Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Almost immediately, these four musketeers divided up the intellectual world between them. Lyell took on the geological history of mankind and energetically visited the gravel beds of the Somme and Abbeville to examine flints and animal bones and to question palaeontologists such as Falconer, William Pengelley, and Joseph Prestwich, who were more familiar with the sites than he was. He was to make this subject his special contribution to the evolutionary story. The human beings who had used those flint tools had presumably lived at the same time as cave bears and mammoths. That startling possibility had first been floated by Boucher de Perthes some fifteen years before, but was not then accepted because of the uncertain nature of the evidence and the way it contradicted conventional views about the arrival of mankind on earth. While few geologists at that time believed seriously in a literal biblical flood that separated the realm of Genesis from that of modern mankind, they nevertheless found it convenient to consider the watery remains of the glacial period as a dividing line between past and present. In his Principles of Geology, Lyell had described just such a cold watery period separating the ancient world from the modern—the period later known as the Ice Age. On that point of view, humankind appeared on the earth only after the cold and ice had gone, when conditions were assumed to be more suitable for humans. Moreover, most people (even geologists) found it acceptable to believe that the first humans had appeared perfectly formed, as the biblical story declared. Whereas Lyell and others intellectualised the issue and equivocated as to how exactly humans might first have risen from the ground, the traditions of religious art fixed the point in Western culture more literally, moving from the earliest depictions of Adam and Eve in the Garden, through images of wildmen and so-called primitives, to the remarkable scenes portrayed in Franz Unger’s geological treatise Die Urwelt in ihren verschiedenen Bildungsperioden of 1851 (“The Primitive World in Its Different Periods of Formation”), in which Unger’s artist depicted a perfectly formed first family. Lyell’s attention to flint tools and the likely barbarism of early humanity caused a perceptible stir. Such a major reassessment of human antiquity, with all its implications for overturning conventional thought, opened the door to fundamental religious difficulties.

  These conundrums haunted Lyell. They were the start of his longlasting engagement with the subject of human antiquity that finally turned him into a reluctant evolutionist.17 Still wavering privately over the implications of Darwin’s scheme, Lyell dedicated himself to a wholly engrossing new area of research. He put aside his aging Principles of Geology and began working on a major new tome, the Antiquity of Man, published in 1863, one of the notable milestones in his own evolutionary journey and an important landmark in Darwinian affairs.

  While Lyell grappled with antiquity, Hooker aimed at the empire of botany. At Kew Gardens in London, Hooker occupied a position in institutional science that allowed him, in his own sphere, to make as much of an agitation as Huxley. In his day botany was one of the strongest imperial sciences, rivalling only astronomy in its perceived importance to the British economy, and operating through an increasingly integrated system of colonial gardens and overseas university departments, all held together by the growing authority of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, itself a formal wing of the British government. The extent to which government botanists underpinned the economic growth of the developing empire is often forgotten today. Tea, coffee, rubber, sisal, sugar, teak, mahogany, cinchona, cotton, and flax—all these were brought into commercial operation through the colonial botanic garden system. At the autocratic, metropolitan hub sat the Hookers of Kew, father and son, the two most powerful botanists in the world in the nineteenth century.18

  Hooker made good use of this institutional base to distribute and defend Darwin’s views. He persuaded the editors of botanical magazines in Britain and Europe to run favourable reviews of the Origin of Species (writing them himself if necessary), encouraged the staff of colonial gardens to discuss the Origin in their local scientific societies (again offering them a piece for their journals should they need it), ensured that Darwin was studied as closely in Calcutta, Sydney, and Cape Town as he was in Britain, added remarks about Darwin’s work to numerous official letters spinning out across the globe, and took it upon himself to convince his most distinguished botanical friends, including George Bentham, William Henry Harvey, Alphonse de Candolle, and Charles Naudin, each of whom hesitated to go the whole way with Darwin. His correspondence with these figures probed many of the difficulties that naturalists then felt about the practical mechanics of evolutionary theory, and Hooker showed several of these letters to Darwin for his information. Hooker further turned his position in London’s administrative circles to good purpose by mingling regularly with museum trustees, members of Parliament, and colonial governors. At Kew, he began directing a small programme of botanical investigations that would ultimately document many of the adaptive strategies of plants that substantiated Darwin’s theories. Although his role was not as likely to attract public attention as either Lyell’s or Huxley’s, he provided the strength of purpose, patronage, solid government contact, bureaucratic status, and geographical breadth essential for consolidating a lasting transformation in science. He was Darwin’s rock; and Darwin depended on him with an intensity he hardly showed for any other man. Much later on, he said warmly, “There never was such a good man for telling me things which I like to hear.” In a letter to Jean Louis Quatrefages written on 5 December 1859, he called Hooker “our best & most philosophical botanist.”

