Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  However, even a grounded man might travel – in his mind’s eye. He could still read about the travellers, still go with them up their mountains and across the plains. In May he read George Gordon Cumming’s A Hunter’s Life in South Africa and Herbert Edwardes’ A Year on the Punjab Frontier. He relished these tales of adventure in new lands – always had. They coloured the way he saw things, like reading Humbolt’s travel stories on the Beagle: ‘he like another Sun illuminates everything I behold’, he had written.14 Cumming’s book was a bloodbath, an account of days spent shooting great game on a massive and ferocious scale, compulsively, triumphantly, for five years. It reminded Darwin of the hunting forays he had taken inland on the Beagle voyage – the day he had ridden across Brazilian plains ostrich hunting with wild soldiers and eaten roasted armadillos as the sun set. dimming described shooting elephants, ostriches, giraffes, alligators – anything that moved – with single, or sometimes multiple, shots. It had taken nearly thirty shots to bring down one elephant, he wrote. Then his guides began the ritual of skinning and disembowelling the dead animal for a feast, even climbing into ‘the immense cavity of his inside … and handing the fat to their comrades outside until all is bare … the natives have a horrid practice of besmearing their bodies, from the crown of the head to the sole of die foot, with the black clotted gore; and in this anointing they assist one another, each man taking up the fill of both his hands, and spreading it over the back and shoulders of his friend.’15 Cumming was not interested in geology, natural history, anthropology, ethnography or politics; he was only interested in the volume of his trophies. He returned to England after five years of sport with thirty tons of animal skulls and skins, some of which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition.

  Herbert Edwardes, author of A Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848–9, which Darwin read that summer, was quite another species of adventurer. An educated military man, he was interested in politics and British overseas policy. His aims were not to boast of hunting victories but to tell the story of the ‘bloodless conquest of the wild valley of Bunnoo’, to give an insight into the life and labours of an Indian political officer and to pass on his knowledge of Indian life and customs. His story would be none the less exhilarating, he promised his readers, asking them to:

  be prepared to enter with me on more stirring scenes; to march with me once more towards the western frontier of the Punjab; assist me to fix the yoke on the neck of a savage people; help me to turn the assassin’s knife; swim with me the midnight ford, and wake the sleeping border rebel in his lair; read with me, with indignant sorrow, the betrayed and wounded magistrate’s appeal for help; sound with me the loud alarum, beat the angry drum; welcome the fierce but unfriendly warriors, that rally to the call; and weld tribes, that never met before in friendship, into a common army, with a common cause; then, confident of right, plunge into THE WAR.’16

  Such men were heroes. Darwin, too, had been a hero to many readers of the Beagle voyage, a man who could take others to unexplored territories, who could make them see, and extend their horizons. Hooker, recently returned from India with his triumphant stories of kidnapping and war and weeks spent in imprisonment, all for the sake of his rhododendrons, was a hero – but still a hero without an income, a hero who had to find a job. Frances Henslow had waited for him during those long years, and now they were married and honeymooning in Paris. These biographies of exploration, and the tales of the recently disembarked naturalists such as Hooker and Huxley, brought back for Darwin the days he had spent on horseback in the South American deserts: the danger, the political intrigue, the discovery of peoples living their lives so differently from those in England or Europe, the zoological and geological differences and the sublime and awe-inspiring variety.

  His own vision might have been myopic that summer, completely absorbed by the delicate and minute body parts of Ibla and Scalpellum under his microscope, but the newspapers and his library books kept his imaginative mind stimulated by tales of international progress and scientific advance. Gold had been discovered in Australia, Livingstone had reached the Zambezi and the great telegraph cable was being laid across the seabed of the Channel. London seemed to be a hive of activity The papers described the honeypot that was luring millions into London – the great glass structure of the palace that housed the Great Exhibition, designed to show the world the power, scale and inventiveness of British industry. Trains carried tourists from every great city of Britain into London. Many were travelling for the first time, travelling in family groups to see the displays of British success and diversity in trade and the arts; but whilst Emma was enthusiastic to visit, Darwin feared that London would make him ill again. He would consider it; he would need a holiday when he finished this wretched manuscript. He’d need to give his eyes a feast, a spectacle on a grand scale, to stretch his vision to bigger sights than the microscopic structures of his creatures. A holiday might give him an incentive to finish. So throughout June he laboured away at organizing the woodcuts for the volume and in trying to reach a conclusion about the evolution of these strange complemental males in Ibla and Scalpellum.

