Huxley describes the theory of natural selection, calling it ‘an ingenious hypothesis’ which ‘gives a reason for many anomalies in the distribution of living beings in time and space’. Whether the theory is absolutely true is still to be discovered:
Goethe has an excellent aphorism defining that state of mind which he calls ‘Thätige Skepsis’ – active doubt. It is doubt which so loves the truth that it neither dares rest in doubting, nor extinguish itself by unjustified belief; and we commend this state of mind to students of species … Mr Darwin abhors a vacuum … The path he bids us follow professes to be not a mere airy track, fabricated of ideal cobwebs, but a solid and broad bridge of facts. If it be so, it will carry us safely over many a chasm in our knowledge, and lead us to a region free from the snares of those fascinating but barren Virgins, the Final Causes, against whom a high authority has so justly warned us. ‘My sons, dig in the vineyard’, were the last words of the old man in the fable [by Aesop]; and, though the sons found no treasure, they made their fortunes by the grapes.137
So ends Huxley’s clever and lively article. The quotation from Goethe is the evidence Darwin found of his being a ‘German scholar’; Huxley had taught himself German as a young man. He is careful not to be too enthusiastic about Darwin’s work, partly because he had some honest disagreements about details, and partly because he judged it would be easier to persuade people to give Darwin a hearing if he did not appear too much of a partisan, though from this point on it was Huxley’s explicit intention to be just that. In the essay he wrote for Darwin’s son Frank’s edition of his father’s Life and Letters, published in 1887, entitled ‘The Reception of the “Origin of Species”’, Huxley remembered being cautious at first, then thinking, ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’, adding, ‘I suppose Columbus’ companions thought much the same when he made the egg stand on end.’ The Darwin–Wallace papers of July 1858, and ‘still more’ the Origin of November 1859, ‘had the effect of the flash of light which, to a man who has lost himself on a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way.’138 When Huxley reviewed Origin at greater length and in more detail in the radical quarterly the Westminster Review in April 1860, he introduced another striking metaphor for the effect of Origin: ‘Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.’ Darwin thought this sentence ‘splendid’.139
Darwin was fortunate in his friends, and he needed to be. Negative responses came thick and fast. Most difficult for Darwin was his wife’s distress, partly at the book itself, and partly at the reaction of theologians and religious readers; he told W.B. Carpenter on 3 December 1859 that the ‘odium theologicum much pains all one’s female relations’.140 Emma was particularly upset by the letter Darwin received from Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge. Sedgwick declared that he had read the book with more pain than pleasure, and some parts of it ‘with absolute sorrow’ because he thought them ‘utterly false & grievously mischievous’. ‘Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved.’ Worst of all, Darwin does not explicitly exclude mankind from his scheme, though he chooses animal and plant species to illustrate his theory. The question of humanity exercises Sedgwick:
There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly. Tis the crown and glory of organic science that it does thro’ final cause, link material to moral … You have ignored this link … you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it. Were it possible (which thank God it is not) to break it, humanity in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it – & sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.
