by Janet Browne
And he fired the imagination of contemporaries as varied as Jules Verne, who used Lyell’s enlarged vision of time in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), and the geological author Louis Figuier. In the second edition of his illustrated volume La Terre avant le Deluge (1867), Figuier jettisoned the Garden of Eden in order to show a savage world inhabited by men and women clothed in skins and wielding stone axes.51 In short, Lyell’s book shattered the tacit agreement that mankind should be the sole preserve of theologians and historians. In a way, he gave the people their geological past. It was the first significant book after Darwin’s Origin to shake humanity’s view of itself.
Aggrieved by the subject matter and confident that humans appeared only recently on the earth, Richard Owen wrote peevishly to Murray saying he “sometimes thought of an essay on the Novity of Man.”52
As Darwin leafed through Lyell’s pages, however, he could not find any clarion call for evolution. Towards the close, Lyell certainly confirmed that he had changed his mind on transmutation since the first edition of Principles of Geology and now stood with Darwin. Yet after dwelling on Lamarck, and admitting he had done Lamarck an injustice in the Principles, Lyell described the technical objections to the Origin of Species very thoroughly. There was a huge gulf between man and beast, Lyell stated. How this gulf was bridged remained a “profound mystery.” “Oh,” exclaimed Darwin in the margin of his copy.
Darwin had pinned his hopes on Lyell’s making an explicit avowal. To that end, he had pushed and nudged and harried and flattered Lyell over the years, all to no avail, it seemed. “I am fearfully disappointed at Lyell’s excessive caution,” he announced to Huxley. “Deeply disappointed,” he told Hooker.53 The book was a mere “digest,” he said forlornly. Embarrassingly, he had invited the Lyells to Down House for a celebratory post-publication weekend.
The Lyells are coming here on Sunday Evening to stay till Wednesday. I dread it, but I must say how much disappointed I am that he has not spoken out on Species, still less on Man. And the best of the joke is that he thinks he has acted with the courage of a Martyr of old.—I hope I may have taken an exaggerated view of his timidity, & shall particularly be glad of your opinion on this head.—When I got his book, I turned over pages & saw he had discussed subject of Species, & said that I thought he could do more to convert the Public than all of us; & now, (which makes the case worse for me), I must in common honesty retract. I wish to Heaven he had said not a word on subject.54
His stomach saved him. Emma declared he was too unwell to receive visitors. Shortly afterwards, Darwin wrote an unecessarily candid letter to Lyell, complaining that Lyell was not doing enough to help him. Then he spelled out the differences between himself and Lamarck. Lamarck’s volume was “a wretched book; & one from which (I well remember my surprise) I gained nothing.… I must add that Henrietta, who is a first rate critic & to whom I have not said a word about Lamarck, last night said, ‘Is it fair that Sir C. Lyell always calls your theory a modification of Lamarck’s?’ ”55
Lyell was upset. He replied that he had spoken out to the “utmost extent” of his tether, “farther than my imagination and sentiment can follow, which I suppose has caused occasional incongruities.”56 From Lyell’s perspective, it probably seemed that Darwin wanted to wring the very soul out of him. His ambivalence about evolution was real. As Hooker remarked, Lyell was “half-hearted and whole-headed.” Despite all their friendly connections, Darwin never really forgave him for betraying his hopes.
Lyell’s book was destined to raise annoyance in other quarters too—annoyance that made the divisions among these Victorian naturalists obvious. One after another, Lyell’s friends complained about the Antiquity of Man for other reasons. Falconer said that Lyell had stolen his results. Prestwich claimed the same. So did John Lubbock, who had actual evidence that Lyell had appropriated his published work on the lake habitations of Denmark and consequently reviewed the book in icy terms in the Natural History Review.57 Darwin had to intervene between Lubbock and Lyell in order to soothe both sets of ruffled feathers.
