Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Darwin returned to Britain in 1836 – ‘all England seems changed’, he said. The Reform Bill passed in 1832 had given the vote to all landowners and had changed the political landscape in Britain for ever, giving a great deal more power to the middle classes; but the country was also on the edge of a recession and the New Poor Law, which had abolished poor relief, was creating civil unrest and widespread destitution across the country. The gap between the urban poor and the middle classes had widened significantly. London itself was in a state of metamorphosis. At night the new gas pipes meant that the town was ‘magically lit by its millions of gas lights’. In street after street, sewer workings revealed the sinews of the city, like a corpse opened up on a dissecting table. Elsewhere the shells of new railway stations rose against the London skyline like the arched bones of mammoth fossils. Like Dickens describing London in Bleak House, published some years later, perhaps Darwin could imagine extinct monsters in this strange place: ‘Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’52

  Darwin returned with his sea plunder and megafauna fossils; 368 pages of zoology notes, nearly 200 pages of marine invertebrate notes, a diary 770 pages long; 1,529 species bottled in wine spirits; 3,907 dried specimens, including giant tortoise shells and dozens of different stuffed or skinned finches.53 He had stories to tell – some tall stories, like those of Baron Münchausen, and others that, like a detective, he had to finish, to trace their narratives through to completion. His task was to ‘Prove animals like plants; trace gradation between associated & non associated animals. – & the story will be complete’.54 Other zoologists back home, in the wake of John Vaughan Thompson’s tall stories of barnacle metamorphosis as strange as the tales from Ovid, were clamouring for storytellers who would puzzle out such wondrous accounts. Facts were indeed proving stranger than fiction.

  Darwin’s close friend the Revd Leonard Jenyns, who had reluctantly turned down the post of naturalist on board the Beagle before Darwin, was one of those passionate zoologists. In a leading article called ‘The Present State of Zoology’ published in 1837 in a new and influential magazine, The Magazine of Zoology and Botany, he called his fellows to arms. The lower animals carried the secrets of life itself, he argued; and the most enigmatic and the least understood were the marine invertebrates. Of these the barnacle, recently unmasked by John Vaughan Thompson, was the most tantalizing. Someone needed to crack the barnacle code. The acquisition of a few facts about the structure and affinities of the barnacle and the bizarre shape-shifting bodies of its marine cousins might lead to ‘the most important discoveries’.55 Zoologists should do fieldwork, spend time on one species, focus, not engage in wild speculation. Evidence was needed. Empirical research had to be done by those, such as John Vaughan Thompson and Robert Grant, who had the patience and curiosity to watch, dissect and map these marine enigmas.

  There were new zoologists on the block in 1836: one man in particular Darwin wanted to know better, a young man who had studied at Edinburgh the year before him and had been working since then on the pearly nautilus, a cephalopod mollusc. This was Richard Owen, the man of the hour, the new Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, a tall man with great glittering eyes. He, like Robert Grant, was widely read and drew his zoological ideas from France and Germany as well as Britain; and now vital materialism was the talk of the zoology season: the idea that the vibrating motion that Darwin and others had seen in the tissues of all living matter under their microscopes was inherent in all life. German and northern European zoological theories had superseded the Parisian philosophies: the ideas of Ehrenberg, Muller, Von Baer, Rudolphi, Carus, Schwann, Tiedemann, Valentin and Treviranus. Darwin began to learn German. He sought out meetings with the influential and stimulating Owen. He needed to find homes for his specimens and intellectual allies for his ideas.

  If Darwin had been afraid that he would sound, on his return, like the Baron Münchausen of naturalists, with tales that no one would believe, he soon found there were plenty of other naturalists returning from sea voyages with similar tales and speculations. From fossils to vibrating primordial granules, nature, newly unmasked by fossil hunters, geologists and microscope owners, was providing the tallest of stories all by herself.

  Notes

  1 CD to Caroline Darwin, 28 April 1831, Correspondence 1: pp. 125–6.

  2Diary, p. 19.

