Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  At the end of the article, Wallace discussed the hierarchy of races projected by his fellow anthropologists. On this, he was the same as the rest. Each group of mankind would not be equal in its fitness to survive, he said. “Improved” races would inevitably “displace the lower and more degraded races,” a point on which few of his Victorian readers would have disagreed. Civilised races were destined to increase at the expense of the latter “just as the weeds of Europe overrun North America and Australia.”58 While Wallace, like Darwin, was for the most part a humane and cultivated man, and dispensed with many of the racial prejudices of his contemporaries, he nonetheless endorsed Western cultural superiority and matched it to evolutionary theory.

  Impressed, Darwin covered his copy with pencil marks. He wrote to Wallace a few days later, mentioning for the first time his own ideas about sexual selection that were in the future to play an important part in his account of mankind. Courteously, he remonstrated with Wallace. The theory of natural selection was “just as much yours as mine.” Neither could have predicted that Wallace’s article contained the seeds of what would become the most significant difference between the two men.

  Soon after, John Lubbock published his researches into archaeology and Edward Tylor described the progressive development of human societies. Both of them believed Darwin’s theories helped them to open up new areas of thought about the lives and minds of early and indigenous peoples.

  In Pre-Historic Times (1865), Lubbock brought the notion of “prehistory” to the fore—a word that he invented to bridge the gap between the geological past and more modern times. His subdivision of the Stone Age into Neolithic and Palaeolithic periods gave intellectual structure to the theme of human antiquity as described by Lyell, and he connected in chronological sequence the flint-making peoples of Europe to societies that produced pottery and other cultural artefacts. A good all-round naturalist, Lubbock was probably happiest with a pottery shard in his hands, recreating in his mind’s eye the men and women who had once used it. He had spent many of his recent holidays sifting through the margins of Scandinavian lakes and bogs in search of these ancient objects, either in buried kitchen middens, among abandoned house piles, or in other recognisable residue of human habitation. His book was widely read and went to five editions in the first year of publication. He and Lyell argued again over the proper attribution of their archaeological data. Lubbock was right in claiming that he had published the information first. The other Darwinians had to smooth things over.59

  On the other hand, Tylor came to the view that human behaviour itself was subject to evolutionary considerations and could indicate ancestry as surely as any physical attribute. His ideas marked the beginnings of evolution’s impact on the social and human sciences. Tylor used well-established disciplines such as linguistics, folklore, mythology, and comparative theology to propose that human thoughts and behaviour patterns could be relics or “survivals” of early cultures just as much as vestigial anatomical organs could be left behind in the evolutionary sequence; as he explained it, the piano was a descendant of the harp. Cultural similarities between disparate groups, he maintained, could be explained on a developmental model comprising independent invention, inheritance, and diffusion. In this he brought the comparative method to a new level of sophistication. From 1865, with his Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, to 1871, when his Primitive Culture was published, he was responsible for securing a place for social and cultural anthropology in the minds of educated British readers. He and Darwin exchanged appreciative letters, and Darwin later consulted him on cultural behaviour and material evidence for the evolution of mankind.60

  With anthropological books and projects hogging the limelight, it is not suprising that the vexed issues of slavery and race would not go away. Still sick at Downe, in 1865 Darwin learned about Governor Edward John Eyre’s suppression of emancipated slaves in Jamaica. The newspapers—and Darwin’s friends—split into opposing camps, and Eyre was alternately castigated as a monster of cruelty or admired for his firm action. James Hunt defended Eyre to the point that the Anthropologicals became identified with blatant anti-Negro sentiment, believing in black “barbarism.” Kingsley openly approved of Eyre, as did Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson. Darwin was startled to hear that Hooker also supported Eyre. Darwin did not. “You will shriek at me when you hear that I have just subscribed to the Jamaica Committee,” he wrote in surprise to the botanist, referring to John Stuart Mill’s Jamaica Committee, established to secure Eyre’s prosecution for murder.61 Huxley also supported the committee, collecting subscriptions from his friends for this fighting fund. Darwin had sent £10. “I am glad to hear from Spencer that you are on the right (that is my) side in the Jamaica business,” Huxley thanked Darwin in November 1866. “It is wonderful how people who commonly act together are divided about it.”62

  Elsewhere, great political events marched forward. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln shook the world. “The noble manner in which our country has borne itself should give you real satisfaction,” Gray said soon after. “We appreciate too the good feeling of England in its hearty grief at the murder of Lincoln. Don’t talk about our ‘hating’ you,—nor suppose that we want to rob you of Canada—for which nobody cares.”63 The man who was born on the same day as Darwin died amid national mourning on 15 April 1865.