Then Richard Owen launched a scattergun fusillade in the Athenaeum, hoping to hit any passing Darwinian by declaring that the facts in Lyell’s skull chapter (which had been written by Huxley) were false. Casting their woes temporarily aside, the Darwinians rallied round. Falconer attacked Owen in the Natural History Review, Hooker defended Lyell (“poor dear L.”), and Huxley cheekily supplied Lyell with sufficent material for an anatomical rebuttal. Rolleston backed up Huxley in the Athenaeum. Darwin merely declared Owen was the very devil of an adversary. “I am burning with indignation.” So when Jacques Boucher de Perthes found a fossilised human jaw in the gravels of Moulin-Quignon—the first human jawbone—the discovery was shot down before it ever flew. Falconer denounced the jaw as a fraud, while Carpenter, no expert, perversely authenticated it as genuine. Owen retaliated by criticising Falconer’s account of the newly discovered Archaeopteryx, an intermediary bird-reptile, “a strange being à la Darwin.” To Owen the fossil bones in no way represented a link between birds and reptiles.
All in all, these talented men stirred up a bitter row over human antiquity and evolution in which each struggled for primacy. Personality and intellectual commitment were the leading forces in appraising these significant fossil discoveries and the right to speak about ancient mankind. “It is wretched to see men fighting so for a little fame,” said Darwin, deliberately backing down from the controversy.
VII
Huxley’s book was called Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, published a few weeks after Lyell’s. “Lyell’s object is to make man old,” protested the Athenaeum, “Huxley’s to degrade him.”
First, though, he published his lectures for working men. Huxley sent a copy of this pamphlet to Darwin, who declared it was “simply perfect.… What is the good of writing a thundering big book when everything is in this little green book, so despicable for its size? In the name of all that is good and bad, I may as well shut up shop altogether.”58
Pleased, Darwin showed the lectures to his daughter Henrietta, who picked up a couple of typographical errors and (with the pompous earnestness of youth) told her father that she wished Huxley would write “something that people can read; he does write so well.” Huxley called her Miss Minor Radamanthus after that, an allusion to the eagle-eyed judge in Greek mythology.59
His Man’s Place in Nature was much fiercer. The text showed Huxley at his snarling extreme. He regarded the piece as a definitive rebuttal of Owen’s views on monkeys, brains, and humans. Where Lyell hesitated, he zipped along, cynical and acerbic in turn.
But it was a line drawing that actually said it all. On first opening Huxley’s book, readers saw exactly what his argument would be. His frontispiece showed five skeletons standing in line, each bony figure leaning slightly forward ready to evolve into the next. From gibbon to orang, chimpanzee, gorilla, and man, the implication could not be plainer. Humans were the result of a series of physical changes from the apish state.
Like all pictures with a political message, this had required careful preparation. Huxley engaged Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the zoological illustrator, to draw the skeletons to scale from specimens at the Royal College of Surgeons and then enlarge or reduce them as necessary to make the point. The pose was the same in each instance, and the sequence (from left to right) an intuitive understanding of the Western way of reading lines of development. It was inspired visual propaganda.
In the text that followed, Huxley showed how mankind must, on all logical biological grounds, be placed with the apes. As usual, Richard Owen was the enemy he openly addressed.
It is not I who seek to base Man’s dignity on his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity. I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the
animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.… Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?60
He knew his audience well enough to include a word or two about primitive human societies and their supposed animalistic propensities, including an unnecessary description of cannibalism, along with an engraving of a so-called butcher’s shop in the Congo complete with severed arms and legs. These sensationalist sops to the audience found little favour with Huxley’s friends. Lyell said, “I hope you send none of these dangerous sheets to press without Mrs. Huxley’s imprimatur.” Falconer protested that he “would let no young lady look at it.”61 One of Huxley’s young acolytes, the comparative anatomist St. George Mivart, disapprovingly remarked he had seen the book for sale on a railway bookstall, available to anyone. Reviewers noted the same flaw. One observed dryly, “We are not yet obliged to be quite on all-fours with Professor Huxley.”62 Another accused him of diving into “the African forests in search of his grandfather.”
