Darwin and the Barnacle
Page 29
He had now identified barnacles with separate sexes in both of the major groups: both sessile (Cryptophialus) and stalked (Ibla and Scalpellum). It revealed spectacularly, he wrote, ‘how gradually nature changes from one condition to the other – in this case from bisexuality to unisexuality’.6 But these males were utterly and fully dispensable. They were minute, multiple, short-lived and had been reduced to only three segments of the usual seventeen barnacle body parts. This was enough for Arthrobalanus survival.
Though it shadowed the burrowing of Alcippe, and the separate sexes of lbla and Scalpellum, Arthrobalanus seemed – extraordinarily – to belong to no one. He would have to have an order all of his own, a new and yet-to-be named order: Abdominalis, he decided, for, uniquely in the barnacle world, Arthrobalanus’s legs were attached to its abdomen and not its thorax. He wrote up his final word portrait of Cryptophialus minutus at the end of March, summarizing the deviance and miracle of this creature in the passionless language of the systematist. There were no exclamation marks allowed here:
Cirripedia, having a flask-like carapace; body consisting of one cephalic, seven thoracic, and three abdominal segments; the latter bearing three pairs of cirri; the thoracic segments without limbs; mouth with the labrum greatly produced and capable of independent movements; oesophagus armed with teeth at its lower end; larva, firstly egg-like, without external limbs or an eye; lastly binocular, without thoracic legs, but with abdominal appendages.7
He was still uncertain, though. His instinct troubled him and he badly needed more time to think over the puzzle that Mr Arthrobalanus’s abdomen presented. But he had no time. Lankester was pressing him hard. There was no option but to try to leave the subject as open as he dared, as he had done with the Ibla and Scalpellum descriptions. So he wrote a curious footnote, seeking to leave the door open as far as he could: ‘I may add that I have several times tried to persuade myself, with no success, into the belief that I have somehow misunderstood the homologies of the thoracic segments and cirri of Trypetesa and Cryptophialus; for if this were so, the two genera could be brought into much closer relationship …’8
On 30 March he carefully placed the eleven prepared slides, with their black asphalt circles containing the dissected body parts of Mr Arthrobalanus, back in the narrow oak drawers of his cabinet, and pushed them shut. Case closed but – frustratingly – not to his satisfaction. Arthrobalanus was mapped but still only dimly understood in evolutionary terms. Time had run out.
He still had one final deviant to map: Proteolepas, which had no legs at all, neither attached to thorax nor abdomen. Like Arthrobalanus it burrowed, so was naked and resembled the larva of a maggot or a fly and like Alcippe had no stomach or anus. This too had to have its own separate order: Apoda – legless.
In 1835, only hours after he had picked up Mr Arthrobalanus’s conch-shell home, whilst he dissected him in the cabin of the Beagle, the volcano out in the sea had begun to erupt spectacularly. He and FitzRoy had watched its angry lava pouring out into the night sky. Days later Darwin had felt the ground tremble under his feet on the shoreline of the South American forest and watched the sea surge up the beach, driven by submarine convulsions. Concepción had been devastated, the cathedral reduced to rubble.
Now, only three days after finishing the final dissections of Mr Arthrobalanus, he read newspaper reports of earthquakes in the west and south-west of England on the night of 1 April: rumbling noises, houses shaken as though by wind, windows rattling and bells ringing. These were but the aftershocks of a huge earthquake that was felt around the world that night, particularly in Canada and in the state of New York.9
Darwin was not a superstitious man; he saw no portents in earthquakes, no signs of divine unrest; but this had been a strange year, meteorologically: snowstorms, floods, fireballs, northern lights and now earthquakes.
