Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Whilst Gully would not allow him to dissect barnacles at Malvern, Darwin nonetheless used his letter-writing allowance to request new specimens, so that they would arrive at Down by his return. Before he left for Malvern he wrote to Johannes Peter Müller, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in Berlin, to beg him to post a Sicilian Alepas minuta specimen he owned. This was, Darwin explained in his letter, the only Alepas he had not yet dissected, and he promised to return all the parts after dissection. Müller’s rare Sicilian Alepas, quarter of an inch long, was housed in the university of revolutionary Berlin, a city that had suffered sieges and riots over the previous months. Later in February he received Scalpellum fragments from James Bowerbank, the owner of a distillery in London and a sponge specialist, who had inadvertently acquired a good number of barnacles riding pillion on the sponges he had collected or purchased; he teased them off to post to Darwin, for they were of little value to him. From Malvern Darwin wrote to Syms Covington, his servant and assistant from the Beagle voyage, who was now settled in Sydney, Australia, to bring him up to date with the Darwin family news, but also to ask him to collect any barnacles ‘that adhere (small and large) to the coast rocks or to shells or to corals thrown up by gales, and send them to me without cleaning the animals … You will remember’, he added, ‘that barnacles are conical little shells, with a sort of four-valved lid on top. There are others with long flexible footstalks, fixed to floating objects, and sometimes cast on shore.’26

  Within eight days of arriving at Malvern, Darwin had his first ‘crisis’. This was a measure of the success of the cure and some people waited months for it to appear. Usually it would take the form of boils, pimples, redness or excessive sweating, and for Darwin it was ‘an eruption’ of boils all over his legs. He was delighted. The crisis was, Joseph Leech explained to his readers, ‘the Shibboleth of Hydropathy … desired, looked for, wished for by everybody’ and much discussed at street corners and at dinner. Leech, in his book Three Weeks in Wet Sheets, describes a conversation he overheard at dinner one night:

  ‘Mrs –, do you know what? – I have just had my fifth crisis!’

  ‘How fortunate!’ replied the other, ‘you have been Mrs –; I have been a month in the house and have had only one, and that a poor, small, wretched, little boil, hardly worth calling a crisis.’

  I stared, not knowing what to make of it; but it was clear the announcement was of the utmost interest to those around the table. Mrs – with her five crises was manifestly the object of the utmost envy.

  ‘Only think of five,’ exclaimed the ladies.

  ‘You have been singularly privileged, Madam,’ observed a gentleman in the civil service of India, raising his eyes from the book he was reading. In what form Mrs –’s fifth crisis appeared she did not state, and I did not inquire; but this I know, it was not visible.27

  As Darwin’s health improved and his trust in the Water Cure strengthened, Gully talked to him about other healing methods he might try. After all, there were other services at Malvern, now a centre for all kinds of experimental medical and healing treatments. It would help to be able to see inside his stomach, like a microscope, to see what was in there that might be causing all the sickness and pain – a blockage, perhaps, or a growth of some kind. He knew of a clairvoyant, he said, who was staying at Malvern, who could see beyond skin and bone, down into the dark, mucus-lined labyrinths of artery and colon. Darwin, confident that Gully’s quackery had done him some lasting good, was not taken in by this. He was sure she was a charlatan, even if Gully wasn’t. There was too much uncritical faith being placed, he thought, in the spells and tricks of clairvoyants and mesmerists all across the country; but for Gully’s sake he would keep an open mind as far as possible. It wasn’t as if the conventional doctors were offering any better ideas. So he agreed to see the clairvoyent on condition that he was able to test her powers for himself. He prepared himself by putting a bank note in a sealed envelope. Alter all, if she could see into flesh and bone, into the fleshy secret recesses of the human body, surely her vision would not be obstructed by paper, thin paper? And if she could tell him what bank note it was, she could keep it, he said.

