Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  9

  Corked and Bladdered Up

  Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  By the end of May 1851 the Down household had accommodated Annie’s death, gathered its sorrow back into the patterns of its days. The newborn baby, Horace, whose arrival Emma had longed for, absorbed his mother’s days and emotions. William, now eleven, boarded at the local prep school at Mitcham in Surrey, one of six boys tutored by the Revd Wharton. So Etty (6) now found herself the eldest of this household of small children: George (5), Elizabeth (3), Francis (2), Leonard (1) and the newborn Horace. There was a new nurse, too, for Brodie, no longer able to bear Down House in the wake of Annie’s death, had asked to retire and had returned to her family on the north coast of Scotland. The life of Down closed around them sympathetically. In the woods where the Sand Walk curled, forget-me-nots glimmered, staining the undergrowth a delicate pale blue like the blackbirds’ eggs in the nests of the hedge. The migratory birds had returned and the swing had been hung up again in the yew trees in Down House garden.

  Charles turned gratefully back to his routines and to the busy life of Down, seeking to fill the gap that Annie had left behind, keeping busy. As he walked around the village, the men from the local Friendly Club who played cricket in his meadow, the carpenters and blacksmiths who had worked on his house and the village shopkeepers passed on their condolences. At home the house was full of new life – the two little boys, Francis and Lenny, for whom Annie was only a passing shadow, no more important than the nursemaids who chased them, played in the garden as before, running after butterflies and catching ladybirds. Charles lay out under the big trees, feeling the warmth of the sun on his face, while the little boys climbed over him, pretending that he was a mountain bear, running their hands though the thick hairs on his chest and arms. He heard their shouts and laughs when he sat in his study. The frame of the study window was filled with startling green – the fresh leaves of lime trees. There were letters to answer and a book to finish.

  The letters Darwin received in May were written to a man of authority; he was older and wiser. Young naturalists had been writing to him for some time now, on the strength of either his Beagle book or his coral papers, or because one of the London professors such as Owen or Forbes had passed on his address. They wrote simply to tell him that they had found a rare fossil, or to ask him to read a draft paper, or for a job reference. There were many appeals to his authority and knowledge that summer.

  A young geologist, J. S. Disnurr, wrote to him in early May to ask him for advice on some fossil footprints he had found near Port Philip in Australia. Darwin advised him to go to see Richard Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – he would verify the find. Disnurr did as Darwin suggested, reporting despondently a few weeks later that Owen had discovered that they were not fossil footprints at all but simply hollows left in the rock by nodules of iron. Darwin felt for his embarrassment, remembering his own blunder in relation to the roads of Glen Roy, and he tried to lift the spirits of the young explorer before he returned to Australia on his ship: ‘Everyone makes plenty of blunders at first & I well know that I have done so – & so long that they are not printed & published, it signifies nothing.’1 Send me your specimens, he suggested, and I will find ‘qualified people to appreciate them & describe them’; but his advice above everything was to be careful – don’t publish anything until you are absolutely sure of your facts and have had them verified by ‘qualified people’. It was a cut-throat world out there.

  There were some blunders, however, that Darwin found it much harder to forgive, from the new generation of headstrong and ambitious naturalists and explorers, the new blood that competed for publication and recognition, some of them with private incomes like himself, others pursuing their sponges or fossils or seasquirts while maintaining a job, like Fitch the Norwich chemist or even Bowerbank the distillery owner; and a rare few competed for the handful of low-paid jobs in universities. So many, Darwin realized that summer, were working on sea creatures; marine zoology dominated the proceedings of the Zoology section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science meetings. It was not surprising, perhaps – there seemed to be a consensus now amongst zoologists that the answers to the origins of life lay in the riddles of rock pools and seabeds.