Finally, ‘I greatly dislike the concluding chapter’ because of the ‘tone of triumphant confidence in which you appeal to the rising generation’ and ‘prophesy of things not yet in the womb of time’.141 Sedgwick attacked Origin a few months later in a review in the Spectator and a speech to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, by which time Hooker, though confessing that he thought Darwin had ‘pressed his hypothesis too far’, insisted to a correspondent that it was ‘the “Book of the Day”’. He thought poorly of the ‘senseless howl’ of many reviewers in articles full of ‘ignorant prejudice’ and ‘mere twaddle’.142
The great Richard Owen wrote his review in the famous quarterly periodical, the Edinburgh Review. He never admitted to being its author, which is hardly surprising given that Darwin’s book is reviewed alongside a number of other works, including Owen’s own new book, Palaeontology, a French translation of one of his previous books, and his lengthy presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Leeds in September 1858. He repeatedly quotes his unacknowledged self against Darwin, whose theory of natural selection is described as ‘mere hypothesis’.143 Darwin wrote to his publisher Murray on 9 April 1860 asking if he had read this. ‘I am thrashed in every possible way to the full content of my bitterest opposers. The article is very venomous, & is manifestly by Owen. I wish for auld lang syne’s sake he had been a little less bitter.’144 To Hooker he wrote amusedly of the Edinburgh review that some of his relations ‘say it cannot possibly be Owen’s article, because the Reviewer speaks so very highly of Prof. Owen. Poor dear simple folk!’145
By May 1860 Darwin had received Wallace’s letter acknowledging receipt of Origin. The letter is lost, but Wallace jotted down some notes in February 1860 after reading the work, and these survive. He calls the work ‘admirable’ and says it agrees absolutely with his own essay written two years earlier and sent to Darwin. In stark contrast to Owen, however, he responds to reading Darwin with complete honesty. ‘His work touches upon & explains in detail many points which I had scarcely thought upon’, and ‘many of his facts & explanations in Geographical distribution are also quite new to me & of the highest interest’.146 He clearly wrote in this vein to Darwin, who thanked him on 18 May for his letter of 16 February:
You must let me say how I admire the generous manner in which you speak of my Book: most persons would in your position have felt some envy or jealousy. How nobly free you seem to be of this common failing of mankind. But you speak far too modestly of yourself; you would if you had had my leisure [have] done the work just as well, perhaps better, than I have done it.147
The 1860 meeting of the British Association took place in Oxford, from 27 June to 4 July. Given what we know of his habits and health, not to mention his sensitivity to criticism, it seems highly unlikely that Darwin would have wished to attend the first meeting of his fellow scientists since the publication of his controversial work. Sure enough, he found he could not attend. He told Lyell on 25 June 1860 that he had ‘given up Oxford’. His stomach had ‘utterly broken down’ and he was about to go to Edward Lane’s new hydropathic establishment, Sudbrook Park, in the hope of getting the usual respite.148 In his absence the most famous row in Victorian science broke out, not directly between Huxley and Owen, as might have been expected, but more spectacularly between Huxley and a supporter of Owen’s, the bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce (known universally as ‘Soapy Sam’).149
As had been the case at the Linnaean Society and British Association meetings in 1858, so now in September 1860 neither of the two heroes of natural selection was present. Instead, Huxley and Hooker spoke up when Darwin came under fire. Hooker wrote excitedly to Darwin on Monday, 2 July about events the previous Thursday, 28 June: ‘Huxley & Owen had a furious battle over Darwin’s absent body at Section D [the botanical and zoological section], before my arrival’. Huxley had been ‘triumphant – you & your book forthwith became the topics of the day’.150
On the Saturday Hooker impatiently sat through a mass of ‘flatulent stuff’ until Wilberforce ‘got up & spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit ugliness
& emptiness & unfairness’ before a huge crowd of between ‘700 & 1000 people, for all the world was there to hear Sam Oxon’. ‘I saw he was coached up by Owen & knew nothing & he said not a syllable but what was in the Reviews – he ridiculed you badly & Huxley savagely – Huxley answered admirably & turned the tables.’ Then Hooker himself asked to speak:
I smashed him amid rounds of applause – I hit him in the wind at first shot in 10 words taken from his own ugly mouth – & then proceeded to demonstrate in as few more 1 that he could never have read your book & 2 that he was absolutely ignorant of the rudiments of Bot. Science … Sam was shut up – had not one word to say in reply & the meeting was dissolved forthwith leaving you master of the field after 4 hours [sic] battle.151
