Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  In trying to tell Galton of his own life, however, he suddenly felt keenly aware of what such a life might look like from the outside to such a rugged and proven adventurer as his cousin:

  ‘I live at a village called Down near Farnborough in Kent, & employ myself in Zoology; but the objects of my study are very small fry, & to a man accustomed to rhinoceroses & lions, would appear infinitely insignificant.’31

  Natural modesty, but doubts too about the significance of the pile of papers that would soon, printed, make up the third of four volumes; he had made a mountain out of a barnacle. He found he couldn’t even venture to tell Galton that the ‘small fry’ of his study were barnacles, the subject of his major work – his life’s work, perhaps, if he never managed to finish the species book. Who would read such a book compared to those who would cherish Galton’s story? And what would people say of the two of them? – Galton, the adventurer in uncharted Africa; Darwin, the barnacle man, the man of the footnote. Yet there was a frankness in Galton’s style and the spirit of his book that Darwin felt he could learn from. His Preface made no grand claims: he offered simply the observations of a curious traveller into a world unknown to Europeans. He was reflective and enthusiastic; he admitted when he didn’t know how things worked.

  While in Eastbourne, Darwin and Emma read, to their horror, about the deaths of two little boys, aged eight and ten, who had been spending their summer at William Fox’s rectory in Cheshire. These sons of family friends, having lost their mother, had been partially adopted by Fox and his wife, absorbed into their huge family. Ellen Fox had just given birth to their eleventh child and now they had scarlet fever in his household, the enemy within. Darwin and Emma knew what faced the distraught parents. They were under siege, waiting for the next strike, trying to explain the deaths to the small children, disinfecting everything, waiting. Darwin wrote to his cousin desperately from Eastbourne: ‘do pray sometime tell me how far you have escaped’. But then Susan, Darwin’s sister, forwarded an ominous letter from Fox reporting that their two-year-old daughter Louisa was seriously ill. Darwin wrote to Fox on 29 July:

  ‘I am so sorry I sent off my former letter on indifferent subjects to you. – But the case has been incomparably worse than I had dreamed of. I did not know how completely the two Boys had been domesticated with you. – you have our deepest sympathy.’32

  Louisa died that very day. When he heard the news some week or so later, when the family had returned to Down House, Darwin wrote immediately to his cousin, with the tight punctuation that he had always used when writing about Annie, as if the words choked him, made him stutter:

  We too lost, as you may remember, not very long ago, a most dear child, of whom, I can hardly yet bear to think tranquilly; yet, as you must know from your own most painful experience, time softens & deadens, in a manner truly wonderful, one’s feelings and regrets. At first it is indeed bitter. I can only hope that your health & that of poor Mrs Fox may be preserved; & that time may do its work softly, & bring you all together, once again as a happy family, which, as I can well believe, you so lately formed.33

  Darwin had promised to take the children with Admiral Sulivan to see the military manoeuvres that had been going on all summer on Chobham Common in Surrey, which was conveniently only a handful of miles from Hermitage House, the home of Emma’s brother and sister-in-law Jessie and Harry Wedgwood. Three days after writing to Fox, Darwin, Emma and family travelled to Surrey. The soldiers, camped here since June, for all their fine displays and mock battles, were preparing for war. Skirmishes between the Russians and the Turks were becoming critical along the Russian border, and war was likely to break out at any moment. Military leaders, ambassadors and politicians across Europe looked on anxiously, for any shift in the balance of power between these two mighty empires would have a global impact. For the British, increased Russian expansion in the Middle East threatened critical trade routes to India and to the Mediterranean. The balance of power had to be maintained. In July, whilst the Darwins were in Eastbourne in the rain, Russia had made its first move, marching into the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. War was now inevitable.

  26 The Allied Camp on the plateau before Sebastopol, 1855

  The sight of 10,000 soldiers storming enemy positions, practising tactics, building camps, bridges and defensive positions on this sandy heathland was, the papers claimed, the most dramatic spectacle of the season, comparable only to the Great Exhibition of two years earlier. It had to be seen. War fever and patriotism brought thousands of tourists that summer, including the Darwin and Sulivan families, with their combined clutch of thirteen children. Their first sight from the Wedgwood carriages was breathtaking: a two-mile stretch of levelled heath, studded with hundreds of white conical military tents, the whole panorama swept with wood smoke from camp fires. To Darwin’s eyes, if to no one else’s in the party, those conical tents must have looked for all the world like clusters of milky-white barnacles on a rocky shoreline at low tide – bizarre. Amongst the tents, thousands of human figures in red or white jackets moved about, cleaning and polishing equipment, cooking, tending the horses and digging trenches. Over the next three days the families stayed all day watching cavalry charges and thrilling to the sounds of metal on metal, rifle fire and the thundering of horses’ hooves. On one day they found themselves in the path of a charging army, the 13th Light Dragoons, and ‘had to run hard to get out of the way’. These same soldiers in dashing dark-blue uniform with gold braid, would charge with the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War a year later, and many would die there.