  Among the piles of still-unanswered letters of condolence from family and friends on Darwin’s desk in May was one from Edward Forbes, Professor of Botany at King’s College, London. Forbes was himself under a stone; he had been occupied since 1848 with writing up his life’s work: a classification of British molluscs in collaboration with Albany Hancock. He was still working on the third of the four volumes. Forbes sent Darwin his sympathy, but also, perhaps in an effort to distract his friend from his grief, asked him to assess a barnacle paper submitted for publication by a young dentist from Swansea called Bate. Forbes was effectively asking Darwin to act as a referee. There were few people in England publishing exclusively on barnacles except Albany Hancock, who was still worrying about burrowing barnacles, and John Gray, the keeper at the British Museum, who had politely stepped aside from his barnacle research when Darwin began his work. Here was a new voice – a man he had never heard of. Darwin began to read this paper with both trepidation and excitement.

  Darwin was shocked by the messy piece of barnacle scholarship that lay before him. The young Bate was clearly enthusiastic enough. He was also a fine draftsman who had done some original research; but he simply didn’t know the field and, worse still, he claimed barnacle discoveries that others had made before him. Replying to Forbes’s letter, Darwin could barely contain his outrage within the conventions of politeness and his own natural generosity: ‘I am sorry to say that Mr Bate is not at all aware (as he suggests himself) how much has been published on the Cirripedia,’2 he began with restraint. In the remainder of the long letter to Forbes, Darwin outlined his objections and the catalogue of Bate’s omissions and blunders, but in doing so he began to realize the scale of his own knowledge. The barnacles had been in chaos, he remembered, when he had begun five years before – complete chaos; but since then others had made significant discoveries and it was now possible to say that advances had been made. The field, though small, had changed rapidly since he had entered it in 1846 and he was bringing it all together. It gave him an opportunity to confirm to himself that he had reached a place at the top of the mountain of barnacle knowledge, able to survey the territory before him; young Bate was merely looking up at the calcareous foothills.

  Yet the dentist was considering going to press. He clearly thought he had discovered and illustrated the very first stage of the metamorphosis of the larvae of stalked barnacles, but the German Karl Burmeister had discovered that back in 1834 – nearly seventeen years before. Then there was Henry Goodsir’s work on the metamorphosis of sessile barnacle larvae published in 1843. This was all old hat. Bate wrote as if mature cirripedes were blind, but the American Professor Joseph Leidy had discovered eyes in mature barnacles in 1848; he also seemed to think he was the first to illustrate barnacle sperm, but Dr Rudolf Albert von Koelliker of Wurzberg had drawn them – admittedly not well – in a published paper of 1843. Bate’s drawings of the sexual anatomy of barnacles were ludicrous too: he had drawn the alimentary canal leading to the end of the barnacle penis and his knowledge and illustration of the barnacle female parts, wrote Darwin, ‘are very far, as I believe from the truth’. To understand female barnacle reproductive parts Bate would need to read the work done in France in 1835 by Gaspar Joseph Martin-Saint-Ange and by Professor Sven Loven in Scandinavia. He himself over five long years, had verified and in some cases modified all of these discoveries. Bate was in the barnacle dark ages. Darwin suggested that Forbes tell Bate to read the wo
rks he had listed and revise his paper in the light of this reading, also revising his claims to barnacle discoveries. ‘It would be unfriendly not to caution him,’ he told Forbes.

  Darwin was always exacting, but generous to younger naturalists. Within a few months of this exchange with Forbes about Bate’s blunders, he and Bate were in direct communication and exchanging findings. By way of thanks and apology, Bate sent Darwin his drawings of the second leg of the larva barnacle in different stages. They were good and careful drawings, and Darwin admired them. The older man offered his empathy for Bate’s disappointment in discovering that his work was not new; such things happened to all scientists, he said: ‘It has occurred to me before now, to have been working hard at a subject, & then found that my results had been previously published, & very much provoked I have felt. – therefore I can appreciate & admire the very pleasant manner in which you received my unpleasant tidings.’4

