by Janet Browne
In particular he returned to his interest in facial expressions. He felt sure that some human expressions were universal, indicating mankind’s single origin. Moreover, he thought the majority of human expressions were also identifiably the same as animal expressions, or at least their origins could be traced in animal movements and emotions, another sign of evolutionary connections. The human grimace of pain would be the same all over the globe, he imagined. It was equally recognisable in dogs. Surely, he asked himself, this revealed the “mental continuities” between animals and humans?
These notions had already supplied him with a pleasant diversion when he was bored with writing Variation. Early in 1867, he had distributed a printed questionnaire in which he asked overseas correspondents about the facial expressions and gestures of indigenous peoples. Did all peoples shake their heads to convey a negative, for example? As soon as Variation went to press, he arranged for the same questionnaire to be circulated more widely, first by Gray to friends in America, then by Robert Swinhoe in the Far East, and finally in 1868 by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, there calling it “Queries About Expression for Anthropological Inquiry.”84 Connecting with the Smithsonian Institution was an astute move. This body was famous for its systematic programme of gathering information from all over the world, especially in meteorology and ethnology. Darwin hoped to get information about indigenous peoples from the far west and north of the American continent, perhaps even from Alaska. Puzzlingly, his correspondence system failed in this regard. Only one reply to all his efforts survives.85
Darwin began sorting through his private papers until he found his notes on the Fuegians and other ethnic groups encountered during the Beagle voyage. He studied his early notebooks again and located his manila folders full of miscellaneous details about the physical and mental properties of human beings. With mounting eagerness he leafed through his collection of printed materials, some relating to human skin colour, others to parasites, or anthropological studies of forest tribes, embryological monstrosities, hairy women, chimpanzee behaviour, religious beliefs, insanity, the human senses, and so forth.
Most eagerly of all, he retrieved his notebook about the Darwin children when they were small, and compared his descriptions of William’s and Anne’s facial expressions with information gleaned from the wives and mothers among his social circle, and then from observant zookeepers like Abraham Bartlett of the London Zoological Gardens. This sequence of observations on his children had been unusual enough when he first began in the 1840s. He now felt sure that mothers—particularly the ones married to scientists and accustomed to the criteria of science—were as knowledgeable in their own field as geologists or horticulturists in theirs, and could be relied upon to provide accurate observations on the faces that their children made. He was one of the first natural philosophers to make use of this generally unexploited area of expertise, and one of the first to make comparative observations between ape and child.86
“Give Mrs Huxley the enclosed,” he suggested to Huxley in 1868, “& ask her to look out (for hints) when one of her children is struggling & just going to burst out crying.” What did the little Huxley’s eyebrows do? “A dear young lady near here, plagued a young child for my sake, till it cried, & saw the eyebrows for a second or two beautifully oblique, just before the torrent of tears began.”87 A human baby seemed to him entirely comparable to a monkey. “When the Callithrix sciureus screams violently does it wrinkle up the skin round the eyes like a Baby always does?” he asked Bartlett. He cornered Dr. Engleheart, the village doctor, with similar questions. Engleheart’s experience at the local schools stood him in good stead. “Blushing commences quite as early as 5 yrs. as I have two fine little Blushers of this age on show at Chesham School,” the doctor told Darwin.
And he threw himself into reconsidering the old favourite of sexual behaviour, human as well as animal. Darwin’s notebooks were full of material about mating rituals among birds, insects, mammals, and faraway peoples, and these spilled into observations about beauty and the moral sense in general. As Darwin understood it, marriage was a selective process. “Our aristocracy is handsomer … than the middle classes, from having the pick of the women,” he said to Wallace, “but oh, what a scheme is primogeniture for destroying natural selection!”88
The driving force behind all this lay in Darwin’s idea of sexual selection, the mechanism he invented to explain secondary sexual characteristics such as the different colouring of male and female birds or the male peacock’s wonderfully ornamented tail. In animal species, he had suggested in the Origin of Species, females would mate more readily with males displaying the largest antlers, the brightest colours, the neatest nest, or the most beautiful song, and thereby leave descendants liable to possess the same characteristics. Over the generations such features would build up in a population. Sometimes the attributes might determine the victor in a fight for possession of the female but generally they served no life-preserving adaptive function. They merely increased the chances of mating and thus the number of offspring.
