Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Hooker, meanwhile, was having his own crisis in the Himalayan Mountains. Darwin stumbled on an account of his friend’s capture in an edition of The Times in November and was horrified. On 7 November Hooker and Campbell, who had joined Hooker to cross the frontier into Tibet, were seized by the Rajah’s troops and held hostage for six weeks. For the Rajah, watching Hooker’s movements for months, this must have been the last straw. Hooker continued to collect rhododendron seeds as he was marched south by the Rajah’s men. Lord Dalhousie sent in troops to Darjeeling, warning that the rajahs ‘could not play fast and loose with a British subject’. The Rajah’s plan backfired. As a result of the kidnapping, Dalhousie decided to claim the southern Sikkim for the British Crown.

  About the same time, Annie, then Etty and two-year-old Elizabeth came down with scarlet fever. Emma was now seven months pregnant as the three girls complained of sore throats and fever, and the characteristic red spots flushed across their necks and chests and made their tongues red and inflamed. Scarlet fever – or scarlatina, as it was then called – was responsible for nearly twenty thousand deaths in 1840 alone, many of whom were children. The girls recovered after weeks of care and quarantine, but Annie in particular took a long time to convalesce and was never as strong again.

  In December Darwin was still hard at work, troubled about the children, who were still weak from the fever; by Hooker, who was still apparently a captive in Sikkim, although he had actually been released just before Christmas; by his fears about Emma’s imminent labour; by the missing Scandinavian precious barnacle package, which still hadn’t materialized, and troubled too by his inability to work out how the larvae of Alcippe, Arthrobalanus and Lithotrya actually got into the shells or rocks in which they were found. Hancock’s specimens had made him less sure that they were ‘cookoos’ burrowing into other creatures’ holes and enlarging them for their own needs. Perhaps, rather, these barnacle larvae might do their own boring by secreting some kind of acid substance instead of depending on other creatures to go in first: ‘I am as much as ever in the dark, whether the larva creeps in, or bores in,’ he wrote to Hancock on Boxing Day, complaining, as the year was about to turn into another, ‘I begin to think I shall spend my whole life on Cirripedia, so slow is my progress working only 2 to 3 hours daily.’37

  The mid-day douches in the garden hut were more invigorating now that the temperature of the water pumped from the well regularly dipped under 40°. The children later remembered their father’s determination and groans through the coldest days, as George recorded: ‘I remember well one bitter cold day with the snow covering everything waiting outside until he had finished & that he came out almost blue with cold & we trotted away at a good brisk pace over the snow to the Sandwalk.’38

  Leonard, their new baby, arrived fifteen days into the new year and the new decade. In February he wrote to Hooker in India: ‘My wife desires her kindest remembrances to you; she has lately produced our fourth boy & seventh child! – a precious lot of young beggars we are rearing. – I was very bold & administered myself before the Doctor came, Chloroform to my wife with admirable success.’39

  The biggest tribe of all gathered in Down House were the barnacles: over two hundred specimens crowded his study and storerooms by the time Darwin’s seventh surviving child was born. There were more arriving – almost by the day – including a rare and extensive collection of fossil specimens from Robert Fitch, a Norwich fossil collector and chemist, and the longed-for Scandinavian collection, which finally arrived in January, to Darwin’s delight. However, the fossil barnacles on which he was now working took up even more time than the recent ones, for the specimens, with the fleshy part of the tissue decayed, arrived simply as single valves that crumbled and broke extremely easily; ‘confound & exterminate the whole tribe,’ he wrote to Hooker. ‘I can see no end to my work.’40

  Notes

  1 This fictionalized account is based upon two primary sources. The first is Darwin’s account of the Water Cure treatment tailored for him by Gully in his letter to his sister Susan on 19 March 1849, Correspondence 4: pp. 224–5. Darwin called this his ‘hydropathical diary’. The second source is Joseph Leech’s comic and detailed account of his three weeks at Malvern in 1850, which was anonymously published as Joseph Leech, Three Weeks in Wet Sheets; Being the Diary and Doings of A Moist Visitor to Malvern (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co; Bristol; John Ridler, Malvern Lamb and Son, 1856).

