Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  However, there were others, like Thomas Carlyle, who saw the patterns of political revolution in terms of epic natural forces of struggle, conflict and metamorphosis. A young revolutionary in exile, Karl Marx, influenced by the writings of German philosophers Frederick Hegel and Ludvig Feuerbach, had the previous year joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League. During the League’s Second Congress in London, in late 1847, Marx and Frederick Engels had drawn up a manifesto, The Communist Manifesto, which had been published in February 1848. Marx and Engels described the history of political change in evolutionary and geological terms: political forms were like a creature or a land mass in a perpetual state of transformation. Just as feudalism had naturally evolved into mercantilism and then capitalism, so capitalism would inevitably give way to its most advanced successors, socialism and communism, as the necessary result of class struggle.

  All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletariat movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.29

  Darwin and Marx were both working in very different ways to disclose the dialectical struggles inherent in the natural order, the special laws that shaped the origin, development and death of an organism and determined its replacement by a higher one. For Marx ‘low’ was ‘high’ – the rule of the proletariat, the lowest stratum of society, was the most advanced political form.30 Progression needed conflict and struggle. Marx understood social and political change in natural and organic terms – they were like volcanoes overturning land, or earthquakes. They were dangerous, catastrophic and necessary. Darwin’s evolutionary paradigms were more gradualist but no less epic.

  Increasingly, Darwin was questioning the ancient natural-history divisions of so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ organisms as he continued to develop his branching idea of nature. If nature didn’t travel in straight lines but was constantly sprouting and budding off new forms from its main ‘stems’, then the notion of high and low forms was too restrictive and crude. This lowest and most humble of creatures, the barnacle, was none the less sophisticated, highly adapted to its environment: it was ‘high’ as well as ‘low’. As early as 1846, on reading Henri Milne Edwards’ essay, he had written: ‘Barnacles in some sense, eyes and locomotion, are lower, but then so much more complicated, that they may be considered as higher…. We then see that highness does not depend on perfection & number of organs, but on development…. leave out the term higher & lower.’31

  That summer, on 16 August, Francis was born. This latest Darwin animalcule emerged from the mouth of Emma’s belly, uncurling from its wateriness, fingernails like shells, beached and mewling and male.

  In October 1848 Darwin wrote to Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist now working on fossil fishes in Harvard, to give him – at Agassiz’s request – a summary of his barnacle findings so far. He wrote from his father’s home in Shrewsbury, for his father was now close to death. He asked the Professor to keep the contents of the letter to himself, in part because he did not want others to publish his findings and in part because he wanted to be free to alter his views and conclusions before they went to press. Darwin’s letter to Agassiz is hesitant, troubled. What could he say? After all, by this point, almost exactly two years after he had begun dissecting, he ought to be able to make definitive statements about barnacles – he was probably now amongst a handful of zoologists in the world who had the authority to make such claims; but the more Darwin looked at them, the more species he had seen, sent to him from around the world, the less he seemed to be able to say about the group. He had plenty to say about the individuals, but he seemed no longer to be able to generalize.

  Nevertheless he would try to generalize, for Agassiz’s sake. After all, it was Agassiz in part who had inspired him to begin this research, for the Professor had said in 1846 in a public lecture in Boston that ‘a monograph on the Cirripedia was a pressing desideratum in Zoology’.32 He had already discovered various important and startling answers to the barnacle riddles, he wrote, but he was conscious, too, that what he had discovered was ridiculous and bizarre ‘you will laugh’, he told Agassiz anxiously, ‘but I assure you I would not presume to tell you anything, of which I was not sure, from repeated examinations of specimens taken at different periods & from different countries’.33 They were definitely crustacea; there was no doubt about that now. They were ‘exquisitely sensitive’ to light and shadows; they could even hear and smell. Young barnacles had three pairs of legs, one compound eye and two pairs of antennae, whereas adult barnacles had six pairs of legs, no eye and one pair of antennae. One of the most remarkable parts of their natural history, he wrote, was that they attached themselves to rocks, he was sure, using a cement produced within the ovary of the young barnacle and secreted through its antennae.34 This ‘curious method of attachment’, Darwin claimed adamantly, was the ‘only character absolutely universal in the Cirripedia’. There was otherwise extreme variation wherever he looked. Every apparent universal he found was quickly demolished by the discovery of an exception. ‘The great majority of cirripedes are bisexual, but it seems that they can fecundate each other, for I have scrupulously examined a Balanus, which had had its penis cut off & was imperforate, but in which the ova were impregnated.’35