  We continue to be deeply interested on American affairs; indeed I care for nothing else in the Times. How egregiously wrong we English were in thinking that you could not hold the South after conquering it. How well I remember thinking that Slavery would flourish for centuries in your Southern States.64

  VII

  Darwin’s illness had little effect on the way his name was progressively spreading across Europe. The wave of editions and translations taking evolutionism back and forth between Britain and continental Europe and America presented a social and intellectual phenomenon in its own right. Few scientific concepts of the nineteenth century were to experience such recasting, popularisation, negotiation, and consolidation as the body of work associated with the Origin of Species. From 1864, when the Origin was translated into Russian, Italian, and Dutch, through to the end of the 1870s, by which time it had appeared in Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Hungarian, and Polish editions, and a host of commentaries, criticisms, and supporting texts had been published and translated, the dissemination of evolutionary thought was firmly embedded in individual national and religious contexts.

  In the process, there was plenty of room for confusion. Although science in translation travelled across geographical boundaries fairly efficiently for the period, the characteristic language in which it was expressed was seldom well understood outside particular national settings. Natural philosophers did not necessarily share unambiguous procedures and principles of reasoning. Metaphors rarely travelled well, omissions or additions to translations might affect the argument, and an unsupervised preface or addendum could undermine the results.65 As Darwin already knew to his cost from Clemence Royer’s and Heinrich Bronn’s early translations of his book, these volumes ought more properly to be regarded as creative reworkings of an author’s ideas in which texts were repositioned in another intellectual and social milieu. And always, in the end, when a translated book reached the hands of a reader, no matter how scrupulously it preserved what the author wished to say, the reader might easily perceive messages different from those that the author intended.66

  After Heinrich Bronn’s death in 1862, Darwin arranged to have his books translated into German by Julius Carus, although not before Carus engaged in a proprietorial tussle with Carl Vogt, who also wished to be Darwin’s German mouthpiece. Two other possible translators emerged as challengers to Carus in 1866, but were quickly eliminated by him.

  Carus was a good choice. His enthusiasm ensured that he did much to spread Darwinism in Germany, and he was the moving force behind the first collected edition of Darwin’s works in any language in 1875. Moreover, h
e was the first commercial writer to capitalise on his relationship with Darwin by asking whether he could produce a “little biographical sketch” including “Birthday, school, and so on. If you should not like it I trust you will tell me quite openly and will not be angry with me.” He also translated Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, a book that made a lasting impression in the German-speaking states, and then Tylor’s anthropological works. Darwin was evidently in safe hands.

  A large number of other evolutionary texts appeared in German too. Adolf Meyer translated Wallace’s works as they were published, and the philosophical materialist Ludwig Buchner translated Lyell’s Antiquity of Man in three successive editions between 1864 and 1874. As might be expected, evolutionary thinkers like Vogt, Ernst Haeckel, and others wrote independent texts in their native language. The main scientific publishing firms in Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Berlin additionally captured a ready market by matching these books, cover for cover, with anti-evolutionary publications, including German translations of Louis Agassiz’s attacks on Darwin. There was much debate and creative engagement with these ideas. Perhaps the naturalist Friedrich Rolle was the only one to “swallow the medicine whole,” as Darwin expressed it. Rolle wrote several early articles and a book on Darwinism in 1863. Elsewhere, Karl von Baer rejected transmutation outright. Ludwig Rutimeyer, Carl Nägeli, and Oswald Heer agreed more or less with the evolutionary view of nature while dispensing with natural selection and reinstating personal religious commitment. Rudolf Virchow, the most prominent of them all, never accepted Darwinism, but religion played no part in his rejection. Despite the range of response, Darwin seemed cautiously optimistic. In 1868 he let slip to William Preyer that he thought “the support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.”67

