Charles Darwin

by Andrew Norman

  The early Fellows combined their enthusiasm for collecting artefacts with a passion for record-keeping. They knew it would be vital to record the results of their experiments and observations so that later researchers could build on firm, factual evidence. At a time when little was known about the natural world, every scrap of new information was precious.

  From the outset, the Fellows realized the importance of publishing the results of their research. By publishing they could claim priority for new discoveries and inventions, and promote their work at home and abroad. In 1665 the Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, founded the Philosophical Transactions (the world’s longest-running scientific journal).

  The Society also supported Fellows who wrote longer books, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica [The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy] being perhaps the most important scientific book ever published.9

  From the early decades of the eighteenth century, science began to be accepted by the British public as a useful and important activity. Science lectures were popular – some were delivered by Royal Society Fellows … .10

  In 1774 Josiah Wedgwood [I] [who was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1783] invented a close-grain ceramic material that he called ‘jasper’. This enabled him to produce perfect portrait medallions quite cheaply. He produced portrait medallions of over seventy Fellows of the Royal Society, past and present, as well as many other British public figures.11

  Darwin himself would one day receive the honour of being portrayed on such a Wedgwood plaque. (As already mentioned, Huxley, Lyell, Owen, FitzRoy, and Hooker were all Fellows of the Royal Society.)

  Until the early 19th century, Fellows of the Royal Society had been elected because they were interested in science, rather than necessarily being practitioners of science. This began to change as science became more established as a profession, and there were calls for reform. In 1847 the Society passed new statutes that restricted admission to men who had made distinguished contributions to science, or were active promoters of science.12

  The reigning monarch in 1859, when Darwin’s book Origin was published, was Queen Victoria. The monarch’s subsidiary title (since 1521) was Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) – which at that time meant the Catholic faith (which originally had been bestowed on Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 for his defence of the faith against the teachings of Luther). It is therefore paradoxical that under Her Majesty’s patronage of the Royal Society, Darwin, a Fellow of that society since 1839, should be instrumental in disproving one of the key tenets of the Anglican faith, namely the Biblical account of Creation.

  Amongst the possessions of the Royal Society are a bust of Darwin by the sculptor Horace Montford (who, incidentally, was born in Darwin’s home town of Shrewsbury in Shropshire), and a portrait of Darwin by Mabel J. B. Messer (which, in turn, is a copy of a portrait of Darwin by John Collier, owned by the Linnaean Society).

  The Enlightenment

  The so-called Enlightenment, which heralded the ‘Age of Reason’, reached its zenith in the eighteenth century. It encouraged science and intellectual discourse, and opposed superstition, intolerance, and abuses by Church and state.

  Enlightenment thinkers were believers in social progress and in the liberating possibilities of rational and scientific knowledge. They were often critical of existing society and were hostile to religion, which they saw as keeping the human mind chained down by superstition.13

  Leading Enlightenment figures were:

  Frenchmen: Voltaire (writer and historian); Denis Diderot (writer); René Descartes (philosopher and mathematician); Jean Jacques Rousseau (political philosopher and educationist).

  Dutchman: Baruch Spinoza (philosopher and theologian).

  American: Benjamin Franklin (statesman, inventor and scientist).

  Scotsmen: David Hume (philosopher and historian); Adam Smith (economist and philosopher); James Watt (engineer and inventor).

  Irishman: Sir Richard Steele (essayist, dramatist and politician).

  Meanwhile, England’s principal Enlightenment figures were: Alexander Pope (poet); Mary Wollstonecraft (writer) and her husband William Godwin (political writer and novelist); John Locke (philosopher); Thomas Paine (radical political writer); Joseph Addison (essayist and politician); Daniel Defoe (writer and adventurer); Isaac Newton (scientist and mathematician); Matthew Boulton (engineer); Joseph Priestley (clergyman and chemist). However, what was most significant for Darwin was the fact that two members of his very own family were Enlightenment figures: namely, Josiah Wedgwood (I) and Erasmus Darwin (I).

  This then, was the Darwinian milieu – the environment in which Darwin found himself – one in which, as a student of natural history, he was positively encouraged, rather than repressed, and one in which he knew that, even if his discoveries offended the Established Church, the worst that he could expect was its opprobrium. And if he offended the Establishment itself, then provided that he did not commit treason or foment insurrection – which was hardly likely – it was of no consequence. Meanwhile, he was not the first to have become fascinated by the question of the origin of species, mankind included; for many before him, including his grandfather Erasmus, had also wrestled with this great conundrum. Indeed, some have earned the right to be called ‘proto-evolutionists’. Of these, Erasmus Darwin (I), Lamarck, Patrick Matthew, and William Charles Wells will now be discussed.

  NOTES

  1. Darwin to Vernon Lushington, Cor.17, p.127.

  2. Oxford Dictionaries Online.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Morgan, The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, p.351.