  A pregnant hermaphrodite eunuch. Sexually diverse they were – they could reproduce themselves every which way. Survival by diversification. Each barnacle he studied showed different deviancies from any common model he began with. What features, indeed, did all these barnacles have in common? The list was diminishing rapidly. Not even hermaphroditism was universal to barnacles, it seemed, now that Darwin had found the Ibla, which had separate males and females. Even the name was now a problem, for cirripede means ‘curled foot’, referring to the fishing feet that curl so elegantly from the hole in the tip of the cone; but some cirripedes had no feet. Darwin had discovered ‘apodal’ cirripedes – a contradiction in terms: ‘The most remarkable individual cirripede, which I have seen is naked, apodal, with a suctorial mouth & parasitic in a double way within another cirripede.’36 They were all aberrants in one way or another. Yet all were brilliantly adapted to their surroundings. Universals were dissolving the more he dissected, the more he mapped. All in the name of survival adaptation was the name of the zoological game. Perhaps adaptation and diversification were the only universals.

  A few weeks later, in November 1848, Darwin’s father died and Darwin was too sick to attend his funeral. He knew his father had died an unbeliever and, if he had been a younger man, he might have been tormented by thoughts of his father’s eternally damned soul. But Darwin had been drifting almost imperceptibly into the seas of unbelief for some time. He wrote later that in the 40s, ‘disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.’37 There was no crisis, no torment of conscience and inner conflict as there had been for so many other intellectuals walking this same path away from Christian certainties, just a drift, a gradual engulfment in disbelief. By the time the letters of condolence had passed backwards and forwards in the Darwin family, it made no sense to Darwin to think of his father in heaven; but though he was not concerned about his father’s soul after death, he felt his father’s absence as a series of terrible physical shocks on his own body as he became more and more sick with giddiness, nausea, vomiting, boils, wakeful nights, headaches and flatulence.

  A month or so after his father died, Darwin sent the three eldest children to London to have their photographs taken – then called ‘daguerreotypes’. It was expensive family indulgence made more attractive to Charles and Emma by the knowledge of the inheritance Dr Darwin had left h
is children: Charles alone had inherited £51,000; but the death of his father had also made him more intensely aware of the relentless mutability of time, and he sought for a moment to capture his children in a still image, to take them for a moment outside time, so that later he could remember them just like this. They travelled to London with Miss Thorley to Claudet’s photographic studio on the roof of the Adelaide Gallery behind St Martin’s-in-the-Fields church, London. Each of the children had to sit absolutely still for fifteen seconds, unsmiling, for a smile held for so long would flicker and blur. Annie, now nearly eight, was given a basket of studio flowers to hold and, however hard she tried, she could not resist the temptation to rearrange a small white flower that had come loose in the bouquet. Her delicate long fingers are caught in movement by the daguerreotype, flurried amongst the flowers.

  15 Annie Darwin in 1849

  William has sharp edges and his hooded, glazed eyes show him deep in daydreams. Etty, round face framed by the half-moon of her straight bobbed hair, looks directly at us, holding herself absolutely still, hardly daring to breathe.

  Notes

  1 In a letter to J. E. Gray, Keeper of the Zoological Department, British Museum, 18 December 1847, Darwin says: ‘it is my intention to publish a monograph on this difficult order’, Correspondence 4: p. 99.

  2Revd Leonard Jenyns, ‘On the Present State of Zoology’, Magazine of Zoology and Botany, vol. 1 (1837), p. 28.

