Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Darwin returned to Edinburgh University in the October of 1826, alone. His brother Ras had completed his Edinburgh studies that summer and was now living and studying in London at the Windmill Street Anatomical School In Ras’ absence, Darwin would have to find alternative shore companions with whom to debate the philosophical zoological questions which pressed upon him. In November 1826 Coldstream nominated Charles Darwin for membership of the Plinian Society, but it seems likely that the three men – Grant, Darwin and Coldstream – had already met on the sands of Leith, for Coldstream walked on Leith beach most days with his notebooks and thermometers, taking down detailed measurements of the meteorological conditions for his regular column in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, or looking for sea sponges with Robert Grant. Coldstream at this time was Grant’s companion and assistant. They might have identified Darwin as a potential acolyte from some distance away, his tailored clothes, collecting equipment and notebooks marking him out from the other occupants of the beach, the fisherwomen and children collecting baskets of mussels on the black rocks to use as bait for fishing lines. Darwin was a fine catch. They would not have known at that first encounter that this athletic, tall, well-dressed young man was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin himself.

  The student-run Plinian Natural History Society met every Tuesday evening in an underground room in the University. It had about one hundred and fifty members, but usually there were about twenty-five young men at each meeting. Hungry for new ideas and a forum for debate, Darwin was a regular attender that winter; between his election in November 1826 and his leaving Edinburgh in April 1827 he attended all but one of the nineteen weekly meetings of the Society, a marked contrast to his erratic attendance at lectures. His contributions must have been engaging from the start because only a week after his election as member he was elected to the Society Council.11 Many of the members were young medical students of Darwin’s age, some, like Darwin, still in their teens. Darwin was seventeen, William Kay, from Liverpool, and George Fife, from Newcastle, were nineteen; John Coldstream, from Leith, and William Ainsworth, from Lancashire, were twenty; William Browne, from Stirling, was twenty-two. Several of the members were involved in radical politics. There were five young presidents that winter: Ainsworth, Coldstream, Kay, Browne and Fife. These, with Darwin, appear to have been the core of the group; but there was a much older man who dominated the meetings: Robert Grant, now thirty-four.

  There were several short papers given every week by members and invited guests. Many had an emphasis on local natural history or were based on natural-history expeditions undertaken by the members. Students gave papers on methods of obtaining bromine from soap-boilers’ waste and on its nature and properties (Leith had a soap-making industry), on the capture of whales on the coast of the Shetlands, and on the oceanic and atmospheric currents. Darwin stated in his Autobiography that, unlike the University lectures, he found the Society meetings stimulating. This was a stimulating time; the papers were often radical and controversial. William Greg, also seventeen when he was elected to the Society at the same time as Darwin, immediately offered a paper, for instance, that would prove that ‘the lower animals possess every faculty & propensity of the human mind’.12 Grant’s heretical ideas about the lowly origins of life were entirely at home in this company of radical young men. Even if members like Coldstream found such ideas disturbing, they were clearly compulsive and fascinating.

  Darwin’s friendship with Coldstream blossomed in the winter of 1826–7 in the meetings of the Society, in their winter walks along the Forth with Grant and in the natural history lectures and museum of Professor Jameson. Darwin was alive to the contradictions in Coldstream’s character from the start, describing him as ‘prim, formal, highly religious and most kindhearted’.13 Coldstream took him out on the dredging boats that sailed from Newhaven, the centre of the oyster trade in the Firth and only a mile to the west of Leith. In the early nineteenth century the houses of this fishing town that lined the shore were red-tiled, two-storey houses with outside stairs and jutting gables. Oyster boats lined the sands and whaling boats filled the harbour. Oysters were big business in the early nineteenth century. Thirty million oysters a year were dredged up from the Firth of Forth. The fishwives, with their striped dresses and baskets slung over their backs, were already an attraction for artists and tourists from Edinburgh and London.14

  Given Coldstream’s meteorological interests, it is likely that Darwin and Coldstream would have seen the startlingly vivid northern lights that appeared in the night sky on 16 January that winter. David Blackadder, another member of the Edinburgh student natural history societies, reported the phenomenon in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal:

