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One Hot Summer

Page 20

by Rosemary Ashton


  You will, & so will Mrs Hooker, be most sorry for us when you hear that poor Baby died yesterday evening. I hope to God he did not suffer so much as he appeared. He became quite suddenly worse. It was Scarlet-Fever. It was the most blessed relief to see his poor innocent face resume its sweet expression in the sleep of death. Thank God he will never suffer more in this world.137

  CHAPTER FIVE

  July 1858

  Darwin in distress

  THE REGISTER OF BURIALS ‘in the Parish of Downe [sic] in the County of Kent in the Year 1858’ records the funerals between 7 June and 22 July of three adults and of four children from the village: 13-year-old Amy Parker, 8-year-old Arthur Perceval, 2-year-old George Elliott, and 18-month-old Charles Waring Darwin.1 Darwin’s child was buried at St Mary’s church on Thursday, 1 July; his parents’ immediate concern was to get their other children away from home as soon as possible. In the few letters Darwin wrote in early July, he told correspondents that all the children except Etty, who was still weak, had gone with their maternal aunt Sarah Elizabeth Wedgwood to her house in Hartfield, on the Kent–Sussex border. He and Emma were staying at home for a few days more until Etty was fit to be moved and the household’s nurse and governess, who both showed symptoms of fever, were better. By Tuesday, 6 July the danger was over, and ‘we are getting less frightened & in every way, more composed’, he told W.D. Fox. Nevertheless, ‘I have been much knocked up & so has my poor dear wife’.2 Three days later he and Emma took Etty to Hartfield, and on 16 July the whole family went on holiday to the Isle of Wight, returning home to Down on 13 August.3

  The day after the baby’s funeral Darwin wrote a short memorial of his tenth and youngest child:

  Our poor Baby was born Dec[embe]r 6th 1856 & died on June 28th 1858, & was therefore above 18 months old. He was small for his age & backward in walking & talking, but intelligent & observant … He had never been ill, & cried less than any of our babies. He was of a remarkably sweet, placid & joyful disposition; but had not high spirits, & did not laugh much. He often made strange grimaces & shivered, when excited … He was very affectionate, & had a passion for Parslow [the butler] … Our poor little darling’s short life has been placid innocent & joyful. I think & trust he did not suffer so much at last, as he appeared to do; but the last 36 hours were miserable beyond expression. In the sleep of Death he resumed his placid looks.4

  It has been suggested by some experts that Charles Waring had Down’s syndrome, the condition named after its identification in 1866 by John Langdon Down, superintendent of an asylum, who corresponded with Darwin in the latter’s later years about facial features.5 Etty Darwin later recalled that her baby brother ‘never learnt to walk or talk’ and was born, she believed, without his ‘full share of intelligence’.6

  With such a sad family event taking place on 1 July (during a brief lull in the hot weather), there was no chance that Darwin would be able to attend the important delayed meeting that evening of the Linnaean Society at Burlington House, Piccadilly, at which his and Wallace’s papers were to be read. In truth, Darwin would probably not have gone up to London even without the death and funeral of his child. His last trip to the capital had been on 20 May, when he attended a dinner of the Philosophical Club of the Royal Society in the Thatched House Tavern in St James’s, the building in which the notorious nine hottest days of June were spent unfruitfully in an attempt to solve the riddle of exactly when Sir Henry Meux had become insane. Darwin spoke with Hooker at the dinner, and it was the last time he visited London, or saw his close and supportive friends, Hooker, Lyell, and Huxley, for many months to come.7 The whole business of getting Darwin’s and Wallace’s work laid before London’s scientific experts was done by Hooker and Lyell, for which Darwin was grateful. His letters to these two friends continued to thank them and express his guilt at putting them to trouble and at worrying so much about his own desire to be recognised as the first person to formulate the theory of natural selection. On 5 July he thanked Hooker for sending him an account of the 1 July meeting and for offering to write to Wallace on Darwin’s behalf: ‘I certainly sh[oul]d much like this, as it would quite exonerate me.’ And from his sister-in-law’s house in Hartfield he wrote again to Hooker on 13 July, confessing that he had been punished for complacency and lack of self-knowledge: ‘I always thought it very possible that I might be forestalled, but I fancied that I had grand enough soul not to care; but I found myself mistaken.’8

