Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  In all this Galton seemingly ignored, or was not able to conceive, the effects of a hierarchically distributed society based on the advantages of education and wealth, or a culture in which professional openings were customarily purchased or passed on from generation to generation. Galton likened brains to the possession of sporting talent. Training could do only so much. Beyond that point innate ability was needed for high achievement.

  However, the book caught Darwin’s eye. “I do not think I ever in my whole life read anything more interesting and original,” he admitted. He, like Galton, believed that primogeniture was pernicious, both socially and biologically. Like Galton, he was interested in heredity and the biological basis for success. “You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.” He moderated this praise by adding, “I still think this is an eminently important difference.”37

  Already a supporter of Darwin, Galton read Variation with mounting enthusiasm. Pangenesis particularly caught his attention. Never having shown any interest in practical natural history observations before, he arranged for a series of experiments to be made on rabbits housed in the Zoological Gardens of London with the intention of demonstrating the transmission of gemmules. At Galton’s request, a curator injected blood from one rabbit into another in the hope that gemmules would be artifically transported from one individual to another, thence to reappear in the next generation. Coat colour would serve as a marker. Blood drawn from the common black-and-white type was injected into a silver-grey, which was then allowed to breed with another silver-grey. Galton expected to see white or black patches emerge in the coats of the offspring. He waited like an anxious father to be called to the birth. Soon finding his paternal visits to the zoo an inconvenience, he asked for the cages to be moved into the garden of his Kensington home.

  The cousins held their breath. “F Galton said he was quite sick with anxiety till the rabbits accouchements were over & now one naughty creature eat up her infants & the other has perfectly commonplace ones,” reported Emma. “He wishes this expt to be kept quite secret as he means to go on & he thinks he shall be so laughed at.”38

  At last the message came. “Good rabbit news!” Galton cried after a particularly long sequence of injections. Two silver-greys had produced an infant marked with white.

  One of the latest litters has a white forefoot. It was born April 23rd but as we do not disturb the young, the forefoot was not observed till to-day. The little things had huddled together showing their backs & heads and the foot was never suspected. The mother was injected from a grey and white and the father from a black and white. This, recollect, is from a transfusion of only ⅛th part of alien blood in each parent; now, after many unsuccessful experiments, I have greatly improved the method of operation and am beginning on the other youngsters of my stock. Yesterday I operated on 2 who are doing well to-day & who have ⅓rd alien blood in their veins. On Saturday I hope for still greater success, and shall go on at any waste of rabbit life until I get at least 1/2 alien blood. The experiment is not fair to Pangenesis until I do.39

  Despite his initial joy, Galton ultimately discovered that such colour variations were common in rabbits. Not a single instance of induced variation occurred in a total of eighty-eight offspring from transfused parents. The gemmules did not work in the way that he thought Darwin described them: “My experiments show that they are not independent residents in the blood.” Unsuccessful he may have been, but Galton here firmed up the line of thought that took him towards his influential “ancestral law of heredity” in which he proposed that the inheritable material was passed on to offspring in due proportion from previous generations.40

  Galton was troubled because he began the work in good faith, intending to prove Darwin right; and he praised pangenesis in Hereditary Genius in 1869. Somehow he had unintentionally proved Darwin wrong. Cautiously, he criticised his cousin’s theory, although qualifying his remarks by saying that Darwin’s gemmules (he called them “pangenes”) might be only temporary inhabitants of the blood and that his experiments could have failed to pick them up.

  Naturally enough, Darwin wanted Galton to keep these unsatisfactory results to himself. Yet Galton went ahead and published them in Nature in 1871, followed by another article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Darwin objected to having his theory’s shortcomings advertised in this fashion among his scientific friends. He published a rebuttal in which he maintained he had not said anything about gemmules being in the blood. Galton was surprised to receive so curt a response. Offended, he backed down, claiming he was acting only as “a loyal member of the flock.” In the end, Darwin also backed down. He modified his wording in later editions of Variation, admitting in a footnote that he would have expected to find gemmules in the blood, although their presence there was not absolutely necessary to his hypothesis. Pangenesis suddenly seemed much harder to establish than either man anticipated. Only the rabbits benefitted. Darwin agreed to rehouse them at Down House, sending his man Mark up to London to collect them. “The rabbits arrived safe last night & are lively & pretty this morning,” he reported.

  The setback did not prevent him encouraging others. In 1870 he thanked E. Ray Lankester for saying a few kind words about pangenesis: “I was pleased to see you refer to my much despised child, ‘Pangenesis,’ who I think will some day, under some better nurse, turn out a fine stripling.”41 And he congratulated John Tyndall for commenting on it in a presidential address to the British Association. “You are a rash man to say a word for Pangenesis, for it has hardly a friend amongst naturalists, yet after long pondering (how true your remarks are on pondering) I feel a deep conviction that Pangenesis will some day be generally accepted.”42

  In the main, Variation was noted by contemporaries for its densely packed accounts of horticultural and agricultural practice, its attempt to classify types of variation, and Darwin’s useful rounding-up of historic material about early breeds.