  2 Joseph Hooker, Himalayan Journals; or notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, &c. 2 vols (London.: John Murray, 1854), vol. 1, p. 115.

  3 Letter from J. D. Hooker to Darwin, 3 February 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 195.

  4 George’s recollections of Malvern in DAR 112.

  5 James Gully, The Water Cure in Chronic Disease (London: John Churchill; Malvern: Henry Lamb, 1846), p. 515.

  6 Tennyson’s poems of this period, particularly ‘The Princess’ (1847) and ‘In Memoriam’ (1850), are full of evolutionary material drawn from Tennyson’s reading of Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.

  7James Gully, op. cit., p. 550.

  8 Ibid., p. 655.

  9 Ibid., p. 658.

  10 Cora Weaver, Malvern as a Spar Town (Malvern: Cora Weaver Press, 1991), p. 43.

  11 Joseph Leech, op. cit., pp. 37–8.

  12 CD to Susan Darwin, 19 March 1849, with additional remarks added by Emma Darwin, Correspondence 4: p. 224.

  13 Joseph Leech, op. cit., p. 92.

  14 James Gully, op. cit., p. 659.

  15 Gully charged three guineas a week to his out-patients, with an additional weekly payment of four shillings to the Bath Man. The first consultation with Gully cost two guineas.

  16 Thomas Carlyle to R. W. Emerson, cited in E. S. Turner, Taking the Cure (London: Michael Joseph, 1967), p. 175.

  17 Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters 1792–1896, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1915), vol. 2, pp. 122–3.

  18 CD to Susan Darwin, 19 March 1849, with additional remarks added by Emma Darwin, Correspondence 4: p. 225.

  19 Joseph Leech, op. cit., pp. 75–6.

  20 Ibid., p. 43.

  21 CD to Hugh Strickland, 4 February 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 207.

  22 From Hugh Strickland’s abstract of Charles Darwin’s paper objecting to existing systems of nomenclature, preserved in the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, and printed in Correspondence 4: pp. 188–9.

  23 CD to Hugh Strickland, 4 February 1848, Correspondence 4: p. 206.

  24 J. D. Hooker to Charles Darwin, 3 February 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 204.

  25 CD to Hugh Strickland, 4 February 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 207.

  26 CD to Syms Covington, 30 March 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 230.

  27 Joseph Leech, op. cit., p. 103.

  28 George Darwin’s account of Malvern, DAR 112: p. 49.

  29 CD to Charles Lyell, 14 June 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 239.

  30 CD to Henslow, 6 May 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 236.

  31 Letter from J. D. Hooker to Darwin, 24 June 1849, Camp Sikkim, Himalayas, Correspondence 4: p. 245.

  32 ‘A Visit to Darwin’s Village – Reminiscences of Some of his Humble Friends from a Special Correspondent’, Evening News (London), Friday, 12 February 1909, p. 4.

  33 Ibid..

  34 See note to letter written by CD to J. G. Forchhammer, 25 September 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 256.

  35 Letter from Darwin to J.. Forchhammer, 1 December 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 282–3.

  36 CD to Charles Lyell, 2 September 1849, Correspondence 4: p. 271.

  37 CD to Albany Hancock, 25 December 1849, Correspondence 4: pp. 291–2.

  38 DAR 112: pp. 9–49.

  39 CD to J. D. Hooker, 3 February 1850, Correspondence 4: p. 310–11.

  40 Ibid., p. 311.

  7

  On Speculating

  Speculate v.i. 1. pursu
e an inquiry, meditate, form theory or conjectural opinion (on, upon, about subject, the nature, cause, etc., of a thing, or abs.) 2. Make investment, engage in commercial operation, that involves risk of loss (has been speculating in stocks, in rubber; esp. w. implications of rashness: is believed to speculate a good deal); so ~ator n. [f. L speculari spy out, observe (specula watch-tower f. specere look) + ATE]