  While Darwin coped with his family’s health, his friends acted in his interest at the meeting brought about by the death of Robert Brown, a Scottish botanist who had studied and collected plants on a voyage to Australia from 1801 to 1805. He had been president of the Linnaean Society from 1849 to 1853. Hooker and Darwin, among others, felt that he was rather a drag on the society, an opponent of progress in his field. Darwin recalled visiting Brown often as a young man and wishing that he would publish more and be more generous to his fellow scientists: ‘He seemed to me chiefly remarkable for the minuteness of his observations and their perfect accuracy. He never propounded to me any large scientific views in biology. His knowledge was extraordinarily great, and much died with him, owing to his excessive fear of ever making a mistake.’ Darwin had observed Brown’s jealousy and secretiveness, his refusal to lend specimens of the plants he had collected.9

  Whatever Darwin and Hooker thought of Brown, his death was, as Hooker recalled at a ‘Darwin–Wallace Celebration’ at the Linnaean Society fifty years later, ‘the direct cause of the Theory of the Origin of the Species being given to the world at least four months earlier than would otherwise have been the case’.10 He meant the Darwin–Wallace papers, not Darwin’s book, but of course it is also true that the whole sequence of events from 18 June, when Darwin received Wallace’s letter, to 1 July, when their papers were read, led to the great book itself being published years earlier than Darwin had anticipated and in a form much more adapted to attract universal attention. Since neither Darwin nor Wallace was able to be in London, their papers were read out by the secretary of the Linnaean Society, John Joseph Bennett, preceded by ‘a few words to emphasise the importance of the subject’ by Hooker and Lyell.11 Among those present were the current president of the society, the zoologist Thomas Bell, and Brown’s replacement as a member of council, the botanist George Bentham. Of the other twenty-five or so members who attended, the best known was W.B. Carpenter, biologist and professor at University College London.12 On publishing Origin of Species the following year, Darwin received an encouraging letter from Carpenter, who, he told Hooker, was ‘likely to be a convert’, one of the handful of scientists he thought ready to accept the theory of natural selection.13 After the minutes of the previous meeting were read out, and acknowledgment was made of various books and papers which had been donated to the society, the main business of the meeting was arrived at, namely the three papers presented by Lyell and Hooker and read out by the secretary Bennett. Five short communications from other colleagues brought the occasion to a close.14

  As Hooker and Lyell had agreed, two of Darwin’s pieces of writing were read out before Wallace’s paper, on the grounds that they had been written earlier. First came ‘An Abstract from a M.S. Work on Species’, sketched by Darwin in 1839, ‘copied in 1844’, and read at that time by Hooker. Second was Darwin’s letter to Asa Gray in Boston, dated 5 September 1857; Hooker’s wife Frances had kindly made a fair copy for the meeting of this piece, ‘my ugly M.S.’, as Darwin shamefacedly described it to Hooker on 13 July 1858.15 The letter to Gray, with a few minor stylistic emendations made for the Linnaean Society meeting, sets out Darwin’s belief:

  In nature we have some slight variation … & I think it can be shown that changed conditions of existence is the main cause of the child not exactly resembling its parents; & in nature geology shows us what changes have taken place & are taking place. We have almost unlimited time: no one but a practical geologist can fully appreciate this: think of the Glacial period, during the whol
e of which the same species of shells at least have existed: there must have been during this period, millions on millions of generations.

  I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work on natural selection (the title of my Book), which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being … I have found it hard constantly to bear in mind that the increase of every single species is checked during some part of its life, or during some shortly recurrent generation. Only a few of those annually born can live to propagate their kind. What a trifling difference must often determine which shall survive & which perish … [Organic beings] always seem to branch & sub-branch like a tree from a common trunk; the flourishing twigs destroying the less vigorous, – the dead & lost branches rudely representing extinct genera & families.