  3 Quoted by Darwin in letter to J. S. Henslow, 1 April 1848, Correspondence 4: p. 128.

  4 The Times, Leading Article, 25 February 1848, p. 5, col. a.

  5 See J. A. S. Grenville, Europe Reshaped 1848–1878 (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 30.

  6 The Times, 4 March 1848, p. 4., col. e.

  7 Grenville, op. cit., p. 35.

  8 Cited in Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: Heretic (London: The Women’s Press, 1994), p. 245. For a study of the impact of geological ideas on the understanding of the nature of revolution in the nineteenth century see Rebecca Stott, ‘Thomas Carlyle and the Crowd: Revolution, Geology and the Convulsive “Nature” of Time’, in Journal of Victorian Culture vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 1–24.

  9 From Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’, in Shirley Chew, ed., Arthur Hugh Clough: Selected Poems (London: Carcanet, 1987), p. 142. For further information on the revolutions of 1848 see Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); R. Price, The Revolutions of 1848 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). For an analysis of how the Victorians described and imagined revolution in geological terms see my essay ‘Thomas Carlyle and the Crowd: Revolution, Geology and the Convulsive “Nature” of Time’, in The Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 1–24.

  10 I am grateful to Dr Adrian Friday, University Lecturer and Curator of Vertebrates at Cambridge Zoology Museum, for this information about the dissection of barnacles. He tells me that barnacle dissection is known to make or break first-year zoology undergraduates, particularly the dissection of coned barnacles.

  11 CD to J. S. Henslow, 1 April 1848, Correspondence 4: p. 128.

  12 Charles Darwin, A Monograph on the Sub-Class Cirripedia: The Lepadidae or Pedunculated Cirripedes (London: Ray Society, 1851), p. 293.

  13 Ibid., p. 214.

  14 See ‘Darwin and the Branching Conception’ in Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology and Natural Selection, 1838–1859 (Cambridge and New York: CUP, 1981), pp. 146–69.

  15 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.

  16 Darwin, letter to J. S. Henslow, 1 April 1848, Correspondence 4: p. 128.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Letter to J. H. Hooker, 13 May 1848, Correspondence 4: p. 140.

  19 See Marsha Richmond (1988) ‘Darwin’s Study of the Cirripedia’, Appendix II of Correspondence 4: pp. 391–2.

  20 The four von Baer rules of development have been summarized as the following:

  (i) The more general characters of a large group of animals appear earlier in their embryos than the more special characters.

  (ii) From the most general forms the less general are developed, and so on, until finally the most special arise.

  (iii) Every embryo of a given animal form, instead of passing through the other forms, becomes separate from them.

  (iv) Fundamentally, therefore, the embryo of a higher form never resembles any other form, but only its embryo. From Rudolf A. Raff and Thomas C. Kaufman, Embryos, Genes and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1983), P. 9.

  21 For a closer examination of von Baer’s ideas see Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology and Natural Selection, 1838–1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 117–24.

  22 Henri Milne Edwards, ‘Considérations sur Quelques Principes Relatifs à la Classification Naturelle des Animaux’, Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 3rd series, vol. 1 (1844).

  23 Ibid., p. 66; see also Dov Ospovat, op. cit., p. 124–9.

  24 Charles Darwin, A Monograph on the Sub-Class Cirripedia: The Balanidae (London: Ray Society, 1854), p. 23.

  25 Letter to Joseph Hooker, 6 October 1848, Correspondence 4: p. 169.

  26 CD to Emma Darwin, 28 May 1848, Correspondence 4: p. 147.

  27 Darwin kept detailed accounts of the books he read. The details here about the books he read in 1848 and his reactions to them are to be found in ‘Darwin’s Reading Notebooks’, Appendix IV of Correspondence 4: pp. 476–7.

  28 J. A. S. Grenville, Europe Reshaped 1848–1878 (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 80-83.

  29 F. Engels and K. Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1848; 1992).

  30 Later Marx was to quote enthusiastically a reviewer who had observed that ‘The scientific value of such an inquiry [The Communist Manifesto] lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death or a given social organism and its replacement, by another higher one.’