  3 See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 116.

  4 Diary, p. 20.

  5 Capt. Robert FitzRoy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, appendix to volume 2 (New York: AMS Press, 1966; a reprint of the 1839 edition, by Henry Colburn Publishers, London), p. 92.

  6 David Stanbury, ed., A Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Beagle (London, Folio, 1977), P. 69.

  7 ‘My father used to say that it was the absolute necessity of tidiness in the cramped space on the Beagle that helped to give him his methodical habits of working.’ On the Beagle, too, he would say, that he learned what he considered the golden rule for saving time; i.e., ‘taking care of the minutes’. Francis Darwin, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters (New York: Dover Publications, 1958; a reprint of the 1892 edition by D. Appleton Publishers, New York), p. 132.

  8 CD to Robert W. Darwin, 8 February 1852, Correspondence 1, p. 202.

  9DAR 30:1, p. 1.

  10 Christain Gottfried Ehrenberg (1835), ‘Über die Akalephen des rothen Meeres und den Organismus der Medusen der Ostee,’ Abh. Königl. Akad. Wiss. Berlin, (Jerg. 1835), 181–260; 233.

  11 Diary, p. 31.

  12 Ibid., p. 35.

  13 Ibid., p. 21.

  14 J. S. Henslow to CD, 15 January 1833, Correspondence 1: p. 293.

  15 CD to Catherine Darwin, 14 July 1833, Correspondence 1: p. 314.

  16 Diary, p. 22.

  17 Ibid., pp. 30–31.

  18 Patrick Syme, ed., Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours with Additions, arranged as to render it highly useful to the arts and sciences … (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1821).

  19 Diary, p. 24.

  20 CD to J. S. Henslow, 23 July 1832, Correspondence 1: p. 251.

  21 Diary, p. 36. See also Terry Gilliam’s film The Adventures of Baron Münchausen.

  22 J. H. Balfour, Biography of the Late John Coldstream (London: John Nisbet & Co, 1964), p. 94.

  23 Ibid., p. 97.

  24 Susan Darwin to CD, 18 August 1832, Correspondence 1: p. 257.

  25 John Thompson, Zoological Researches and Illustrations; Or Natural History of Nondescript or Imperfectly Known Animals (Cork: King and Ridings, 1830), p. 40.

  26 Diary, p. 111.

  27 Ibid., p. 22.

  28 John Thompson (1830), Zoological Researches, pp. 49–50.

  29 Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 55.

  30 See Philip Sloan’s interesting breakdown of the notebooks in Philip R. Sloan (1985), ‘Darwin’s Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836: Preconditions for Transformism’ in D. Kohn, ed. (1985) The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 89–91. For further information on Charles Lyell see introductory essay by James A. Secord in Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997).

  31 Darwin to W. D. Fox, 23 May 1833, Correspondence 1: p. 316.

  32 Richard Keynes, ed. (2000), Charles Darwin’s Zoology Notes & Specimen Lists from H.M.S. Beagle (Cambridge: CUP), p. xi.

  33 CD to J. S. Henslow, 23 July 1832, Correspondence 1: p. 251.

  34 Philip R. Sloan, ‘Darwin’s Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836: Preconditions for Transformism’, in D. Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 110.

  35 Ibid., p. 111.

  36 Charles Darwin, Voyage
of the Beagle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 202. It is tempting to see in this extract an early version of Darwin’s famous entangled bank analogy in the Origin.

  37 See Diary, p. 146.

  38 Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 203. The supposed cannibalism of ‘barbarian’ tribes was one of the recurring preoccupations of travel writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter Hulme has shown how often it recurs in colonial narratives and has also shown how little actual evidence there was to support the supposed extent of cannibalism in the ‘uncivilized’ world; see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters. Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 (London. Routledge. 1986, reprinted 1992).

  39 Diary, p. 222.

  40 Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 178.

