Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  In the evenings Darwin relaxed with books about orchids. He stoked up an enjoyable correspondence with tropical experts like Fritz Müller and William Ogle, the latter a medical statistician at the registrar-general’s office whom he had met through William Farr. All this he regarded as restful and eminently useful. Friends appreciated the self-effacing manner he showed at these times. They felt able to tease him. Once, when Darwin was wandering about the garden at Down House in the company of William Ogle, he paused to pick a flower and said that it was staggering to have to believe that the beautiful adaptations which it showed were the result of natural selection. To this Dr. Ogle replied, “My dear sir, allow me to advise you to read a book called the Origin of Species.”

  Thomas Henry Farrer, the husband of Effie Wedgwood (Darwin’s niece), became a close colleague in these botanical matters, being well read and sufficiently leisured to participate in some of Darwin’s inquiries. Darwin enjoyed his company and started accepting invitations to stay at Abinger Hall, Farrer’s estate near Dorking, in Surrey. It was nearly the only place he would visit outside his customary circuit of Henrietta, Erasmus, William, and his sister Caroline at Leith Hill Place. This “pleasant, friendly house was now added to the very few places where my father felt enough at ease to pay visits,” noted Henrietta. Effie made them welcome, and as often as not Erasmus would run down for a day or two as well, for Effie was his special favourite among Fanny and Hensleigh’s adult daughters. She would sing in the evenings for family parties, as “admirable as any concert,” said the Darwin brothers enthusiastically. At Abinger, Emma knew her husband would eat, talk, and rest. He “ran riot rather—bribery tart, peaches, grapes &c. He has promised to reform. He has much botanical talk with THF.”15

  Darwin and Farrer’s routine was simple enough. They would call at the greenhouses, then walk out onto the “Rough,” a patch of wild commonland. Farrer liked these companionable rambles.

  His tall figure, with his broad-brimmed Panama hat and long stick like an alpenstock, sauntering solitary and slow over our favourite walks, is one of the pleasantest of the many associations I have with the place.16

  Underneath the pleasantries, Farrer also served as a useful foil for some of Darwin’s botanical ideas. He helped Darwin understand the complicated adaptations for fertilisation in Passiflora, the climbing passion-flower, then a rarity in English gardens. During one summer visit to Abinger, the two men sat pensively in the dusk beside Farrer’s specimen, in full flower, waiting to see if any local insect might serve as a fertilising emissary in the absence of humming-birds. They saw “neither humble-bees, nor butterflies, nor any other large insects.” On other occasions, they watched the bees on Farrer’s summer bedding schemes, noting how the bees concentrated on the yellow nursery varieties and ignored pink or white. At these times, Farrer’s admiration for Darwin was limitless. He seemed never to be irritated by Darwin’s habit of following one of Farrer’s remarks by saying, “Yes; but at one time I made some observations myself on this particular point; and I think you will find, &c. &c.”17

  They also discussed Darwin’s theories about climbing plants. Farrer reported to him how the passifloras “seek & find & hold on & pull up like an animal.” Living in the Kent countryside, with hop-fields all around, Darwin could not help but notice the twining tendrils that hitched the plants up their wires in the late-spring sunshine. The ornamental climbers on the veranda at Down House caught his attention. Sweet peas and runner beans scrambling over netting were an amusement. “I kept a potted plant, during the night and day, in a well-warmed room to which I was confined by illness,” Darwin said, and observed the growing points move with the light, like the hand of a watch. The local countryside was a constant source of inquiry to him. “The number of different kinds of bushes in the Hedge Rows, entwined by traveller’s joy & the bryonies, is conspicuous, compared with the hedges of the northern counties,” he had noted in anticipation when he first arrived at Down.18