  This experience of embarrassment at a misinterpretation or mistake, or a sense of anxiety that a new discovery might be about to be published by someone else, made him continuously humble and generous, even to someone who had blundered as extensively and carelessly as Bate. Afraid that Bate might be discouraged from further work by this disappointment, Darwin sent him valuable advice on dissection techniques. After all, Bate might be on the foothills, but with help he might make some considerable headway up the lower slopes without threatening Darwin’s own discoveries. He lived in Wales, had access to the sea and to excellent microscopes, and was progressing fast with his theoretical knowledge. Darwin told him how to preserve precious and minute barnacle body parts. He described how he would take a barnacle jaw, for instance, and place it in water, then place the drop of water on a glass slide and with gold size draw a circle around the drop, sealing the slide with a glass cover slip placed on top: ‘Every cirripede that I dissect I preserve the jaws &c. &c. in this manner, which takes no time & often comes in very useful. This very day I have been using preparations thus made two years since, & they are perfectly clear & with some colour preserved.’5 He also told Bate to buy a glass-ruled micrometer to slip in the eyepiece of his microscope in order to ‘measure to the twenty-thousandth or less of an inch, without delaying your work half a minute’.6

  He enjoyed being able to pass on his practical knowledge. His neighbour, the wealthy astronomer, mathematician and banker Sir John William Lubbock, who lived in the big house, High Elms, had a seventeen-year-old son who had been visiting Darwin for two years now for lessons in dissection and preservation techniques. He would be back from Eton for the summer and Darwin was keen to show him some new techniques he had recently perfected. It was a strange rite of passage this: he had been seventeen when he had started dissecting with Robert Grant in Edinburgh. They had even carried their microscopes down on to the sands of Leith, so that they could study the sponges in situ, in the rain, in the fog, at dawn, even at night. Now he was the master and John Lubbock the pupil. Just as Grant had used him and Coldstream as skilled sponge collectors, he now had a global army of barnacle collectors of his own to draw on. Also like Grant, in return he would pass on his unique knowledge and skills and introduce younger men to other specialists. Disnurr, for instance, was going to sea again in June and he wrote to ask Darwin for advice on dredging. Darwin referred him to Edward Forbes in the Jermyn Street Museum of Practical Geology: ‘Prof Forbes knows more about dredging than all the other naturalists in Europe put together,’ he wrote.7 Back in 1835 he had written to John Coldstream in Leith for advice on making a dredge; he remembered the letter and the diagram Coldstream had returned. He had also visited Grant in London to be brought up to date with the latest techniques in the dissection of invertebrates. That had been twenty years ago.

  Where was Grant the brilliant anatomist and transmutationist now? Still in the chair of Comparative Anatomy and Zoology at University College, but no one had heard anything of him for years – except his students. Some said he was living in a slum in London and that he was almost completely deaf. He had never written that ground-breaking book that he had always said he would. He hadn’t turned the world upside down with his invertebrate discoveries. The University had seen to that, with soul-destroyingly low pay and conditions.8 He took home £39 a year from his post. Even Richard Owen, Hunterian Professor, only took home £300 a year before his Crown pension and grants; and Owen had seen to it that Grant was discredited too, with his distasteful and outspoken Lamarckian ideas. With a word here and there he had seen to it that Grant was isolated and eventually ostracized from the Zoological Society. This cut him off both from the zoological community and from the dead animals that he needed to continue his work. Owen had patrons and contacts and power; he was not a man to cross.

  A private income and a home outside London had bought Darwin some degree of independence from these complicated networks of power. When he had returned from the Beagle it had been his father’s wealth that had granted him the time to sift through his ship-load of specimens and to publish his papers before others did. Now in London he could see a handful of brilliant young naturalists disembarking from long world voyages as he had done, with ideas and theories and cases of carefully preserved evidence. Like Dick Whittington they had come to London, imagining it paved with gold – fame for the taking; but without a private income and patronage their theories were as nothing. Thomas Huxley, the brilliant naturalist and ship’s surgeon with the hawk-like eyes who had just returned from the Rattlesnake, was living in rooms on Regent’s Park, looking around for favours, references, patrons and piecemeal jobs. He had a fiancée in Australia, they said, and wanted to bring her to England, but couldn’t do so until he had a regular income. There were few prospects in science.9