  41 Ibid., p. 179.

  42 For more detailed accounts of the Fuegians on the Beagle and the outcome of FitzRoy’s experiment see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London: Pimlico, 1996); Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Gillian Beer, ‘Four Bodies on the Beagle: touch, sight and writing in a Darwin letter’, reprinted in Judith Still and Michael Worton, eds., Textuality and Sexuality. Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester University Press, 1993); and Richard Lee Marks, Three Men of the Beagle (New York: Knopf, 1991).

  43 CD to Susan Darwin, 14 July 1832, Correspondence 1: p. 248.

  44 CD to Frederick Watkins, 18 August 1832, Correspondence 1: p. 261.

  45 Diary, p. 367.

  46 CD to Susan Darwin, 14 July–7 August, 1832, Correspondence 1: p. 248.

  47 David Stanbury, ed., A Narrative of the Voyage of the Beagle (London: Folio, 1977), p. 222.

  48 Diary, p. 271–2.

  49 David Stanbury, ed., A Narrative of the Voyage of the Beagle (London: Folio, 1977), p. 223.

  50 Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 338.

  51 CD to Catherine Darwin, 20 Jury 1834, Correspondence 1: p. 391.

  52 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 49.

  53 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). p. 189.

  54 Philip R. Sloan, ‘Darwin’s Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836: Preconditions for Transformism’, in D. Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 111.

  55 Revd Leonard Jenyns, ‘On the Present State of Zoology’, Magazine of Zoology and Botany, vol. 1 (1837), p. 28.

  4

  Settling Down

  And this creature, rooted to one spot through life and death, was in its infancy a free swimming animal, hovering from place to place upon delicate ciliac, till, having sown its wild oats, it settled down in life, built itself a good stone house, and became a landowner, or rather a glebae adscriptus, for ever and a day. Mysterious destiny!

  Charles Kingsley, Glaucus (1855)

  Down House, Kent, 1 October 1846 – early afternoon. Darwin, now thirty-seven years old, sits at his microscope at a table in front of a large study window looking out over a gravel drive, a low flint wall, and trees beyond – lime trees, which in October are turning gold. The main road to the village of Down1 skirts the house on the other side of the flint wall; horses and carts pass by, drivers touching their hats respectfully to Mr Darwin framed in the window. It is a good window for microscope work, he tells visitors, for the light comes from the north. It is furnished with small tables, large, comfortable armchairs, shelves stacked with papers, bottles and books, and behind a curtain there is a small toilet.2 He has even brought a low stool of his father’s from Shrewsbury to Down, with a revolving seat and castors. Sitting on it, he can turn easily from side to side and with a push of his legs he can move quickly from desk to desk and surface to surface in the study without standing up. When he is not working, the children are allowed to use it as a boat for their games, punting themselves around the drawing room with poles. On the left side of the microscope there is a round table with radiating drawers that turn on a vertical axis. The drawers are labelled ‘Best Tools’, ‘Rough Tools’, ‘Specimens’, ‘Preparations for Specimens’, and they contain his sharpest knives, the eyepiece for his micrometer, forceps, small bottles, boxes, lengths of string, sealing wax, ink, squares of sandpaper – nothing is thrown away here. ‘If you throw a thing away,’ he would say to Emma, ‘you are sure to want it again directly.’3 Emma agreed. Her store cupboards had been criticized by visiting aunts for muddle and chaos, but, she would tell them, she knew where to find everything. No one need disturb Darwin unnecessarily here, for he has added a little mirror to the wall outside the study window so that he can see anyone arriving at the front door and decide whether he is ‘at home’. Everything in this large study is just right, perfectly designed.

  9 Down House

  At the back of the large, square house the garden is tidy and recently replanted with azalea trees and flower borders, and down beyond the kitchen garden, through a door in the hedge, Darwin has just designed and built a ‘thinking path’, a sand walk that loops its way round the edge of a small wood. Sand and red clay lodge in the ridges of his walking boots. He walks the loop of the thinking path five times every day before lunch, and when it is wet he shelters in the summerhouse that Lewis, the local builder, has just finished building for him down at the far end of the wood. Regular walks are good for his digestion. Outside the study, across the hallway, he can hear the sound of his small children playing and the soft Scottish lilt of the nursemaid Brodie, who is preparing them for an afternoon walk. The children are six-year-old William, five-year-old Annie, two-year-old Henrietta and baby George.

