important group of natural philosophers, see Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (New York and London: Continuum, 2006).
53. “The volcano has come to an eruption”: Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, translated by John Oxenford (London: George Bell and Sons, 1874), 121–22. Goethe appeared on Darwin’s list as a supporter of a form of transformism.
54. His savage obituary of Lamarck: Dorinda Outram, “The Language of Natural Power: The Funeral Éloges of Georges Cuvier,” History of Science 16 (1978): 153–78.
55. One such young man was the brilliant young soldier: Corsi, Age of Lamarck, 179.
56. All through his years of exile he published books and papers: Ibid., 223.
57. Transformism … had always been political: See Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
58. the French madman: On Rafinesque, see C. T. Ambrose, “Darwin’s Historical Sketch—An American Predecessor,” Archives of Natural History 37, no. 2 (2010): 191–202, and Jim Endersby, “ ‘The Vagaries of a Rafinesque’: Imagining and Classifying American Nature,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40, no. 3 (2009): 168–78.
10. THE SPONGE PHILOSOPHER
1. the harbor port of Leith: For the social history of Leith, see James Scott Marshall, The Life and Times of Leith (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986); Sue Mowat, The Port of Leith: Its History and Its People (Edinburgh: John Donald in association with the Forth Ports, 1994); and Joyce M. Wallace, Traditions of Trinity and Leith (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1997).
2. Robert Jameson, Regius professor of natural history: For further information on Professor Jameson, see James A. Secord, “Edinburgh Lamarckians: Robert Jameson and Robert E. Grant,” Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1991): 1–18.
3. he had fallen upon Zoonomia: For more on the work of Erasmus Darwin, see King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, and McNeil, Under the Banner of Science.
4. Grant was twenty-two when he arrived in Paris: See Simona Pakenham, In the Absence of the Emperor: London-Paris, 1814–15 (London: Cresset Press, 1968).
5. had made Paris the heart of the new medicine: See Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Fontana, 1997), 306–14.
6. Grant did not attend: We presume Grant did not attend because he did not sign the register. See Pietro Corsi’s fascinating database documenting the auditors of Lamarck’s lectures: www.lamarck.cnrs.fr/auditeurs/presentation.php?lang=en.
7. “All facts known about the sponge”: Robert Grant, “Observations and Experiments on the Structure and Functions of the Sponge,” Edinburgh Philosophical Journal 13, no. 25 (1825): 99.
8. “It is pleasing to observe that our forefathers”: Ibid., 97.
9. He kept his work to himself, however: The most detailed research into Grant’s life and work has been undertaken by Adrian Desmond in The Politics of Evolution, in Desmond, “Robert E. Grant’s Later Views on Organic Development,” Archives of Natural History 11 (1984): 395–413, and in Desmond, “Robert E. Grant: The Social Predicament of a Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” Journal of the History of Biology 17, no. 2 (1984): 189–223. A short book about Grant’s life has also been put together by Sarah E. Parker: Robert Edmond Grant (1793–1894) and His Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy (London: Grant Museum of Zoology, 2006). Grant, trained in Parisian medical research techniques, took notes about everything he dissected, all his ideas, particular trains of thought, and critical conversations. But all of this has disappeared. He died unmarried with no close relatives, and although his library survived, these valuable journals and bundles of notes and letters did not. So tracing his intellectual and physical journeys is a matter of detective work. A long biographical essay written by his friend Thomas Wakley in 1850 for The Lancet, probably based on interviews with Grant, survives, but almost nothing else, apart from the dozens of essays he published in the 1820s and 1830s: Thomas Wakley, “Biographical Sketch of Robert Edmond Grant, M.D.,” Lancet 2 (1850): 686–95. For a full and detailed list of all of Grant’s publications on the sponge, see Parker, Robert Edmond Grant (1793–1894) and His Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy.