He was convinced that this explained many aspects of human evolution. “Among savages the most powerful men will have the pick of the women, and they will generally leave the most descendants,” he mused to Wallace. Strictly speaking, this was not natural selection, since choice was involved. In humans, said Darwin, the choice was exercised by males. The situation was otherwise in the animal kingdom, where he believed females took the decisive role. He was coming to believe that this process generated most of the physical differences between the human sexes and between human races: “every race has its own style of beauty.” Superficial attributes like skin colour might easily shift under reproductive preferences like these.
Wallace disagreed. “How can we imagine that an inch in the tail of the peacock … would be noticed and preferred by the female?” he asked derisively. Crickets did not stridulate for sexual purposes. Male and female toucans both possessed brightly coloured beaks. Gloriously flecked and spangled male game birds were polygamous, so how could the females possibly exercise choice? In Wallace’s opinion, the dull colour of female birds gave them vital protection from predators and hence possessed genuine survival value. By far the better tropical naturalist, he systematically forced Darwin to reexamine his evidence as if he were a connoisseur pointing out the subtlest aspects of a rare piece of china.
Nothing could have suited Darwin better. In his new frame of mind, a good argument like this brought his mind alive again, set the machinery going. All his competitive spirit burst forth. “My difficulty is, why are caterpillars sometimes so beautifully and artistically coloured?” he asked Wallace in 1867. An abstruse correspondence on caterpillars ensued. He tried to catch Wallace out. “Can butterflies be polygamous?” he probed. What of reindeer horns? Elephant tusks? Cocks’ combs? “It is an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock’s tail was thus formed; but, believing it, I believe in the same principle somewhat modified applied to man,” he asserted. Wallace set out his alternative theory of the colours of caterpillars in the Westminster Review in 1867 and explained protective colouration and birds’ nests in 1868. “I believe I was the first to give adequate reasons for the rejection of Darwin’s theory of brilliant male colouration or marking being due to female choice,” he claimed in unruffled fashion in his autobiography.89
In short, Darwin felt invigorated, ready at last to confront the pivotal issue he deliberately omitted from the Origin of Species. He decided to start a “Man-book.” The subject was huge, but very appealing to him. Human variation, geographical diversity, facial expressions, moral sensibilities, inheritance, reproductive behaviour, and sexual selection—in essence, the entire natural history of mankind—at last secured his attention.
None of his friends treated the subject of humans quite as he had hoped. Despite Huxley’s continuing writings and lectures, Man’s Place in Nature mostly served its author’s special polemical purposes. Although Lubbock wrote about archaeolo
gy and prehistoric societies, he did not explicitly address natural selection. Lyell, for all his reinterpretation of the antiquity of the human species, had done as much as he was able. Spencer primarily interested himself in the development of civilisations. Asa Gray defended the existence of divinely guided variation. Haeckel ran amok with missing links and recapitulation theory. Vogt and Hunt believed that humans emerged from multiple origins. Galton pursued the human intellect with statistics alone.
Other authors less intimate with Darwin also tackled the evolution of mankind in ways that he would rather not have encountered. George Douglas Campbell, the Duke of Argyll, had issued an influential challenge to Darwin’s presumed ideas about mankind in his book The Reign of Law (1867). Since reviewing Darwin’s Orchids, Argyll’s occasional remarks on evolution had earned him the newspaper epithet “the Darwinian Duke,” although he supported the alternative idea of a providential God acting in nature. Huxley irreverently referred to him as the Dukelet. “How can you speak so of a real living Duke?” protested Darwin. For all Darwin’s revolutionary ideas, he still felt a stab of awe for the hereditary peerage, strong enough to laugh at himself on occasions. “I have always thought the D. of Argyll wonderfully clever,” he told Hooker, “but as for calling him ‘a little beggar’ my inherited instinctive feelings wd. declare it was a sin thus to speak of a real old Duke.”