  The clairvoyant, insulted and sensing cynicism, refused to be tested. This was not a circus show, she said. She was no bearded lady performing in a tent for money. Her maid at home would perform such tricks for financial reward, she said. She had a reputation to maintain and references to prove her status, so if Darwin didn’t want her to look inside him, if he wasn’t a believer, why should she waste her time? Shamed and suffering a sharp look from the Water Doctor, Darwin lifted his shirt, lay back on the couch and let the clairvoyant focus her eyes down upon his prostrate stomach, for all intents and purposes like a barnacle under one of his own watch glasses. Languid, tired by the presence of an unbeliever, the clairvoyant dimmed the lights, applied herself, swaying slightly, loosing herself from the restraints of common vision, then, after a long pause, gasped and turned away. Pressed by Gully, she described what she had seen: horrors, she said – appalling horrors – a vision worse than she had even imagined possible. She would say no more. Her powers were only human, she said. There were times when it was better not to go on.28

  If she had cared to look inside Emma Darwin’s abdomen that same day, she might have seen the causes of Emma’s new bout of sickness. She was, Darwin wrote to Henslow in June, in her ‘usual wretched state, which to none of our friends requires any further explanation’.29 Emma was again in the early stages of pregnancy, expecting her next baby – this would be her eighth – in January 1850. Leonard had been conceived here at Malvern in April. Darwin, reminiscing about the days before his sickness and mindful of the anatomical variety in nature, particularly in aquatic nature, joked to his mentor: ‘those were delightful days when one had no such organ as a stomach, only a mouth and the masticating appurtenances’.30 All mouth, no stomach, no bowel; painless pleasures. His stomach was his enemy now.

  19 Joseph Hooker

  Hooker wrote again in June, this time from Camp Sikkim in the Himalayas, where he had camped 12,000 feet up in the mountains, ten miles south of the Tibetan border. He had virtually gone native and often went days without eating, he wrote, living off wild fruits and herbs. He was in some considerable danger, too, because the Sikkim Rajah had refused to let him cross into Tibet, even though he knew that some of the rhododendron specimens Hooker needed were tantalizingly over the border, beyond his reach. The Rajah’s men had assembled across the pass to prevent him going any further; conflict seemed imminent, and he had only a few of Campbell’s men with him. ‘I am writing on my knee on top of a great rock with a little Tent 8 ft by 6 ft over me & a blazing fire in front; still the ground is sodden and I cannot keep my feet warm’, he complained. Everywhere around him up here, the rocks spoke of violence: ‘the smallest fragment you can pick up shows signs of violence in the land, it is disturbed to the smallest lamination, shaken at one time, fractured at a second, baked at a third, broken away by a fifth & carried to where you find it by another. The Chaotic confusion of the jagged mass shooting up all around me must be seen to be appreciated.’31 The enormous variation he had seen amongst the spectacular rhododendrons he was collecting were always, he said, ‘asking me the vexed question, where do we come from?’

  Back in Down, in July, the reassembled barnacles were asking Darwin the same vexed question: where do we come from? He was still collecting species from all around the world in an attempt to answer this question. Already he had been sent barnacles from the most important invertebrate collections in the world: from the British Museum, from the Cuming, Sutchbury, and Sowerby collections and from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris; but his health was still a priority and he was determined to continue the treatment in Down with Gully’s advice. After all, the sickness had been cured, the flatulence had abated and Gully had promised to design him a daily regime for Down that would avoid bringing on a crisis. Darwin would be allowed to dissect for two hours a day to start w
ith, on condition that he read nothing but newspapers. Emma, anxious that he sustain his improved health, monitored his schedules and sent the children to fetch him if he overran the agreed ration of dissection or reading time.