  Evening fine, brilliant moonshine, a beautiful, opaque, drapery of cloud… the air was now calm and serene. In the course of a few minutes the cloudy tissue had entirely disappeared. A brilliant aurora was exhibited. In rapid change of feature and distinguished by unusual proximity. Horizontal cloudy vapours, of great tenuity, repeatedly accompanied its more brilliant evolutions, seeming to support its columns; appearing and vanishing with the more vivid coruscations. Thereafter, the aurora became extended, to right and left, forming the segment of a large circle … the arch always presented a broken or interrupted line, with recurrence of separate masses of luminous spears, of a brilliant bluish-white lustre; a golden tint, and burnished lustre, distinguished the continuous arch of the central portion, which, towards the left, became coppery.15

  Even if the winter skies were dazzling, the dredging expeditions would have been cold and cramped for the young naturalists. The oyster boats were small and carried four men, who left at daybreak and rowed and dredged all day, sometimes for twelve hours. They sang fishing shanties and the rhythms of the boat, the movement of the oars, the dropping and hauling in of the dredge all followed the cadences of their singing. By the end of the day their boats would be heavy with gleaming oyster shells, many covered with barnacles. There was danger too. The men of Newhaven were often in territorial disputes with the oyster dredgers of Prestonpans. These attacks took place on the open sea with each boat trying to capture the other. Darwin, who suffered from acute seasickness later on the Beagle, cannot have found these dredging voyages easy, despite the pleasures of teasing out sea creatures from the nets and dredges and slipping them into glass jars. However, in the company of friends like Coldstream, Grant and Ainsworth, he came to know the Forth well that winter, travelling by boat as far as the coast of Fife, and sometimes to the islands of May and Inchkeith. On one occasion a storm drove Darwin and Ainsworth to take refuge at the lighthouse on Inchkeith island.16

  The Plinian Society had its measure of practical jokes as well as philosophical speculation. In the spring of 1827 Darwin and William Kay, then the secretary of the Society, co-authored a spoof paper for the Society called ‘A Zoological Walk’. It was a satire on the type of lengthy, inconsequential journal-style paper regularly given by another student called Ritchie. It was written to be delivered in alternate voices by Darwin and Kay. The paper described every minute detail of their long walk from Leith to Portobello during which the shoreline was shrouded in thick fog. When they arrived at Portobello the tide had come in:

  Here from the first we had hoped for an ample field of amusement; but alas, again we were deceived, the shore appeared perfectly destitute and void of everything that could interest the zoologist. We then, as a last resource, determined to proceed to some rocks lying a mile or two to the right of Portobello … when we gained this our last destiny, our last long looked for scene of amusement, [we found] the few last jutting points covered by the ebbing tide. We lingered a few moments then turning our backs on the hidden treasure, disappointed, we retraced our tedious footsteps to Edinburgh.17

  On 16 March 1827 Darwin began a second zoological notebook that was distinctly different from his scarlet notebook. Now he was a man with a clear intellectual project. The marine invertebrate notes in this journal show the marks
of Grant’s training and way of seeing. All Darwin’s notes here concern the stages of zoophyte reproduction. Only six months before, Grant had published his discovery that the eggs of the sea sponge were free-swimming, propelling themselves along by the vibration of small hairs or cilia that covered their bodies, ending his essay with the words: ‘How far this law is general with zoophytes must be determined by future observations.’18 Now he had turned to zoophytes – organisms that were like the sea sponge – to see if he could determine whether these free-swimming eggs, bursting from the bodies of their parents like seeds, were indeed common to all zoophytes. In order to produce the evidence more quickly, he enlisted Darwin and Coldstream to work on the Flustra, a pale-brown seaweed-like zoophyte, known colloquially as ‘sea-mat’, growing in clusters of rocks close to the shoreline, and made up of hundreds of interdependent, connected polyps. Did this simple, primitive organism also ejaculate free-swimming ova like the sea sponge?