  Many odd facts emerged. Rather absurdly carrying his wooden measuring stick with him on strolls around the Down House flower beds, Darwin discovered that wisteria could move faster than morning glory. Some species, he saw, climbed using their leaves, others with hooks and latches. Most preferred to move anti-clockwise, except for Loasa eurantiaca, which moved first one way and then the other, until it hit something to act as a support. His walking stick even participated in this private source of interest, for it was cut from a hardened, twisted rope of native honeysuckle, a daily reminder of the strange byways along which his theory was taking him. Thereafter, he obtained sensitive species from Farrer, or from the glasshouses at Kew, and set them to work in his greenhouse or study, either climbing or twining or sleeping. He regarded them as tenderly as he did Polly the dog. “F. is much absorbed in Desmodium gyrans and went to see it asleep last night. It was dead asleep—all but its little ears which were having most lively games such as he never saw in the daytime,” wrote Emma.

  Francis came closest to understanding his father’s dedication. It was “a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form & colour. I seem to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in.”

  It ran through all his relation to natural things—a most keen feeling of their aliveness. Sometimes it came out in abuse & not praise, eg. of some seedlings—“the little beggars are doing just what I don’t want them to.”—Or the half-provoked, half-admiring way he spoke of the ingenuity of a Mimosa leaf in screwing itself out of a basin of water in which he tried to plunge it.19

  His volume on climbing plants was issued in 1875, an expanded version of the paper he had published in the Linnean Society Journal ten years before. Despite the attention that Darwin lavished on his twitchers, twiners, climbers, and scramblers, these adaptive devices did not catch the public fancy any more than the digestive powers of Drosera. The book was one of his slowest sellers.

  III

  The old order began to pass. Hooker’s wife, Frances, died in 1874, the year after he accepted the presidency of the Royal Society. He told Huxley that he still thought of her as the young girl who he had dreamed about when plant-hunting in the Himalayas. Twenty-five years on, the gap her passing left in his life was enormous. He turned to Darwin for solace, visiting Down for a few days after the funeral, bringing his children with him. “I cannot tell you how depressed I feel at times.” Two years later he married Hyacinth Symonds, the widow of Sir William Jardine, a marriage that brought companionship, a mutual enjoyment in science, and then the birth of a baby. The couple caused an unprecedented stir by leaving “the president’s baby” with the porter at the Royal Society apartments when Hooker was called to London for scientific engagements.

  Lyell died on 22 February 1875, aged seventy-eight. “How completely he revolutionised geology: for I can remember something of pre-Lyellian days,” mused Darwin. “I never forget that almost everything which I have done in science I owe to the study of his great works.” To Hooker he admitted that the death did not catch him unprepared. Lyell had been fading away ever since Mary Lyell’s death from typhoid fever in 1873, and Darwin was glad that his friend went out with his faculties intact. “I dreaded nothing so much as his surviving with impaired mental powers.” Among the memories Darwin most wished to keep secure were Lyell’s “freedom from all religious bigotry” and his eager interest in political and social advance.

  He was, indeed, a noble man in very many ways; perhaps in none more than in his warm sympathy with the work of others. How vividly I can recall my first conversation with him, and how he astonished me by his interest in what I told him. How grand also was his candour and pure love of truth. Well he is gone, and I feel as if we were all soon to go.20

  As president of the Royal Society, Hooker arranged for Lyell to be buried in Westminster Abbey, as much a tribute to the man himself as any propaganda for the new order of things. Katherine Lyell, Lyell’s sister-in-law, asked if Darwin would join Hooker, Huxley, and others as a pa
llbearer. Darwin refused. He said he “dared not,” for he would “so likely fail in the midst of ceremony and have my head whirling off my shoulders.” Nor did he attend the funeral. According to Emma’s diary, he sent Bessy, Francis, and Francis’s wife, Amy. It was a sorry end to a remarkable friendship, at root surely reflecting the same form of selfishness, the same self-indulgence, that had tainted his response to John Stevens Henslow’s death, the other man who had made him who he was and who had given him just as much dedicated assistance as Lyell. Darwin could be ruthless in cutting himself off from those to whom he owed the greatest debts. Perhaps he thought that to go to Lyell’s funeral—to make himself ill for Lyell’s sake—would serve no useful purpose. No wonder he suddenly felt “old & helpless.”