  Asa Gray became gatekeeper for North America. He ensured that everything from Darwin’s pen that was destined for the Americas passed through his own capable hands, a privilege he guarded zealously. Like Hooker, Gray was captivated by the insights offered by the Origin of Species and promoted the book at every opportunity. There was perhaps little else that Gray could do: he could hardly back out now that Darwin’s 1857 letter to him had been published in full evolutionary context in the Linnean Society Journal. Like Huxley, he had previously disliked transmutation and had vehemently rejected Vestiges when it was published in 1845 in the United States. Now, come what may, he found himself thoroughly caught up in the evolutionary camp. Yet Gray had never been comfortable with the dry intellectual tools of his trade and was independently coming to see plant species as disconcertingly fluid units, not easy to define at the boundaries. He was a confirmed empiricist, one of the few hardline empiricists in the transcendental mist of Emerson’s, Thoreau’s, Agassiz’s, and Lowell’s America, rejecting idealist ideas about “abstract types,” scorning Romanticism in the sciences while appreciating the transcendentalists’ adherence to the divine in mankind.19 To him, the Origin represented the first serious alternative to Agassiz’s metaphysical biology.

  So he volunteered to arrange an American edition of the Origin of Species to be published as soon as possible, opening negotiations on Darwin’s behalf with Ticknor & Fields, the Boston house with which Gray had good relations. A number of pirate copies were already circulating in New York, rushed out in bulk by the firm of Appleton’s in the first few months of 1860 without Darwin’s knowledge. In actual fact, the house of Appleton was doing nothing illegal. The firm, founded by Daniel Appleton and then run by his sons, published hundreds of books of an educational nature and many local versions of overseas titles. In those days of cut-throat commercial markets, publishers were unhampered by overseas copyright agreements and authors were not protected by legislation enforcing foreign contracts or royalty earnings. The firm that got the book on the shelves was the one to make the profit. These unauthorised reprints of Darwin’s Origin (evidently printed from a single copy purchased in London and rushed across the ocean) had their own bibliographic idiosyncrasies. The first had two quotations facing the title-page, the second had three. A third issue, whose status is uncertain, bears the words “Revised edition.”20 All were published by Appleton’s before June 1860 and bound in a greyish-brown pimpled cloth.

  Darwin clear
ly needed a friend like Gray there on the ground to protect his interests. Gray abruptly prevented any further entrepreneurial reprints of the Origin by negotiating with William Henry Appleton in person, promising that in exchange for a proper publishing contract and token fee he would supply a fully authorised text, complete with Darwin’s endorsement. William Appleton agreed, and the first edition that Darwin approved was published later in 1860, carrying on the title the words “New edition, revised and augmented by the Author.”21 For this Darwin shared with Gray a cheque for £50 (“pin-money for Mrs. Darwin”) and received a solitary copy of the volume. He cared far more about producing a supervised version than for the lucre. “Most sincerely do I thank you from my heart for all your generous kindness & interest about my book,” he wrote to Gray. After this shaky start his relationship with Appleton’s prospered.22 The firm became the primary agent for bringing Darwin’s writings and Darwinism in general to American shores.

  Gray smoothed the path for all subsequent editions of the Origin of Species in America, several of which put American readers well in advance of details not yet published in Europe. With Gray’s encouragement, Darwin added an important historical introduction (“Preface”) as well as a supplement indicating his additions and alterations. In this preface Darwin answered his earliest critics and attempted to provide some of the absent acknowledgements that British reviewers had cynically noted. He assessed the evolutionary work of his immediate precursors, cautiously referring to Lamarck as “this justly celebrated naturalist” and mentioning “how completely my grandfather Dr. Erasmus Darwin anticipated these erroneous views in his Zoonomia … published in 1794.” He made sure to praise Spencer and a number of other authors, including Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and finished with a quotation on the persistent types of animal life from Huxley’s Royal Institution lecture. This historical sketch was not published in England until 1861.23

  Moreover, Gray stoutly defended Darwin against American attacks and wrote three important reviews in as many months for leading North American journals. He pushed himself forward as a major intellectual rival to Louis Agassiz, tussling with Agassiz over the definition of species in a series of well-attended public meetings in Boston during 1860 and 1861, questioning whether species were metaphysical constructs, created by God according to a transcendent plan, as Agassiz declared, or whether they arose by natural means from the processes of variation and adaptation, as Darwin propounded. Gray shamelessly enjoyed these fights, a continuing contest inextricably bound up with his power struggle with Agassiz; and he found an authoritative ally in William Barton Rogers, the geologist later to become first president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These two readily understood that Agassiz was the only man in America to possess the stature and influence to crush theories that did not meet his approval; and the resulting controversy in Massachusetts rivalled anything that Huxley and Wilberforce could provide in Britain. Rogers argued violently with Agassiz in a series of four evening meetings at the Boston Society of Natural History, showing that Darwin’s views would not collapse like a pack of cards under Agassiz’s wrath as had other transmutationary theories like Vestiges. Gray harassed Francis Bowen, who opposed Darwin on philosophical grounds, at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Gray launched his reviews in the American Journal of Science and Arts in March 1860. This journal was run by James Dwight Dana and Benjamin Silliman, Jr., two clever brothers-in-law at Yale, whom Gray, Darwin, and Agassiz knew well. Agassiz retaliated by writing a bitter commentary on species, also published in the American Journal, and reiterated his definition of divine creation in various natural history periodicals. Gray responded with another, this time in the form of a dialogue, which included a measured response to Agassiz. Every one of Gray’s words “tells like a 32-pound shot,” said Darwin appreciatively.