  In the letter of September 1857 Darwin signs off by telling Gray that ‘this sketch is most imperfect, but in so short a space I cannot make it better. Your imagination must fill up many wide blanks.’ He finishes in a characteristic sentence which Hooker deleted from the version to be read out on 1 July 1858, ‘Without some reflexion it will appear all rubbish; perhaps it will appear so after reflexion.’16

  Here in a scrap barely three pages long is the idea at the heart of Darwin’s theory; the phrases about millions of generations, about the small differences which determine the survival or perishing of species, and especially the metaphor of the great tree with its branches and sub-branches to describe evolution, found their way almost unchanged into On the Origin of Species, which so shocked those who believed the age of the earth to be counted in thousands, not millions, of years, and who rebelled at the idea of species created by God perishing in such numbers.

  Next came Wallace’s contribution, ‘An Essay on the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type’, written in Ternate, an island of eastern Indonesia, in February 1858. This was the longest of the three pieces, though it ran to only eight pages. In his autobiography, written nearly fifty years later, Wallace recalled that at the time he was ‘suffering from a sharp attack of intermittent fever’. ‘Every day during the cold and succeeding hot fits [I] had to lie down for several hours, during which I had nothing to do but to think over any subjects then particularly interesting to me.’17 Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, published anonymously in 1798 and expanded in 1803, came to Wallace’s mind. Malthus had written that while population tends to increase in ‘geometric ratio’, doubling every twenty-five years, food supply grows only in ‘arithmetic ratio’, so that population and food supply are only kept in balance by ‘checks’ including wars, famines, plagues, delayed marriages, and prostitution. In the second edition he advocated a positive check for the problem, namely delayed marriage, but only when accompanied by ‘moral restraint’ both before and during marriage.18 Though Malthus was controversial in respect of his diagnosis of, and suggestions for the improvement of, the human condition, the idea of checks and balances in the natural world attracted Wallace, as it had Darwin years earlier. In October 1838, as he recalled in his autobiography, Darwin read Malthus ‘for amusement’, and was struck that in the ‘struggle for existence’ ‘favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed’. ‘Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.’19

  Wallace, too, felt he had experienced a ‘Eureka’ moment. ‘Why do some die and some live?’ he asked. The answer, he recalled in his autobiography,

  was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live … then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain – that is, the fittest would survive … The more I thought it over the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species … I waited anxiously for the termination of my fit so that I might at once make notes for a paper on the subject. The same evening I did this pretty fully, and on the two succeeding evenings wrote it out carefully in order to send it to Darwin by the next post, which would leave in a day or two.20

  The paper he wrote, which first Darwin, then Lyell, then Hooker read, and then about thirty gentlemen of the Linnaean Society heard on 1 July, contained such sentences as the following (many of which, as Darwin had seen in his shock, were almost in the same words as his own bits of writing and thinking): ‘The life of wild animals is a struggle for existence’; ‘even the least prolific of animals would increase rapidly if unchecked’, yet it is clear that ‘permanent increase, except in restricted localities, is almost impossible’. Though ‘very few birds produce less than two young ones each year, while many have six, eight, or ten’, a ‘simple calculation’ would show that, without checks, ‘in fifteen years each pair of birds would have increased to nearly ten millions!’21 In chapter three of Origin of Species, entitled ‘Struggle for Existence’, Darwin took the most slow-breeding of all species, the elephant, and calculated that in five centuries, without checks, there would be ‘fifteen million elephants, descended from the first pair’.22 Wallace’s essay continues with the theme of variation and struggle. Individuals might survive or not according to various differences:

  Even a change of colour might, by rendering them more or less indistinguishable, affect their safety; a greater or less development of hair might modify their habits … If, on the other hand, any species should produce a variety having slightly increased powers of preserving existence, that variety must inevitably in time acquire a superiority in numbers … All we argue for is, that certain varieties have a tendency to maintain their existence longer than the original species, and this tendency must make itself felt.23