  He is writing a letter to Captain FitzRoy, who has just returned to England from New Zealand, where he has been governor, with his wife and children. It was a curious appointment and has not been an entirely successful one, Darwin has heard. He hasn’t seen FitzRoy for many years. Both are now family men. Both have settled down. Darwin writes:

  My life goes on like Clockwork, and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it; we have four children, who & my wife are all well. My health, also, has rather improved, but I am a different man in strength and energy to what I was in old days, when I was your ‘Fly-catcher’ on board the Beagle; I have just finished the 3rd and last part of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle.4

  ‘I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it.’ FitzRoy too has reached the end of his free-swimming days. The larval Darwin has metamorphosed; he has found his rock. Anchored to it, he will stay here, like the adult barnacle, for the rest of his days, reproducing himself, fishing with his feet as the tide comes and goes. And his life does indeed go on like clockwork, as regular as the tides: breakfast – work – opening the morning post – work – walk – lunch – writing letters – afternoon sleep – work – rest – tea – books – bed.5 The same every day; and this is just how he likes it: a large family house ‘at the extreme verge of the world’,6 full of children, animals, specimens and routines.

  Barnacle specimens are on Darwin’s mind again now. The glass jar containing the minute specimens of his Chilean barnacle sits on the desk in front of him; the light, refracting through the yellow wine spirits, ripples on the ceiling behind him, casting strange watery shapes. He is trying to decide what to do with this last and prized Beagle specimen. The grand plan in 1837 was to start work on the geology of the Beagle and end with the tiny invertebrates he had collected, but this plan was sabotaged when his grant ran out. Still, there was interesting work to do here and riddles to be worked through. Hadn’t the Revd Leonard Jenyns, his Cambridge mentor, said all those years ago that the barnacle was one of the greatest riddles yet to solve in zoology? If you could get to understand the lowest creatures, he said, then you had a chance of understanding the higher ones; and the barnacle was one of the lowest – so common, yet so implausible. In millions along every shoreline in the world, within their snowy cones, these hermaphrodites were fishing a
way with their feet, glued by their heads to rocks.

  10 Darwin’s Study

  Darwin shakes the jar, peering into the yellow fluid. He will have to carve out a Latin name for this creature while he works on him. ‘Arthrobalanus’ he will call him for the meantime, a graft of the Latin roots of ‘arthro’ (jointed) to ‘balanus’ (barnacle); but Arthrobalanus, he remembers, just doesn’t fit the things the experts have said about barnacles. Mr Arthrobalanus just doesn’t classify. All barnacles have shells; but this barnacle – and it definitely is a barnacle – has no shell of his own. How to make sense of him? It ought to be possible – after all, classification is a simple and logical process enough, if one has enough dissection and thinking time. Didn’t Jenyns always insist that a good zoologist should dedicate himself to one field, one investigation, if he had the time. ‘It’s time for empirical proof not wild surmising,’ he’d said. ‘Always move from observable known facts to general principles,’ he’d said. The marine invertebrates are unknown territories, as strange and unmapped as Amazon forests. So he will settle to the barnacle work, stick at it, see where Mr Arthrobalanus takes him. It will help him to think through some of the current issues in comparative anatomy – issues he will need to address in his species book when he expands the essay still locked away in his drawer.

  All barnacles settle down in the end. They cannot help it. Most find rocks and glue themselves down as if the slightest whim might make them long for their free-swimming existence again. Mr Arthrobalanus found a conch shell and dug out a hole inside it, a conch shell that would be washed up on a Chilean beach at a particular time in history, when a particular British naturalist was walking by – a British naturalist who would make this barnacle famous and immortalize him in a glass jar.