Argyll said there must be much more to nature than mere mechanical chance. “Ornament or beauty is in itself a purpose, an object, an end,” he wrote in his Reign of Law, and he reiterated the point in various articles. To him, progress in the living world was inexplicable except on the assumption that it was planned from the beginning by a divine mind. This kind of creative evolutionism was attractive to many people who felt they could make a compromise by swallowing evolution but rejecting natural selection. Darwin crossly accused Argyll of speaking “absurdly” about “beauty existing independently of any sentient being to appreciate it” and allowed himself a tremor of satisfaction when Wallace “smashed” into Argyll over the issue of bird colours, showing how the iridescence of hummingbirds could be explained by natural selection alone.90
Lubbock took on Argyll as well. At the British Association meeting in 1867, Lubbock had argued that primeval mankind lived in a state of “utter barbarism” and had only gradually evolved towards a civilised state. The Duke of Argyll responded in the magazine Good Words with a series of refutations that formed the substance of his next book, Primeval Man, published in 1869. In this book, Argyll claimed mankind was far more likely to have degenerated from an earlier perfect state than to have risen from the animals. He and Lubbock clashed on the issue at the next British Association meeting. How could early human beings have successfully competed with apes? asked Argyll. Apes would always be better at living in the wild. “Place a naked high-ranking elder of the British Association in the presence of one of M. du Chaillu’s gorillas, and behold how short and sharp will be the struggle,” tartly observed one of Argyll’s supporters.91
All the same, their relationship was cautiously well disposed. Argyll admired Darwin’s scholarship, saying in his autobiography that he thought “the subject can never go back to where it was before he wrote.” And Darwin regarded him with the respect due to an intellectual. Later, when he needed Argyll’s political help he was glad they had not irrevocably disagreed.
Only Wallace, as Darwin saw it, was trying to locate human origins in the strict framework of natural selection as originally proposed, and even here Darwin considered that Wallace unjustly spurned his idea of sexual selection. None of these colleagues said what Darwin thought was most needed. The moment was ripe for him to say it himself.
VII
Months passed. He heard about Hooker’s speech as president of the 1868 British Association at Norwich—the speech Hooker had been writing when they all visited the Isle of Wight. “I feel like the parrot which was in the habit of saying in a tone of great contempt after the family prayers were over, ‘My God,’ ” said Hooker.92 Hooker was the first of the Darwinians to fill the presidential role and took the opportunity to review the reception of evolutionary theory. Wallace reported:
Darwinianism was in the ascendant at Norwich (I hope you do not dislike the word, for we really must use it) and I think it rather disgusted some of the parsons, joined with the amount of advice they received from Hooker & Huxley. The worst of it is, that there are no opponents left who know any thing of Nat. Hist. so that there are none of the good discussions we used to have. Vogt told me that the Germans are all becoming converted by your last book.93
Then Asa Gray came to stay. Darwin was pleased to clasp his friend’s hand at last, a feeling that was reciprocated. Darwin was “entirely fascinating,” commented Mrs. Gray that weekend. He was “tall & thin, though broad-framed, & his face shows the marks of suffering and disease.… He never stayed long with us at a time, but as soon as he had talked much, said he must go & rest.” He had “the sweetest smile, the sweetest voice, the merriest laugh! and so quick, so keen!”94 Over dinner, she told him about her sister’s dog that washed its face like a cat, a story that eventually made its way into Darwin’s writings.
Gray magnanimously ignored his differences with Darwin over the Civil War and downplayed Darwin’s recent remarks against him in Variation. Together they looked over his experimental work. The visiting botanist was silently amused by the simple workbench in the greenhouse and the turned earth in the kitchen garden ready for next year’s scientific peas and beans. To Gray, Darwin seemed positively to favour working in humble conditions. Gray went away impressed by his friend’s ability to push into unexplored scientific territory armed with only a trowel.