  George, eight, now completely besotted by all things military, spent his time showing Sulivan how he could spot the different regiments by the colour and cut of their uniforms: the Royal Horse Guards, the battalions of the 19th, 35th, 79th, 88th, and 97th Foot, 2nd Dragoons, 4th Light Dragoons and the 8th Hussars. From the vantage point of a hill Sulivan explained all the military movements with the greatest of approval as if it were a giant chess-board stretched out beneath them. The military strategist was in his element.34

  Darwin’s mind was also on strategy. He had a Preface to write and reviews to negotiate. How to draw the reader’s mind from the chaos of barnacle detail to larger philosophical questions? And whether he should. He had originally intended to write a separate volume, in which he would consider all the philosophical questions the barnacles raised; but now, in this bellicose climate, he was not so sure he was ready to do so.35 The still-anonymous author of one of the most speculative books of the century, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, had just brought out a tenth edition of his book. Darwin still thought it intriguing nonsense, but it had been in print for ten years and had brought a version of the development theory into the drawing rooms of Britain to be laughed at or taken seriously. During those ten years, public opinion about development had shifted perceptibly, while he had been entirely caught up with his barnacles. The reviews of Vestiges were more positive now that the book had held its place in print for as long as this, and the reviewers seemed to want to engage with the larger questions of science, even if they remained critical of the inaccuracies in the elegantly written book, errors ‘both in fact and philosophy’.36 Huxley, too, though damning the book, noted in his review column that the questions ‘thinking men’ were prepared to ask were now bigger and bolder; but the climate of debate at the Geological Society and the Royal Society had become increasingly warlike on these big questions, Darwin noted, each time he went to London. War fever had infected all men of science, it seemed. Huxley spoke glibly in conversation about front lines and hostilities. Debates about development theories had come to sound like warfare, with intellectuals ranged on either side of a policed border, hurling bricks at each other. It must be possible, Darwin was sure, to put his ideas into words speculatively, tentatively, to engage in conversation and debate rather than intellectual and religious conflict.37

  Now that London intellectuals were taking sides and journalists were
championing the development hypothesis in the public eye, stirring up conflict, polarizing opinion, it seemed that no systematist in botany or zoology could easily avoid publishing new work without commenting one way or another. Prefaces and Introductions had become statements of position and conversations were being closed down this way, Darwin complained to the young naturalist, John Lubbock, working under his direction at Down. He was still waiting to see what Hooker would do with his first publication after their conversations at Down in the spring. The long-promised preview of Hooker’s manuscript introduction to Flora Novae-Zelandiae arrived by post in September after a longer silence than usual between the two friends.38 What would Hooker have to say about the species problem? The introductory essay, much longer than Darwin had expected, was brilliant, clever, well written. Hooker displayed his knowledge as a man of unquestionable authority, surveying recent developments in botany critically and judiciously. In the opening pages Hooker wrote that he felt the need to declare his theoretical views on the origin, variation and dispersion of species, because all too often naturalists began research with a hypothesis they wanted to prove that coloured their judgement. Whilst he felt humble about his ability to ‘grapple with these great questions’, Hooker wrote, he felt it necessary to do so. Then came six pages of suspense, while Hooker, having announced his intention to pin his colours to the mast, digressed to summarize the history of the botany of New Zealand. Darwin skipped anxiously through these pages, still uncertain how Hooker would stand on the ‘great questions’. The first indications of a declaration-of-position critical statement began to unfold many pages later, as Hooker began to set out his stall:

  Although in the Flora I have proceeded on the assumption that species, however they originated or were created, have been handed down to us as such, and that all the individuals of a unisexual plant have proceeded from one individual, and all of a bisexual from a single pair, I wish it to be distinctly understood that I do not put this forward intending it to be interpreted into an avowal of the adoption of a fixed or unalterable opinion on my part.39

  He had taken a position, he claimed, because a systematist ‘should keep some such definite idea constantly before him, to give unity to his design’. For today, Hooker claimed, he was a fixity-of-species man. But tomorrow …? He reserved the right to change his mind.

  Darwin was not surprised at Hooker’s decision to argue for fixity. After all, he had expected him to play safe with regard to species; he had no choice. Although Hooker might have wanted to allude to Darwin’s natural selection ideas, he was bound to silence by his friend, and until Darwin actually published evidence about the mutability of species, Hooker would have to take the position that carried most evidence. Despite the arguments for fixity, however, Darwin found Hooker’s discursive, open-minded Preface surprisingly powerful to read. His friend seemed to be thinking aloud, weighing up the evidence, speculating. He was opening up questions for discussion, not firing guns. The Preface might encourage others to do likewise: dialogue, open discussion; not warfare. After all, it wasn’t that Hooker absolutely believed in creationism – he wasn’t fighting a Holy War – but rather that his friend’s entire intellectual energy thus far in his botanical career had been dedicated to finding affinities, establishing stable patterns of kinship within the botanical world. He had a tidy mind, and within all the chaos of mountains of dried plant specimens in which he and Thomson worked at Kew, it perhaps seemed the only course open to them, to make sense of it all, to find patterns, mark out stable natural boundaries. Besides, his friend’s career was still hanging in the balance, and he and Frances had started a family that spring.40 Darwin had not gathered enough evidence as yet for him to risk that career for.

