Darwin and the Barnacle
Page 13
Somewhere moored out in the bay of Cape Town, in the ship the Rattlesnake, the twenty-two year-old Thomas Huxley, assistant ship’s surgeon, was wondering about writing a monograph on molluscs but worried about the time it would take: ‘I fear me that, as the old saying goes,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘my eyes are bigger than my belly.’ It would take him at least five years, he wrote. What kind of future would marine zoology bring him? He was a man with no independent means. He would have to find a paid job on his return to England; and what about marriage – how could he possibly support a wife on his current salary?
In late 1847 the Rattlesnake moored in Sydney, Australia, and despite Huxley’s best intentions he began to fall in love with Henrietta Heathorn, a Sydney brewer’s daughter. She was captivated by the young naval surgeon’s flashing eyes and fascinating manner.40 In the ballrooms and at the dining tables of Sydney he told Henrietta not about the horrors of shipboard operations on gangrened limbs, but of the deadly beauty of the Portuguese man-of-war, the pale purple, semi-translucent Physalis. He had just sent a paper home to England, he explained, that would make his fortune. He was on to something. Now that he understood how all the delicate communities of polyps worked together in the Physalis, he said, he could prove they were related to jellyfish. You only had to look at the embryonic forms under a microscope to see the amazing similarities and watch the way they reproduced. Why was this paper important? Why would it make his fortune? Because it would prove that jellyfish had been wrongly classified for centuries. He would have his name on the zoological map. He would be remembered for his Physalis paper. And there would be more. He had zoological ground to break.
Notes
1 In the 1840s the village of Down in Kent changed its name to ‘Downe’ so that it would not be confused with County Down in Ireland. Darwin and his family, however, continued to call their house Down House. To avoid confusion for the reader I will call both the village and the house Down, rather than Downe.
2 Darwin’s son Francis wrote in later life that he remembered the study shelves being full of ‘odds & ends, glasses, saucers, biscuit boxes, zinc labels, bits of wood, flower pot saucers of sand, and spirits of wine glycerine.’ Francis Darwin, The Completed Edited Manuscript of Francis Darwin’s Preliminary Draft of the ‘Reminiscences of My Father’s Everyday Life’, ed. Robert Brown, manuscript in possession of the Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge University Library, p. 58.
3 Francis Darwin manuscript of Reminiscences, p. 56.
4 CD to Robert FitzRoy, 1 October 1846, Correspondence 3: p. 345.
5See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), P. 336.
6 CD to W. D. Fox, 25 March 1843, Correspondence 2: p. 352.
7 CD to Emma Darwin, 25 June 1846, Correspondence 3: p. 326.
8 CD to Emma Darwin, 24 June, 1846, Correspondence 3: p. 325.
9 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 271.
10 ‘Darwin’s Notes on Marriage: Second Note July 1838’, Correspondence 2: pp. 444–5.
11 Ibid.
12 Charles Darwin described his son William as an ‘animalcule’ in a letter to T. C. Eyton, 6 January 1840, and to Robert FitzRoy, 20 February 1840, Correspondence 2: p. 255.
13 Correspondence 7: Supplement.
14 Cited in Edna Healey, Wives of Fame: Jenny Marx, Mary Livingstone, Emma Darwin (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), p. 241.
15 ‘On the Remarkable Diffusion of Coralline Animalcules from the Use of Chalk in the Arts of Life as Observed by Ehrenberg’, The Annals of Natural History, December 1839, p. 57; see also C. Lynn, ‘Colors and other Materials of Historic Wallpaper’, in Wallpaper Conservation: A Special Issue. JAIC, vol. 20, no. 2, (1981) pp. 58–65 and E. J. LaBarre, Dictionary and Encyclopaedia of Paper and Paper-making (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1969).
16 For further information on Joseph Hooker see Ray Desmond, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (Antique Collectors Club, 1999) and a forthcoming essay by Jim Endersby, ‘Gentlemanly Generation: Darwin on Heredity, Reproduction and Marriage’, Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: CUP, 2002).
17 CD to J. D. Hooker, 11 January, 1844, Correspondence 3: p. 2.
18 CD to Leonard Jenyns, 12 October 1844, Darwin, Correspondence 3: p. 67–8.
19 For a splendid and comprehensive account of the history and reception of Vestiges read James Second, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).
20 See Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred; or, the New Crusade (1847; London: Peter Davies, 1927), pp. 112–13.
21 CD to Hooker, 7 January 1845, Correspondence 3: p. 108.
22 [Sedgwick] ‘Natural History of Creation’ Edinburgh Review (1845); see also discussion of Segwick’s reaction in James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 231–47.