  One clarification was helpful. In the closing pages Darwin provided an explanation of the crucial difference between variation and selection. In those days, it was not always apparent that these were distinct processes. Indeed, perhaps only Darwin, with the advantage of many years of thinking about the distinction, and a handful of experienced French and German experimentalists were able easily to separate them.43 Investigators more usually felt there was some form of inbuilt direction in the process of variation—they put back into the evolutionary process the purpose or even the divine guidance that Darwin removed. Asa Gray, in particular, advocated this view, both in print and in private, one result of his conversations with Darwin about design in orchids. In Variation Darwin deliberately contradicted Gray’s opinion.

  If an architect were to rear a noble and commodious edifice, without the use of cut stone, by selecting from the fragments at the base of a precipice wedge-shaped stones for his arches, elongated stones for his lintels, and flat stones for his roof, we should admire his skill and regard him as the paramount power. Now, the fragments of stones, though indispensable for the architect, bear to the edifice built by him the same relation which the fluctuating variations of each organic being bear to the varied and admirable structures ultimately acquired by its modified descendants.… Can it reasonably be maintained that the Creator intentionally ordered, if we use the words in any ordinary sense, that certain fragments of rock should assume certain shapes so that the builder might erect his edifice?44

  Although the architect or builder would always choose the best stones for building a house, the shapes of the stones themselves were completely random—or rather, their geological production was not related in any causal way to the architect’s intention.45 The final configuration of the house derived only from the architect’s ability to utilise local resources, not from any innate adaptive power of the rocks. “However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief.�
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  V

  Successful or no, his release from Variation signalled a marked change in family activities. Darwin felt “very well,” as well as he ever did. And after such a long haul at home alone with him and his illnesses, Emma and the girls longed for “dissipation.” Leaving Darwin behind in his greenhouse, they took the train up to London and the theatre. Francis and George, both studying at Cambridge, joined them for entertainment; so did Erasmus and the sociable Wedgwood cousins. Soon, Darwin began venturing out for lunch parties in neighbouring country houses, amenable to sitting in the drawing room with the ladies, especially if these included young Lady Lubbock. “Papa adored her as usual,” observed Emma after one such lunch.

  For the older Darwin offspring, independence started to flower. During this period, Henrietta was to make a short continental tour with her younger sister Bessy, and a longer one in 1870, starting off with her cousin Edmund Langton and his bride, Lena Massingberd, waiting in Paris for her brother George to come and collect her for the last leg home, although, as Emma said, “Parslow seems quite ready for a trip to France as far as Calais or Boulogne if you like to meet there in preference to this side of the channel.” Emma wrote almost daily with advice about clothes, sights to see, and “Papa’s health.” Bessy went to Germany on her own in 1866.

  The names they called each other changed, too. In general, the family was much given to nicknames. No one ever really knew why the children were given their particular baptismal names, apart from William, whose first name ran in the Darwin family. Francis used to joke that “our parents lost their presence of mind at the font and gave us names for which there was neither the excuse of tradition nor of preference on their own part.”46 There seemed little rationale behind the nicknames either. Even so, it had been a long time since George was called Jingo or Leonard answered to Pouter. On her 1870 tour abroad, Henrietta changed her name to Harriot [sic], an adjustment that Emma suppressed as soon as possible. Emma began to call Henrietta “Body,” perhaps an allusion to the ever-present illnesses; Lizzie opted for Bessy; Darwin moved from “Etty” to “Hen”; and Henrietta organised her brothers and sister to abandon “Papa” in favour of “F.,” an abbreviation of Father. Darwin did not like this. When she informed him of the forthcoming change he retorted, “I would as soon be called Dog.”47

  Far away from parental supervision, William Darwin’s mind ran on equally independent lines. He wrote home to say he was thinking of getting married. Emma was thoroughly startled: “Do not marry for marrying sake,” she exclaimed. “Look at Uncle Frank for a warning.” She meant look at Frank Wedgwood’s wife, who was idle, dissipated, and expensive. By return of post she advised William to choose a wife only from among family friends. In her eyes a successful marriage depended on the families knowing each other beforehand, no doubt a reflection of her own marital circumstances and other relationships in the close-knit Darwin-Wedgwood clan. She told him she remembered Darwin making a list of the disadvantages and advantages of marriage before he proposed to her, and said she would turn this up when William next made a visit home.48 William bowed gracefully to maternal pressure and did not venture into matrimony for ten more years. Then he pleased his parents by chosing Sara Sedgwick, the sister of a close friend of the family.

