Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Even so, a French Origin of Species was appreciated by anthropologists, zoologists, geologists, botanists, and anatomists living in France, Belgium, Russia, and Switzerland, including Charles Brown-Sèquard, Édouard Lartet, and Jean Louis Quatrefages, and was discussed from time to time at meetings of the Société d’Anthropologie in Paris and elsewhere. The experimental botanist Charles Naudin was particularly grateful to have the Origin in his native tongue, for he was not easily able to comprehend Darwin’s letters to him. Letters from Down House presented him with a fatal combination of bad handwriting, the English language, and complicated botanical concepts.

  Yet the Origin of Species was not destined to have anything like the impact on French science that it did in Britain or Germany during those first years. French naturalists never took easily to Darwin’s ideas, and if they wished to endorse evolution they usually opted for a generalised form of Lamarckism. In partly Lamarckising Darwin’s work, Royer may ultimately have done Darwin a good turn.47 Her version of the Origin was also distributed among French social scientists.48 Later on Darwin corresponded with Royer in guarded fashion about a second edition, which was published in 1866, and a third in 1870. Each of these later editions troubled him, and the third offended him. He insisted that she change or remove several of her notes—and she grudgingly complied while complaining that the changes weakened the argument.

  Taken together, these overseas publications necessarily fell into other cultural contexts and became associated with different issues. In retrospect it seems likely that Darwin was unprepared for the way his writings would be reinterpreted. German, French, and American readers were coming to grips with an Origin of Species different from the one he thought he had written. Bit by bit, these foreign editions and translations may have forced him to acknowledge the independent life of his child.

  Last but not least, attention came from family quarters as well. Darwin’s niece Julia Wedgwood was by now an aspiring literary critic, one of a new breed of women in Britain who took up the suffrage cause a little later in the century. Where a female commentator like Royer was perceived by Darwin as unusual, even a nuisance, Julia had the advantage of being a relative. In 1860 Julia wrote a thoughtful analysis of the Origin of Species for Macmillan’s Magazine, following on from Huxley’s review in that journal. The article was too obscure in places for Darwin—Julia was strongly influenced by the charismatic preacher Thomas Erskine, with whose followers she spent part of 1859, and by Frederick Denison Maurice, the founder of Christian Socialism, a friend of her parents, who was striking out on an independent theological path. Julia’s article took the form of a conversation about the proper boundaries of science and religion: “Can you receive as truth something that on the other side of the boundary becomes utter falsehood?” asked one protagonist. In the guise of another speaker, Julia defended her uncle from the charge of atheism. Darwin was touched.

  I think that you understand my book perfectly, and that I find a very rare event with my critics.… Owing to several correspondents I have been led lately to think, or rather to try to think over some of the chief points discussed by you. But the result has been with me a maze—something like thinking on the origin of evil, to which you allude. The mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed; yet where one would most expect design, viz. in the structure of a sentient being, the more I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design.49

  Slowly, it began to dawn on him that no matter what he did, he was doomed to be a public figure.

  V

  From the time of the Oxford meeting his home life had not been entirely easy. His oldest daughter, Henrietta, was perpetually unwell, not fully recovered from what had been diagnosed as a typhoid-like fever. These lingering bouts of low-level fever worried Darwin greatly. Such illnesses could easily flare up into killers, as was demonstrated by Prince Albert’s death from typhoid at Windsor Castle in 1861. Less severe forms like Henrietta’s tended to drag on and on, leading to physical weakness, occasional feverish relapses, and poor digestion—a sickly, chronic state that usually drove sufferers into long-term invalidism. He therefore took Emma and the children for an extended summer holiday in 1860 to Emma’s sisters, Elizabeth Wedgwood and Charlotte Langton, whose houses were next to each other in Hartfield, Sussex. Any visit there was comfortably familiar, but this did little to help Henrietta. For a month or more, while he wrote letters and dealt with translators, the family sank into dealing with the ups and downs of convalescence.

  Without really realising it, Darwin yearned for something fresh and interesting to do. He needed a distraction. At Elizabeth’s house he embraced the chance to get away from his book and his letters. He wanted to be alone in the country.

  Escaping the family one day, he went looking for native orchids in the boggy Sussex hollows, and he stumbled on another kind of plant he had never much noticed before, the tiny insect-eating sundews. Fascinated, he dug one up to take back to the house for a few small experiments, and watched, intrigued, as the sticky leaves curled around a meal of flies. The phenomenon was well known to botanists but not to Darwin. By the end of the afternoon he was caught as surely as any fly. Working on these living plants over the next few months gave him endless, uncomplicated pleasure—the pleasure of working with his hands again, of observation and speculation unhampered by the burden of Henrietta’s ill health or the species problem, of seeing nature in action again after the tedious months of writing.