In London, a few days later, at a meeting of the Geological Society, friends pointed out Thomas Huxley across the crowded room. Though still struggling to secure a university position, Huxley was making a career for himself, they said. The Toronto job had gone to another man, but he had already been given a Royal Medal for his work, and had delivered a Royal Institution lecture. From a distance Darwin watched him talking animatedly, gesticulating with his hands, black eyes flashing under thick black brows. Formally introduced, the two men opened a conversation about the sea squirt, a creature that, when disturbed, squirts sea water as it contracts. Huxley explained that he was cataloguing the British Museum’s collection and had some ideas developing. John Chapman, he told Darwin, who enquired after his career, had offered him his own science review column in the heavyweight quarterly, the Westminster Review. This was power indeed, Darwin reflected. From the top of his column Huxley would be able to read and review all the latest science books and shape public reaction to them. If he came to be trusted by the readers of the Westminster, his word could make or break a theory or the reputation of a naturalist. Huxley’s conversation was witty and sparkling, his language bold and colourful. He gossiped easily, was indiscreet. Darwin warmed to him. He had sea squirts back at Down House, he said quietly, rare ones that he would not be using. Would Huxley find them useful?
25 Thomas Huxley
Immediately on his return to Down, exhausted from conversation and suffering from the painful flatulence that the London visits always brought on, Darwin wrote to Huxley to cement the beginnings of what he hoped might be a valuable friendship. He wrote to offer some twelve to fifteen sea squirts, describing in detail all their coils and colours and tails by way of bait. Tucked away on his shelves, he wrote, he had a copy of Johannes Müller’s important work on echinoderms, a book that Huxley was unlikely to have seen and was bound to covet. So with a rare book and rare bottled specimens from the Falkland Islands promised but not yet sent, he slipped seamlessly into his own request. Rare sea squirts, it seemed, came with strings attached:
You spoke as if you had an intention to review my Cirripedia: it is very indelicate in me to say so, but it would give me great pleasure to see my work reviewed by any one so capable as you of praising anything which might deserve praise, and criticising the errors which no doubt it contains … it has been published a year, and no notice has been taken of it by any zoologist, except briefly by Dana. Upon my honour I never did such a thing before as suggest (not that I have exactly suggested this time) a review to any living being…. I have become a man of one idea, – cirripedes morning & night –10
Just days after receiving Darwin’s letter, Huxley’s mother died; but despite his grief, caused in part by his inability to find consolation in Christianity,11 he copied out and sent Darwin a copy of the mollusc paper he was working on, asking for comments and opinions and confirming that he would like to see the rare sea squirts. Bartering as well as conversation had begun and both men recognized the importance of the friendship. In the mollusc paper Huxley had declared his position on the species question – he was an archetype man, and his archetypes were absolute and unwavering – but at least he marked himself off from Richard Owen in this respect, by making it absolutely clear that these archetypes were real material structures like ‘a diagram in a geometrical theorem’,12 not idealized Platonic blueprints. However – and this was a disappointment to Darwin – Huxley was clearly passionate about showing that nature had absolute archetypal boundaries. He was a fixity-of-species man.
This was difficult: how to get Huxley to see that species might be mutable without turning the man against him? How to keep the conversation going without becoming entrenched in battle positions? Darwin drew his most speculative prose about him like a cloak, as if he were thinking these things through, still not decided, an ignorant man groping for the truth:
I have read it all with much interest; but it wd be ridiculous in me to make any remarks on a subject on which I am so utterly ignorant … Several of your remarks have interested me; I am, however, surprised at what you say versus ‘anamorphism’: I shd have thought that the archetype in
imagination was always in some degree embryonic, & therefore capable of & generally undergoing further development.13
Then in for the kill – seemingly light and inconsequential questions that Huxley would find difficult to answer.
Is it not an extraordinary fact, the great difference in position of the heart in different species of Cleodora? I am a believer that when any part usually constant differs considerably in different allied species; that it will be found in some degree variable, within the limits of the same species: – Thus, I shd expect that if great numbers of specimens of some of the species of Cleodora had been examined with this object in view, the position of the heart in some of the species, wd have been found variable. – Can you aid me with any analogous facts?14
This strategy came naturally to him. It was one he used with Hooker – rounds of carefully formulated questions which, when answered, began to work away at certainties. It would be some time before Darwin would succeed in converting Huxley to the species theory, but he had begun.