  7. The Royal Society: 350years of Science, pp.14–15.

  8. Ibid, p.10.

  9. Ibid, p.19.

  10. Ibid, p.35.

  11. Ibid, p.39.

  12. Ibid, p.48.

  13. Tritton, The Hutchinson Encyclopedia for the Millennium.

  Chapter 23

  Erasmus Darwin

  Darwin’s paternal grandfather, Erasmus, was born on 12 December 1731 at Elston Hall near Nottingham, the son of Robert Darwin, a lawyer of independent means, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Hill). Having studied classics and mathematics at St John’s College, Cambridge, he went on to study medicine at Edinburgh, taking his MB degree (from Cambridge) in 1755. He then set up in medical practice, first in Nottingham and, subsequently in 1756, in Lichfield, Staffordshire.

  In December 1757 Erasmus married Mary Howard who bore him five children, including Robert Waring Darwin, born in 1766 (the father of Charles Robert Darwin). In 1761 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1770 Mary died after a long illness. Eleven years later, in 1781, Erasmus married Elizabeth Pole, a widow (who, allegedly, was the illegitimate daughter of Charles Colyer, 2nd Earl of Portmore), whereupon the couple relocated to Derbyshire.

  Erasmus was a founder member of the Lunar Society – so called because its meetings were held on the afternoon of the Monday nearest to the time of the full moon. Its members included many of the great scientists and industrialists of the day, including clergyman and scientist Joseph Priestley, potter Josiah Wedgwood (I), and arms manufacturer Samuel Galton (grandfather of Sir Francis Galton). Many of these men were of the Unitarian faith which made them unpopular, and when they supported the French Revolution they became even more so.

  In addition to pursuing his medical practice, the energetic Erasmus found time to experiment with gases and electricity; to study natural philosophy, chemistry, geology, and meteorology; and to design ‘[horse-drawn] carriages, a copying machine, and even a mechanical bird’!1 He created his own botanic garden and undertook the translation of the writings of Swedish naturalist Carl Linneaus (1707–78) and those of Linneaus’s son Carl the younger (1741–83). Poems which Erasmus wrote included The Loves of the Plants and The Economy of Vegetation. Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia was published in 1794 in two volumes, and it reveals that many of the ques
tions which interested its author were the same ones as would one day exercise the mind of his grandson Charles.

  Zoonomia, Volume I

  In a section entitled ‘Generation’ Erasmus reveals an interest in embryology and also in the mechanism of inheritance and heritable diseases.

  The living filament

  Erasmus postulated that:

  At the earliest period of its existence the [embryo], as secreted from the blood of the male, would seem to consist of a living filament with certain capabilities of irritation, sensation, volition, and association; and also with some acquired habits or propensities peculiar to the parent: the former of these are in common with other animals; the latter seem to distinguish or produce the kind of animal, whether man or quadruped, with the similarity of feature or form to the parent.2

  As for this (supposed) living filament, its characteristics

  may have been gradually acquired during a million of generations, even from the infancy of the habitable earth … . [He also points out that this ‘fact’] appears to have been shadowed or allegorized in the curious account in sacred writ [i.e. in Genesis, the first Book of the Old Testament] of the formation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

  From all these analogies I conclude, that the [embryo] is produced solely by the male, and that the female supplies it with a proper nidus [place of nurture], with sustenance, and with oxygenation ….

  However, the constituency of the nidus ‘may contribute to produce a difference in the form, solidity, and colour of the fetus …’ and therefore, ‘it follows that the fetus should so far [i.e. to some extent] resemble the mother’. Furthermore, ‘This explains, why hereditary diseases may be derived either from the male or female parent … .

  ‘From this account of reproduction’, said Erasmus, ‘it appears that all animals have a similar origin, viz. from a single living filament ….’

  Selective breeding

  Erasmus describes ‘the great changes introduced into various animals by artificial [i.e. selective breeding by humans] or accidental cultivation’, which had resulted in the appearance of stronger and faster horses; rabbits and pigeons of novel shape and character, etc. In fact, such animals ‘have undergone so total a transformation, that we are now ignorant from what species of wild animals they had their origin.’

  An explanation for physical abnormalities, or even for the creation of a new species

  ‘The great changes produced in the species of animals before their nativity,’ said Erasmus, was due either to ‘artificial cultivation’ [i.e. selective breeding], to ‘accident’, or to ‘the exuberance of nourishment supplied to the fetus’ – which could result in the ‘monstrous births’ of creatures with additional limbs, claws, etc., or, conversely, to the absence of limbs or other physical features. It could even result in the appearance of ‘a new species of animal’.

  God as the creator of life

  As to the origin of mammalian life, asked Erasmus,

  Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind …, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE [i.e. Creator] endued with animality [an animal nature], with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

  Divergence

  The ‘first link’ of the ‘perpetual chain of causes and effects [was riveted] to the throne of GOD …’, said Erasmus. Furthermore, this chain ‘divides itself into innumerable diverging branches …’. (This, of course, goes to the very heart of the principle of Divergence.)