  George’s success in the final examinations at Cambridge gave Darwin much the same tingle of parental surprise. Francis afterwards said that his father appeared—at least to them—as if he sometimes doubted whether any son of his could truly succeed, a dispiriting state of affairs that propelled the boys into proving themselves over and over again. “We used to laugh at him, and say he would not believe in his sons, because, for instance, he would be a little doubtful about their taking some bit of work for which he did not feel sure that they had knowledge enough.”49 George in particular had made a slow start as an undergraduate. He tried unsuccessfully for an entrance scholarship at St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1863. He joined St. John’s as an ordinary undergraduate but left shortly afterwards to start again at Trinity, failing the scholarship examination for that college in 1864. He eventually achieved a Foundation scholarship at Trinity in 1866, but “did not display any of that colossal power of work and taking infinite trouble that characterised him afterwards,” said a mathematical friend, Lord Moulton.50 Francis Darwin also failed the scholarship examination at Trinity College when he tried in 1869 (Francis may have sat for the new natural science scholarship at Trinity begun in 1867), and he too entered as an ordinary undergraduate. These ambitious targets and subsequent failures cannot have helped the boys’ sense of themselves. Although Darwin must at some level have endorsed the decision for the boys’ attempts at scholarships, he seems to have thought of them as very like himself at the same age, characterised by application rather than brilliance. Over the years he became uncertain about their aptitude for any of the traditional occupations of well-connected Victorians, and he convinced himself that each boy’s trust fund would be insufficient to allow independent financial existence. The boys would have to get jobs. “Papa is reading a book upon the choice of profession,” Emma had remarked at an early point, “which makes him very low as it appears quite impossible to get on in any.”51

  So he was completely delighted when George sent news that he was second in the final mathematical honours list at university, “Second Wrangler” as the Cambridge terminology put it, one of the highest university achievements that a young man could then obtain. Darwin had no inkling that George was mathematically able. To him, it seemed like a transformation. The boy who used to spend his time drawing knights in armour and hunting up the family genealogy had emerged like a butterfly out of a chrysalis.

  I am so pleased. I congratulate you with all my heart and soul. I always said from your early days that such energy, perseverance and talent as yours would be sure to succeed; but I never expected such brilliant success as this. Again and again I congratulate you. But you have made my hand tremble so I can hardly write. The telegraph came here at eleven. We have written to W. and the boys. God bless you my dear old fellow—may your life so continue.52

  George’s success reverberated through the Darwins’ small world. At George’s old school at Clapham the mathematics master took the honour as a personal triumph and awarded the boys a half day’s holiday. Leonard and Horace, in the top two forms, were heroes of the hour. In London, Francis Galton “crowed v. much because of his theory.”53 And at Down House, congratulatory letters from Darwin’s scientific friends poured in, almost as if it were Darwin himself who had excelled all expectations: these letters were much more complimentary, more jubilant, more admiring, than any of the letters pangenesis inspired. Male congratulated male. George’s award was precisely the kind of achievement that these men of science understood and valued highly. Huxley inquired which son was it, remembering only a gang of similarly aged boys from his visits. “It is the herald,” Darwin replied contentedly.

  Thereafter George took a suitably academic line. He was elected to a junior fellowship at Trinity College and contemplated reading for the bar, until his health, previously robust, deteriorated rapidly. At that point he gave up the law and opted to stay at Trinity as a mathematician for the rest of his life.

  Then Leonard came second in the entrance examination for Woolwich College, the training school for military engineers. “By Jove how well his perseverance and energy have been rewarded,” said his father. Leonard was usually regarded as the duffer of the family. Amused, George dropped him a note. “Bless your soul we’re always second we are.”

  Warming to the renewed sociability, Darwin, Emma, and the girls spent March 1868 in London at Elizabeth Wedgwood’s house in Chester Place, dining with Fanny and Hensleigh Wedgwood and Erasmus nearby. They made some new friends during this visit, notably Thomas Henry Farrer (later Lord Farrer) and his wife, Frances, who was a distant relative of Fanny Wedgwood’s. The men were united as much by appreciation of Fanny’s singing as by their mutual interest in natural selection. Th
omas Farrer was a lawyer and high-ranking civil servant at the Marine Board of Trade, a good amateur botanist, with a range of hothouses in the country, and he had many questions to ask Darwin about plants. The two corresponded regularly after this meeting. “What a capital observer you are,” said Darwin with pleasure. “A first rate naturalist has been sacrificed, or partly sacrificed, to public life.” They became intimate friends in 1873 when Farrer, whose wife died in 1870, married Hensleigh’s daughter Effie, another accomplished singer. With webs of relationships like these, Darwin’s science was increasingly becoming an extension of his domestic circle.

  They also met Frances Power Cobbe, the social reformer and anti-vivisectionist. “Miss Cobbe was very agreeable,” said Emma. “She is very fresh and natural.”54 Eccentric, well-read, sentimental about dogs, loud, and overpowering, she was a type of English countrywoman very familiar to Darwin and members of his family. She persuaded Darwin to read Kant, telling him that he would find much to reflect on in his writings, and asking him bluntly, “are you never going to unite your lines of thought & let us see how metaphysics & physics form one great philosophy?” She was encouragingly avant-garde over evolution but less willing to contemplate an animal foundation for human morals. The human idea of justice is all our own, she insisted. She had written an intelligent commentary on Kant’s ethics and could speak perceptively about the problem of how humans come by a conscience. Darwin thought he was not up to the task of reading Kant. However, he read, at her urging, Kant’s Metaphysic of Ethics, in an early-nineteenth-century translation.