Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  Taken aback, Darwin went to enormous lengths to explain in Variation that pangenesis would permit the preservation of some favourable variations in a population. Advantageous characteristics, he claimed, did not always disappear through blending.15

  And pangenesis allowed Darwin to propose that the effects of use and disuse could sometimes be inherited, a feature of the living world he had always hesitated to claim in case he looked too much like the French naturalist Lamarck. Possibly his doubts about cousin marriages partly encouraged him to take this line. Still, Darwin’s hesitation was very real. He hated to have his name linked with Lamarck’s. For Lamarck’s scheme always seemed to him excessively simplistic, with organisms striving to adapt to external conditions and then somehow transmitting these acquired characteristics to the next generation. To his mind, a large gap yawned between the “speculations” of late-eighteenth-century French thought and the steam-driven pragmatism of mid-nineteenth-century British science which he adopted. “I can see nothing in common between the Origin & Lamarck,” he said. Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique was a “wretched book,” one from which “I gained nothing.”16 Natural selection, as he viewed it, was a completely different theory, in which an organism’s adaptation to its conditions of life was firmly based on statistics and the rules of chance.

  Moreover, Darwin disliked the prospect of being linked with the atheistic, progressivist, loosely environmentalist ideologies of the 1820s and 1830s, doctrines of thought that had haunted his first explorations of evolutionary theory and were now retrospectively associated in people’s minds with the political change and upheavals of that period.17 Although he was not generally a vain man, he was excessively vulnerable to jibes that his work was merely a restatement of Lamarck’s. He defended his originality as far as good manners would allow, but he always corrected friends and reviewers if they remarked on the similarities. Time after time, Lyell innocently lumped the two together. Time after time, Darwin rebuked him, and muttered ungraciously to Hooker about Lyell’s failings.

  But Darwin now wanted to include in his scheme the possibility of the inheritance of some limited acquired changes. Pangenesis gave him the chance to be Lamarckian without any of Lamarck’s inner strivings. As he put it, some aspects of the external environment could modify the inheritable gemmules.

  In variations caused by the direct action of changed conditions, of which several instances have been given, certain parts of the body are directly affected by the new conditions, and consequently throw off modified gemmules, which are transmitted to the offspring.18

  No doubt the whole hypothesis of pangenesis was extremely complicated, he conceded. “But so are the facts.”

  III

  The awkward terminology did not help. So original in his outlook elsewhere, Darwin’s mind would usually go blank when faced with inventing names. Even the relatively straightforward process of naming animals and plants stumped him. He had needed Hooker’s help when manufacturing barnacle names in the 1850s, and he relied heavily on experts to identify, name, and classify his Beagle collections. In 1841, he had joined the British Association committee charged with establishing rules for scientific nomenclature that any “ignoramus” could follow without anxiety.19 As a general rule, he believed in the magic of names. To name was to possess, as every contemporary naturalist recognised—a system of controlling diversity in order to comprehend it. The precision of knowledge could be reflected in the precision of names.

  This time Darwin consulted his son George, reading mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge, asking George if he could find a classical scholar to provide an appropriate name for his inheritance theory. Darwin wished to convey his belief that the inheritable materials were offshoots of individual body cells. “Do you know any really good Classic who cd. suggest any Greek word expressing cell, & which cd. be united with genesis?” he inquired.20

  George responded with a series of outlandish Greek terms straight from the armchairs of the junior common room, including “cyttarogenesis,” a word-for-word translation of cell-genesis. “Atomo-genesis sounds rather better I think, but an atom is an object which cannot be divided,” Darwin commented to Huxley in bemusement. “Perhaps I shall have to stick to Pan.” At home, Emma thought “pangenesis” sounded wicked, “like pantheism.” Darwin could not tell if she was serious. But he joked to Bates, “The great god Pan has been an immense relief to my mind.” The hint of a pagan spirit of nature operating in a non-Christian world was evidently appealing.