23 CD to J. D. Hooker, 10 September 1845, Correspondence 3: p. 253.
24 Darwin, Notebook C: 76–7.
25 Letter to J. D. Hooker, 2 October 1846, Correspondence 3: p. 346.
26 See Charles E. Lee (1974), The Horse Bus As A Vehicle (London: London Transport, 1974); John Reed (1988), London Buses Past And Present (London: Capital Transport, 1988); also the website of the London Transport Museum at http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk
27 CD to J. D. Hooker, 12 November 1846, Correspondence 3: p. 358, note 7.
28 CD to J. D. Hooker, 26 October 1846, Correspondences 3: p. 357.
29 Ibid., p. 357.
30 CD to J. D. Hooker, 12 November 1846, Correspondence 3: p. 365.
31 Ibid.
32 Bill Newman has argued in ‘Darwin and Cirripedology’, in Crustacean Issues, vol. 8 (1993), p. 379 that this double penis was in feet ‘two median-dorsal filaments’ on the female of Cryptophialus; but as Darwin assumed all barnacles to be hermaphrodite, it did not occur to him as yet that separate sexes might be present in some sub-groups.
33 CD to Sir James Ross, 31 December 1847, Correspondence 4: p. 101.
34 See Rowland Hill and George Birkbeck Hill, The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the History of Penny Postage, 2 vols (London: De La Rue & Co, 1880) and Rowland Hill, Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability (London: C. Knight, 1837).
35 J. F. C. Harrison, Early Victorian Britain, 1832–51 (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 25.
36 Kellow Chesney, The Victorian Underworld (London: Temple Smith, 1970), p. 34.
See also J. F. C. Harrison, Early Victorian Britain, 1832–51 (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 49–50.
37 See James Walvin, Beside the Seaside: A Social History of the Popular Seaside Holiday (London: Allen Lane, 1979), pp. 36–71.
38 Charles Darwin, ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, Correspondence 2: p. 440.
39 Edward Forbes, A Monograph of the British Naked-Eyed Medusae (London: Ray Society, 1848), p. 60.
40 Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 70.
5
Better Than Castle-Building
I was at home
And should have been most happy – but I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw
The greater on the less feeds evermore.
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I far was gone.
Still am I sick of it; and though, today,
I’ve gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay
Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,
Still do I that most fierce destruction see –
The shark at savage prey, the hawk at pounce,
The gentle robin, like a pard or ounce,
Ravening a worm.
John Keats, V
erse Letter to James Rice (April 1818)
Spring 1848, April Fool’s Day. There are bluebells in the woods at Down, fringing the Sand Walk. Emma is five months pregnant; Annie, now seven, sitting in the warmth of her mother’s lap, can feel the baby stir beneath the lace and brocade, beneath the taut skin of her mother’s curved belly – a fluttering, she says, waiting for it to move again. Inside, in the wet darkness, ten inches long, Francis Darwin, as yet unnamed but clearly sexed, rolls and lolls freely. His eyes now open, he can see the stubby tentacles of his own fingers and the thick striped cord that floats and twists alongside him, the stalk that connects him to his mother. His mouth opens and closes, drawing in water, not air. His skin, wrinkled and translucent, stretches as his body uncurls like the flower heads of spring ferns. Emma feels his nocturnal gymnastics when her own body most needs sleep, feels him move to the sound of her voice and to the shouts of the children. She is tired, she says. She has been very sick again.
13 Emma Darwin with her son Leonard
Darwin is now fully committed to writing a full monograph on the barnacle.1 He has given himself up to the task and will see it through to its end, however long it takes. In early 1848 he is still working on mapping the stalked barnacles; the unknown and much larger continent of the acorn, or sessile, barnacles lies on the horizon. In his study he dissects and maps another barnacle aberrant, this time from the Philippines, the Ibla cumingii, named after his friend, the seashell expert Hugh Cuming, who first discovered it; but this morning he is worried about the time the research is taking and about the usefulness of his growing barnacle knowledge. He hears the voices of his Cambridge mentors inside his head, disagreeing about the role of zoology. The Revd Jenyns insists that intricate fieldwork like this is the only important work in zoology,2 yet Henslow argues that zoology should be useful: ‘however delightful any scientific pursuit may be […] if it shall be wholly unapplied it is of no more use than building castles in the air’.3 Darwin feels the need to write to Henslow now, to justify these long hours and frustrations, to justify them to himself, too. So he writes: ‘I fear the study of the cirripedia will ever remain “wholly unapplied” & yet I feel that such study is better than castle-building.’
For Darwin the barnacle research would always need justifying to himself and to others – after all, it was the epitome of empirical observation, field research of the most exacting kind: but so what? It could only be worth doing if there were philosophical questions that could be answered along the way. He needed to reach beyond the detail, the dry-as-dust drawing and recording and measuring of infinitely small differences within the bodies of infinitely small creatures. He needed to use the detail to explore the bigger questions, the questions about origins that now occupied his speculative mind. And he had just found something extraordinary embedded in the body of his Ibla specimen, something so small that it was only visible beneath a microscope, but with a significance that would take him months to think through. Certainly better than castle-building. But useful? He wasn’t so sure about that.