10. “On moving the watch-glass”: Robert Grant, “Observations and Experiments on the Structure and Functions of the Sponge,” Edinburgh Philosophical Journal 13 (1825): 102.
11. the hole could be described as a “fecal orifice”: Robert Grant, “Observations and Experiments on the Structure and Functions of the Sponge,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 2 (1826): 126. While Grant was publishing his sponge sequence, the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal was renamed the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal.
12. “This animal,” Grant wrote, “seems eminently calculated”: Ibid., 136.
13. “I have plunged portions of the branched and sessile sponges”: Robert Grant, “Observations and Experiments on the Structure and Functions of the Sponge,” Edinburgh Philosophical Journal 14, no. 27 (1826): 123.
14. It shared both plant and animal characteristics: The sponge is in fact an animal and not a transitional organism. Sponges are an ancient group of animals that diverged from other metazoans more than 600 million years ago. This divergence required the evolution of mechanisms for cell division, growth, specialization, adhesion, and death. In modern genetics they play a central role in the search for the origins of metazoan multicellular processes. I am grateful to the geneticist Kate Downes for conversations about the sponge.
15. “My praise is altogether an unclean thing”: John Hutton Balfour, Biography of the Late John Coldstream (London: J. Nisbet, 1865), 6.
16. a certain mysterious sense of disgust about his body: The first historian to suggest that Robert Grant might have been homosexual was Adrian Desmond in Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875 (London: Blond and Biggs, 1982), as a conjecture based upon accounts of Grant’s reputation from the zoology department at University College London. Grant never married and continued to have intense friendships with men throughout his life; he traveled with many of them for several months abroad. If sexual feelings arose between Coldstream and Grant, this may account for the level of self-loathing that Coldstream expressed in his diaries during the time he worked alongside Grant, particularly given the intensity of Coldstream’s religious beliefs. It may also, as Desmond points out, be one possible factor among many in the decline of Grant’s reputation in London and Charles Darwin’s eventual distancing from him. I am grateful to Adrian Desmond for discussions on this matter.
17. the boundary between the animal and vegetable kingdoms: I am again grateful to Adrian Desmond for generous assistance and advice on this matter some years ago. At the University of Heidelberg, Grant had met the young professor of anatomy and physiology Frederick Tiedemann. Lamarck, for all his transformism, still believed in an absolute demarcation between animal and vegetable kingdoms. Tiedemann, however, believed that in the most simple and ancient life-forms the boundaries between these kingdoms were not fixed.
18. Plinian Natural History Society meetings: See J. H. Ashworth, “Charles Darwin as a Student in Edinburgh, 1825–1827,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 55 (1935): 97–113. For this period of Darwin’s life, see the fascinating account by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992); P. Helveg Jespersen, “Charles Darwin and Dr. Grant,” Lychnos (1948–49): 159–67; George Sheppersen, “The Intellectual Background of C
harles Darwin’s Student Years at Edinburgh,” in M. Banton, ed., Darwinism and the Study of Society (London: Tavistock Publications; Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), 17–35; and J. H. Ashworth, “Charles Darwin as a Student in Edinburgh,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 55 (1935): 97–113.
19. “the lower animals possess every faculty & propensity of the human mind”: Plinian Minutes Ms, 1ff., 34–36, Edinburgh University Library, Dc.2.53.
20. “How far this law is general with zoophytes”: Grant, “Observations on the Spontaneous Motions of the Ova of Zoophytes,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 1 (1826): 156.
21. “Having procured some specimens of the Flustra Carbocea”: Edinburgh Notebook, listed as DAR 118 in the Darwin archive in Cambridge University Library, 56.
22. “One frequently finds sticking to oyster and other old shells”: Ibid.
22c Darwin gave a paper on the ova of the Flustra: Cited in Ashworth, “Charles Darwin as a Student in Edinburgh,” 105.