  The first batch of plants (the common Drosera rotundifolia) that he collected from Hartfield amply demonstrated the sundew’s sensitivity. The small, round, reddish leaves were covered in sticky hairs or tentacles, rather like a miniature sea anemone, which flexed and bent to snare any unwary insect that landed. Darwin wondered about Drosera’s ability to sense the presence of an insect and how a flying animal could be trapped by such slow-moving leaves. He wondered how far the hairs were truly sensitive and if they also performed the digestive function. He puzzled over the fact that the plants were evidently adapted to eat meat instead of making their own nutrients out of sunshine and water in the usual manner. Were the sticky hairs acting like misplaced roots, perhaps, adapted to suck nutrition from flies rather than the soil? Or were they really like sea anemones, the reef-building coral polyps that he had loved to think about on the Beagle voyage? All in all, the plants displayed amazingly animal-like functions and responses.

  Niggling natural history questions like these were always good for him. His spirits lifted as he commandeered a kitchen shelf for a temporary laboratory and prowled Elizabeth’s house looking for flies; “a little botanical work as amusement,” he told Lyell, making fun of his own enthusiasms. Willingly, he allowed his natural inclination towards anthropomorphism to take over. “At present he is treating Drosera just like a living creature,” Emma wrote to Mary Lyell, “and I suppose he hopes to end in proving it to be an animal.”50 This became evident at mealtimes when Darwin regulated the plants’ feeding regime as if he were a Victorian zoo-keeper. Just before lunch on 17 July 1860, he placed four dead flies on the sundew’s leaves. By suppertime the outer rim of hairs was curving over. At breakfast the next morning he reappeared beside the plant to give it a spider. At 10:00 a.m. he marked individual leaves with different-coloured threads from Emma’s sewing basket, feeding one leaf with a piece of paper, another with dry shavings of wood, another with a bit of feather, the last with shreds of moss. He was back an hour later with a piece of raw meat.

  As the days passed, he experimented with other materials, here a bit of bathroom sponge, there a gnat’s wing. Touching the leaves with a sewing needle failed to raise any effect. It looked as if Drosera could identify its proper food and reject inappropriate stimuli. At teatime one afternoon a week later, the leaves with flies were “splendidly curled in.” The insects were “well embraced.”

  These plants returned with the family to Downe. They subsequently provided Darwin with hours of indoor amusement
while Henrietta continued poorly and the weather was rainy. Appropriately, if rather bizarrely, many of Darwin’s silent fears and preoccupations of recent months seemingly began interlocking. The question of stomachs persistently seeped into his thoughts—Henrietta’s stomach, his own stomach, leaves as stomachs. These Drosera leaves appeared to carry out some of the functions of an animal digestive system, something like human stomachs turned inside out and exposed to view. To investigate his leaves was to search for the essence of the Darwin family weakness, the bane of his life. It seems as if he may have contemplated more than a simple problem in plant physiology.

  Drosera did not give up its mysteries lightly. Try as he might, Darwin could not understand how the plants distinguished food from indigestible alternatives. At home at Down House he tested them with everything that came to hand. In August he tried feeding leaves with drops of milk, olive oil, white of egg, and gelatin, then moved on to syrup, white sugar, laundry starch, and gum. In September he plied them with strong tea and sherry. Soon he used himself as a private source of supply, trying human mucus, saliva, and urine.

  With the domestic armoury exhausted, he turned to drugs and chemicals. Most of the substances he used were common enough for the period, and several were already in the family medicine chest. At one point he dosed the plants with chloroform, using the drops he kept handy for toothache. Chloroform vapour, he told Hooker excitedly, “paralyses them completely.” Every day brought a fresh experiment, another substance, another way of tempting the sundew’s appetite. Upstairs, Emma laboured at the same task with Henrietta. She ate hardly anything, Emma reported to William.

  The story was much the same under the lens of his microscope. He could not work out what was happening inside the sundew’s hairs at the cellular level. Was he perhaps witnessing the absorption of nutritious materials? he asked Henslow.

  When the viscid hairs contract or become inflected they pour out much fluid & the contents of the cells in the footstalks, instead of being a thin pink homogenous fluid, becomes a broken mass of dark red, thick fluid.… What has surprised me is that the globules & cylinders of the thick dark red fluid or substance keeps on an incessant slow contracting & expanding movement: they often coalesce & then separate again; they often send out buds, which rapidly increase at the expense of the larger parent mass; in short endless slow changes in form.51

  He hoped he was seeing the digestion process. “Is any such phenomenon known?” he inquired. “It may be quite common, as I am so ignorant of vegetable physiology.”

  As it happened Darwin was watching a phenomenon not fully understood until the twentieth century in which the wrinkling of the inner cell membrane, special to Drosera, provides a large surface area for the transfer of fluids. Darwin noted that what he called “clumping” happened only when plants were exposed to food substances: “A very weak solution of C. of Ammonia instantly sets the process at work.” Henslow was baffled by Darwin’s terminology of clumps, coalescing globules, and colour changes. Peering down his microscope, Darwin fretted anxiously over the problem, haunted by the notion of digestive processes gone wrong.

  The plants accompanied him, too, when the family travelled to Eastbourne in the early autumn for another recuperative holiday for Henrietta. Yet at Eastbourne Henrietta relapsed, so quickly and so completely that Emma and Darwin were frightened she might die. Her stomach pains were “dreadfully fierce.” It was “a fearful attack,” Darwin told Henslow in panic. “What the end will be, we know not.”

