by Janet Browne
Blackwood’s Magazine continued the apish theme with a rhyme set to a drinking tune.
Pouters, tumblers, and fantails are from the same source;
The racer and hack may be traced to one horse:
So Men were developed from Monkeys, of course,
Which nobody can deny.
Which nobody can deny.…69
Irresistibly, Victorian humorists declared that apes were more intelligent than men because they at least knew when to keep silent. Typological satire flooded the pages of Punch, with guest appearances from Mr. O’Rilla and Professor Porpus. Soon a Mr. G-G-G-O-O-O-rilla, beautifully dressed in evening clothes, was pictured arriving as a guest at a high-society party. This was quintessential Punch display, linking obscure trivia with scientific parody.70 Appreciative of the public taste for apes, Punch dedicated its 1861 Christmas Annual to the gorilla and pictured the magazine’s imaginary Mr. Punch playing leapfrog with his alter ego for the year. These popular writings and cartoons not only conveyed the central point under debate and expressed the fears of traditionally minded British readers but also generated a nonspecialist, vernacular idiom for discussing and understanding the question.
Gorillas did not go away. Owen spoke about Du Chaillu’s specimens in a lecture in 1861 at the Royal Institution titled “The Gorilla and the Negro” and crossly responded to Huxley’s cruel post-Oxford article. The brain question, he said, was not one of fact but of interpretation. Owen claimed his “hippocampus minor” applied to humans alone and was not a term that could be used indiscriminately when speaking about animal brains. Though the gorilla was evidently much closer in structure to mankind than any other ape, this skilled anatomist asserted that its behaviour and its brain anatomy indicated an unbridgeable divide.
Owen’s paper made a splash in the pages of the Athenaeum, accompanied by drawings of gorilla skulls, eliciting a sharp reply from Huxley criticising points of pictorial detail. Owen responded in chilly tones in the letter columns on 6 April, to which Huxley retorted in the same columns, “Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.”71
Darwin and Hooker held their breath. This time Huxley really might have gone too far. He had descended into invective. But when Hooker told Darwin to calm down, the reply came back as smartly as Huxley’s. Darwin said he would never forget Owen’s behaviour over the Edinburgh Review.
In simple truth I am become quite demoniacal about Owen, worse than Huxley, & I told Huxley that I shd. put myself under his care to be rendered milder. But I mean to try to get more angelic in my feelings; yet I shall never forget his cordial shake of the hand when he was writing as spitefully as he possibly could against me.… Oh dear this does not look like becoming more angelic in my temper.72
The apish unpleasantness continued in the next number of Huxley’s Natural History Review, in which George Rolleston, the Oxford professor of comparative anatomy, published a slightly more temperate paper on brains, comparing an orang-utan with a human, but still defending Huxley’s position. In a letter to the Annals and Magazine of Natural History Owen again pointed out that the issue was not a matter of fact but one of definition. Huxley publicly dissected a spider monkey that had recently died in the Zoological Gardens to substantiate his alternative case.
When Du Chaillu’s book was issued early in May, Owen’s camp started to waver. John Edward Gray of the British Museum declared Du Chaillu’s gorilla story must be fantasy. With an incongruous twist of museum expertise, he pointed out that the donated skin displayed no gunshot holes in the chest as Du Chaillu’s picture suggested. The only holes were in the back of the skull, as demonstrated in a diagram he sent to the Athenaeum.73 The implication was that Du Chaillu was a liar, and perhaps a coward as well, for he had evidently shot his specimen in the back. The Westminster Review condemned Du Chaillu and ran through the hippocampus controversy again, this time favoring Huxley’s view—the author was John Chapman, a friend of Herbert Spencer and George Lewes. Huxley’s own journal, the Natural History Review, guardedly mentioned Du Chaillu’s “rather vivid imagination.” In the end, the Athenaeum published letters from all the protagonists, each defending himself to the hilt, even from Du Chaillu’s brother-in-law, who accused his relative of embroidering the facts. The British Museum rushed out a commercial picture postcard showing the skeletons of a man and a gorilla, amicably standing side by side.
