Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  The stalked barnacles came first – coning was a later variation, an adaptation to shoreline conditions. The Pollicipes had used the valve in Darwin’s hand to fish for food in seas in which ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs hunted. Yet the dredging boats still pulled in clusters of Pollicipes that were almost identical. Pulled from the seabed, they looked for all the world like dinosaur body parts: glistening black stalks as wrinkled and thick as elephant skin and a claw-like valve at the end of the stalk like a bird’s beak. Inside the valve the tiny shrimp-like body fished with its legs through the valve opening, its legs looking every bit like the black-dyed ostrich feathers on this season’s mourning hats. No fundamental change since Jurassic times, just diversification: no need for change; perfect adaptation to environment. Yet even in Jurassic times there had been thirty-two different species of barnacle, Darwin told his readers. The fossil barnacles were a testimony to ‘the exhaustless fertility of nature in the production of diversified yet constant forms’.1 Now Nature’s exhaustless prodigality has been recorded, marked down minutely. Pollicipes, Scalpellum and Ibla fossils from all over the world have been defined, identified, placed in family groupings; all from valves alone.

  The barnacles are far from finished with Darwin, however. Now that he has completed the classification of the thirty-two fossil stalked barnacles, he must classify and describe the recent stalked barnacles, and there are hundreds of these. The smaller group of fossil acorn barnacles will make a slim volume, but the classification of the largest group of all, the recent acorn barnacles, will run to hundreds of pages. Each will take a separate volume: four volumes in all. He has finished one of the four; and the species theory is still locked in the drawer, incomplete and unpublished. He had planned to return to it by now, hadn’t he? A year on the barnacles, he had promised himself. At most. Yet October would mark the end of the fifth year he had spent on them. They have not finished with him yet. And there is no going back.

  A soft thud in the silence of the room startles him; the tiny valve in his hand falls on to the desk. First he checks the valve is safe, then turns towards the sound. He had forgotten Annie, who is now asleep on the chaise longue in his study, an honour allowed to the children only when sick. Her book, William Howitt’s The Book of the Seasons; or the Calendar of Nature, has fallen to the floor. Darwin picks it up – she has been reading Howitt’s lyrical description of January, he notes: ‘Seeds are secure in the earth, or in the care of man; herbaceous plants have died down to the root, which, secure in their underground retreat, are preparing their fresh shoots, leaves, and flowers, in secret, to burst forth at spring with renewed splendour’2 Darwin has borrowed it from the London library for his sick daughter. It will help her to look forward to the spring, he told Emma. He closes it and places it back on the table next to her, pushing the pill bottles and thermometers to one side.

  Her mouth is slightly open and her breathing heavy. The hand that was clasping the book has fallen limply over the side of the couch. Darwin steps softly. He reaches for his black Sand Walk cloak that hangs on the hook in the study and tucks it around her, closing her arm back across her body, and lifts the heavy coil of her plaited hair. Her skin is almost translucent when she sleeps, he notes, particularly against the midnight black of his cloak. The daguerreotype is a good likeness, but she has changed since it was taken two years ago: her face is longer and narrower. With his forefinger he traces the familiar blue vein that branches across her temple – Skimmed-milk White. He can see the pulse beat steadily in her neck, now taut and stretched. There is a flush across her cheeks – Aurora Red. She twitches, dreaming, and groans a little. Pain or dreams? he wonders. Instinctively, he feels her forehead. It is cool. Dr Gully’s methods are beginning to work, perhaps. He stokes up the coals in the fireplace to a brighter glow and sits to watch her sleeping, lost in barnacle thoughts.