  Try as he might he could not summon the linguistic certainty he needed when he tried to reach Ibla and Scalpellum conclusions. Blunders haunted him. Perhaps it was better to hedge, to defer, to make his thinking processes visible so that others might see the problems in his logic, if there were problems in his logic. He wrote the title out several times: Summary On The Nature And Relations Of The Males And Complemental Males, in Ibla and Scalpellum. Here, his speculations all depended upon a sequence of ideas and premises, like a chain in which any of the links might be defective. He decided to show the sequence – allow the reader to follow the links in long chain-like sentences, where clauses clanked against each other like steel: ‘It should be observed that the evidence in this summary is of a cumulative nature. If we think it highly, or in some degree probable that [A, B, C and D] … if from these several considerations, we admit that [X, Y and Z]… then in some degree the occurrence of parasitic males in the allied genus Scalpellum is rendered more probable.’17

  Probable; possible; likely – it was the best he could do when there was crucial missing evidence, facts that he could guess at but which he had not actually seen with his own eyes. He continued to forge hesitant phrases outlining decent probability, appealing to common sense: ‘It was hardly possible that I should be mistaken… the only possible way to escape from the conclusion … a conclusion hardly to be avoided.’ He was back to dangerous speculation and speculation was what this barnacle work had been about avoiding, but it was the best he could do here in one of the most baffling corners of his work. Over unimaginable stretches of time, Ibla and Scalpellum had evolved new reproductive methods to maximize their survival prospects, moving away from hermaphroditism to separate sexes and a division of labour. Barnacle variations: millions of years in the making and infinitely more astonishing, inventive and diverse than the range of breathtaking designs and productions of British industry housed in the great Palace of Glass.

  The second volume of the stalked barnacle monograph was to be published by the Ray Society, a new publishing house established only seven years before, named after John Ray, a seventeenth-century naturalist, and dedicated to publishing specialist books on British flora and fauna. This was a prestigious list, but the books would only reach other specialists who subscribed to the Society, not the general reader. By July Darwin was in weekly correspondence with the President of the Society, Edwin Lankester, finalizing details of typeface and size of type, length and number and type of illustrations. His stalked barnacle volume would be number 21 in the Ray Society list, next to number 20, a book on lichens. Now that the volume was finished, he worried that the manuscript was almost impossible to read in places, but he hoped that if the printers had tolerated the previous manuscript they could make this one out. He would just have to check the proofs very carefully.

  Even if the manuscript was atrociously bad, it was
the only manuscript, and delivering it to Edwin Lankester in London would be risky. Disasters had happened to other great books such as Carlyle’s first copy of The History of the French Revolution, which had been accidentally and famously thrown on the fire by one of John Stuart Mill’s maidservants, thinking it waste paper. Everyone Darwin knew seemed to have a story to tell about missing pages or lost pages or spoiled pages. So he would take no risks and send the manuscript to London with Parslow. Parslow could be trusted to carry the package of precious paper and put it directly into Edwin Lankester’s hands. He would ask Parslow to wait while Lankester looked over the manuscript, and then he would be instructed to deliver it by hand to the printers at 22 1/2 Bartholomew Close. A good plan; but Lankester wrote to say that he would need at least a week to look over the script, and so Darwin decided that there was no option but to take it himself. He would use the opportunity to have a holiday with Emma, George and Etty in London. It would do them all good to see the Exhibition and some of the London sights.