  Grant, Coldstream and Darwin were all working closely together, by this point, dissecting in Grant’s rooms and even on the beach itself, searching for the presence of swimming eggs in as many different apparently immobile sea creatures as they could. Outdoor dissection had become important for Grant when working on marine organisms that quickly deteriorated when taken out of their natural habitat. He taught Darwin how to dissect out of doors, using a microscope, and talked excitedly with him about his theories of the aquatic origins of life in a way that would have been more unguarded than he was prepared to be in his published work. Darwin claimed in his Autobiography that he was astonished by Grant’s Lamarckian conclusions, despite the fact that he had already encountered these ideas in his grandfather’s Zoonomia. But if he was astonished, he was also wildly curious about Grant’s developing speculations.

  Darwin’s March notebook is full of detailed illustrations and copious notes describing his zoophyte dissections and search for free-swimming ova in zoophytes or other marine invertebrates he could find in the dredging boats at Newhaven and on the black rocks of Newhaven and Leith. He made a significant discovery on 20 March 1827. Knowing it to be important evidence to support Grant’s theories, he rushed to the Prestonpans house with the news as soon as the dredger moored in the harbour:

  Having procured some specimens of the Flustra carbocea (Lam:) from the dredge boats at Newhaven; I soon perceived without the aid of a microscope small yellow bodies studded in different directions on it. – They were of an oval shape & of the colour of the yolk of an egg, each occupying one cell. Whilst in their cells I could perceive no motion; hut when left at rest in a watch glass, or shaken they glided to & fro with so rapid a motion, as at some distance to be distinctly visible to the naked eye […] That such ova had organs of motion does not appear to have been hitherto observed either by Lamarck Cuvier Lamouroux or any other author: – This fact although at first it may appear of little importance yet by adducing one more to the already numerous examples will tend to generalize the law that the ova of all Zoophytes enjoy spontaneous motion.19

  About the same time, Darwin made a second discovery, also described in his notebook:

  One frequently finds sticking to oyster and other old shells, small black globular bodies which the fishermen call great Pepper-corns. These have hitherto been always mistaken for the young Fucus Lorius … to which it bears a great resemblance…. But on examining some others I found that this fluid, acquiring by degrees a vermicular shape, when matured was the young Pontobdella Muricata (Lam.) which were in every respect perfect & in motion.20

  Darwin found swimming eggs in almost all the zoophytes he dissected, but the more evidence he brought to Grant, the more tensions seemed to arise between them – tensions that to Darwin seemed inexplicable. Grant gave a paper on the free-swimming ova of the Flustra to the prestigious Wernerian Society on 24 March 1827, illustrated by preparations and drawings. It was clearly indebted to Darwin’s findings as well as his own. He also announced the discovery of cilia on the young of other zoophytes and that he had discovered the mode of reproduction of the sea leech Pontobdella muricata. Darwin gave a paper on the ova of the Flustra to the Plinian Society three days later, his very first scientific paper. He was eighteen.

  Given that Grant had been rearing colonies of Flustra in his Prestonpans house and watching for evidence of free-swimming ova night and day for some months, it is unlikely that Darwin would have witnessed free-swimming ova before Grant. However, it does seem likely that Darwin’s excited tales of witnessing swimming Flustra eggs in a watch glass on a dredging boat would have frustrated Grant, who was always careful to stage-manage his scientific announcements. Could it be that Darwin’s ‘discovery’ propelled Grant to give his paper earlier than he had wanted? However, in July, when Grant published further information about the ova of the Pontobdella, he did acknowledge ‘my zealous young friend Mr Charles Darwin of Shrewsbury, who kindly presented me with specimens of the ova exhibiting the animal in different stages of maturity’.21

  The relations between Darwin and Grant had cooled. A note, written by one of Darwin’s daughters and allegedly found in a bundle of papers in 1947, provides some explanation for this:

  I then made him repeat what he had told me before, namely his first introduction to the jealousy of scientific men. When he was at Edinburgh he found out that the spermatozoa (?)/ ova (?) of (things that grow on sea weed)/ Flustra move. He rushed instantly to Prof. Grant who was working on the subject to tell him, thinking he wd be delighted by so curious a fact. But was confounded on being told that it was very unfair of him to work at Prof. G’s subject and in fact that he shd take it ill if ray Father published it. This made a very deep impression on my Father and he has always expressed the strongest contempt for all such little feelings – unworthy of searchers after truth.22