X
Charles Kingsley had the last word. By now Kingsley felt he knew every detail of the controversy, every nuance of the elaborate performances played out on the British Association stage, and every crevice of the personalities involved. The British Association meeting at Cambridge in 1862 provided him with his moment. Coming so soon after the Athenaeum articles and letters, this was an excitable meeting, the summit of Owen and Huxley’s long-running personal encounter. Huxley was president of the section in which Owen presented two anti-Darwinian papers. One was on the aye-aye, a tree-climbing lemur from Madagascar; Owen claimed that the adaptations that suited this animal for an arboreal, insect-eating life disproved evolution. In the second, Owen dwelled defiantly on the brain again and introduced the age-old question of whether apes have toes or thumbs. Owen appeared to be “lying & shuffling,” said Huxley. He made mincemeat out of Owen’s thumbs and toes. One by one, Huxley’s anatomical friends rose in his slipstream to the attack.
Kingsley produced a privately printed skit during the meeting composed in the style of Lord Dundreary, a comic theatrical character of the season, called Speech of Lord Dundreary in section D, on Friday last on the great Hippocampus question. A hippocampus in the human brain was a rum thing, said Dundreary. “I never felt one in mine; but perhaps it’s dead and so didn’t stir.”
The other gentleman who got up last, Mr. Flower, you know, he said that it was all over the ape everywhere—all over hippocampuses, from head to foot, poor beast, like a dog all over ticks!… And Prof. O. said it wasn’t in apes at all; but only in the order Bimana, that’s you and me.… So one must be right, and all the rest wrong, or else one of them wrong, and all the rest right—you see that?74
Not long after, Kingsley dreamed up the storyline of his children’s book The Water Babies. “Such a story” said Alexander Macmillan, the publisher, gratefully. The Water Babies was published in instalments in Macmillan’s Magazine beginning in August 1862 and then as a book by Macmillan in 1863. Alongside the religious cleansing and evolutionary transformations experienced by Kingsley’s young hero, the soot-blackened chimney-sweep Tom, lay Kingsley’s characterisation of contemporary science, in which he brought the thinly disguised figures of Huxley, Owen, and Du Chaillu and the hippocampus debate to a wider Victorian readership. If a water baby existed, wrote Kingsley, it would have to be cut in half, one half for Owen, the other for Huxley. Professor Ptthmllnsprts (Put-them-all-in-spirits) was Huxley. Deftly, Kingsley had Ptthmllnsprts claim nothing was true except for what he could see, hear, taste, or handle.
He had even got up once at the British Association, and declared that apes had hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have. Which was a shocking thing to say; for, if it were so, what would become of the faith, hope and charity of immortal millions? You may think there are other more important differences between you and an ape, such as being able to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong, and say your prayers, and other little matters of that kind; but that is a child’s fancy, my dear. Nothing is to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test.75
The Owen-Huxley clash lent itself readily to Kingsley’s mockery. “If a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in one single ape’s brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grandmother from having been an ape too.” Kingsley also poked fun at the entrenched positions the two men had adopted. Asked to explain why there were no water babies, the Huxley character rudely retorted, “Because there ain’t.” No other commentator so succinctly conveyed Huxley’s
bulldog spirit.
When Linley Sambourne came to illustrate the book in 1886, he included caricatures of Huxley and Owen examining a bottled baby.76 Some six years after that, Huxley’s own grandson, the future biologist Julian Huxley, was sufficiently confused by the literary fame of the episode to ask his grandfather whether he could look at this water baby in its bottle.77
In truth Darwin’s proposals needed a well-publicised affray like this. Following hard in the footsteps of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and the Wilberforce-Huxley Oxford debate, the attention generated by apes and the arguments about apes propelled Darwin’s ideas about evolution out of the arcane realms of learned journals and books into the ordinary world of humour, newspapers, and demotic literature. Mr. Punch’s monkeys and gorillas, Du Chaillu’s tall stories, and Huxley and Owen’s battle of wits forced the full implications of Darwin’s densely packed theory to sink in much more quickly and thoroughly than he could ever have expected.
