We are still in the middle of the Industrial Revolution; we had better be, for we have many things to put right in it. But it has made our world richer, smaller, and for the first time ours. And I mean that literally: our world, everybody’s world.
From its earliest beginnings, when it was still dependent on water power, the Industrial Revolution was terribly cruel to those whose lives and livelihood it overturned. Revolutions are – it is their nature, because by definition revolutions move too fast for those whom they strike. Yet it became in time a social revolution and established that social equality, the equality of rights, above all intellectual equality, on which we depend. Where would a man like me be, where would you be, if we had been born before 1800? We still live in the middle of the Industrial Revolution and find it hard to see its implications, but the future will say of it that in the ascent of man it is a step, a stride, as powerful as the Renaissance. The Renaissance established the dignity of man. The Industrial Revolution established the unity of nature.
That was done by scientists and romantic poets who saw that the wind and the sea and the stream and the steam and the coal are all created by the heat of the sun, and that heat itself is a form of energy. A good many men thought of that, but it was established above all by one man, James Prescott Joule of Manchester. He was born in 1818, and from the age of twenty spent his life in the delicate detail of experiments to determine the mechanical equivalent of heat – that is, to establish the exact rate of exchange at which mechanical energy is turned into heat. And since that sounds a very solemn and boring undertaking, I must tell a funny story about him.
In the summer of 1847, the young William Thomson (later to be the great Lord Kelvin, the panjandrum of British science) was walking – where does a British gentleman walk in the Alps? – from Chamonix to Mont Blanc. And there he met – whom does a British gentleman meet in the Alps? – a British eccentric: James Joule, carrying an enormous thermometer and accompanied at a little distance by his wife in a carriage. All his life, Joule had wanted to demonstrate that water, when it falls through 778 feet, rises one degree Fahrenheit in temperature. Now on his honeymoon he could decently visit Chamonix (rather as American couples go to Niagara Falls) and let nature run the experiment for him. The waterfall here is ideal. It is not all of 778 feet, but he would get about half a degree Fahrenheit. As a footnote, I should say that he did not – of course – actually succeed; alas, the waterfall is too broken by spray for the experiment to work.
The story of the British gentlemen at their scientific eccentricities is not irrelevant. It was such men who made nature romantic; the Romantic Movement in poetry came step by step with them. We see it in poets like Goethe (who was also a scientist) and in musicians like Beethoven. We see it first of all in Wordsworth: the sight of nature as a new quickening of the spirit because the unity in it was immediate to the heart and mind. Wordsworth had come through the Alps in 1790 when he had been drawn to the Continent by the French Revolution. And in 1798 he said, in Tintern Abbey, what could not be said better.
For nature then …
To me was all in all – I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion.
‘Nature then to me was all in all.’ Joule never said it as well as that. But he did say, ‘The grand agents of nature are indestructible’, and he meant the same things.
CHAPTER NINE
THE LADDER OF CREATION
The theory of evolution by natural selection was put forward in the 1850s independently by two men. One was Charles Darwin; the other was Alfred Russel Wallace. Both men had some scientific background, of course, but at heart both men were naturalists. Darwin had been a medical student at Edinburgh University for two years, before his father who was a wealthy doctor proposed that he might become a clergyman and sent him to Cambridge. Wallace, whose parents were poor and who had left school at fourteen, had followed courses at Working Men’s Institutes in London and Leicester as a surveyor’s apprentice and pupil teacher.
The fact is that there are two traditions of explanation that march side by side in the ascent of man. One is the analysis of the physical structure of the world. The other is the study of the processes of life: their delicacy, their diversity, the wavering cycles from life to death in the individual and in the species. And these traditions do not come together until the theory of evolution; because until then there is a paradox which cannot be resolved, which cannot be begun, about life.
The paradox of the life sciences, which makes them different in kind from physical science, is in the detail of nature everywhere. We see it about us in the birds, the trees, the grass, the snails, in every living thing. It is this. The manifestations of life, its expressions, its forms, are so diverse that they must contain a large element of the accidental. And yet the nature of life is so uniform that it must be constrained by many necessities.
The theory of evolution was conceived twice by two men living at the same time in the same culture.
Charles Darwin.
So it is not surprising that biology as we understand it begins with naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: observers of the countryside, bird-watchers, clergymen, doctors, gentlemen of leisure in country houses. I am tempted to call them, simply, ‘gentlemen in Victorian England’, because it cannot be an accident that the theory of evolution is conceived twice by two men living at the same time in the same culture – the culture of Queen Victoria in England.
Charles Darwin was in his early twenties when the Admiralty was about to send out a survey ship called the Beagle to map the coast of South America, and he was offered the unpaid post of naturalist. He owed the invitation to the professor of botany who had befriended him at Cambridge, though Darwin had not been excited by botany there but by collecting beetles.
I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.