Now that the ground had thawed after the long snows and the floods had abated, Darwin turned from his barnacle burrowers to his own digging project. The pump from the now-abandoned douche had given him an idea for an experiment inspired by Justus von Liebig’s Familiar Letters on Chemistry.15 In London everyone was talking and writing about sanitary reform; without a proper sewer system such as the one Napoleon III was building in Paris, human waste would simply choke London, and the Thames was itself already no more than an open sewer. Everywhere people were devising schemes whereby clean water could be channelled into the city and the waste pumped out. Liebig was one of them. Passionate about circulating the chemicals of life and death, he advocated returning waste matter to the soil to rejuvenate it on a large scale. The followers of British sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick were pressing for engineering schemes that would channel the waste straight into the fields, thereby providing free fertilizer, and setting up a perfect circulation between the putrefying and the living, the city and the country.16 The huge machines and inventions of the Great Exhibition had made people feel that anything was possible with enough imagination, experimentation and financial investment.
While completing the dissection of his deviant burrowing barnacles Alcippe, Arthrobalanus and Proteolepas, Darwin wrote to his brother Erasmus:
I am very much obliged for the calculations about the Tanks. I am scheming a great water-work & heartily wish you were here to scheme: it is to make a very large tank; & then to be able from this to fill my three others, which are much smaller but as deep or deeper, from the shallow one. I want you to look when next at Athenaeum in Encyclopaedia, & see if you can find anything on the subject. The siphon I propose to be gutta Percha: it would have to be about 180 feet from top of the furthest tank to tank, not in a quite straight line …17
He had already built a liquid sewage tank ten years earlier at Down House,18 and since then he had added sunken, covered brick-lined water tanks, so he knew how expensive these building schemes could be. He had some trading to do first, some cashing in of railway shares to release the money that would be needed to buy the bricks and the labour and that would pay for the design of the cables and pumps. If the summer was hot and dry, as it had been the previous year, the Down House gardeners would have a much greater supply of water to use on the vegetable and flower gardens and in the orchard.
Unable to work out the siphon system, he had written to the Gardeners’ Chronicle at the end of April, explaining his scheme and asking for advice: ‘Now can any one tell [me] whether a syphon made of Burgess and Keys’ canvas hose, lined and coated with gutta percha, or of any other material, would practically answer? What bore should the siphon have, to convey in the course of 10 or 12 hours 3000 gallons of water?’19
The answers came not from the readers of the Gardeners’ Chronicle but from Edward Cresy, to whom Darwin had written separately, the principal assistant clerk at the Metropolitan Board of Works and architect to the fire brigade, an expert on pumps and on gutta percha, a newly discovered natural rubber that had been used to line and insulate the great telegraph cable, laid three years before across the Atlantic seabed. At Cresy’s suggestion Darwin travelled to the London offices of patent agents Burgess & Key to discuss the project on 7 May, combining his visit with Lord Rosse’s Royal Society party, where he and Hooker talked late into the night about Hooker’s travels in India.20 Burgess & Key were not able to supply the piping that Darwin needed at a price he was prepared to pay, so despondently he settled on a much smaller project with a single tank, worked by the pump from the douche. It had taken up too much time already. The village builder, Issac Laslett, completed the work on 4 July.21
When George Sowerby came in mid-June to complete the illustrations for the 900-page third volume, Darwin worked ‘like a slave’22 alongside him, while outside Laslett completed the domed brickwork for the tank near the well. A promised holiday with Emma and the children was now only a couple of weeks away. To make matters worse, a valuable collection of rare fossil barnacles had arrived from a chemist and fossil collector in Maastricht on 8 June. The new collection and the delays in completion of the garden tank23 forced Darwin to postpone the family holiday. Elizabeth, who turned six on 8 July, and George, who turned eight on the following day, would have to celebrate their birthdays in Down House, not by the sea. He couldn’t set off without at least seeing the tank complete, and the fossil barnacle collection was tantalizing; it was, Darwin wrote to Joseph Bosquet, ‘a magnificent present … I truly hope that you have not robbed yourself’.24 Finally, on 14 July, the fossil barnacle volume still frustratingly incomplete, Darwin and Emma made for Eastbourne, where Emma had secured lodgings for three weeks at 13 Sea Houses, in an elegant parade overlooking the sea.25