This time George Henry Lewes got it absolutely right for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1861. “The Darwinian hypothesis … is clamorously rejected by the conservative minds, because it is thought to be revolutionary, and not less eagerly accepted by insurgent minds, because it is thought destructive of old doctrines.”78
chapter
5
EYES AMONG THE LEAVES
SOON THE WARMER weather brought out the wild flowers around Downe—a mass of bluebells in the Sandwalk followed by ox-eye daisies in the home meadow and other species a little further away in the woods and fields towards the village of Cudham, where Darwin and Emma liked to walk in the afternoons to a place they called Orchis Bank. Resting on that grassy bank, idly listening to bees humming round the flowerheads, was far nicer than worrying about reviews. “Observing is much better sport than writing,” Darwin admitted.1 The location carried a special place in Darwin’s and Emma’s affections, for these walks were mentioned time after time in their respective memories of each other, and it may well have been the same sweetly tangled bank, “clothed with many plants of many kinds,” that Darwin had in mind when bringing the Origin of Species to its close. “Larks abound here & their songs sound most agreeably on all sides; nightingales are common,” he recorded appreciatively soon after their move to Down.2
He had always found the study of plants to be a pleasant combination of relaxation and interest. Whenever he felt over-stretched or ill, a few botanical investigations usually soothed his troubled mind. After the Origin of Species was published they helped him forget how haggard he was becoming: how much he was turning into a letter-writing machine, forever defending his pitch, incessantly chipping away at the walls of resistance, always courting approval, nudging, or explaining. Rambling about the garden or along the Kentish lanes took him away from the ferment whipped up by Huxley and others in London.
He would usually laugh at these placid interests of his and claim he was no botanist, saying he was “a man who hardly knows a daisy from a dandelion.” Certainly, he rarely ventured into what he thought of as real botany, the herbarium-based sciences of taxonomy and morphology at which Hooker and Gray excelled. His friends were much better at these than he was. Yet he loved to puzzle over the quietly complicated lives of plants. Ever since coming to Downe, with its fields and lawns set in the chalky countryside, he took daily interest in the green activity going on around him.
But even Darwin was surprised by the ardour for orchids that coursed over him in the middle of 1861, something like an unexpected love affair late in life. Attracted by their beauty and diversity, he pushed his book on variation aside and launched himself into a complete reevaluation of the anatomy and reproduction of these complicated plants, in the end publishing a small monograph on the subject in 1862, his first theoretical work after the Origin of Species. In the process, he came to admire orchids with the single-minded devotion that he had once given to barnacles; and he sometimes wondered if his addiction was turning into “another barnacle job.” Even he, the most attentive of strategists, could see the incongruity of following the magisterial pace of the Origin with a little book on flowers.
The endeavour, as it happened, did turn into another barnacle project, for many reasons and at many levels. First and foremost was the feeling that he was being introduced to something new and beautiful. Everywhere he spoke of his curiosity about orchids, his appreciation, and how “very lucky” he was in his “beautiful facts.”
Furthermore, he probably longed to get away from his dull writing work on variation for Murray. He said he felt tired, sometimes bored, with the evolutionary controversy, irked by wrenching answers to critics out of his churning brain. He had written or dealt with three English editions, two American editions, and two translations of his Origin in three years. He sensed that his friends would probably carry on promoting evolution without his constant personal intervention, for a while at least, more effectively than he in most cases. He lacked the energy for confronting difficult public situations. This, coupled with an apparent disinclination to expose himself to intense emotion, encouraged a temporary retreat. His greenhouse or his study was a good place to be when the intellectual wind howled around his ankles. “I am got intensely interested,” he confided. “I cannot fancy anything more perfect than the many curious contrivances.”