Darwin’s father opposed his going, and the captain of the Beagle did not like the shape of his nose, but Darwin’s Wedgwood uncle spoke up for him and he went. The Beagle set sail on 27 December 1831.
The five years that he spent on the ship transformed Darwin. He had been a sympathetic, subtle observer of birds, flowers, life in his own countryside; now South America exploded all that for him into a passion. He came home convinced that species are taken in different directions when they are isolated from one another; species are not immutable. But when he came back he could not think of any mechanism that drove them apart. That was in 1836.
When Darwin did hit on an explanation for the evolution of species two years later, he was most reluctant to publish it. He might have put it off all his life if a very different kind of man had not also followed almost exactly the same steps of experience and thought that moved Darwin, and arrived at the same theory. He is the forgotten and yet the vital character, a sort of man from Porlock in reverse, in the theory of evolution by natural selection.
His name was Alfred Russel Wallace, a giant of a man with a Dickensian family history as comic as Darwin’s was stuffy. At that time, in 1836, Wallace was a boy in his teens; he was born in 1823, and that makes him fourteen years younger than Darwin. Wallace’s life was not easy even then.
Had my father been a moderately rich man … my whole life would have been differently shaped, and though I should, no doubt, have given some attention to science, it seems very unlikely that I should have ever undertaken … a journey to the almost unknown forests of the Amazon in order to observe nature and make a living by collecting.
So Wallace wrote about his early life, when he had had to find a way to earn his living in the English provinces. He took up the profession of land-surveying, which did not require a university education, and which his older brother could teach him. His brother died in 1846 from a chill h
e caught travelling home in an open third-class carriage from a meeting of a Royal Commission committee on rival railway firms.
Evidently it was an open-air life, and Wallace became interested in plants and insects. When he was working at Leicester, he met a man with the same interests who was rather better educated. His new friend astonished Wallace by telling him that he had collected several hundred different species of beetles in the neighbourhood of Leicester, and that there were more to be discovered.
If I had been asked before how many different kinds of beetles were to be found in any small district near a town, I should probably have guessed fifty … I now learnt … that there were probably a thousand different kinds within ten miles.
It was a revelation to Wallace, and it shaped his life and his friend’s. The friend was Henry Bates, who later did famous work on mimicry among insects.
Meanwhile the young man had to make a living. Fortunately, it was a good time for a land-surveyor, because the railway adventurers of the 1840s needed him. Wallace was employed to survey a possible route for a line in the Neath Valley in South Wales. He was a conscientious technician, as his brother had been and as Victorians were. But he suspected rightly that he was a pawn in a power game. Most of the surveys were only meant to establish a claim against some other railway robber baron. Wallace calculated that only a tenth of the lines surveyed that year were ever built.
The Welsh countryside was a delight to the Sunday naturalist, as happy in his science as a Sunday painter is in his art. Now Wallace observed and collected for himself, with a growing excitement in the variety of nature that affectionately remained in his memory all his life.
Even when we were busy I had Sundays perfectly free, and used then to take long walks over the mountains with my collecting box, which I brought home full of treasures … At such times I experienced the joy which every discovery of a new form of life gives to the lover of nature, almost equal to those raptures which I afterwards felt at every capture of new butterflies on the Amazon.
Wallace found a cave on one of his weekends where the river ran underground, and decided then and there to camp overnight. It was as if unconsciously he was already preparing himself for life in the wild.
We wanted for once to try sleeping out-of-doors, with no shelter or bed but what nature provided … I think we had determined purposely to make no preparation, but to camp out just as if we had come accidentally to the place in an unknown country, and had been compelled to sleep there.
In fact he hardly slept at all.
When he was twenty-five, Wallace decided to become a full-time naturalist. It was an odd Victorian profession. It meant that he would have to keep himself by collecting specimens in foreign parts to sell to museums and collectors in England. And Bates would come with him. So the two of them set off in 1848 with £100 between them. They sailed to South America, and then a thousand miles up the Amazon to the city of Manaus, where the Amazon is joined by the Rio Negro.
Wallace had hardly been further than Wales, but he was not overawed by the exotic. From the moment of arrival, his comments were firm and self-assured. For example, on the subject of vultures, he records his thoughts in his Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro five years later.
The common black vultures were abundant, but were rather put to it for food, being obliged to eat palm-fruits in the forest when they could find nothing else.
I am convinced, from repeated observations, that the vultures depend entirely on sight, and not at all on smell, in seeking out their food.
The friends separated at Manaus, and Wallace set off up the Rio Negro. He was looking for places that had not been much explored by earlier naturalists; for if he was going to make a living by collecting, he needed to find specimens of unknown or at least of rare species. The river was swollen with rain, so that Wallace and his Indians were able to take their canoe right into the forest. The trees hung low over the water. Wallace for once was awed by the gloom, but he was also elated by the variety in the forest, and he speculated how it might look from the air.