The book was little more than a crowd-pleaser, although it had the advantage of expressing, in a small compass, the anatomical issues at stake. Yet it was to spread around the world almost as rapidly as Darwin’s Origin of Species. William Appleton, in New York, produced an American edition. Charles Mudie bought several hundred copies for his lending library, recognising a good title when he saw one. Darwin welcomed it with delight. “Hurrah the Monkey Book has come,” he shouted in triumph. “I long to read it, but am determined to refrain till I have finished Lyell, & I have got only half through it. The pictures are splendid.”63
Quick as a flash, Huxley replied, “Why did not Miss Etty send any critical remarks on that subject by the same post? I should be most immensely obliged for them.”64
Victorian commentators were equally quick to note that belligerence was the name of Huxley’s game. In May a well-observed skit was printed in the magazine Public Opinion that played on Huxley’s obvious relish for argument, “A Report of a Sad Case recently tried before the Lord Mayor, Owen versus Huxley, in which will be found fully given the merits of the Great Recent Bone Case.”65
In that skit, Owen and Huxley were depicted as Victorian street traders dragged into a courtroom trial for brawling. All through the fanciful trial they shouted learned insults at each other: “posterior cornu,” “hippocampus,” and so on. Such vulgarity was “scarcely human,” declared the judge, at which the Huxley character laughed rudely. Rowdy barrow-boys in the gallery, including Hooker, “in the green and vegetable line,” and “Charlie Darwin, the pigeon fancier,” cheered Huxley on. The Owen character refused to let Huxley swear the courtroom oath—how could the court take an affidavit from a man who did not believe in anything? He inquired stonily. Huxley’s character retorted that Owen was just as bad, for he “does not know a hand from a foot.” In the end the judge claimed “no punishment could reform offenders so incorrigible.” This barrack-room farce intelligently seized the main points at issue, the political and theological as readily as the anatomical. The inventive author was rumoured to be George Pycroft, a surgeon and fellow of the Geological Society.66 “It is capital,” said Darwin in high good humour. “The more I think of the ‘Sad Case’ the cleverer it seems.”
When the laughter died down, he acknowledged that “a scientific man had better be trampled in dirt than squabble.”
VIII
Close behind came Henry Walter Bates offering butterflies to the cause. Reticent and unassuming, this relatively unknown naturalist supplied the first real evidence for natural selection at work, slipping it into an evocative travel narrative of the Amazon that captivated Victorian readers in 1863 during the same spring publishing season.
Bates had arrived back in England in the summer of 1859 after eleven years of collecting in Brazil, mostly living and working around Ega (Tefé), where Wallace had left him, some two hundred miles upstream from Manaus. Like Wallace, he brought home a lifetime’s work in natural history, based in a collection of more than fourteen thousand different species, many of them insects, of which some eight thousand were new to Western science. He was committed to the idea of evolution, which like Wallace he had first learned from Chambers’s Vestiges, and this commitment was afterwards supplemented by his own investigations. Soon after his arrival in England he read Darwin’s Origin of Species. Just as was true of Wallace, his years in the rain forest left him unprepared for making his way in the metropolis. After paying off his debts, his profit for those eleven years of collecting barely amounted to £800. He had no visible means of supporting himself. He possessed nothing beyond his skill in empirical natural history.67
It was Darwin who threw him a lifeline. The two men had met early in 1861, and Darwin liked him immediately. In a way, Bates was everything that Wallace was not. Bates was never a rival to Darwin—however agreeable that rival might prove. Bates put his ideas completely at Darwin’s service. He was grateful for Darwin’s favours. He was, Darwin told Asa Gray, “a man of lowly origin, of great force of character, & wonderfully self-educated.” To Hooker he said, “What a pity that this man shd. have to work for his daily bread.” In return, Darwin was perhaps able to praise Bates more fluently than he managed with Wallace. If Darwin had learned anything from the Wallace incident, it was not to underestimate the talent of his natural history correspondents. At the very least, Bates was eager for Darwin’s practical help. Darwin helped him apply for a curator’s job at the British Museum and commiserated with him when it went to Owen’s candidate, Albert Gunther. He carried on looking for suitable work for Bates until he found him a position as the assistant secretary of the Royal Geographical Society in 1864 (Wallace applied unsuccessfully for the same job). “I am sure he is no common man,” said Darwin about Bates to his influential friends.68
More especially, Bates arrived in England with two gifts for Darwin. One was the concept of insect mimicry. The other was a collection of butterflies that displayed evolutionary diversification.