When Gray went to dine at the X Club, he found England’s other Darwinists were much more men of the world. Warily, he distanced himself from what he called “the English-materialistic-positivistic line of thought,” by which he probably meant Huxley’s Whitworth-gun fusillades. At this particular moment Huxley was rampaging on miracles and the existence of the soul. A few months later, he was to coin the word “agnostic” to describe his own position as neither a believer nor a disbeliever, but one who considered himself free to inquire rationally into the basis of knowledge, a philosopher of pure reason, as he liked to say, linking himself with David Hume and Immanuel Kant. The term fitted him well, and although the validity of Huxley’s story of its parentage remains uncertain, it caught the attention of the other freethinking, rational doubters in Huxley’s ambit and came to signify a particularly active form of scientific rationalism during the final decades of the nineteenth century.95 “Most of my colleagues were ‘ists’ of one sort or another … so I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of ‘agnostic’ ” In his hands agnosticism became as doctrinaire as anything else—a religion of scepticism. Huxley used it as a creed that would place him on a higher moral plane than even bishops and archbishops. All the evidence would nevertheless suggest that Huxley was sincere in his rejection of the charge of outright atheism against himself. He refused to be “a liar.” To inquire rigorously into the spiritual domain, he asserted, was a more elevated undertaking than slavishly to believe or disbelieve. “A deep sense of religion is compatible with the entire absence of theology,” he had told Charles Kingsley back in 1860. “Pope Huxley,” the Spectator dubbed him. The label stuck.96
Reassuringly, Gray discovered that Lyell was steady in his belief in divine authority and willing to discuss with him some of the religious shortcomings of the evolutionary worldview. Lyell in fact drew support from Gray. “Asa Gray’s articles, all of which I have procured, appear to me the ablest, and on the whole, grappling with the subject, both as a naturalist and metaphysician, better than anyone else on either side of the Atlantic.” Lyell alone of the inner circle of Darwin’s friends adhered to Gray’s position on design and theology.97 The most obvious souvenir of Gray’s trip was, however, physical. He returned to Boston with a “venerable white beard” just li
ke Darwin’s. Reinforced with this badge of allegiance, he promoted Darwinism with the same dedication as before.
At home, Darwin’s life continued steadily, divided between plants in the greenhouse and work on mankind. His wife Emma understood that the domestic arrangements of a man like him should be based on routine. It was enough to keep the windows open, the meals coming, and the sofa ready. Privacy and quietness was all.
In the spring of 1869 he fell off his horse Tommy, hurting his leg badly in the fall, and making him declare that he would not ride again, although it had amused him to plod along the same route every day while noting Tommy’s vivid imagination for wolves or highwaymen as they passed and repassed the same heap of grass clippings. The accident put him out of action for weeks. Plaintively, he asked to be towed to the hothouse on a makeshift trolley pulled into position by Horace and a few lads from the stableyard. “I am afraid Ch’s nerve will be quite gone whatever animal he rides,” Emma told an absent family member. “We have got a Bath chair which is better than the truck on which he rode ignominiously to the hothouse. The boys take him round the sandwalk & he enjoys it after his confinement.”
It was in the drawing room, nursing this bad leg, that he seemingly became part of nature himself.
Yesterday a wasp settled on F.’s face & put its proboscis into his eye to drink the moisture apparently. He got up very quietly from the sofa & stood looking at himself in the glass till the wasp moved.98
As Emma said, “A sting in the eyeball wd. have been horrid.”
VIII
Under these circumstances, he found revising the Origin of Species for a fifth edition was irksome. “That everlasting Origin,” he complained to Fox. “I am sick of correcting.” To be sure he made several important adjustments. After studying Carl Nägeli’s commentary on natural selection, he thought that there were probably some features of living organisms that had no adaptive purpose whatsoever. This was a major concession to make. “I have lately i.e. in new Edit. of Origin been moderating my zeal,” he confessed to Wallace, “& attributing much more to mere useless variability.—I did think I wd send you the sheet, but I daresay you wd not care to see it, in which I discuss Nageli’s essay on Nat. selection, not affecting characters of no functional importance, & which yet are of high classificatory importance. Hooker is pretty well satisfied with what I have said on this head.”99