Better than castle-building. Every day, after lunch, Darwin read The Times newspaper. In the spring of 1848 he read disturbing and relentless accounts of revolutions across Europe. The economic depression and famines of the 1840s were taking their toll and the poor, the unemployed and the disenfranchized were attacking castles and palaces and barricading cities in some of the most violent events in the history of Europe. In January, Sicilian citizens had risen against their Neapolitan rulers, defeating the army and declaring independence. In the last days of February a crowd of demonstrators in Paris, incensed by government corruption and abuse of power, had grown to a force strong enough to dethrone the French king and defeat the National and Municipal Guard. Darwin read The Times report with alarm:
France has been suddenly and violently awakened from apathy to revolution. These events in Paris will shake the kingdom with electric force. They will reverberate through Europe, where the materials of combustion are already profusely strewn abroad, and at a moment of extreme difficulty in many other countries, a sudden shock is felt from the quarter where it was least expected. These considerations disclose a most threatening and uncertain future.4
One hundred thousand Parisians poured on to the streets and erected hundreds of barricades all over the city using paving stones, upturned omnibuses, some four thousand trees, lamp posts and railings.5 Louis Philippe, disguised in a pea-jacket loaned him by the English captain of the ship he sailed on, fled to England for protection.6 Everywhere crowds sang ‘The Marseillaise’ as a new provisional government was assembled with poets and historians, astronomers and mechanics amongst the people’s representatives, a government that established universal male suffrage, national workshops and the abolition of slavery, and reduced the working day to ten hours.7 The Times had been right to predict further combustion: over the following weeks, Darwin read newspaper reports of revolutions in Hungary, the Austrian Empire, Prussia and Italy. In the great European cities Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Venice, Frankfurt – riots toppled kings and governments and brought industries to a standstill. Struggles for power; struggles, in the hungry forties, for survival.
To many in Britain, particularly those who had read Thomas Carlyle’s cataclysmic History of the French Revolution published in 1837, these revolutions, each seeming to spark further revolutions, seemed comparable to epic natural forces: volcanoes, earthquakes, whirlwinds and tidal waves. In March 1848, for instance, the day before Darwin penned his letter to Henslow about castles in the air, Charlotte Brontë wrote to her friend about her fears of revolution in England: ‘Convulsive revolutions put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its surface … That England may be spared the spasms, cramps and frenzy-fits now contorting the Continent, and threatening Ireland, I earnestly pray.’8
To many journalists, novelists and poets writing in the aftermath of these events, revolution was especially like a wave crashing against an eroding coastline or surging into cities. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens described the mob as a living sea rising ‘wave on wave, depth on depth’ and overflowing Paris. In Arthur Hugh dough’s poem Amours de Voyage, written whilst Clough was in Rome during the siege of 1849, the hero, also trapped in Rome during an uprising, compares himself to a limpet clinging to a rock while the waves buffet all around him:
So we cling to our rocks like limpets; Ocean may bluster,
Over and under and round us; we open our shells to imbibe our
Nourishment, close them again, and are safe, fulfilling the purpose
Nature intended.9
In Down, in April and May 1848, Darwin’s forays deep into the barnacle shells allowed him to see the marks, not of violent generational overthrow, but of the slowest, almost imperceptible drip-drip of time acting on shell, valve, leg, sexual organ. For all their minute gradualism, however, these changes were no less epic. While democracy struggled to establish itself against the feudal vestiges of an old order, while Darwin’s friends, relations, correspondents and the journalists and columnists he read expressed their fears that this revolutionary democratic surge might spread even to conservative England, Darwin discovered evidence of an extraordinary mutation deep in the history of time: the emergence of a bisexual generation from a hermaphrodite one – a mutation of inconceivably slow gradations, but a shift no less epic in its implications.
Darwin found the evidence of this mutation marked within the soft body of the Philippino stalked barnacle Ibla, which, in the spring of 1848, he had carefully soaked and prised apart ready for dissection. It was grotesque and comic at the same time, this Ibla – quite different from Mr Arthrobalanus. One of the stalked rather than coned barnacles, it looked like a wrinkled, dark-brown hairy finger with a long claw at the end, the shrivelled finger of a witch perhaps, pickled in its bottle, in its yellowed wine spirits, several centimetres long (See opposite). For all the world as if it were beckoning; sinister and ridiculous. Cemented to a rock
on the ocean floor or secured to the bottom of a ship, these stalked barnacles moved, twisted, and oriented their bodies more than the non-stalked species, twisting in the current, directing their openings into the currents that carried food to them – fishing with their feet through the opening in their valves, just like the coned barnacles.
14 Ibla: Scalpellum; Sowerby’s drawing of a Scalpellum which Darwin included to illustrate the similarity between Scalpellum parasitism and Ibla parasitism. In both the male is embedded in the flesh of the female as shown in drawing 9.
Being considerably larger, these Ibla specimens were much easier to handle than the minute Mr Arthrobalanus; but even so, barnacle dissection and identification of any kind was unbearably frustrating for Darwin.10 Each tiny specimen had to be carefully prised from its shell, disarticulated, dissected, prepared in spirits and then mounted between two plates of glass. But as soon as he began this work, holding down the barnacle specimen to apply a knife, the barnacle would invariably spring to the other side of the room. Identification would only work through a process of scrupulous and patient elimination, building up a set of features identified from the shell, its valves and plates, the shape of the orifice at the top, the way it was attached to its rock and the type of cement the barnacle produced. All this to determine before he could even start to dissect and examine the body parts under a microscope.