  On 24 July Darwin wrote to an old dissecting companion who lived near Hyde Park in London, George Newport, for a pair of scissors. While in London he wanted to visit the surgical instrument makers on the Strand, he explained, ‘in order that I may shame Mess Weiss & Co to endeavour to make me an equally good pair (but to open with a spring & mounted with one arm long, for I have in vain endeavoured to cut in the wonderful manner I saw you do with one elbow pointing at the sky) … Weiss has made me two pair, but they are very poor articles.’18 He would have been back for more dissection training before now, he wrote, ‘but I have found the excitement of London so injurious, that I have seldom come up’.19

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, 30 July Charles, Emma, Etty and George arrived at Darwin’s brother’s house at 7 Park Street, Grosvenor Square, London, The journey from the outskirts of London to Grosvenor Square had taken them much longer than usual, for the streets were full of people and carriages, families who had travelled to London from all over Great Britain and the world for the Great Exhibition. Many Americans had also travelled in order to see the eclipse that had taken place two days before on 28 July and which, the papers promised, would be particularly visible from England. As it happened, the eclipse had been a rather unremarkable affair except for those few people who had watched from remote Scottish islands, the papers said now.

  The lodging houses were full to bursting point. Everywhere the Darwin children spotted posters and flyers on shops and the sides of omnibuses that advertised the Exhibition and other summer events and spectacles: Wyld’s Monster Globe in Leicester Square, Cremorne Gardens, the Royal Hippodrome, Madam Tussaud’s, Drury Lane, The Lyceum, and the Zoological Gardens.

  Carefully packed in Darwin’s hand luggage by Parslow were two pairs of scissors, his own defective pair and Newport’s perfect pair, a microscope and a manuscript. Darwin had already prepared a cover letter to Edwin Lankester of the Ray Society and this was packed in the barnacle manuscript parcel with the etchings. While Emma supervised the unpacking, and Uncle Ras entertained the children, Darwin walked from Erasmus’s house along Oxford Street and Regent Street towards Old Burlington Street to deliver the manuscript personally.20 The wide streets were bustling with activity, sounds and smells and sights that Darwin found he could scarcely take in: rows of carriages drawn up on at the edge of every pavement; men and women walking, on horseback or in carriages; shopmen, trimly dressed, stepping out to meet customers or to deliver parcels into waiting carriages; bakers and confectioners with open windows filled with buns and tarts; coffee shops, trunkmakers, hosiers, fruit and vegetable stalls loaded with cabbages and cauliflowers, a fishmonger drenching his shop with cold water in the heat of the sun.

  Although Darwin had promised himself that the manuscript would be delivered before the end of July, this was not a good week for Lankester to look at it, nor for Darwin to be in London, if he expected to see old friends. Lankester was due to sail to Paris at any moment as one of the jurors of the Great Exhibition invited by Louis Napoleon, the President of the French Republic, to a festival in honour of the Exhibition. Joseph Hooker and his new wife Frances would be there, too, with the other British guests, who included the members of the Royal Commission, the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the City of London. Lankester would be busy with the daily schedules of glamorous receptions, fetes, theatre and ballet performances. However, Lankester had made an agreement to look at the manuscript, Paris or not, and Darwin would hold him to it. He would return for the manuscript in eight or nine days, he said. There would be no settling down to the new barnacle volume until this one was in print.

  So with the manuscript safely in Old Burlington Street, Darwin and Emma could look through the papers and decide which sights they would see with the two children. Eras, living as he did in the heart of fashionable Mayfair, had seen many of die sights already and recommended some of the panoramas and lectures at the Polytechnic on Regent Street – they would be of particular interest to his science-minded brother. Emma’s brother Hensleigh and Fanny had already been to stay with the hospitable bachelor Erasmus that summer and he had some feel for what Fanny’s children had enjoyed. There was even a Chinese junk moored on the Thames, he told the children, and the Chinese sailors threw wild parties with fireworks at night.21 First of all, though, they must see what the world and his wife had travelled to London to see: the Palace of Glass in Hyde Park – the Great Exhibition. Erasmus ordered three carriages to take them all the short distance from Park Street to the Prince of Wales Gate on Kensington Road, skirting the perimeter of the great park. The carriages would keep them a little separated from the crowds, he said, and save the children’s feet. From Kensington Road the children peered through the carriage windows and through the crowds to get a glimpse of the fairy palace, which looked for all the world like a great cathedral made of crystal.