  For a week or so Annie has joined her Either in a specially adapted version of the Water Cure that arrived from Dr Gully in the post; and for a week or so Darwin has kept a record of her progress alongside his own in his health diary. However, he finds defining the subtleties of Annie’s health almost as difficult as diagnosing a species from a valve alone, or Werner’s task in defining and describing colours. Words are so inadequate. So, in order to be as clear as possible, he has made his own code, defining degrees of Wellness, better or worse than the day before, by reading the signs of Annie’s body: her pulse, temperature, bowel movements, sleep patterns and appetite. As with Werner’s colour chart or the adjectives he used to describe the minute differences between one barnacle valve and another seemingly identical one, the degrees of Wellness could thus be measured in a kind of chart:

  well very well almost well well not good pretty good poorly a poorly

  very quite little

  This record would help Gully determine the nature of her mysterious ailment and find a cure; it was a history – a case history. It would also chart Annie’s reaction to the water treatment, so on the left of the sheet, next to the recorded date, Darwin wrote the chosen treatment for the day – dripping sheet and spinal wash administered every day; a wet wrap three or four times a week; the lamp treatment once a week – and in the next column her state of health in the hours following: ‘well’ or ‘pretty good’, for instance. Brodie and Bessie’s morning work had been much increased by this new routine, but they did not complain, though Emma had noticed that they had become less patient with Etty. Annie was not a complainer, but she cried out none the less when the cold sheets touched her feverish skin. She was more patient than he had been with the cure; and she enjoyed the warmth of the study when it was all over, too, she said.

  The family health diary, Darwin reflected, was a record of oscillations – sometimes wild oscillations between the ‘poorly’ and the ‘well’ or ‘well almost very’. It was not a narrative of progress – no perceptible hour hand ticking steadily towards the ‘well very’, or even an imperceptible minute hand, but rather more like the swings of a pendulum wildly out of kilter. It was a Foucault’s pendulum, swinging erratically, like the instrument the scientific journals described on display in Paris, heavily swinging from its metal chain, proving in its slow swings the rotation of the Earth’s surface. Even Foucault’s pendulum had some degree of predictability – like the weather; but the seasons of Darwin’s own body seemed to move to no gravitational pull or position of the sun, and now Annie’s little pendulum was swinging fitfully alongside his own. They shared inherited characteristics, as he had feared. All he could do was record movements and try his best to see patterns of correlation between the things they ate, or drank, or did, and the unfolding patterns of Wellness. Her spasms of pain were the worst to bear – stabbing, jagged pains in her stomach that made her cry out and writhe. No one could take those pains from her; not even her father.

  It had been six years since he had watched or described any of his children this closely. When the elder three had been babies, he had kept a journal exclusively to take notes on their development as they hiccupped, sneezed, cried, learned to smile, pulled themselves to a standing position or tried to work out the puzzle of their own faces reflected back in a mirror. He had been particularly interested in how they cried, he remembered – when do real tears appear? And how do the muscles of a baby’s face work in crying? He hadn’t written so much about baby Annie as he had about baby William – though Annie had come to be his favourite since those early writings. William had been the firstborn, after all – the first unfolding of a miracle. Babies Annie and Etty were simply points of comparison in the journal; William was the chief case study – the animalcule, as he had called his son.

  Though he hadn’t written much about Annie, her smile had been recorded as one of her chief characteristics from the start – that broad smile imprinted on her face as soon as her facial muscles could conjure it up: ‘Annie at 2 months & four days had a very broad sweet smile & a little noise of pleasure very like a laugh,’ he had written. Now, almost ten years later, h
e was listening again for those little cries that were yet more signs of her level of pain, writing on 24 January: ‘two little cries’, 27 January: ‘late evening tired and cry’ and next day: ‘early morning cry’.3

  Darwin had stopped writing about the children back in September 1844 – the year he had put the species theory away. Both accounts waited for the return of his attention. Both were in limbo – suspended, usurped by barnacle-watching and barnacle-writing. Now Annie was back in his writings, not as a healthy specimen of childhood development but as an ailing one. The overall pattern of her health had, he feared, shown gradual decline since the previous summer. She had not been herself, Emma reminded him anxiously again and again, since that bout of illness that had begun in the storms of the previous summer. Annie was not herself. What did being Annie mean, though? Might not these changes, these mysterious aches, this lack of concentration and fitful irritability be part of another metamorphosis, the emergence of a woman’s body from that of a child? Perhaps the grown Annie would not be so even-tempered. Perhaps the adult Annie would bear no relation to her free-swimming self.