Though Hooker thus took much of the credit to himself, others put the rout down mainly to Huxley’s brilliant repartee when Soapy Sam apparently asked him whether he claimed his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother. Huxley told a friend in September 1860 that he had replied that he would ‘rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather’ than a man ‘possessed of great means of influence & yet who employs’ that influence ‘for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion’.152 Many years later he recalled that he had been so astonished at how ignorant the bishop of Oxford showed himself to be that he muttered to the man next to him, ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands’, then stood up and ‘let [himself] go’.153
From Sudbrook Park Darwin responded to Hooker’s account with a mixture of melancholy and pleasure:
I have been very poorly with almost continuous bad headache for 48 hours, & I was low enough & thinking what a useless burthen I was to myself & all others, when your letter came & it has so cheered me. Your kindness & affection brought tears into my eyes. Talk of fame, honour, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection … [N]ow that I hear that you & Huxley will fight publicly (which I am sure I never could do) I fully believe that our cause will in the long run prevail. I am glad that I was not at Oxford, for I sh[oul]d have been overwhelmed, with my stomach in its present state.154
He wrote to Huxley too: ‘I honour your pluck; I would as soon have died as tried to answer the Bishop in such an assembly.’155
Darwin’s chronic ill health never left him. He tried many alleged remedies, and in 1865 he wrote down his symptoms for Dr John Chapman, old friend and journalist colleague of Marian Evans and Lewes, publisher of the Westminster Review, and the inventor of an ice-bag which he claimed could cure a number of ailments, including those suffered by Darwin.156 Now aged fifty-six, Darwin wrote that he had endured for twenty-five years ‘extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence’, occasional vomiting, which was ‘on two occasions prolonged during months’, singing in the ears, shivering, and half-fainting. He could not walk more than half a mile and was always tired.157 Over the years Darwin tried among other things calomel, cinnamon, potassium bicarbonate, aloe, bitters, phosphate of iron, chalk, magnesia, and various purgatives, as well as making frequent visits to hydropathic establishments, including Edward Lane’s.158 Nothing gave him lasting relief, though he lived to the age of seventy-three, dying of heart failure in April 1882. Modern medical diagnoses range from physical causes – perhaps from germs picked up during the voyage of the Beagle – to psychological or psychosomatic ones, traced usually to Darwin’s alleged anxiety as a boy to please his formidable father.159
Like Dickens twelve years before, Darwin was deemed important enough to be buried in Westminster Abbey. One of the pallbearers was Alfred Russel Wallace. In his autobiography Wallace quotes the obituary in Nature by Huxley, which he thinks the ‘most discriminating and most beautiful’ of the many tributes to Darwin. Huxley had written:
One could not converse with Darwin without being reminded of Socrates. There was the same desire to find some one wiser than himself; the same belief in the sovereignty of reason; the same ready humour; the same sympathetic interest in all the ways and works of men. But instead of turning away from the problems of nature as wholly insoluble, our modern philosopher devoted his whole life to attacking them in the spirit of Heraclitus and Democritus.160
As ever, Huxley had found a fitting analogy to place Darwin’s importance in the history of science and of knowledge generally. He wrote in a letter to a colleague that Darwin had ‘a clear rapid intelligence, a great memory, a vivid imagination, and what made his greatness was the strict subordination of all these to his love of truth’.161
Darwin himself would not have claimed as much. In the autobiography he wrote for his children in 1876 he notes that he was slow at school and not thought clever: ‘I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my Father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.’162 Even after finding his métier, he never felt he could express himself ‘clearly and concisely’, though he believes that this ‘has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about every sentence’.163 He admits that he could not learn to speak another language, and though he likes music and poetry, he has no aptitude for them.164 (This seems to have been true of the whole Darwin–Wedgwood family; Gwen Raverat remembered that all of her aunts and uncles – Darwin’s children – except Frank were ‘benevolently philistine’, regarding the arts ‘as the inessential ornaments of Life’.165)
Darwin continues with his description of his failings. ‘I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley.’ His memory meanwhile ‘is extensive, yet hazy’. Finally, he analyses, as he might do in the case of an animal or plant species, his characteristics and the conditions in which he has existed:
My habits are methodical, and this has been of not a little use for my particular line of work. Lastly, I have had ample leisure from not having to earn my own bread. Even ill-health, though it has annihilated several years of my life, has saved me from the distractions of society and amusement.