  But these were also, perhaps thankfully, Darwin’s last weeks in Edinburgh. Grant too would leave Edinburgh that summer: powerful advocates were recommending him for a chair at London University. Darwin was destined for Cambridge. His father had decided that, given that he was not going to qualify as a doctor, he should try for the Church. Perhaps in Cambridge he would show more application. Coldstream had decided to go to Paris to continue his medical studies and to follow Grant’s example. It is likely that several graduating members of the Plinian Society set off for Paris in the summer of 1827. Perhaps they travelled together. Grant joined them there later in the summer for his annual visit to the Paris museums and libraries. William Browne, now beginning to specialize in the medical treatment of the insane, wanted to study in the Parisian asylums. Ainsworth, who would later become a surgeon and geologist to the Euphrates Expedition and achieve fame in documenting it, planned to study geology and medicine in Paris; and Darwin, though destined for Cambridge studies, also travelled to Paris in June and July of that summer. His Uncle Josiah was travelling to Geneva to pick up his daughters, Fanny and Emma Wedgwood, who had been staying with an aunt for eight months, and he offered to take Charles as far as Paris. While his uncle travelled on to Geneva, Charles was left in Paris to occupy himself for several weeks. Given his invertebrate interests, he is likely to have spent some time with Coldstream and his other Plinian Society friends, accompanying them to the natural history museums and specialist libraries.

  Darwin found Coldstream ill at ease, even that first summer of his Paris studies. Paris science was beginning to unsettle Coldstream’s mind and his religious beliefs even more than Dr Grant had. William Mackenzie of Mission House in Passy, in whom Coldstream confided, recorded that ‘he was troubled with doubts arising from certain Materialist views, which are alas! too common among medical students. He spoke to me of his doubts, and manifested anxiety on the subject of religion.’23 If the ideas of Paris made Coldstream anxious, those he encountered in Germany brought him breakdown. Soon he was in a Swiss sanatorium. Convalescing, he made decisions. There would be no further continental study, no further materialist temptations. He would return to Leith in 1828 and work simply as a loc
al doctor, healing the sick. He would shun the company of heretical zoologists such as Grant, Grey and Browne. ‘In our day the majority of naturalists, I fear are infidels,’ he wrote in 1829.

  Coldstream, frightened by the sexual liberalism and hedonism of Paris and the temptations of materialist science, returned to Edinburgh in the middle of one of the most notorious trials of Scottish history: the trial of William Burke and William Hare for murder. Burke and Hare, two unemployed Irish navvies who had moved to Scotland to work on the Union Canal, had decided to reclaim unpaid rent from a deceased lodger by selling his body to Robert Knox, Dr Barclay’s successor at Surgeons’ Square, for £7/103. A few weeks later they lured an old woman into their lodgings and suffocated her whilst drunk. This body, carried to Surgeons’ Square in a wooden chest, fetched them £10. At the trial that began on Christmas Eve 1828, Burke pleaded guilty to supplying sixteen bodies to Robert Knox, but there may have been as many as thirty. Hare and his wife provided enough evidence to sentence Burke, but they were acquitted. Burke was hanged at the Head of Libberton Wynd at dawn on 28 January 1829, and his body taken to Dr Munro’s dissecting theatre, where it was partially dissected before noting crowds broke the windows of the dissecting rooms, demanding to see the body. Police were forced to allow groups of forty to fifty people at a time into the theatre. Men, women and children filed past the partially dissected body of the murderer as if it were the body of a king in state.24

  Living back with his parents in Leith, Coldstream continued to be haunted by festering bodies and moral corruption. ‘A fair exterior covers a perfect sink of iniquity,’ he wrote of himself on 1 January 1830. He blamed his mental weakness on lack of discipline and temptations of the flesh: ‘my present condition of mind is much inferior in strength and solidity to what it might have been had I not given loose reins to my lustful appetites. I have been ruined and enervated by a life of effeminacy and slothful indulgence.’25