  The women of Down House – Emma, Brodie, Bessie, Miss Thorley – prayed for Annie. Aunt Sarah in the village prayed for her. Fanny Wedgwood, Emma’s sister-in-law, prayed for her. Charles couldn’t. He did not feel at ease about consigning Annie to the will of God. It seemed such an arbitrary will – taking, snatching where it could. He could see how nature might be so, but to try to fathom out and live with a sentient being behind and responsible for all such tragedies – that was a task for the women.4 It was beyond him. Emma seemed to gain peace from believing she would see all her lost ones again – her baby, her sister, her parents – in heaven; but he, Charles, could not share this confidence with her. At least, not since his father died. After all, how could he be faithful to a religion that required him to believe that his father, a declared non-believer, had been consigned to hellfire? Perhaps Annie, whose belief could not, at the age of nine, be a robust one, teetered on the brink of hell-fire, too, for all her goodness.

  Since his father’s death, in 1848, Darwin had been drifting with these problems, not quite struggling. Reassuringly, many of the memoirs he read by eminent intellectuals seemed to tell a similar story of spiritual drift, as if these books that his brother Erasmus had sent him or recommended had found him out, engaged him in silent dialogue, confirming or challenging his own ideas and anxieties. Erasmus was no believer, and seemed to embrace these radical London ideas with less conflict than Charles did; but then Erasmus had no children’s souls to care for, and there were few churchgoers in his immediate circle.

  Darwin continued to order each of the new books by the freethinker Harriet Martineau, who had been such a close friend of his and Erasmus’s back in the London years, before he had met and married Emma. Harriet continued to outrage some people in her outspoken commitment to telling the truth, however it looked to her. At the end of her book. Eastern Life: Present and Past, for instance, which Charles had read in 1849,5 she had concluded passionately:

  when all thinkers say freely what is to them true, we shall know more of abstract and absolute truth than we have ever known it yet It is no concern of the thoughtful traveller whether what he says is familiar or strange, agreeable or unacceptable, to the prejudiced or to the wise. His only concern is to keep his fidelity to truth and man: to say simply and, if he can, fearlessly, what he has learned and concluded. If he be mistaken, his errors will be all the less pernicious for being laid open to correction. If he be right, there will be so much accession, be it little or much, to the wisdom of mankind.6

  Many did not want to hear about her truth. In her most recent book, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development, which she had co-written with the phrenologist and psychologist Henry Atkinson as a radical ‘correspondence between two friends’,7 she had rejected God and Christianity – in print. Christianity was no more than superstition, the letters claimed, and superstitious people refused to see the blinding truth being revealed by science. Christianity was a ‘notion of the cave’: ‘Science is gradually leading us through these notions of the cave into open daylight, by showing the undeviating laws of nature: and thus men are gradually drawn out of the Church, into the lecture-room.’8 And there were many others who were afraid to wake up: ‘There are many who have a half knowledge that their religion is but a waking dream yet beg you will not disturb them.’ But, Atkinson preached, till we ‘recognise this science, we live in a barbarous and dark age, and have no health in us’.

  The women around Darwin might largely have been believers – some even devout; but there were plenty of women who were growing away from religion, like himself, however reluctantly. Men too – such as Francis Newman, Cardinal Newman’s younger brother, whose book, The Soul, which Darwin read in 1849, expressed radical new ideas about the afterlife and the prospects of Christianity. There was also Harriet Martineau’s publisher, John Chapman, setting up the Westminster Review in London, dedicated to ideas of progress and the light of science. They were brave people, outspoken people, but it was not Darwin’s way. He would keep his doubts from Emma. Such thoughts would trouble her, especially now, when she needed her faith and her God to steer her through this most troubling of times.