  Concise Oxford Dictionary

  In 1850 Darwin was unlikely to know that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had already used his name as a verb to describe the wild surmising of his grandfather’s natural history. Erasmus Darwin, like his grandson Charles, had been a man of big ideas about the origins of life and the laws of nature. ‘Darwinizing’, Coleridge said, ‘was all surface and no content, all shell and no nut, all bark and no wood.’1 Erasmus and Charles Darwin would become a verb, ‘Darwinize’, and an adjective, ‘Darwinian’, and even an adverb, ‘Darwinically’, in the hands of later writers. All of these words carried the vestiges of a meaning that Darwin feared greatly and an accusation that had been levelled at his own grandfather: speculation – wild surmising; castles in the air; rashness of thought and risk of loss, even bankruptcy. Erasmus had been a speculator, some said, not with money but with ideas. The author of Vestiges was another such speculator.

  Speculation was a family business. Darwin’s Either, Robert Waring Darwin, had been a practising doctor in Shrewsbury, but only a third of his income ever came from medical fees. The remainder came from dividends on securities, stocks and bonds, from rent and the interest on mortgages raised on local property. He was a canny speculator, the most important financier in the region. His money went into the local infant school, the county gaol, the infirmary, the town hall and the waterworks. He owned three quarters of Shrewsbury, the local people said, and large numbers of the local aristocracy were in hock to him. All this from so little. He had arrived in Shrewsbury in 1787, the local gossip ran, with only £20 in his pocket and immediately started buying property. With the rental income from these he had invested in canals, bridges and local manufacturing industries. When Dr Darwin died, in 1848, his estate was worth £223,759.2

  By the late 1840s railway speculation offered quick and easy fortunes for those with capital to invest, so in 1846–7, with the Doctor’s advice, Charles and Emma Darwin began to speculate on the railway companies by buying shares in the London and North West Railway, the Great Western Railway and the Monmouth Canal and Railway In 1850 Charles made further railway investments for both Emma and himself and transferred money on the advice of his financial advisors, Salt & Sons of Shrewsbury.

  The word ‘speculation’ carried contradictory values for men like Darwin in 1850: in the world of high finance, speculation meant risk and adventure, but also a kind of gambling, and in the pages of The Times governments worried about its effect on national markets and bishops about its effect on the soul.3 Elsewhere, in the world of science, speculation was caught up in the debates about Newtonian and Baconian science, about induction and deduction and the nature of hypothesizing.4 The word was both stirring and unsettling, then, for Darwin, and in 1850 it particularly bothered him; but it was also what he was good at. It was what his mind did, despite his best efforts to anchor it down in empirical detail. It was what he had been doing since a boy, he explained to John Lubbock, the son of the local squire, who had come to him for dissection lessons. He had tried to connect things, to see the bigger picture, on the beach at Leith, in the cabin on the Beagle; tried to reason from the evidence of his eyes or the evidence in his mind’s eye. As if in an attic in the dark, he had felt the edge of the rim of an object, a curved shape in the darkness, and for a moment, without effort, he could see in his mind’s eye the wholeness of the thing – a wheel, a tennis racket, a sieve for soil. The inch of curve under his hand made a circle in his mind or at least gave him a hypothesis with which to work.

  Hypotheses, Darwin told young Lubbock again and again, had to be tested and proved by collecting facts, but you had to start with something as you began to feel your way further around the shape. You had to have an idea of what you were looking for; and that’s what he was doing with his barnacles: he had a hypothesis, a species theory to work with – a theory that was only a shadowy presence for John Lubbock. Sometimes Darwin was aware that he was looking through that hypothesis at his barnacles; but most of the time he was not aware of the presence of the big idea: it was a loose framework within which to work. His grandfather had made an elegant family motto from his hypothesis: Ex omnia conchis (All from shells). Darwin remembered seeing the phrase underneath the family coat of arms everywhere, like an advertisement, in his grandfather’s house – on the side of the family carriages and on the bookplates in the library. All from shells. Everything had come from the sea and from a single aquatic filament. Darwin hadn’t understood it then – it had just seemed part of his grandfather’s eccentricity; but now that he had read Zoonomia several times, he understood its import.