  In the garden, near the well, Darwin employed the village carpenter, Lewis, to build a church-shaped hut to contain a tub with a platform in it and a huge cistern to contain 640 gallons of water. The carpenter’s son, John, was employed to pump the cistern full every day. He recollected later: ‘Mr Darwin came out and had a little dressing place and he’d get on the stage and go down, and pull the string, and all the water fell on him through a two-inch pipe. A douche they called it.’32

  Whilst Parslow, the butler, served as Bath Man, scrubbing Darwin as his Malvern Bath Man had done, John also helped with the other regimes down in the bath hut and on the lawn, the dripping sheet and the lamp-baths followed by shallow baths, all carefully integrated into the Darwin day along with the monitored two hours of barnacle dissection, letter writing, walks and rest:

  He used to get up at seven and I had to have the big bath outside the study on the lawn and Mr Darwin would come down [into his hut] and sit in a chair with a spirit lamp and all rolled round with blankets till the sweat poured off him in showers when he shook his head… I’ve heard him cry to Parslow, ‘I’ll be melted away if you don’t hurry!’ Then he’d get into the ice-cold bath in the open air.33

  Whilst Darwin’s own health had improved beyond all hope, however, the children were ill in July. Etty came down with a fever on 5 July, and then William on 11 July. William, now nine years old, did not recover as quickly as Etty and was in bed for three long weeks. Emma, now three or four months pregnant, bustled from bed to bed with remedies mixed in the kitchen from chemicals stored in her medicine cupboard.

  Now that over 4,000 copies of the Journal of the Beagle travels had been sold around the world and reports of his ongoing barnacle research were being reported in the international journals, Darwin could afford to ask for specimens directly and without introductions from others; but he was still dependent on the goodwill of naturalists he had not met, if he was going to fulfil his ambition to dissect and describe every known barnacle. There were still gaps in his collection, particularly amongst the fossil barnacles. In August he wrote to two American zoologists with notable crustacea and shell collections – Augustus Gould, a Boston doctor, and James Dwight Dana, a geologist and zoologist – to ask for additional specimens. Like Bowerbank, all of these men had been collecting barnacles inadvertently as pillion passengers amongst their shell, mineral and sponge collections. Now that he had done the rounds of the sponge and shell collectors, he would have to begin approaching the geologists. There would be fossil barnacles amongst the great mineral and geology collections.

  In September he and Emma travelled together to Birmingham for the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, in the hope that Darwin might meet other potential barnacle suppliers and friends he had lost touch with during the Malvern months; but he was sorely disappointed: the place was ‘large & nasty’ and Henslow, Jenyns and Fox were all elsewhere. His stomach pains and vomiting returned, and he was forced to return to Malvern for a day on his journey home for further treatment and advice from the Water Doctor.

  The Association meeting had other less tangible rewards for him, though: two contacts who would be important correspondents and who would lead him into new fields. The first was Albany Hancock, a Newcastle zoologist and the chair of the Tyneside Naturalists’ Field Club. He had been working on molluscs since the 1840s and had a rare barnacle in his possession, Alcippe lampas, which he claimed excitedly in his paper was the only barnacle to bore into shells. Darwin listened to Hancock’s paper, knowing that this wasn’t true. After all, Darwin had Mr Arthrobalanus and other boring barnacles in his study. He introduced himself to Hancock, congratulated him on the ‘admirable paper’, but also warned him that he might have to qualify his claim, because there were other barnacles with burrowing powers. The two enthusiastically agreed to correspond and disagree about the burrowing of barnacles. Darwin could tell that Hancock was not just a collector; he had also read widely and was interested in philosophical questions. Had Darwin read the new paper by the curator of the Natural History Museum in Stockholm, Sven Loven? Hancock asked, sipping his glass of port. This was about a new and very curious stalked barnacle called Alepas squalicola, which lived as a parasite on a North Sea shark called Squalus. Darwin’s heart sank – another Alepas he hadn’t yet seen. He thought he had finished with the Alepas when Müller had sent him the rare Sicilian specimen. He asked Hancock to send him a copy of the paper and the drawing Loven had published, even though it was written in Swedish – he would have to find a translator.

  The second contact Darwin made in the tea rooms of the British Association meeting in Birmingham was a Johan Georg Forchhammer, a Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the University of Copenhagen, who was giving a paper in the Chemistry section.34 Not only did the Copenhagen Geological Museum have barnacle fossils among its rock specimens, he replied to Darwin’s discreet enquiries, but he could send them to any address that Darwin supplied. He would also give Darwin the address of his friend Japetus Steenstrup, Professor of Zoology at the University, who had his own collection of barnacles and who was particularly interested in hermaphroditism amongst the lower animals.