  A passing problem lay in finding appropriate words for the Abbey tombstone. Katherine Lyell drafted two proposals that Hooker thought were far too religious (“I have fainted away twice,” he said cynically). Darwin agreed. “They sound to me like truckling to the parsons or to Westminster Abbey.”21 Together they devised a form of words that played to Lyell’s strengths rather than what they secretly had come to regard as his private failings. Yet the epitaph was not as fulsome as it might have been. To them he had perhaps outlived his usefulness.

  Throughout a long and laborious life he sought the means of deciphering the fragmentary records of the earth’s history in the patient investigation of the present order of Nature, enlarging the boundaries of knowledge and leaving on scientific thought an enduring influence.

  IV

  These ruminative gardening days were interrupted by the political problems of science. Darwin’s position as a biologist, as a national figure, and as a man increasingly engaged in physiological researches pulled him into the last great medical controversy of the century—vivisection.

  Always a delicate problem, and fairly well regulated in Britain through a code of practice set out in 1871, the issue of vivisection raised fundamental social, moral, and professional issues that collided with public opinion during the 1870s and 1880s.22 Fears about cruelty to animals were only a part of it. British experimental physiologists faced extreme hostility, not just from the public, but also from practical medical men and clinicians who at that point saw no need to adjust their finely honed diagnostic skills to accommodate laboratory knowledge. Only a few hospitals at that time provided facilities for medical research. The great public institutions were primarily charities for the relief of the sick, run by a board of governors who considered it no part of their business to establish expensive laboratories for the academic investigation of disease. In Britain, University College Hospital, St. Bartholomew’s, Guy’s, and St. Thomas’s hospitals were the exception. Similarly, the universities found it difficult to understand the new desire for laboratories to study blood, muscles, or nerves, although Huxley had made a promising start in South Kensington. A doctor with experimental leanings would therefore tend to equip a room in his house as a small laboratory oriented toward microscopy or chemistry according to his tastes. As a result, physiologists in Britain struggled to establish the value of their researches in the slipstream of spectacular advances made elsewhere in Europe. Furthermore, well-publicised appointments to university chairs of men like Burdon Sanderson, Edward Sharpey-Schafer, and Michael Foster called into question matters of medical authority—why should medicine, hitherto dominated by the Royal Colleges, take seriously university professors whose appointments and research interests lay outside the clinical system? Barely hidden questions of power and authority fuelled the debate, fanned by the political activities of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and public outrage against the use of living animals for research.

  When Burdon Sanderson published a Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory for students in 1873, his readers were made uncomfortably aware of the methods adopted by rising young experimentalists. The following year, at a medical meeting in Norwich, the British Medical Association allowed a particularly ill-chosen experimental demonstration of the effects of absinthe on a dog. The session ended in uproar and criminal proceedings were brought against the French neurologist Valentin Magnan for cruelty.23

  Victorians were alternately stirred, chastised, annoyed, and appalled by reports of such practices that appeared in the press. Led by Frances Power Cobbe, on the one hand, the founder in 1875 of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, and Richard Holt Hutton, editor of the Spectator, on the other, public revulsion against laboratory experiments on living animals gathered pace. But there was also accumulating unease about what was claimed to be science’s heartless, value-free agenda of inquiry, fears that were displayed in Wilkie Collins’s unusual novel Heart and Science, in which the villain’s callous behaviour was attributed to his vivisectionist researches. The main argument of the antivivisectionists was that experiments on living animals were cruel, useless, and immoral. Cobbe called them “tortures.” Human beings, she argued, had moral duties towards other creatures, creatures that also possessed the capacity to suffer. Perhaps she felt that the wanton exploitation of animals reflected something of the political and social vacuum in which women then existed. The link with feminist history has always been strong. Beyond that, antivivisectionists freely expressed their misgivings about the growing ascendancy of science and medicine. It seemed to many that experimentalists pursued their researches without any legal or moral obligations to society or to the higher world of the divine. The campaign groups that emerged were steadfast in their opposition. When Darwin tried to describe Hutton’s inflexibility over the issue of animal experiments, he said in awe, “He seems to be a kind of female Miss Cobbe.”