  Though Hooker later remembered that the papers caused ‘intense interest’ in the audience at Burlington House, he also saw that ‘the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists before armouring’.24 He reported optimistically to both Darwin and Wallace at the time, though the former recalled with amusement in his autobiography that ‘our joint productions excited very little attention, and the only published notice of them which I can remember was by Professor Haughton of Dublin’, whose ‘verdict was that all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old’.25 (Haughton was not only a biologist but also a minister in the Church of Ireland, who believed in the truth of biblical texts and could therefore not reconcile his views with Darwin’s.26) Certainly there seems to have been no immediate notice in the press of the Linnaean Society meeting, and at the Leeds meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September 1858, though the Darwin–Wallace papers had by this time been published in the Linnaean Society journal, the only mention of them was a brief, grudging, neither welcoming nor dismissing paragraph in the address of the president, Richard Owen, who was to attack Darwin fiercely, though anonymously, in his review of Origin of Species in April 1860.

  By October 1858 Wallace had received letters from both Darwin and Hooker. He told his mother on 6 October that the letters (now lost) of ‘two of the most eminent Naturalists in England’ had ‘highly gratified’ him. On the same day he thanked Hooker for his and Lyell’s efforts on behalf of his paper, adding that ‘It would have caused me much pain & regret had Mr Darwin’s excess of generosity led him to make public my paper unaccompanied by his own much earlier & I doubt not much more complete views on the same subject, & I must again thank you for the course you have adopted, which while strictly just to both parties, is so favourable to myself.’27

  Darwin and his friends were struck at this time, and later, when Wallace returned to England, by his immediate and full acceptance that Darwin’s work took precedence, both in terms of the dates of his discoveries and the fullness of the studies which allowed him to reach his conclusions. As early as January 1858 Wallace had written to Henry Bates, his erstwhile travelling companion, that Darwin was ‘preparing for publication his great wo
rk on Species & Varieties, for which he has been collecting information 20 years’. He added clear-sightedly, ‘He may save me the trouble of writing the 2nd part of my hypothesis [as first put forward in his essay from Sarawak, published in Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855].’28 Wallace would accept praise for only one thing. As he wrote in his autobiography, ‘I may have the satisfaction of knowing that by writing my article and sending it to Darwin, I was the unconscious means of leading him to concentrate himself on the task of drawing up what he termed “an abstract” of the great work he had in preparation, but which was really a large and carefully written volume – the celebrated “Origin of Species”, published in November, 1859.’29

  Huxley was one friend who delighted in the effect Wallace had on Darwin; he wrote to Hooker in September 1858 expressing his pleasure that ‘Wallace’s impetus seems to have set Darwin going in earnest, and I am rejoiced to hear we shall learn his views in full, at last. I look forward to a great revolution being effected.’30 In the memoir of the reception of Origin of Species which he contributed to Frank Darwin’s life of his father in 1887, Huxley, while making it clear that Darwin deserved all the credit he got, was commendably scrupulous in noting Wallace’s contribution: ‘The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the “Origin” guided the benighted.’31

  As was usual with Darwin, he himself did not immediately spring to the idea that his great work could be completed and published soon. His family problems and continuing wretched health, as well as his self-confessed slow way of working and thinking, meant that he went off for his summer break believing that at most he might work up, as Wallace noted, a longer ‘abstract of my Species Theory’.32 It took him many more months, almost to the point of publication itself, before he was persuaded by his good friends to drop the self-deprecating words ‘abstract’ or ‘essay’ from the title.33 Much later he put down his sense of obligation to Wallace in determining the form of his published work: ‘An element in the success of the book was its moderate size; and this I owe to the appearance of Mr Wallace’s essay; had I published on the scale in which I began to write in 1856, the book would have been four or five times as large as the Origin, and very few would have had the patience to read it.’34

 

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