Darwin’s mind was absorbed with digging, despite the completion of the tanks: now it was gold mines. Emma had been reading aloud from the volumes of Godfrey Charles Munday’s new book Our Antipodes … with a Glimpse of the Gold Fields. The children loved to hear the gold-rush stories, particularly George, knowing that their father’s friend and old servant Syms Covington lived out there in the great open spaces that Munday described. The discovery of gold in Western Australia had not led to the civil disorder that had so characterized the California gold rush; Munday described the gold mines as orderly and healthy places to make a fortune: ‘there has scarcely been a case of serious sickness at either of the diggings. The scarcity of strong drinks, the plainest of food, physical activity combined with a healthy degree of mental excitement, seems to render drugs and doctors useless.’26
Munday’s description of life in Sydney with its warm climate all year round, shark hunts, balls, picnics and oyster hunts, stood in sharp contrast to the Eastbourne in which they arrived in July 1853 as Darwin described it to Fox: ‘Here we are in a state of profound idleness, which to me is a luxury; & we shd all, I believe, have been in a state of high enjoyment, had it not been for the detestable cold gales & much rain, which always gives much ennui to children, away from home.’27
The rains were torrential across the country that month, The Times reported. Many farmers who had lost livestock in the heavy spring snows, had been expecting an abundant hay harvest, which was now quite ruined. Darwin’s additional tank, so carefully and expensively built to insure against drought, would not be drawn upon this year. In Eastbourne, tourists sheltered like the Darwins inside damp lodging houses and watched the rain fall on the bathing machines and donkeys and the colours change from green to grey out on the storm-mirrored sea. When Darwin asked Lenny how he liked Eastbourne, the boy, now three, replied, nodding towards the sea: ‘I like that pond best but where will they put it to when we dig in the sand?’28
Darwin, free to watch his growing children adapt to a new environment, wondered at the variety of type and personality he and Emma had brought about as they promenaded with the children, governess and nurses gathered around them like a small tribe. William, released from the routines of school,
enjoyed the freedoms of the family holiday and his own senior place in the family pecking order; Etty liked the seashore, collecting shells and showing an interest in identifying them with her father; Lizzie, now decidedly eccentric, talked and mumbled odd phrases to herself, keeping away from the other children, particularly the boys, whom she found tiresome; George, popular and good-natured, ran and chased and bothered the younger boys, played at soldiers and ignored his sisters. Lenny whined and complained a good deal about his bumps and cuts, so that George teased him about being a baby. Bony, they called him. He cried easily. Franky and Horace were like large, soft puppies, rolling and tumbling together, sand between their fat white toes.29
On long wet days, when Emma had finished reading about Australia and the gold rush, she transported the entire family to Africa for long hours by reading aloud from their cousin Francis Galton’s new book which Darwin called Tour in South Africa. Galton, still in his early thirties, had sailed for Africa in 1850 in search of adventure and unknown territories and good shooting opportunities. He had found there ‘shooting in abundance, and an opportunity to learn about an interesting race of negroes’, the Damara tribe who lived in a land ‘where no white man had ever penetrated’. The two-year journey, he wrote, had given him ‘robust health’ and had fostered ‘habits of self-reliance in rude emergencies … which are well worth possessing, though an English education hardly tends to promote them’.30 Darwin dreamed of such adventures and experience for his own boys, fostering habits of self-reliance. It was the best book he had heard read for months, with its descriptions of the customs and rituals of the Damara tribe, as well as stories of mirages, missionary stations, night bivouacs in the desert, attacks by lions, shooting giraffes and watching game at night through a large pair of opera glasses – a manly tale told by a family member, blood stock. He wrote ‘good’ next to it in his reading notebook – so good, in fact, that he wrote to Galton from Eastbourne, care of the publishers, to congratulate him: ‘What labours & dangers you have gone through: I can hardly fancy how you can have survived them, for you did not formerly look very strong, but you must now be as tough as one of your own African waggons!’