  Darwin wrote to congratulate his friend on his ‘admirable introduction’, veiling his criticisms and defensiveness in the rhetoric of congratulation:

  Many of your arguments appear to me very well put: & as far as my experience goes, the candid way in which you discuss the subject is unique. The whole will be very useful to me, whenever I undertake my volume; though parts take the wind very completely out of my sails, for I have for some time determined to give the arguments on both sides, (as far as I could) instead of arguing on the mutability side alone.41

  He could not blame Hooker for arguing for the stability of species, but he might at least have alluded more to other hypothetical positions – he might have been more balanced perhaps. Hooker had made the evidence seem more clear-cut than it was; he skewed the picture in favour of fixity. Behind the scenes, in Darwin’s study and in letters, hadn’t Hooker admitted that on some days he couldn’t decide whether the New Zealand specimens before him belonged to one species or twenty-eight? But then Hooker was approaching classification differently, impelled by the need to carve order out of the chaos of stamens and leaves and fibres. Darwin, on the other hand, was trying to do two things simultaneously. He was trying to classify species, as Hooker was, but he was also trying to understand how these species had evolved and diversified through eons of seabed and rockpool time.42

  In the Preface, Hooker had, like Harvey before him, advised students of botany to undertake their investigations with no fixed idea to prove and without ‘reference to any speculations which are too apt to lead the inquirer away from the rigorous investigation of details, from which alone truth can be elicited’.43 Was this attack on men with a fixed idea an allusion to his friend Darwin? It was difficult to tell, Darwin reflected. He had started out on his barnacle research with a theory – that species had changed through time through a process of natural and sexual selection – and yet he had always been prepared to abandon it, if he had encountered incontrovertible evidence that disproved it. The species theory had complicated his barnacle findings, not simplified them. He felt he had to defend himself against Hooker’s attack on men with fixed ideas, so he wrote carefully, trying to avoid sounding aggrieved:

  … in my own cirripedial work … I have not felt conscious that disbelieving in the permanence of species has made much difference one way or the other; in some few cases (if publishing avowedly on doctrine of non-permanence) I shd not have affixed names, & in some few cases shd have affixed names to remarkable varieties. Certainly I have felt it humiliating, discussing & doubting & examining over & over again, when in my own mind, the only doubt has been, whether the form varied today or yesterday (to put a fine point on it, as Snagsby would say). After describing a set of forms, as distinct species, tearing up my M.S., & making them one species; tearing that up & making them separate, & then making them one again (which has happened to me) I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, & asked what sin I had committed to be so punished. But I must confess, that perhaps nearly the same thing wd have happened to me on any scheme of work.44

  It was not that the theory stopped him seeing objectively, rather that no barnacle facts at any point contradicted his theory. Confirmation was everywhere; but always the classifier in him was in conflict with the speculator, he told Hooker. One looked to solve a problem one way, the other in another. Either way, headaches and sickness followed.

  Whilst the words of Hooker’s manuscript were not yet set in the stone of a printing room, Darwin knew that these finely chosen words were unlikely to change significantly. Hooker had stayed on the other side of the line – the fixity side. He had no choice while Darwin’s theory remained a secret between them. Darwin was keen to absolve his friend tactfully of any feelings of responsibility, and he bade him farewell cheerfully, as if he were embarking on a voyage that would separate them for some time: ‘Farewell, good luck to your work, – whether you make the species hold up their heads or hang them down, as long as you don’t quite annihilate them or make them quite permanent; it will all be nuts to me; so farewell yours most truly, C. Darwin.’45

  A week later, however, sending comments on the rest of Hooker’s volume, he wrote more positively still, calling the essay ‘perfect & elaborated … the most important discussion on the points in questions
, ever published. I can say no more.’ Yet it did make him feel gloomy, he admitted, to see that Hooker was about to put into print arguments for the permanence of species that at present he could not publically challenge and that amounted to hostile facts he would have to deal with later:

  partly from feeling I could not answer some points which theoretically I shd have liked to have been different; partly from seeing so far better done than I could have done, discussions on some points which I had intended to have taken up … In a year or two’s time, when I shall be at my species book (if I do not break down) I shall gnash my teeth & abuse you for having put so many hostile facts so confoundedly well.46

  He consoled himself, he told Hooker, by reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s new novel Ruth, which he asked Hooker to tell his wife, was ‘quite charming’. ‘I am becoming an abandoned novel-reader,’ he added, conscious that Frances was keen to convert them all to novel-reading.47 He abandoned his plans to write an accompanying volume in which he would tease out all the philosophical conclusions to which the barnacles had carried him.48 He would, he decided, let the barnacles speak for themselves. When he did take a position, it would not be here in the pages of the barnacle research. It would colour readers’ reactions to it, make it seem that he was a man so fixed in his tracks that he would prove one idea only. He would stay silent on the bigger issues, perhaps occasionally infer a philosophical conclusion but never state one categorically. The battle – if it proved to be a battle – would not be fought on barnacle ground.