  Darker waters swirled. Isolated by sickness for so long from his friends and the hurly-burly of scientific life, he had time to dwell on morbid thoughts. He was convinced no one would pay proper attention to his ideas on inheritance. He called pangenesis his beloved child, his baby. He said his child would be stillborn, that he was the only one who loved it. The allusions were disturbingly intense. Sometimes his talk turned feverishly sub-religious in tone. “The poor infant Pangenesis will expire, unblessed & uncussed by the world, but I have faith in a future & better world for the poor dear child!” he told Bates excitedly. “My fear has always been that Pangenesis would be a still-born infant, over whom no one would rejoice or cry,” he said to Lyell.21

  If Darwin ever teetered on the brink of mental disarray, this was the time. He was locked into ill health, endlessly turning the same questions over in his mind, and the pangenesis hypothesis held hidden meanings. Dead or unloved children supplied an unnerving source of metaphor. He felt protective, apprehensive, defiant. His previous intellectual child—natural selection—had nearly died at the same time as his real baby, Charles Waring Darwin. How was this one to fare? The strength of his fatherly emotions blinded him. He looked indulgently on the theory’s frailties, just as if it were Henrietta or Horace, sickening quietly in their rooms upstairs. Although his written work was dedicated to the idea of letting the weakest fall by the wayside, the case took a very different hue when it involved an infant of his own.

  Furthermore, it had been a long time since he had constructed a completely new theory from scratch. Although he spun interpretative webs around everything he did, large or small, this project was on a higher plane, full of ambitious intentions. He wanted to do it properly. But he was slowed down by age and illness, by his correspondence, his need to keep up with the criticisms of the Origin of Species, his continuing writing and research. Stubbornly, he refused to acknowledge that he was tired, full of tensions, not completely free from the sickbed, capable only of a carefully regulated hour or two at full mental pitch. He could not recapture the buoyant inspiration of his early notebooks. He had not just stepped off the Beagle in Falmouth, young, alert, and eager.

  Moreover, he laid psychological weight on the way pangenesis linked together what he regarded as otherwise inexplicable conundrums. Long ago, the same kind of explanatory embrace had helped convince him of the validity of natural selection. He had no reason to change his mind. He felt that if a single theory of inheritance could explain so much, it might well approximate to the truth. He admitted as much to the botanist George Bentham.

  To my mind the idea has been an immense relief, as I could not endure to keep so many large classes of facts all floating loose in my mind without some thread of connection to tie them together in a tangible method.22

  To another, Darwin confided, “Pangenesis has very few friends, so let me beg you not to give it up lightly. It may be foolish parental affection, but it has thrown a flood of light on my mind in regard to a great series of complex phenomena.”23 He assured Asa Gray that “at the bottom of my own mind I think it contains a great truth.” To Lyell he said that “it will be a somewhat important step in Biology.” As time went by, he put on a bolder front. “I fear my dear Pang. will appear bosh to all you sceptics.”24

  As usual, Huxley grasped the essential point. “Genesis is difficult to believe, but Pangenesis is a deuced deal more difficult.”

  IV

  Darwin produced The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Do
mestication in two substantial volumes in January 1868, having delayed publication for William Dallas to complete the index. Henrietta helped her father correct the proofs, for he was weary with this big book, glad to see it go. In fact the mass of material was so unwieldy that Murray printed the specialist information in smaller type in order to reduce the number of pages, an ugly typological innovation that was not repeated. This time around, Darwin sent fifty presentation copies to the people who had helped him, including John Jenner Weir, Lubbock, Tegetmeier, John Scott, Fritz Müller, James Paget, his children William and Henrietta, and his nephew Edmund Langton, who had fed goldfish and trapped spiders on his behalf. One went to an unidentified colleague, personally inscribed with the words “With very kind regards from his friend and opponent the Author.” Others were transported by steamship and camel train to India, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. By now Darwin was a global publishing phenomenon. When the second edition came out a few months later, he could afford to be more local in his distribution, giving one to his gardener, Henry Lettington, and another to Camilla Ludwig, the family’s former governess, with whom Emma kept up a correspondence.25 Camilla had translated some difficult German texts on inheritance for him.