Practical investigations therefore seemed particularly alluring. He wanted to pit his wits once again against the native ingenuity of animals and plants, to be able to follow a lucky hunch, and use all his guile and skill to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. He liked to win—no doubt about that. More than that, he loved the spirit of the game itself. Inside every practical scientist the same pleasure in competing against nature lurks below the surface, the same enthusiasm for experiment, the same satisfaction in dreaming up new gambits and twists that can trick or tease the natural world into revealing its secrets. The sense of personal enjoyment that Darwin derived from research was strong. He relished the creative opportunities that lay in identifying significant and subtle problems that were not amenable to traditional approaches, and felt his theory gave him a way of looking at the world that helped unlock doors. “I am like a gambler, & love a wild experiment,” he declared.3 To the end of his days he said, “I cannot bear to be beaten.” Perhaps without really understanding why, he needed to confront the raw material of nature again. His barnacle work had made him feel focussed and purposeful during a difficult time in his life. Orchids looked set to supply a similar mental release. Writing the Origin, the book by which he was becoming known to posterity, could almost be thought of as a personal ordeal sandwiched in between.
II
Not everything came to a peak together. When other plants stirred in the garden, Darwin began a multitude of small experiments that he had been saving up over the dull winter months. He looked briefly at sundews again and investigated a Venus’s fly-trap which Hooker sent to him from the Kew glasshouses. Darwin greeted the fly-trap with cries of delight, because this species closed its hinged and spiky leaves over the flies like a mantrap. “How curious it is to see a fly caught & how beautiful are the adaptations compared with Drosera.” He speculated about possible connections between sundew hairs and the spines lining the fly-trap’s outer edges.
As soon as he could get outside in the weak spring sunshine, he also repeated some observations on garden plants that had been rained off the previous summer. Assiduously, he reactivated his correspondence with Daniel Oliver, the senior curator at Kew Gardens. Oliver was an ideal contact for him, interested in the same kind of living plant functions as Darwin, willing to follow up research topics, and soon to become professor of botany at University College London, where he took many of Darwin’s ideas into the world of academic botany. Hooker had introduced them a few months earlier, which proved to be an inspired move. “He must be astonished at not having a string of questions,” Darwin cheerily remarked to Hooker. “I fear he will get out of practice!”
Primroses and cowslips bloomed early th
at year and Darwin went to work cross-pollinating the different kinds. On his instructions, Brooks and Lettington, the Down House gardeners, transplanted a number of wild primroses into an experimental bed in the kitchen garden. Darwin intended to discover whether the two separate forms of flowers—the long-styled (pin-headed) and short-styled (thrum)—were specially adapted to fertilise each other. Although each form of flower was self-fertile, he thought pin-to-thrum matings were more likely, on his theories, to succeed better than pin-to-pin or thrum-to-thrum. A discrepancy in the size of pollen grains suggested that this might be the case. “I do not know whether I shall suceed in making out the meaning of the dimorphism,” he told Oliver in April 1861, “but I have not been idle, for I have made much above 100 crosses with the pollen of the different sizes.”
He crouched in the flowerbeds transferring pollen grains with a fine paintbrush from primrose to primrose. Then he waited for the fertilised plants to set seed. In May he counted the number of seedpods on each plant. A week or two later, he collected the pods, unzipped them, and weighed the seeds from different batches, using his old apothecary’s balance from the Shrewsbury days, having decided that the weight of the seeds would be the best way to establish each plant’s relative fertility. By June he had confirmed his expectations. If the two forms were crossed, they were at their most productive. If they were allowed to fertilise their own kind, much less so. Darwin concluded that the flowers were physically adapted to facilitate outbreeding, almost as if the original hermaphroditic condition was gradually differentiating into two sexes. “I think that you will think that I have made out the meaning of dimorphism in Primula satisfactorily, & a very odd case it is & has caused me much labour in artificial crossing,” he reported to Hooker. He sent a long, original paper on this subject to the Linnean Society in November 1861. He had created something meaningful out of apparently insignificant researches.