  In early March, Annie rallied for her birthday and even rode on William’s pony. From the house Emma watched her playing in the hedge with William, and it gladdened her heart. But then, two weeks later, on 13 March, Darwin’s notes on Annie’s health recorded a downward turn: ‘Poorly with cough and influenza,’ he wrote, followed by a string of dittoes for eight days. By 21 March he could no longer take the strain of watching and recording Annie alone. This was the final straw for Emma and Charles. Emma, heavily pregnant, was worn out with worry; they both were. His stalked barnacles would have to wait. He wrote to Dr Gully and arranged rooms for a month for Annie, Etty and their nurse Brodie in Montreal House in Malvern. Miss Thorley would join them if possible. Annie now needed Dr Gully’s direct help – he was good with children and had several of his own. The journey with coughing Annie took two days, for they stayed overnight with Uncle Erasmus in Park Street, near Hyde Park. The following day Darwin settled the nurse and two children into the Malvern lodgings, consulted with Dr Gully and left for London two days later. He arrived in London just in time to he registered at Erasmus’s house for the National Census; and in London he had something of a holiday from his barnacles and from the worry of Annie, visiting friends and going to the library.

  For two weeks Darwin left the care and recording of Annie to Dr Gully and to Miss Thorley, who had joined the children and their nurse at the beginning of April. He returned to Down House and began to assemble his notes on the recent stalked barnacles for the second of the four volumes. His immediate task was to try to explain the mystifying and curious complemental males he had found on the Ibla and the Scalpellum. Mere bags of spermatozoa; minute, worm-like, singular; perfect, extraordinary, wonderful. It was difficult to speculate about their origin without expressing simultaneously the wonder and the transience of it all, for these little males lived only to fulfil their function and then dropped off their female host to be replaced by others. Again he was reminded about the usefulness of his species theory, for he would never have been led to investigate the Ibla and thus discover the complemental males if he hadn’t already had an idea that separate sexes had evolved from hermaphrodite forms. He was plotting a bloodline in these books, starting from the ancient hermaphrodite Pollicipes, through the Ibla and Scalpellum to the recent stalked barnacles: diversification and variation; branching and splitting.

  Meanwhile, as spring continued to unfold into April, Annie took the water treatment and seemed to stabilize, Miss Thorley reported in her letters. She went on donkey rides with them, though she still tired easily. Etty entertained her sister with collections of tiny ladybirds kept in matchboxes, which the sisters fed on milk; but suddenly and without warning on 15 April Dr Gully sent an urgent and alarming
note to Darwin, asking him to return to Malvern immediately: Annie had a high fever and was dangerously ill. Darwin dropped everything and left immediately, leaving instructions for Emma to make sure that she had chloroform in the house in the event of the baby arriving early. Two days later he arrived in Malvern, hoping to reach Annie and at least speak with her before it was too late. Etty, then a very small child, remembered her father’s arrival and ‘his coming in, and after Miss Thorley saying something, his flinging himself down on the sofa on his face, and Miss Thorley sending me out of the room in a frightened way’.9 Miss Thorley, who was already at breaking point, told him Gully’s prognosis: it would all be over by the morning.10 He cried a good deal that day and over the next seven long days, for Annie did not die that night. Gully, who had stayed the night in the lodging house to be on hand should Darwin need him, conceded at dawn that if she was no better she was at least no worse. ‘It is’, Darwin wrote to Emma at noon the following day, ‘now from hour to hour a struggle between life and death. God only knows the issue.’11

  He resumed the narrative of Annie’s sickness with no idea of its ending, writing to Emma, marooned in Down and too heavily pregnant to risk the journey, immediately on his arrival at Malvern, struggling to be absolutely truthful even if that truth might break a mother’s heart: ‘She looks very ill: her face lighted up & she certainly knew me. – Thank God she does not suffer at all – half dozes all day long … My own dearest support yourself – on no account for the sake of [ou]r other children; I implore you, do not think of coming here …’ Then he added in a postscript, presumably added after he had seen Dr Gully: ‘I am assured there is great hope. – Yesterday she was a little better, & today again a little better.’12 He was desperate to see improvement even if the day-to-day changes were imperceptible.