  Darwin followed up these leads immediately on his return from Birmingham, writing to Hancock in Newcastle sending him a summary of his findings about burrowing barnacles. In return he asked Hancock for a transcript of the Loven paper and for a specimen or two of the Alcippe lampas, promising that he would be careful not to encroach on Hancock’s territory and telling him how excited he was at the prospect of working on ‘a new form of cirripede’. Hancock, generous by nature and keen to assist a fellow barnacle enthusiast, posted them almost immediately, and Darwin promised him his small collection of naked molluscs in return: there was bound to be some new genus amongst the collection, he added. Darwin also wrote to Lady Lyell, wife of Sir Charles Lyell the geologist, who was an accomplished linguist, asking her to translate the Loven paper. Lady Lyell’s translation of the paper, when it arrived a few weeks later, was ‘as clear as daylight to me’, he wrote to Charles Lyell, and he particularly approved of her coining of the word ‘leglessness’.

  Now he just needed to see the Alepas barnacle for himself. He wrote to the elusive Sven Loven in November asking him to send him a specimen or two via Professor Forchhammer in Copenhagen, who was about to ship a number of barnacles from Steenstrup and from the Copenhagen Museum to England on his behalf. As it happened, Professor Steenstrup sent his own specimen of the Alepas squalicola in the Forchhammer parcel. This parcel was loaded on to the steamer Pomona, which sailed to St Petersburg and Riga before it arrived at Gravesend, London on 20 November. Unfortunately the barnacle package had been packed inside another parcel, which was sent to a mineral dealer in London, who did not forward the rare specimens to Darwin until the following January. Darwin was distraught: ‘I write in great anxiety,’ he wrote to Forchhammer, ‘there was a specimen of Alepas squalicola, which is the cirripede of all others in the world, I wish most to dissect … it is a terrible loss … I will put an advertisement in the Times newspaper, & offer a large reward for recovery of Parcel.’35 Once again, however, he found, when the specimen finally arrived, that the creature had been misdefined and misnamed. It was not an Alepas at all but a completely new genus, which Darwin renamed Anelasma squalicola.

  He and Hancock continued to debate the burrowing powers of barnacles throughout the autumn and winter. He was quite sure, he told Hancock, after dissecting specimens of Mr Arthrobalanus, that none of these apparently ‘boring’ barnacles actually dug their own holes, but rather that the pupae crawl into holes made by other creatures in their shell or rock host, and then enlarged their holes as they grew. They had, he explained, special serrated edges to their valves and these wore away at the shell or rock and,
as they blunted, were moulted and replaced by new, sharper edges. He advised Hancock to take some specimens and see for himself, using a compound microscope.

  The gratitude and affection of Darwin’s letter to Hancock masks an irritation with him for not taking the care and time to look for himself before he made large-scale claims. It further proved his point that these naturalists were sometimes so keen to see their name in print next to a new discovery that they did not do their work carefully enough. Sometimes you had to just hold fire. His species theory had taught him that.

  The reproductive habits of Mr Arthrobalanus and Ibla were on his mind again in the autumn. He wrote to Charles Lyell:

  I work now every day at the Cirripedia for 2½ hours & so get on a little but very slowly – the other day I got the curious case of a unisexual, instead of hermaphrodite cirripede, in which the female had the common cirripedial character, & in two halves of the valves of her shell had two little pockets, in each of which she kept a little husband; I do not know of any other case where a female invariably has two husbands. – I have one still odder fact, common to several species, namely that though they are hermaphrodite, they have small additional or as I shall call them Complemental males: one specimen itself hermaphrodite had no less than seven of these complemental males attached to it. Truly the schemes and wonders of nature are illimitable…36

  The other day. It was a whole year and a half since he had made this particular discovery in the body of the Ibla – hardly the other day. Yet it still seemed extraordinary. These long barnacle days, punctuated only by the birth of children and the daily routines of his douches and immersions, had begun to merge into one another.