23. “I then made him repeat what he had told me before”: Jespersen, “Charles Darwin and Dr. Grant,” 164–65. The note that Jespersen refers to has now been lost, so one should read this reminiscence with care. However, later when Grant worked in London he was notorious for his priority disputes and guarded about his research findings: see Desmond, The Politics of Evolution.
24. “he was troubled with doubts”: Balfour, Biography of the Late John Coldstream, 38.
25. “In our day the majority of naturalists, I fear are infidels”: Ibid., 69.
26. “A fair exterior covers a perfect sink of iniquity”: Ibid.
27. “no pursuit is more becoming for a physician than Nat. Hist.”: Letter from John Coldstream to Charles Darwin, February 28, 1829, Letter 58, DCP.
28. “Be so good as to write me again soon”: Ibid.
29. “What a fellow that D. is for asking questions”: Cited in Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 82.
30. “It strikes me, that all our knowledge”: Charles Darwin to William Darwin Fox, July 9, 1831, Letter 101, DCP.
31. “Natural History … is very suitable to a Clergyman”: Charles Darwin, Autobiography with original omissions restored; edited with appendix and notes by his grand-daughter, Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 71–72.
32. Coldstream drew careful instructions and diagrams: Coldstream soon returned to some kind of peace in his rock pool explorations. He married in 1835 and settled down to family life and his growing medical practice, writing occasional encyclopedia entries on jellyfish, limnoria, and barnacles.
33. he defiantly promoted his friend: For a detailed account of the Wakley-Grant alliance and a brilliant analysis of politics and science in the early nineteenth century, see Desmond, Politics of Evolution, 122–23. Wakley published Grant’s entire lecture course in The Lancet in 1833–34, further radicalizing Grant’s ideas by association.
34. “While myriads of individuals appear and disappear”: Robert Grant, Lecture 55, Lancet 2 (1833–34): 1001.
35. “He appears to have allowed himself to be frightened”: From Carl Gustav Carus, On the State of Medicine in Britain in 1844; cited in Desmond, Politics of Evolution, 258.
36. The backlash came, perhaps inevitably, from close quarters: Adrian Desmond, “Richard Owen’s Reaction to Transmutation in the 1830’s,” British Journal for the History of Science 18, no. 1 (1985): 25–50.
37. set out to demolish Lamarckian transmutation: Pietro Corsi, “The Importance of French Transformist Ideas for the Second Volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology,” British Journal for the History of Science 11, no. 3 (1978): 221–44.
38. to “[degrade] Man from his high Estate”: Desmond, Politics of Evolution, 328.
39. It worked. Grant was ousted: For a brilliant account of Grant’s struggles in London, see Desmond, “Robert E. Grant: The Social Predicament,” 189–223.
40. “I have found the world to be chiefly composed of knaves and harlots”: John Beddoe, Memories of Eighty Years (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1910), 32–33.
11. THE ENCYCLOPEDIST
1. “violence held rule almost everywhere”: William Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers and Autobiographical Reminiscences of William Chambers (Edinburgh and London: W. & R. Chambers, 1872), 50. I am indebted to James A. Secord not only for his generously reading, correcting, and providing feedback on a draft of this chapter but for his masterly book Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), without which this chapter and indeed parts of other chapters could not have been written.
2. Chambers had taken refuge in the local bookshop: C. H. Layman, ed., Man of Letters: The Early Life and Love Letters of Robert Chambers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 57.
3. “all my spare time was spent beside the chest”: Ibid., 58–59.
4. William was learning the book trade: Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 77.
5. “He was great in electricity”: Layman, Man of Letters, 84–85.
6. a literary journal called Kaleidoscope: Cited in Chambers, Memoir of Robert Chambers, 242–43.
7. “This fervour is as fatal to literature as the irruption of the Goths”: Chambers to Scott, March 30, 1830; cited in James A. Secord, “Behind the Veil: Robert Chambers and Vestiges,” in James R. Moore, ed., History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 169.
8. eighty thousand in bookshops around the country: Secord, Victorian Sensation, 234.