Therefore, my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these the most important have been – the love of science – unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject – industry in observing and collecting facts – and a fair share of invention as well as of common-sense. With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that thus I should have influenced to a considerable extent the beliefs of scientific men on some important points.166
Strikingly, when he came to write his autobiography thirty years later, Alfred Russel Wallace assessed his own talents in similar terms and with equal modesty. He too contrasts himself with Huxley; he possesses, he writes, none of Huxley’s ‘fiery energy and intense power of work’. Like Darwin he notes that he has no ear for music, no facility in learning languages, and – more problematically for a naturalist – not much talent for drawing. Nor does he have a good verbal memory, and he regrets ‘the total absence of wit or humour, paradox or brilliancy, in my writings’,167 though here he surely underestimates himself. His account of his eight years away, published in 1869 under the title The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature, is lively and proved lastingly popular. If he does not write wittily, he can certainly paint a vivid verbal picture of the singular experiences he has had in remote places. On his return to England in March 1862 from his long trip, he notified the secretary of the Zoological Society that he had safely brought back the two live birds of paradise he had bought in Singapore seven weeks earlier, describing in detail the almost impossible task he had performed in getting them home. He recounts the difficulties of finding suitable food for them en route. ‘Bananas they had till Suez & melons at Malta.’ ‘Cockroaches they are excessively fond of & I managed to get them fairly regularly till leaving Bombay.’ In the middle of the Red Sea he resorted, nervously, to giving them ha
rd-boiled eggs, ‘which they are very fond of but which I doubt agreeing with them for long’. He reassures his correspondent that the birds have survived the long journey north and the increasingly low temperatures ‘wonderfully’. He has succeeded in bringing live birds of paradise to Europe for the first time, and he writes simply, ‘I hope they will be glorious.’168
Wallace never claimed to be the originator of the theory of natural selection. On the contrary, he wrote at every turn, both privately and publicly, of Darwin’s genius and claim to priority. While in Ternate in December 1860 he told his correspondent Henry Bates how much he admired Origin: ‘I could never have approached the completeness of his book, – its vast accumulation of evidence, its overwhelming argument, & its admirable tone & spirit.’ Darwin had created ‘a new science & a new Philosophy, & I believe that never has such a complete illustration of a new branch of human knowledge been due to the labours & researches of a single man’.169
After his return to England in 1862 and up to his death in 1913 Wallace published books on the geographical distribution of animals, while his best-known work was Darwinism, published in 1889. When the Darwin Medal was instituted by the Royal Society in 1890, Wallace was the first winner, with Hooker following in 1892 and Huxley in 1894.170 He surprised friends by turning to spiritualism in the 1860s, as did other free thinkers, including Robert Chambers and Darwin’s cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood. For them evolutionary theory did not exclude religious faith, but confirmed their belief that higher forms of life would continue to evolve in the spiritual realm after death.171 Wallace also became involved in social and political issues, including land nationalisation and women’s suffrage. He was a prominent figure when the Linnaean Society marked the fiftieth anniversary of its seminal, though at the time unnoticed, meeting of 1 July 1858. The fittingly named ‘Darwin–Wallace Celebration’ took place on 1 July 1908 in the Institution of Civil Engineers in Great George Street, Westminster, the Linnaean Society’s rooms in Burlington House not being big enough to hold the large gathering of scientists who attended. Present were several members of the Darwin family, including Darwin’s son Frank, now a fellow of the Royal Society; representatives from the Danish, Swedish, and German embassies; and all the current leaders of natural history, including the zoologist Sir Ray Lankester and Darwin’s cousin the geneticist Francis Galton, who both received medals at the event.
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