  Gray plagued Agassiz privately as well, hounding him at Harvard University seminars, and pursued him through the scientific journals of the East Coast. His aggressive mood was strengthened by the admiration for the Origin of Species expressed by Jeffries Wyman, the Harvard professor of anatomy whom Gray thought “the best of judges.” Dawdling around the log fire in Wyman’s college rooms at Christmastime in 1859, a group of friends had grown “warm discussing the new book of Mr. Darwin’s.” James Russell Lowell, Henry Torrey, and Charles Eliot Norton were there with Wyman and Gray.24 They knew that their Harvard colleague Louis Agassiz would be up in arms. The Origin of Species, Agassiz had said dismissively during those first weeks, was “poor—very poor.”25 Eagerly Gray set about using Darwin’s work to attack Agassiz’s absolute monarchy. Month by month, he sent Darwin copies of local reviews, clippings from Boston newspapers, and verbal reports about his progress with natural selection in the New World.

  The regard was mutual. Darwin admired Gray’s tactical successes and valued his philosophical acumen. “I declare that you know my book as well as I do myself; & bring to the question new lines of illustration & argument in a manner which excites my astonishment & almost my envy!” he said as Gray’s reviews of the Origin came out.26 Gray’s talents were wasted on plants, he joked. “You ought to have been a lawyer, & you would have rolled in wealth by perverting the truth, instead of studying the living truths of this world.”27 Later, Darwin made the point again with feeling. “I said in a former letter that you were a lawyer; but I made a gross mistake, I am sure that you are a poet. No by Jove I will tell you what you are, a hybrid, a complex cross of Lawyer, Poet, Naturalist, & Theologian!—Was there ever such a monster seen before?”28 Soon he was convinced that “no other person understands me so thoroughly as Asa Gray. If I ever doubt what I mean myself, I think I shall ask him!”29

  III

  And after the Oxford debate, the fourth musketeer, d’Artagnan, found his focus. Huxley opted for apes. Apes and evolution let him channel his gifts into a single, high-blasting campaign, one that simultaneously allowed him to further his work in the biological sciences, criticise theological authority, advance the cause of young professionals like himself, tackle enemies like Owen on their home territory, promote a naturalistic approach to the living kingdom, and feed his lust for life and combat. By becoming the front man for human evolution from apes he could fight hard for all the things he believed in. The others were happy enough to let him blaze away. He reigned supreme over what can only be called the marketing of evolutionary theory—a heady publicity campaign for a reformed, fully scientific, rational England, where power should be wrestled out of the restrictive hands of the church and aristocracy and reestablished on what Huxley regarded as suitably clear-headed principles. Biology played a crucial role in this vision. Huxley considered evolution by natural selection to be the best argument yet for cutting ecclesiastical claptrap away from science. For him, it opened the door to a properly naturalistic consideration of the origins of living beings and mankind. More than this, despite his reservations, he regarded it as a good hypothesis—one that worked and provided explanations.

  Huxley intuitively recognised that an open battle over the Origin of Species would be advantageous for all concerned. While it would be going too far to claim that he did not care whom he fought—he was not a complete bully, and it is clear that he mostly opposed those who, in his eyes, were endangering the integrity and rationalism of scientific thought—it must be said that he appreciated a good rival. Darwin knew he was lucky that such a volatile man felt prepared to assist him. If circumstances had been different, Huxley might have been as ready to attack as to defend. “For heaven’s sake don’t write an anti-Darwinian article,” Darwin said at an early stage in their relationship. “You would do it so confoundedly well.” Years later, with scores of Huxley’s destructive essays and articles behind them, he could still say the same. “There is no one who writes like you.… If I were in your shoes, I should tremble for my life.”30

  Huxley was lucky in finding Darwin too, for through him he established himself as a leading publicist for science. T
he Oxford meeting had marked a turning point in his career as surely as it did for evolutionary theory. At Oxford Huxley saw the power of the crowd. He saw the effect of wit and daring. Before that, his scientific work was flashy but diffuse, a series of anatomical studies whose undeniable value was weakened by the lack of any overall direction and whose impact was limited to the domain of scientific experts. The Origin of Species allowed him to reveal his flair.

  His fight with Owen was central in this, and the course of evolutionary theory would have taken a far more circuitous path if Huxley had not found such an elevated target to topple. Furthermore, he deliberately chose to use the British Association for the Advancement of Science as a major platform. From year to year much of the Darwinian debate took place in the shape of snarled abuse delivered by either Owen or Huxley in front of delighted British Association audiences.

  At first, it did seem as if Huxley was out of control. In September 1860, just after the Oxford clash, his son Noel died of scarlet fever. Huxley raged against the death with such ferocity that Darwin and Hooker exchanged anxious remarks. “I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief,” Darwin wrote consolingly.31 The loss of his daughter Anne was still distressing. “To this day, though so many years have passed away, I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer & I can even call up the smile of our lost darling with something like pleasure.”