  Author and publisher also saw to it that Variation was issued in French, German, and Russian translations. The Russian one was prepared by Vladimir Kovalevsky, a palaeontologist and brother of Aleksandr Kovalevsky, the rising embryologist. The brothers both admired Darwin. Vladimir was so prompt in his work that his translation was published in St. Petersburg in November 1867, two months before the English first edition. His title showed that even at that late stage Darwin intended to publish in sequence the whole of his original long manuscript on natural selection—the Russian title of Variation reads, in translation, On the Origin of Species, Section 1.26 Through this translation, Vladimir Kovalevsky and his wife, Sophie, the mathematician, became personal friends of the Darwin family. At the same time, Aleksandr pursued notably original research in embryology, arguing on Darwinian grounds that the great class of vertebrate organisms originated in the lowly sea-squirt, the transparent, sedentary ascidian.

  Despite this apparent early enthusiasm, Variation was never popular, selling only five thousand copies in Darwin’s lifetime. It was excessively detailed, complained the reviewers. Readers looked in vain for remarks about ape ancestry. Few noticed that Darwin described a number of anomalous human variations, including Julia Pastrana, the “gorilla-woman” known professionally as the “ugliest woman in the world,” who had died some ten years beforehand. Wallace had assured Darwin that Julia Pastrana was no artificially constructed circus freak. She was a genuine curiosity, although neither Wallace nor Darwin was able to examine her, and in Variation, Darwin cited a third party’s report. She possessed “a thick masculine beard and a hairy forehead; she was photographed, and her stuffed skin was exhibited as a show; but what concerns us is that she had in both the upper and lower jaw an irregular double set of teeth, one row being placed within the other.… From the redundancy of teeth her mouth projected, and her face had a gorilla-like appearance.”27 Julia Pastrana’s career as an exhibit had already been artificially extended after death even without Darwin’s discussion. She had married her manager and given birth to a stillborn son as unusual as herself. After her early death she was mummified, dressed, and displayed as an ape-woman by this manager all over Europe, making a bizarre personal contribution to the distaste that surrounded much of the debate on evolution. She reappeared in print among the gooseberries and chickens that were Darwin’s primary focus.

  Apologetically, Darwin gave Hooker some valuable advice. “Skip the whole of vol 1, except the last chapt (& that need only be skimmed) & skip largely in 2nd vol., & then you will say it is a very good book.” To Huxley he merely breathed, “Oh Lord, what a blowing up I may receive!”28

  As for pangenesis, the centrepiece of the argument, Darwin’s colleagues were cool. Very few of them understood what he was driving at except Herbert Spencer, who had proposed something similar a few years earlier, and Francis Galton, whose interest in heredity was intense. Wallace adopted it and then dropped it. Much later, in 1880, the naturalist Hugo De Vries took up what he called Darwin’s “pangenes” in order to investigate the material basis of heredity, describing his own theories as a modification of Darwin’s ideas, and Darwin and De Vries corresponded in the years just before the older man’s death.29 Otherwise, Lyell prevaricated; Huxley quibbled; Henry Holland found it “very tough reading.” Soon, Huxley warned Darwin that pangenesis duplicated the discredited work of the eighteenth-century naturalist Charles Bonnet, a disagreeable revelation also mentioned by a reviewer in the Athenaeum, who sneered that Darwin’s pangenesis was all of a piece with Pouchet’s devotion to spontaneous generation. Darwin thought (rightly) that such an unfriendly review could only be by Richard Owen.

  One or two naturalists, including Lydia Becker, an intelligent botanist shortly to redirect her energies towards the suffrage movement, wrote to praise pangenesis. But he could sense his theory was not having the impact he desired. Hooker warned him no one would comprehend it, “not one naturalist in 100.”30 To cap it all, Clemence Royer accused him of stealing the scheme from Spencer, slipping the accusation into a new preface to her French Origin of Species.

  Darwin hardly knew whether to laugh or weep. “I must enjoy myself & tell you about Madll. C. Royer who translated the Origin into French, & for whose 2d. Edit I took infinite trouble,” he wrote to Hooker.