  The issue involved Darwin directly as a figurehead for advanced modes of thought. At the same time, however, he was disgusted by cruelty to animals of any kind. As a local magistrate he sometimes came across cases of cruelty to farm animals and was inexorable in imposing fines and punishment. In 1853 he had waged a private vendetta against a Mr. Ainslie in the village for cruelty to his carthorses, sending for an officer of the RSPCA and threatening to “have him up before a magistrate & his ploughman also.” From time to time, he would jump out of his carriage to remonstrate with coach drivers using whips or spurs excessively.24 He sacked a Down House employee who had left the family horse standing in its harness for hours. This was more than mere sentiment. Darwin dimly remembered the screams of Brazilian slaves during his voyaging days. A profound dislike of inhumane treatment of any vulnerable being strongly coloured his perspective, and he said that the thought of laboratory animals being made to feel pain simply in order to satisfy human curiosity was “abhorrent” to him. In a little-noted passage in The Descent of Man he wrote that “every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.”25

  In these views Darwin was supported by Emma and Henrietta. Some ten years beforehand, in 1863, Darwin and Emma had written a joint letter to the Bromley Record, the local newspaper, protesting about the use of steel traps for vermin. This letter was accompanied by a line drawing made at Darwin’s request of a rabbit’s paw fractured by a sprung trap. The letter was republished, minus the picture, in the Gardeners’ Chronicle under Darwin’s initials alone, and again as a separate pamphlet that Emma sent around to friends and relatives in order to raise funds for the RSPCA to investigate humane traps. Darwin recorded payment for the cost of distributing the “cruelty pamphlet,” and his name was listed for several years beside an announcement in the RSPCA magazine Animal World of his intention to give a monetary prize to the inventor of an alternative, more humane, device. The prize was still listed in 1876. With the antivivisection debate in full flood, Emma drew on that published text for another letter that she apparently sent under her own name to the Times or Spectator, although it seems not to have been published.26

  So at home, antipathy to
vivisection ran high. When George Romanes came for a visit, Darwin warned him, “When in the presence of my ladies do not talk about experiments on animals.” Yet Darwin also believed physiology to be “one of the greatest of sciences, sure … greatly to benefit mankind.” His devotion to science—his belief in it as the way forward—ensured that he pledged wholehearted support to the ideals of pure research. His personal solution to the dilemma was less clear. He believed that experimental animals should be rendered completely “insensible.” Then again, as early as 1871, he told Edwin Ray Lankester that although he felt vivisection was essential for the progress of knowledge it should not be performed for “mere damnable and detestable curiosity. It is a subject which makes me sick with horror, so I will not say another word about it, else I shall not sleep tonight.”

  He did not follow his own advice. He refused to sign the antivivisection petition that Henrietta presented to him in January 1875 and wrote her a long letter explaining his reasons. These were mainly pragmatic. The proposed licensing system seemed to him likely to be overly restrictive. Furthermore, “I do not see who is to determine whether any particular man should receive one.” The traditional country sports of English gentlemen, he added, were far crueller than a properly executed experiment. Most of all, he feared a deleterious effect on research.

  If stringent laws are passed … the result will assuredly be that physiology, which has been until within the last few years at a standstill in England, will languish or quite cease. It will then be carried on solely on the Continent; and there will be so many the fewer workers on this grand subject, and this I should greatly regret.… No doubt the names of doctors will have great weight with the House of Commons; but very many practitioners neither know nor care anything about the progress of knowledge. I cannot at present see my way to sign any petition, without hearing what physiologists thought would be its effect, and then judging for myself. I certainly could not sign the paper sent me by Miss Cobbe, with its monstrous (as it seems to me) attack on Virchow.27