  The picture was broadly repeated in tsarist Russia. Lyell’s 1859 British Association address and Huxley’s 1860 Royal Institution lecture were translated into Russian early on, prompting S. A. Rachinski to translate the Origin of Species in 1864 and the botanist Kliment Timiriazev to write a favourable commentary titled Charles Darwin and His Theory. These works were followed by Vladimir Kovalevsky’s translation of Variation Under Domestication in 1868, by translations of Lubbock and Vogt, and by the publication of evolutionary expositions by noted naturalists like Andrei Beketov and Il’ia Mechnikov. By 1870 it was possible for Russians to read in their own language all of the Western European texts that presented the salient features of the controversy. The dispatch with which Russian scientists took account of these developments was for the most part probably due to the intelligentsia’s acceptance of the general phenomenon of evolution some years before the Origin of Species was published.68

  From the outset, however, many Russians considered the Malthusian basis of Darwin’s and Wallace’s argument relatively unimportant. Darwinism arrived in that country without Malthus’s political economy of struggle, changing its costume as it moved across cultural and ideological frontiers. Karl Marx had judged Darwin and Malthus together as part of the British national type. So did Leo Tolstoy, who criticised Darwin for bringing “a fictitious law” into biology. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s character Levin attacked the moral consequences of Darwin’s views so sharply that in real life Timiriazev felt compelled to respond. Notwithstanding this, Kovalevsky and Timiriazev ensured that Darwin was elected to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1867, one of the first major scientific awards he received.69

  These evolutionary thinkers were in the main young, unconventional, patriotic, still relatively fluid in their careers, and united by a dislike of traditional forms of religion, especially Kovalevsky, Vogt, Haeckel, Fritz Müller, and Buchner. While Vogt had caught the headlines as a radical member of the National Assembly in 1848 and Buchner’s hardline social views were expressed in numerous treatises, Ernst Haeckel had first met Darwin’s ideas in a biological context. Darwin wrote to them all, carefully establishing the rapport that he felt would lie at the heart of his theory’s progress abroad. “He was sometimes troubled how to reply to Monsieur et très honoré Confrère or Hoch verehrter Herr!” explained Francis, amused at his father’s caution. He was driven to use “Dear & respected Sir.”

  Haeckel championed Darwin in the Versammlung Deutscher Wissenschaftler und Aertze (Academy for Arts and Sciences) and preached his theories in biology lectures at Jena. He contacted Darwin in 1864 by sending him a copy of his book on Radiolaria, minute protoplasmic sea organisms that inhabit elaborate carapaces, telling Darwin that nothing had made such a “powerful impression” on him as the Origin of Species.70 Haeckel became by far the most ardent Darwinian in Germany, influencing a generation of scholars that included Anton Dohrn, Hans Driesch, Hans Spemann, and Richard Goldschmidt. In biology, he believed that Darwin’s ideas opened fresh research areas and generated original methods of analysis. In social and political terms, he also set about using Darwin’s views to bring about a cultural transformation.71

  Fritz Müller lived a more obscure life in science than Haeckel but was rather more typical for that reason. He too was a political animal. He regretted the failure of the 1848 revolution, declined a position in the Prussian educational system because of its Christian observance, and emigrated to Brazil, where he spent his final years imprisoned by rebel forces. A dedicated rationalist, he believed in free love, natural history, and Darwin—one of the increasing number of relatively unknown naturalists who were coming to think that Darwin’s principles genuinely assisted their work. Müller’s name became linked with Darwinism through his small volume on Crustacea, in which he applied evolutionary considerations to the life cycle of prawns and similar species. Für Darwin was published in Leipzig in 1864. In it Müller declared that Darwin’s theories furnished “the key of intelligibility for the developmental history of the Crustacea.”72

  Darwin was delighted. Müller’s book at last delivered the embryological analysis of evolution in action that he had longed to see—the work he had hoped that Huxley, with all his gifts, might have provided. From Down House he wrote Müller an enthusiastic letter. “A man must indeed be a bigot in favour of separate acts of creation if he is not staggered after reading your essay.”