  31 DAR 73:117–19v.

  32 Louis Agassiz had been invited to give a course of public lectures in Boston in the United States by John Amory Lowell in 1846. These lectures, called ‘Plan of Creation in the Animal Kingdom’, were so popular that Agassiz decided to remain in the United States; E. Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 116–33.

  33 Letter to Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, 22 October 1848, Correspondence 4: p. 180.

  34 Darwin was wrong about the cement glands – see William A. Newman (1993), ‘Darwin and Cirripedology’, in Crustacean Issues, vol. 8, pp. 368–70.

  35 Ibid., p. 179.

  36 Ibid., pp. 178–80.

  37 Autobiography, pp. 86-7.

  6

  Very Like a Lobster

  To have got the whole Barnacle family together would have been impossible for two reasons. Firstly, because no building could have held all the members and connections of that illustrious house. Secondly, because wherever there was a square yard of ground in British occupation under the sun or moon, with a public post upon it, sticking to that post was a Barnacle. No intrepid navigator could plant a flag-staff upon any spot of earth, and take possession of it in the British name, but to that spot of earth, so soon as the discovery was known, the Circumlocution Office sent out a Barnacle and a despatch-box. Thus the Barnacles were all over the world, in every direction – despatch-boxing the compass.

  Charles Dickens, ‘A Shoal of Barnacles’, Little Dorrit (1855-7)

  Dawn on 20 March 1849; The Lodge, Malvern, a spa town in the Malvern Hills. Darwin is sleeping alone on a single bed in a large, dark, high-ceilinged room. The door opens and a young man with long, thin hair enters carrying a pile of white towels and sheets, neatly folded and pressed. H
e places the towels on the chair by Darwin’s bed and draws back the heavy brocade curtains. A little watery dawn light reveals the shapes of two large tin baths placed on either side of the tall windows, which look out over green hills and trees shrouded in fog. Darwin stirs, groans and wakes. The young man leaves the room while Darwin rouses himself and returns a few minutes later with two large buckets of water and various water-pouring implements, which make a good deal of noise, clattering and splashing.1

  Darwin shakes his head nervously and retches into a small bowl next to his bed, then reaches for the small health diary that he has started to keep, with intricate notes about his daily health. The retching has diminished, he notes with resolute optimism, since he has been at Malvern. Something of all this apparent quackery has made a difference. The Bath Man sets about stripping the bed enthusiastically, continuing to make encouraging noises as he puts four of the white sheets, shaken out, into one of the tin baths and pours cold water over them. He has done this hundreds of times before, but it makes a change to be working in one of the lodging houses rather than in Dr Gully’s establishment on the Wells Road. He has been hired for two months by Darwin from Dr Gully, the Water Cure Doctor, and now he comes every morning to The Lodge before dawn. Parslow helps to draw the morning’s water.

  He takes the thin mattress off the bed, places a wooden board over the metal frame and then shakes out the first of the wet white sheets, smoothing out the wrinkles. Darwin knows what to do, but he procrastinates, brushing his hair before taking off his nightgown. The man’s body is tall and thin, the Bath Man notes, as he helps him to lie down on the wet sheet, reassuring him, as he does so, that the discomfort will not last long.

  Darwin fixes his attention on the ceiling and concentrates on the crooning reassurances of the Bath Man, who now pulls the wet sheet across his body as quickly and tightly as he can. Darwin gasps with the cold as the Bath Man tucks the edges firmly under his recumbent body so that only his head is visible outside the wrap. Miserable, he thinks of the wrapped, embalmed bodies of the Egyptian pharaohs deep in their tombs. He thinks of swaddling clothes and Lazarus raised from the dead, confused, pinioned, wrapped around like this, dead yet alive. Best to do this quickly, the Bath Man explains, firmly, serious now – get it over with. ‘You’ll soon feel the benefits,’ he says again. ‘You’ll be as warm as toast before you know it.’ He places two of the other sheets across his patient and tucks them down, rolling Darwin’s body over gently and smoothing out more wrinkles in the cloth. Then dry sheets and eiderdowns are piled on top, also tucked in tightly. A giant wet white chrysalis; perhaps Darwin will be a butterfly yet.