  Thoroughly alarmed, they summoned Henry Holland from London, who prepared them to expect the worst. For a week they lived on the edge. Then she rallied slightly. “We have had such a week of misery as I did not know man could suffer,” Darwin managed to write to Asa Gray afterwards. “As much misery as man can endure.”

  My daughter grew worse and worse, with pitiable suffering, so that all the Doctors thought we should lose her. But the stoppage is over, & she has rallied surprisingly; but whether there is much organic mischief & what the final result will be cannot be known, till the miserable issue is decided. But she is quite easy now, & one comes at last to care only for that; & we have managed to conceal from her, her extreme danger.—You are so kind & sympathetic that I have not resisted telling you our unhappiness.—We shall not be able to remove her home for several weeks even if the case is not worse than the Doctors now hope & believe.52

  The experience unsettled him much more than he admitted. Death breathed so close behind. With three children already gone, he said he dreaded the thought of losing Henrietta as a fourth. He could not see what possible prospect lay ahead for her now. Even a long period of convalescence might still leave her as a semi-invalid.

  From then onwards, he and Emma viewed Henrietta’s health with anxiety, an understandable response at a time when the nation was ravaged by unmanageable disorders and infectious disease. The fear they experienced at Eastbourne never really left them. Henrietta did make a full recovery in the end and ultimately lived to a great old age. But her parents worried over her smallest infirmity for years to come, solicitously hiring bed-carriages for journeys, keeping her indoors most of the time, consulting different doctors, sending health bulletins around the family, and devising cautious routines that permitted only half an hour downstairs in the evenings, all of which tipped relatives and friends into regarding her as a permanent invalid. Henrietta emerged at the end of this illness not as a healthy young women of seventeen yearning to pick up the threads of the social life she was missing, but as a delicate daughter, prone to unspecified infirmities and relapses. At least she recognised the self-absorbed nature of these preoccupations when, as a mature woman, she said her mother had been “a perfect nurse in illness.” Being ill under Emma’s supervision was an opportunity for a daughter to be cherished, perhaps in contrast to Emma’s normally undemonstrative manner. “We are cool fish, we Darwins,” said Leonard many years later. The same opportunity to be physically close probably also applied to her father. When she was ill, Henrietta received Darwin’s undivided attention. She remembered how Darwin would stop working in his study and come into her room with such an expression of tender sympathy and emotion that she said she could scarcely bear to see it. “Both parents were unwearied in their efforts to soothe and amuse whichever of us was ill; my father played backgammon with me regularly every day, and she [Emma] would read out to me.”53 Although it does seem likely that these early illnesses indicated some lingering internal problem, Henrietta probably saw little incentive to abandon the semi-invalid state. Later on, her own marriage was partly built on giving and receiving the same kind of all-consuming medical attention.

  Darwin’s unease about Henrietta merged into unease about sundews. Back at home in Down House, Darwin could no more diagnose the feeding requirements of his insectivorous plants than get to the bottom of his daughter’s illness. While Emma rubbed castor oil onto Henrietta’s abdomen (the latest medical recommendation, Hooker assured him), Darwin calculated and measured and dripped different solutions of chemicals onto his Drosera leaves. Then he moved on to poisons, ordering arsenic, henbane, and strychnine from William Baxter, the Bromley chemist. He made, in his study, weaker and weaker solutions of poison in order to test the detective powers of the leaves: how small a dose would kill them? He began corresponding with a forensic scientist in London who specialised in detecting small doses of arsenic in murder cases and was interested to discover that his plants were much more sensitive to poisons than people. His own stomach deteriorated as if in sympathy. “I sometimes suspect I shall soon entirely fail; my stomach now keeps bad nearly all day & night.” Unaware of these parallels with Victorian detective fiction, he read The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins’s mystery story. “The plot is wonderfully interesting.”54

  It might almost be said that focusing on leaves served to displace Darwin’s wretchedness about Henrietta. Teasing and torturing the plants filled his mind. He could not easily contemplate the thought of Henrietta dying, or the tho
ught that through inheritance he might be the cause of her weak stomach. Perhaps these emotions were funnelled into the escape route of natural history, just as he had once escaped the realities of another daughter’s death by immersing himself in the anatomy of barnacles. Perhaps the plants themselves reflected his own fears. Not long after this, he discovered he could kill them.

  All his work, however, was called into doubt by a single stray human hair that drifted onto an unprotected leaf. To his surprise, the sundew thought that this too was food and began curling over the hair, sparking a chain of worrying doubts in Darwin’s mind. Were the tentacles stimulated by weight rather than by chemicals? All his results so far indicated that something chemical was going on. Disconcerted, he tried feeding them with pieces of cotton thread, less than 1/50 of an inch long, and then with Emma’s hair, finer than his own. Obligingly, the tentacles curled over. He was nonplussed. “I cannot persuade myself that it is the weight of 1/78,000 of a grain of solid substances which causes such plain movement; nor that it is in most cases the chemical nature; & what it is, stumps me quite,” he complained to Hooker.55 He mentioned the same doubts to Lubbock and Lyell.