  I look at the publication of your essay as one of the greatest honours ever conferred on me. Nothing can be more profound and striking than your observations on development and classification.… What an admirable illustration it affords of my whole doctrine!73

  Darwin promptly arranged to have Müller’s book translated into English by William Dallas, a capable naturalist who usually prepared the indexes of Darwin’s volumes. This was published in 1869 at Darwin’s expense by John Murray as Facts and Arguments for Darwin, clad in the same green cloth as Darwin’s titles. Darwin took on the publisher’s risk. “I think you wd. be safe with 750 [copies],” Murray advised him. Once it was out, Müller’s words of praise for Darwin’s evolutionary system were there for all to see, a “splendid structure which he has raised with such a master-hand,” said Müller. This was highly effective publicity.

  In France, Darwin felt his situation was still difficult—impenetrable.74 While Clemence Royer’s translation of the Origin of Species could hardly be responsible for what Huxley called the “conspiracy of silence,” reactions were decidedly muted. Several influential positivists followed Auguste Comte’s example by attacking transformism. Catholic opinion, although far less interested in biblical literalism than that of other churches, was for the most part opposed to proposals for the existence of godless, independent natural laws.75

  More to the point, the centralisation of learning in France probably allowed any rising hostility to Darwin to take root and reemerge as dogma. Despite the efforts of French-speaking naturalists like Alphonse de Candolle, François Pictet, and Édouard Claparède, all based in Switzerland, Darwinism fared poorly in Paris itself, in the Académie des Sciences, the Sorbonne, and the Musée d’histoire naturelle. So when Pierre-Jean-Marie Flourens, the most conspicuo
us French Academician of the day, declared in 1864 that Darwin’s work was deficient in the basic rules of logic, there seemed little reason for Frenchmen to give any more thought to the Origin of Species. Flourens has written “a dull little book against me,” said Darwin in 1864, encouraging Huxley to give him a drubbing in the Natural History Review (“hang the scalp up in your wigwam!” said Huxley). In France, however, Flourens’s Examen du livre de M. Darwin sur l’origine des espèces carried special weight.

  There were discussions about racial biology and brain anatomy from time to time among some Parisian anthropologists in the Société d’Anthropologie. Darwin’s book also impinged in a general way on the continued argument between Louis Pasteur and Charles Pouchet about spontaneous generation and the defining features of life. And Lyell’s and Huxley’s books were translated into French in 1864 and 1868, Spencer’s and Haeckel’s soon after. Yet during the 1860s only fifteen new scientific books carried the word transformisme in their title; in the 1870s, the number crept up to twenty-nine. Undeterred, Darwin counted Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages, Albert Gaudry, Édouard Claparède, Henri Milne-Edwards, and Louis Charles de Saporta as friends and received qualified approval from Paul Broca, Paul Topinard, and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Unknown to him, the pioneering psychologist Hippolyte Taine mentioned Darwin’s work favourably in 1863 and again afterwards. Otherwise, struggle and natural selection were considered alien concepts by French intellectuals.

  Darwin naturally felt there was still much to be done in establishing his views a mere twenty miles across the English Channel. He felt gratified by Quatrefages’s efforts to get him elected to the prestigious Académie des Sciences, however unsuccessful these efforts were against Flourens’s resistance. In all, Darwin was nominated three times by Quatrefages, supported by the naturalist Henri Milne-Edwards, in 1870, 1872, 1873, and finally with success in 1878. Even then, Darwin was elected on the basis of his botanical work, a snub that intentionally ignored his Origin of Species rather as the Royal Society of London had omitted any mention of the Origin when awarding Darwin the Copley Medal. “It is curious how nationality influences opinion,” he remarked after hearing about the first Académie rejection. “A week hardly passes without my hearing of some naturalist in Germany who supports my views, & often puts an exaggerated value on my works; whilst in France I have not heard of a single zoologist except M. Gaudry (and he only partially) who supports my views.”76 Quatrefages considered Darwin was the only man to have proposed an evolutionary theory that was properly scientific and embraced all aspects of natural knowledge. Generously, Quatrefages said he appreciated the “grandeur” of Darwin’s work.77