  She has now just brought out a 3d. Edit without informing me, so that all the corrections &c in the 4th & 5th English editions are lost. Besides her enormously long & blasphemous preface to 1st Edit, she has added a 2d Preface, abusing me like a pick-pocket for pangenesis, which of course has no relation to the Origin—Her motive being, I believe, because I did not employ her to translate “Domestic Animals.”31

  So he was grateful when Galton professed himself a convert. Galton’s interest in heredity was already displayed in scientific circles. Three years earlier he had published in Macmillan’s Magazine a pair of papers on “hereditary talent,” arguing that intellectual ability ran in families and employing techniques derived from the Belgian statistical pioneer Adolphe Quetelet to support his argument. These led shortly afterwards to his full-length study Hereditary Genius (1869), and culminated in his coining the term “eugenics” and initiating significant developments in the study of heredity and early genetics.

  Up to this point the relationship between the two cousins, Darwin and Galton, had never been particularly intimate, although they shared Dr. Erasmus Darwin as a grandfather, tracing their descent from Erasmus Darwin’s first and second wives, Mary Howard and Elizabeth Pole respectively. When they were boys, the age gap of thirteen years had been slightly too large for easy comradeship, although Darwin remembered visiting Galton’s father, his uncle, once or twice in Birmingham. The youngest of that branch of the family, Galton was a Cambridge graduate and traveller like Darwin. His Art of Travel was a characteristically flat-footed account of an expedition to southern Africa, full of tips for campsites and how to wield a machete. This sold well and in 1867 went into a fourth edition. But for some reason Galton was unable to penetrate the inner circles of British science, despite contributing to the Royal Geographical Society and dancing attendance on Huxley, Spottiswood, Tyndall, Spencer, and the rest by editing the Reader for a while. He may have hoped to be invited to join the X Club.32 His views were as starkly naturalistic as the X Clubbers, and he made a point, as they did, of attacking the conservative doctrines of the day. Galton became prominent in December 1871 by publicly criticising the Day of Intercession—a national day of prayer—imposed by the government to give thanks for the restoration of young Prince Albert’s health after a dangerous attack of typhoid. Galton questioned the efficacy of such intercesssions, laughing at those who believed in prayer as a remedy for cattle plagues, cholera, or excessive rainfall, and half seriously called for pro
per statistical tests in which the recovery rates of hospital invalids would be measured, some with prayers and some without.33

  Yet he was never really part of the Darwinian club as the others were. Perhaps his pedantic manner made for shaky personal relations.34 Either way, Darwin kept up contact pleasantly. For his part, Galton declared that his cousin’s book marked an “epoch in my own mental development.” He “devoured” its contents, saying that he assimilated Darwin’s arguments as fast as he could read them.35 He liked to think that he and Darwin shared the same hereditary bent of mind—a proposal that probably seemed more convincing to him than it would have to Darwin.

  While Galton’s views were generally more sophisticated than usually assumed, there could be no denying the zeal with which he defended the idea that talent was an innate, inheritable quality unaffected by social considerations. Ability “clings” to families, he asserted. Intelligence and ability were biological traits, the product of nature not nurture. In his opening salvos in Macmillan’s Magazine he listed the genealogy of English judges since the Reformation, a theme that Darwin, with his penchant for reading about Lord Chancellors and famous legal trials, found absorbing. Judges, said Galton, were usually descendants of other judges or other eminent figures in the ancestral tree.

  These views were developed in Hereditary Genius, a book that can almost be read as a collective autobiography of the masculine Victorian elite. There, in Galton’s pages, nearly every member of the British intelligentsia could find data that indicated that his ability ran in his blood and, moreover, was inherited through the male side (although Galton conceded that an able mother could tilt the balance). In truth, Galton assembled some striking materials. In the section dedicated to “Men of Science” many of the people whom Darwin knew, or had read, turned up in print, the family lines of de Candolle, Herschel, Hooker, Humboldt, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and de Saussure, among others. Darwin was in the book himself, along with his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, Robert Waring Darwin, and a little-known botanical great-uncle, another Robert Waring Darwin (1724–1816). Somewhat disingenuously, Galton did not include his own name in the Darwin entry, saying only that “I could add the names of others of the family who in a lesser but yet decided degree have shown a taste for subjects of natural history.”36