  Erasmus cites Linnaeus’s early description of evolution – though this word was not in use at the time.

  Linnaeus supposes, in the Introduction to his Natural Orders, that very few [varieties of] vegetables were at first created, and that their numbers were increased by their intermarriages … [and declares] This idea of the gradual formation and improvement [i.e. evolution] of the animal world seems not to have been unknown to the ancient philosophers.

  This was a reference to Linnaeus’s book Systema naturæ per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis or System of nature through the three kingdoms of nature, according to classes, orders, genera and species, with characters, differences, synonyms, places, which was first published in 1735.

  God as the designer

  Erasmus proceeds to criticize certain ‘ancient philosophers, who contended that the world was formed from atoms …’. Had they

  ascribed their combinations to certain immutable properties received from the hand of the Creator … instead of ascribing them to a blind chance; the doctrine of atoms, as constituting or composing the material world by the variety of their combinations, so far from leading the mind to atheism, would strengthen the demonstration of the existence of a Deity, as the first cause of all things …

  And he ends by quoting from the Book of Common Prayer, Psalm xix: The heavens declare the glory of GOD, and the firmament sheweth his handywork. One day telleth another, and one night certifieth another; they have neither speech nor language, yet their voice is gone forth into all lands, and their words into the ends of the world. He also quotes from Psalm civ: Manifold are thy works, O LORD! in wisdom hast thou made them all.3

  Zoonomia, Volume II

  This is a comprehensive medical textbook, complete with suggested remedies for each disease mentioned. Said Darwin

  The book when published was extensively read by the medical men of the day, and the author was highly esteemed by them as a practitioner.4

  However, as far as the opinions expressed by Erasmus in respect of the aetiology of the various diseases which he describes are concerned, these are largely uncorroborated and unsubstantiated.

  In his biography of his grandfather (whom he never knew, and published in 1879), Darwin indicates just how enlightened and ahead of his time Erasmus was. For example, he was strongly in favour of prison reform; public health and hygiene; vaccination against smallpox; education; the abolition of slavery; and the humane treatment of the insane. Equally, he was strongly opposed to intemperance.5 Erasmus was also a stickler for scientific rigour, as he indicates in ‘The Botanic Garden’ (a poem in two parts, published in 1791), where he laments the conjectural nature of the works of others.

  It may be proper here to apologize for many of the subsequent conjectures on some articles of natural philosophy, as not being supported by accurate investigation, or conclusive experiments.6

  Said Darwin of his grandfather:

  He was what would now be called a liberal, or perhaps rather a radical. He seems to have wished for the success of the North American colonists in their war for independence … [and] Like so many other persons, he hailed the beginning of the French Revolution with joy and triumph.7

  The vividness of his imagination seems to have been one of his pre-eminent characteristics. This led to his great originality of thought.8

  As for his religious beliefs, wrote Darwin, Erasmus

  has been frequently called an atheist, apparently as a convenient term of abuse; whereas in every one of his works distinct expressions may be found showing that he fully believed in God as the creator of the universe.9

  Darwin does, however, admit that although Erasmus

  was certainly a theist in the ordinary acceptation of the term, he disbelieved in any revelation – the divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world10. Nor did he feel much respect for unitarianism, for he used to say that ‘unitarianism was a feather-bed to catch a falling Christian’.11

  What Erasmus meant by this was, presumably, that if a Christian, for one reason or
another, lapses in his or her faith, then there was always Unitarianism to fall back on. What were Darwin’s views on Zoonomia?

  In his autobiography Darwin describes how, during his time as a medical student at Edinburgh University, he took a walk with biologist Dr Robert Edmond Grant (from 1827, Professor of Comparative Anatomy at University College London), who

  burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution. I listened in silent astonishment and as far as I can judge, and without any effect on my mind. I had previously read the Zoonomia of my [late] grandfather [Erasmus], in which similar views are maintained, but without producing any effect on me. At this time, I admired greatly the Zoonomia; but on reading it a second time, after an interval of ten or fifteen years, I was much disappointed; the proportion of speculation being so large to the facts given.12

  In other words, Darwin was impressed neither by the arguments of Lamarck, nor by those of his own grandfather Erasmus, for as far as he was concerned, the scientific opinions of a family member were to be subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny as those put forward by others.

  And yet Erasmus must be praised for his industriousness, and for his attempts to shed light on some of the unsolved conundrums relating to the natural world.

  Erasmus died on 18 April 1802, seven years before his grandson Charles Darwin was born.

  NOTES

  1. Matthew, and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  2. Darwin, Erasmus, Zoonomia; or The Laws of Organic Life, Vol. I.