  Boxes of barnacles came and went almost weekly at Down House. Although Darwin had returned some of the larger fossil collections to their owners, men like Bowerbank and Fitch, more were coming in. So the study was like a railway station filled with boxes either being shipped up to leave or having just come in, waiting to be unpacked. Everything had to be labelled and ordered or Darwin would lose rare specimens. Sometimes he requested particular barnacles from particular collections; sometimes people just sent them. Of course they didn’t know which barnacles he was working on at any one time; they just knew he was ‘doing’ barnacles and offered to send him their collections, or just sent them. So they arrived randomly – he’d ask for a particular Ibla specimen in order to finish a section of his manuscript or in order to settle a point of fact, and the Ibla would come tucked into a box with a Scalpellum or a burrowing barnacle. So questions would open up again that he simply couldn’t think about until he had finished with this immediate and particular set of problems. So he had to make himself label them, jot down a note or two for future reference and to jog his memory, and put them to one side.

  At least he was beginning to feel secure in the knowledge that there were fewer and fewer barnacles arriving that he hadn’t already seen. Robert Ball, the Director of the Museum at Trinity College, Dublin, wrote to him from Ireland in late May with the offer of a whole series of specimens that four years before would have been a veritable feast, but now he knew he had seen and mapped almost all of them. So he didn’t need to see them, and he told Ball with a note of polite desperation: please don’t send me your notes or your barnacles or the cast of the turtle shell: ‘I do not think a cast wd be worth sending … many thanks for your offers … but … I do not think it likely there would be anything new.’10 Ball sent the barnacles anyway, and the cast of the turtle shell, which he said had been ‘mined’ by barnacles. Darwin was amazed: these barnacles had burrowed so far into the turtle shell that they had penetrated not only bone but also through to the soft body of the turtle. Had they burrowing powers after all? Or had the bone and skin grown up around them? Why had they developed these powers? He wrote to Ball: surely ‘a barnacle could not have lived in such a chamber as you describe, not openly connected with the sea-water’… ‘I can only repeat that I am quit
e confounded on the subject.’

  These were questions he had begun to ask on the Chilean beach sixteen years before – he had only been twenty-six when he had picked up Mr Arthrobalanus and wondered about why and how this species had evolved burrowing powers as a survival strategy. Now he was forty-two. But whilst these puzzles pressed him in May 1851, his schedule would not allow him to begin work on the sessile barnacles until 1852. Mr Arthrobalanus and his tribe would have to wait longer in the wings.

  The barnacles he received by parcel carrier in the summer of 1851 came from every corner of the globe, including Angola, South America, California and South Africa,11 but there were others he still wished either to see for the first time or to see again. When Disnurr, who was about to travel back to Australia, offered to do some barnacle-collecting for him, Darwin leapt at the opportunity to commission the naturalist:

  I am really obliged & flattered by the wish you so kindly express to send me something interesting – There is a little pedunculated cirripede I believe common on the whole South Australia –12 Which I should be very glad to have several specimens of all sizes still attached sent home, having been placed immediately in strong spirits – well corked & bladdered up – They consist of 4 little bluish valves mounted on a flexible peduncle crossed with yellowish spines – There is a most extraordinary anatomical peculiarity which I want to dissect. There is also another cirripede attached to corallines of So Australia in deep water of which I enclose a rude tracing which I should much like to have several of for same purpose in spirits – I am at present hard at work on a Monograph on the Anatomy & Classification of all the Cirripedes (Lepas Balanus &c) in the whole world.13

  Disnurr was footloose and fancy-free and determined to make discoveries, just as Darwin had been in his twenties; but now Darwin was well and truly grounded in Down – by the weight and complexity of his work, by his family commitments and by his health. These naturalists – these recruits – must work for him; he must be content to be the still centre, to whom others returned with their zoological plunder, to whom others wrote for knowledge and understanding: barnacle hunters.