9. “All previous hardships and experiences”: Ibid., 241.
10. “It has been a matter of congratulation”: Ibid., 238.
11. “On all hands,” William wrote, “we were beset with requests”: Ibid., 246.
12. “The shepherds, who are scattered there”: Layman, Man of Letters, 177.
13. The Journal became more outspoken by the year: For information on the increasingly outspoken nature of the Journal, see Robert J. Scholnick, “ ‘The Fiery Cross of Knowledge’: Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1832–1844,” Victorian Periodicals Review 32, no. 4 (1999): 324–58; unfortunately, Scholnick fails to register the significance of the fiery cross reference, however, arguing instead that it is evidence of Chambers’s increasingly “messianic” tone, which it is not. It has a specific political meaning in the context of Scottish history.
14. “I believe this liberal view is advancing”: Chambers to Ireland, no date; cited in Secord, “Behind the Veil,” 171.
15. “When we reflect … that some of the forms of heathenism”: Robert Chambers to George Combe, November 24, 1835, National Library of Scotland Ms 7234; cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 87.
16. He denounced the “revolutionary ruffians”: George Combe, Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects (Edinburgh: J. Anderson Jr., 1828), 301.
17. “The acute and anatomical knowledge of the Doctor”: Robert Chambers, “Natural History: Animals with a Backbone,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, November 24, 1832, 338.
18. “man himself, Socrates, Shakespeare and Newton”: Robert Chambers, “Popular Information on Science: Transmutation of Species,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, September 26, 1835, 273–74; cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 93.
19. he started writing a treatise on phrenology: In 1837, Robert Chambers wrote to friends that all his spare moments in the previous two years had been spent on a manuscript treatise on “the philosophy of phrenology.” That book became Vestiges. Secord, “Behind the Veil,” 174.
20. “work at his secret with all the security of a criminal unrecognized”: Eliza Priestly, The Story of a Lifetime (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1908), 43.
21. “I do not think Churchill is likely to boggle”: Robert Chambers to Alexander Ireland, June 30, 1844; cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 114.
22. he proposed publishing a thousand copies: Secord, Victorian
Sensation, 115.
23. “pointed to his house in which he had eleven children”: R. C. Lehmann, Memories of Half a Century (London: Smith, Elder, 1908), 7; Lehmann is quoting here from the memoirs of Frederick Lehmann, who married one of the Chambers daughters in 1852.
24. “they can but suspect and surmise”: Cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 376.
25. “The great plot comes out here”: Ibid., 104.
26. “Every effort is made that reason and common sense would at all admit of”: Robert Chambers to Alexander Ireland, June 30, 1844, National Library of Scotland; cited in Secord, “Behind the Veil,” 171.
27. “I am happy to say that I have been able at the end”: Robert Chambers to Alexander Ireland [1844], National Library of Scotland; cited in Secord, “Behind the Veil,” 170–71.
28. “I think you could smash him and I wish you would”: George W. Featherstonhaugh to the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, November 16, 1844; cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 222.
29. “You have no conception what mischief the book has done”: Adam Sedgwick to Macvey Napier, May 4, 1845; cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 240.
30. “iron heel upon the head of the filthy abortion”: Adam Sedgwick to Macvey Napier, April 10, 1845, in Macvey Napier, ed., Selections from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier (London: Macmillan, 1879), 492.
31. “comes before them with a bright, polished, and many-coloured surface”: Cited in Secord, Victorian Sensation, 246.
32. praised Sedgwick’s “masterly essay”: Christian Remembrancer, June 1845, 612.
33. “We seem to be standing on the verge of a vast volcano”: [James McCosh], “Periodicals for the People,” Lowe’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1847, 200.
34. “the lower levels of society had sunk into a miasmatic marsh”: Hugh Miller, “The People Their Own Best Portrait Painters,” Witness, December 5, 1849, 2.