What we may fairly allow of tropical vegetation is, that there is a much greater number of species, and a greater variety of forms, than in the temperate zones.
Perhaps no country in the world contains such an amount of vegetable matter on its surface as the valley of the Amazon. Its entire extent, with the exception of some very small portions, is covered with one dense and lofty primeval forest, the most extensive and unbroken which exists upon the earth.
The whole glory of these forests could only be seen by sailing gently in a balloon over the undulating flowery surface above: such a treat is perhaps reserved for the traveller of a future age.
He was excited and frightened when for the first time he went into a native Indian village; but it is characteristic of Wallace that his lasting feeling was pleasure.
The … most unexpected sensation of surprise and delight was my first meeting and living with a man in a state of nature – with absolute uncontaminated savages! … They were all going about their own work or pleasure which had nothing to do with white men or their ways; they walked with the free step of the independent forest-dweller, and … paid no attention whatever to us, mere strangers of an alien race.
In every detail they were original and self-sustaining, as are the wild animals of the forests, absolutely independent of civilisation, and who could and did live their lives in their own way, as they had done for countless generations before America was discovered.
It turned out that the Indians were not fierce but helpful. Wallace drew them into the business of collecting specimens.
During the time I remained here (forty days), I procured at least forty species of butterflies quite new to me, besides a considerable collection of other orders.
One day I had brought me a curious little alligator of a rare species, with numerous ridges and conical tubercles, Caiman gibbus, which I skinned and stuffed, much to the amusement of the Indians, half a dozen of whom gazed intently at the operation.
Sooner or later, amid the pleasures and the labours of the forest, the burning question began to flicker in Wallace’s acute mind. How had all this variety come about, so alike in design and yet so changeable in detail? Like Darwin, Wallace was struck by the differences between neighbouring species, and like Darwin he began to wonder how they had come to develop so differently.
There is no part of natural history more interesting or instructive than the study of the geographical distribution of animals.
Places not more than fifty or a hundred miles apart often have species of insects and birds at the one, which are not found at the other. There must be some boundary which determines the range of each species; some external peculiarity to mark the line which each one does not pass.
He was always attracted by problems in geography. Later, when he worked in the Malay archipelago, he showed that the animals on the western islands resemble species from Asia, and on the eastern islands from Australia: the line that divides them is still called the Wallace line.
Wallace was as acute an observer of men as of nature, and with the same interest in the origin of differences. In an age in which Victorians called the people of the Amazon ‘savages’, he had a rare sympathy with their culture. He understood what language, what invention, what custom meant to them. He was perhaps the first person to seize the fact that the cultural distance between their civilisation and ours is much shorter than we think. After he conceived the principle of natural selection, that seemed not only true but biologically obvious.
Natural selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a few degrees superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher. With our advent there had come into existence a being in whom that subtle force we term ‘mind’ became of far more importance than mere bodily structure.
He was steadfast in his regard for the Indians, and he wrote an idyllic account of their life when he stay
ed in the village of Javíta in 1851. At this point, Wallace’s journal breaks into poetry – well, into verse.
There is an Indian village; all around,
The dark, eternal, boundless forest spreads
Its varied foliage.
Here I dwelt awhile, the one white man
Among perhaps two hundred living souls.
Each day some labour calls them. Now they go
To fell the forest’s pride, or in canoe
With hook, and spear, and arrow, to catch fish;
A palm-tree’s spreading leaves supply a thatch
Impervious to the winter’s storms and rain.
The women dig the mandiocca root,
And with much labour make of it their bread.
And all each morn and eve wash in the stream,
And sport like mermaids in the sparkling wave.
The children of small growth are naked, and
The boys and men wear but a narrow cloth.
How I delight to see those naked boys!
Their well-form’d limbs, their bright, smooth, red-brown skin,
And every motion full of grace and health;
And as they run, and race, and shout, and leap,
Or swim and dive beneath the rapid stream,
I pity English boys; their active limbs
Cramp’d and confined in tightly-fitting clothes;
But how much more I pity English maids,
Their waist, and chest, and bosom all confined
By that vile torturing instrument called stays!
I’d be an Indian here, and live content
To fish, and hunt, and paddle my canoe,
And see my children grow, like young wild fawns,
In health of body and in peace of mind,
Rich without wealth, and happy without gold!
The sympathy is different from the feelings that South American Indians aroused in Charles Darwin. When Darwin met the natives of Tierra del Fuego he was horrified: that is clear from his own words and from the drawings in his book on The Voyage of the Beagle. No doubt the ferocious climate had an influence on the customs of the Fuegians. But nineteenth-century photographs show that they did not look as beastly as they seemed to Darwin. On his voyage home, Darwin had published a pamphlet with the captain of the Beagle at Cape Town to recommend the work that missionaries were doing to change the life of savages.
The Ascent of Man Page 19