Mimicry was an unusual feature of the living world that not even Darwin could have anticipated. While working together in the Amazonian river basin, both Bates and Wallace had perceived that occasional unrelated species of butterfly could superficially resemble each other. Wallace had taken this insight with him to Malaysia, while Bates continued working on it alone in Brazil. Afterwards, in fact, the two felt gently competitive about the notion, each believing he had independently worked out the idea directly from the observations, and each slightly annoyed that his individual work on the subject tended to be confused with the other’s. In this regard, Wallace’s reputation for benevolence did not apply. Beyond his relationship with Darwin (in which he was notably consistent), he was generally very reluctant to give up his originality to other men. Indeed it may have been the shock of colliding with Darwin over natural selection that sensitised him to future priority issues. He did not argue with Bates as such—he merely voiced his own claim to the idea of mimicry. But he argued fiercely with George Romanes, years afterwards, when Romanes accused him of stealing the notion of “physiological selection.” And there was a moment of coolness with Huxley over another minor incident.69 One small circumstance at the London Zoo suggested the nub of the problem between Wallace and Bates. Charles Lyell one day saw Bates in the Zoological Gardens and hailed him as “Mr. Wallace.” When corrected, he blundered on, “Oh, I beg pardon, I always confound you two.”70
Bates proposed that mimicry functioned as a life-saving disguise. One insect might be unpalatable to birds. If another species came to imitate it, it too would benefit from not being eaten. Once Bates was alerted to the possibility of insects imitating each other for protection he found the phenomenon everywhere, even noticing insects that masqueraded as sticks and leaves. His daily expeditions became treasure hunts, or detective stories, as he turned o
ver leaves and logs, peered under lianas, constantly adjusting his perspective as he searched for the giveaway clue that revealed an insect leg or beetle carapace blending into the tropical background. Back in England, Bates explained to Darwin how this protective mimicry must emerge through adaptation and selection. By eating some insects and not others, birds were naturally selecting the forms and colourings that would survive. The better the mimic, the better the survival rate. He provided a full account in a paper delivered at the Linnean Society in London in 1862. Brimming with enthusiasm, Darwin took the unusual step of asking Huxley if he—Darwin—could write an article describing Bates’s work for the Natural History Review. In that article Darwin made the evolutionary implications of “deceptive dress” explicit. Published in 1863, it was an unstinting appreciation of another man’s work—work that intimately supported his own.71
After this there could be no stopping him. Oblivious to the younger man’s reluctance, Darwin pushed Bates towards a longer publication on the natural history of the Amazonian basin.
Within a few weeks, Darwin had fixed him up with John Murray, an arrangement that could not have been made without Darwin’s vigorous representations to Murray. Darwin read and commented on Bates’s manuscript page by page as it was produced and supported him when he wilted under the unaccustomed pressure of authorship. He offered tips on writing, provided money for illustrations, and invited him home for the weekend. He got Asa Gray to arrange for extracts from the book to be released in the United States. There can be no doubting the effort that Darwin poured into Bates’s personal and intellectual welfare in order to get this book published. Bates’s The Naturalist on the River Amazons [sic] came out in April 1863, a lasting classic of the genre. No doubt exhausted by the force of Darwin’s attention, Bates said feelingly that he would rather spend another eleven years on the Amazon than write a second volume. Darwin declared that Bates was nearly as good as Humboldt and busied himself getting the book reviewed in all the journals.