  In early nineteenth-century science, not everyone agreed about the value of working from a hypothesis or about the point at which you could claim that a hypothesis had been proved. The names of Francis Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton were thrown backwards and forwards in these debates – names that carried myths and stories, sacred names. Bacon, some said, had insisted that hypotheses should only emerge from a weight of gradually accumulated evidence; they should not be pre-formed. Newton’s famous phrase, Hypotheses non fingo, was much bandied about: ‘I never make hypotheses.’ But others pointed out that Newton and Bacon had both worked from pre-formed ideas – it was, after all, impossible to avoid developing them at some point in the scientific process. What was more important, some said, was that you should be aware of the hypotheses you were working with and prepared to jettison them if they didn’t work out; but what was the role of the imagination in all of this? And was the process of discovery really as rational, objective and gradual as Bacon seemed to imply? By 1850 Darwin knew that the process of discovery was much more rugged and unpredictable, and so did others. William Whewell, author of The Philosophy of the Inductive Science (1840), for instance, wrote in a review of Bacon’s reprinted volumes of 1857: ‘The theories which make the epochs of science do not even grow gradually and regularly out of the accumulation of facts. There are moments when a spring forward is made – when a multitude of known facts acquire a new meaning … Previous to such epochs, the blind heaping up of observed facts can do little or nothing for science.’5

  Speculation was a leap in the dark, a vision in the mind’s eye.6 The word itself came from the latin ‘specere’ (to look) and was kin to ‘speculari’ (to spy out) and ‘specula’ (watchtower). Sometimes it began with a flight of fancy or a daydream. And Darwin was aware that, whilst the acquisition of knowledge was cumulative and gradual, great leaps of understanding might happen in the strangest of places, in the middle of the dustiest and most laborious attention to detail, when, as if after months of seeing only the textured landscape of a piece of bark under the microscope, he could suddenly see the whole wood, as if from above – suddenly see the wood for the trees. It was astonishing, breathtaking, this shift of vision, this leap in the dark.

  Darwin could remember the exact spot in the road, for instance, where, travelling in his carriage, his mind had suddenly come to understand that adaptation was a key to the diversification of species.7 The exact spot in the road: this was a kind of road-to-Damascus revelation – it was no wonder that he used the word ‘conversion’ to describe his acceptance of new ideas – a revelation like an earthquake, in which everything is transformed or turned about. The mind has mountains, he knew, with crags and hanging valleys that shifted imperceptibly from day to day, but then could be heaved up in moments, like the sea beach at Concepción, leaving him breathless, like the shellfish suddenly plunged upwards into air. There would be no outward sign of such a revolution, no change in his body or face to mark the epiphany; the carriage wheels continued to turn over the potholes in the
road, the beetles to scurry in the undergrowth, the spiders to build their webs.

  Darwin knew how susceptible he was to pictures. Things he saw, or that others made him see with their descriptions, were more persuasive than anything, and it made him careful, intensely aware of the power of sight as a reasoning tool. He had listened to Robert Grant on the shores of Leith wrapping his sea sponges around with extraordinary theories and images of transmutation and metamorphosis. Then, on the Beagle, Grant’s way of seeing had become overlaid with that of Alexander von Humbolt, Darwin’s favourite travel writer and naturalist; and then, eventually, overlaid again with the powerful new vision of Charles Lyell, whose book Principles of Geology he had read on board.8

  These writers could make him see anew. He could see the world anew through their eyes; and although, as an older man, he was more sceptical and cautious, it was still happening. On 5 December 1849 he wrote to congratulate the American geologist James Dana on his new book on volcanic geology: ‘last night I ascended the peaks of Tahiti with you, & what I saw in my short excursions was most vividly brought before me by your descriptions … Now that I have read you, I believe I saw at the Galapagos, at a distance, instances of the most curious fissures of eruption.’9 Dana’s pictures had made him think again about the mental pictures he had brought back from the Galapagos, shapes of mountain ranges seen only from a distance, and remembered as a shape against clouds: I believe I saw, but now I don’t know. Just because Dana’s pictures and ideas were vivid enough to take him up a mountain in Tahiti in his own mind, this didn’t mean, however, that the American’s conclusions were true: ‘your remarks strike me as exceedingly ingenious and novel, but they have not converted me’, he added in his letter to Dana.