  22 Interior of The Crystal Palace

  As Charles, Emma, Eras and the children with Parslow and the ladies’ maids approached the main entrance, the arched transept towered above them, catching the colours of the sky and clouds like an enormous mirror, a hundred feet high. The effect of the exhibition was ‘more than sense can scan or imagination attain’, The Times had eulogized and for Darwin, accustomed to microscopic vision and easily moved to wonder and awe, this must have seemed a vision. His eyes could simply not take it all in at once. Stretching away from them on either side as they queued to enter, the building faced them with its 1,851 feet of glass, probably the longest building they had ever seen. Through the turnstile, past the stalls selling catalogues and the umbrella stands, they stood to absorb their first impressions, suddenly stilled along with the scores of other visitors who had entered with them. Charles or Erasmus lifted the little boy George to see it all: flowers and palm trees, the towering Hyde Park elms now under glass at the far end of the transept, the brilliant blue-and-white colour scheme and the great netting of steel that held it all together between them and the sky. Before them sparkled the famous Osier’s Crystal Fountain, twenty-seven feet high, made of coloured glass and surrounded by sculptures of gleaming white marble.

  Through the crowds they glimpsed the glitter of the Koh-i-noor diamond, heard the thunder and hiss of the great steam engines, tasted the savoury pies and jellies in the refreshment courts, looked up at the stuffed elephant, down at the scientific instruments, microscopes and inventions, wandered through the stained glass and carved wood of the Mediaeval Court, peered into tented courts of Indian furniture and textiles, admired artefacts made of glass, crystal and steel by British manufacturers, and heard the incessant hyperbole of the attendants about the might and inventiveness of British industry. Like most visitors, they were overwhelmed by things – by light, by invention and by progress. Eventually it was all too much. Darwin’s head swam. The children became cross and quarrelsome; Emma tired. Erasmus had seen this all before with his other visitors: Exhibition fatigue; time to go home.

  Another day Emma and Darwin left the children
in the care of their uncle to visit other sights: the Overland Mail diorama at the Gallery of Illustration at 14 Regent Street. The advertisement in The Athenaeum promised: ‘The Diorama of the Overland Mail to India exhibiting Southampton, the Bay of Biscay, Cintra, the Tagus, Tarifa, Gibraltar, Malta, Algiers, Alexandria, Cairo, Suez, the Red Sea, Aden, Ceylon, Madras, Calcutta, and the magnificent Mausoleum of the Taj Mehal, the exterior by moonlight, the beautiful gateway and the gorgeous interior, lighted by crystal and golden lamps’.22 All in one afternoon. Together he and Emma would travel to India without leaving their seats, by watching a revolving series of vast brightly lit, richly painted scenes moving across the stage in a darkened theatre, reconstructing the journey made by Thomas Waghorn, a naval officer, between London and Calcutta. They were used to mental travelling, reading as they did, listening to Emma’s piano playing as they did – they could conjure up the same images. Emma had travelled at sixteen throughout Europe with her sisters – the Grand Tour – but she only knew the East through Harriet Martineau’s descriptions. Now it was all so vivid and sublime in the moving diorama images, new exotic worlds opening out before them.

  23 Royal Polytechnic Institution

  At the Polytechnic Emma and Charles listened to lectures on the chemistry of the minerals of the Great Exhibition, including the Koh-i-noor diamond; on the total eclipse of the sun; demonstrations of Foucault’s Pendulum, accompanied by explanations of how the heavily and apparently erratically swinging pendulum proved the rotation of the Earth’s surface; a lecture that promised to explain how newly invented gas cookers would revolutionize British kitchens; a lecture on the history of the harp with vocal illustrations; and watched two series of dissolving views of a diver and diving bell – all of this for only one shilling: a bargain. They also took the children to the Zoological Gardens, which were an entirely different place now that they had opened up to the public, Darwin noted. It was astonishing that these animals drew crowds as large as this – there had been over 300,000 visitors since January, the porter told him.23 They saw the family of elephants, monkeys in small and cramped cages, the young orang-utan from Borneo, the new and depressed alligator, which refused to surface, horned lizards, hummingbirds, ospreys and jaguars, and the famous hippo Obadiah, which Annie had seen the previous year with Miss Thorley.24 In a week Emma and Darwin had not left London, but they had travelled to India, Africa, Greece, Egypt and to the bottom of the sea – all by means of panoramas and dioramas and a garden full of exotic animals. Like millions of visitors to London that year, they found in London all the empire and exotic lands they needed, carefully performed at their convenience in the comfort of Leicester Square or Piccadilly.25