Darwin and the Barnacle
Page 31
A month later, in November, Hooker wrote effusively from London to congratulate Darwin on winning the Royal Medal for his work on the stalked barnacles, admitting playfully, however: ‘I neither proposed you, nor seconded you; nor voted for you.’ The prize, a gold medal of some considerable weight, would be presented on 30 November. The ‘warmth, friendship & kindness’ of Hooker’s enthusiasm made Darwin ‘glow with pleasure till my very heart throbbed’, a pleasure that was worth more, he wrote to Hooker, ‘than all the medals that ever were or would be coined’.49
In early December he carried the third barnacle volume on sessile barnacles, containing his sketchy conclusions about Mr Arthrobalanus, to London – the longest and heaviest manuscript of them all, amounting to almost a thousand pages; not a manuscript to trust to a servant to deliver, even one as trustworthy as Parslow, nor a manuscript to lose sight of until it was handed over to Edwin Lankester personally.
The proofs began to arrive at the beginning of February 1854 and at the same time the Palaeontographical Society confirmed that they did want him to complete a separate volume on the fossil sessile barnacles for their series, despite Darwin’s concerns that there was really very little to say about the small number of fossil specimens that were of a decent enough condition to study.50 As he completed the proofs and tried to describe the last fossil specimens, he plunged into Hooker’s Himalayan Journals, delighted to find that Hooker had dedicated them secretly to him. Since he had read and reread Darwin’s wonderful Beagle travels, Hooker wrote to him, it had been his life’s ambition to complete such a book of exploration himself and ‘I am now happy to go on jog-trot at Botany till the end of my days’.51
Britain declared war on Russia in March. Sulivan enthusiastically reported for duty and sailed for the Baltic in command of his own ship, the Lightning, on the twenty-fifth. Most reports expected the military action to be over by the following Christmas. Darwin was full of anxieties about the consequences of war with Russia, fearful about completing the barnacle volumes and moving on to the inevitably controversial species book. Would his species theory explode like a bomb, leaving a mark on the world for ever? Or explode in apparent emptiness, ejecting a million spores into the air? He wrote to Hooker: ‘How awfully flat I shall feel, if when I get my notes together on species &c &c, the whole thing explodes like an empty puff-ball.’52 Within weeks, despite his fear that he had lost Hooker to the other side, the two men were in discussion about the species theory again, Hooker asking more and more questions of Darwin about what he understood by high and low, and teasing Darwin about his ‘elastic theory of creations & perfections & imperfections’.53
By July the proofed third volume was whirring its hundreds of pages through the presses of Charles and James Adlard, Printers, in Bartholomew Close, London, and the short fossil barnacle volume was nearing completion. In September 1854 Darwin could see an end to what had come to feel like damnation. He wrote to Hooker promising him a complimentary copy of the third volume:
I am very glad you wish to have my Barnacle Book, for I would rather send it to you than to any half-dozen-others, if you cared to have it. Our old friend Arthrobalanus is now christened Cryptophialus. Under the Order to which it belongs, I discuss the (as it appears to me) very curious case of its affinities; I was most uncomfortably puzzled how to class it & am far from sure that I decided correctly.
I have been frittering away my time for the last several weeks in a wearisome manner, partly idleness, & odds & ends, & sending ten-thousand Barnacles out of the house all over the world. – But I shall now in a day or two begin to look over my old notes on species. What a deal I shall have to discuss with you: I shall have to look sharp that I do not ‘progress’ into one of the greatest bores in life to the few like you with lots of knowledge.54
Notes
1 Darwin kept a microscope slide catalogue, which is now in the Cambridge Zoology Museum, History of the Collection, vol. III, 1892–97, no. 454. The microscope catalogue that lists the 11 Arthrobalanus slides shows that CD retained the Arthrobalanus name right to the end of his research, for at the top of the page he writes: ‘Arthrobalanus = Cryptophialus’.
2 Philip Henry Gosse, A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica, assisted by Richard Hill (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), p. v.
3 CD to Albany Hancock, 30 March 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 126. Subsequent zoological research has shown that Alcippe (now called Trypetesa) and Cryptophialus have much closer affinities than Darwin believed. See William A. Newman, ‘Darwin and Cirripedology’, in Crustacean Issues, vol. 8 (Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1993), pp. 385–6. I am grateful to Shelley Innes of the Darwin Correspondence Project for drawing Newman’s work to my attention.
4 CD to Albany Hancock, 30 March 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 127.
5 Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia, Vol. II. The Balanidae, vol. 12 of The Complete Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett & R. B. Freeman (London: William Pickering, 1988), p. 26.
6 Ibid., p. 29.
7 Ibid., p. 500.
8 Ibid., p. 501.
9 Annual Register, vol. 95 (1853), p. 48.
10 CD to T. H. Huxley, 11 April 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 130.
11 See Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 178. Huxley wrote in the after math of his mother’s death: ‘Belief and Happiness seem to be beyond the reach of thinking men in these days but Courage and Silence are left.’ Huxley’s mother died on 14 April; she was buried in Banning on 19 April. CD reported having read Huxley’s mollusc paper in a letter of 23 April, which means that Huxley must have sent it between receiving Darwin’s first letter dated 11 April, which would have arrived on 12 or 13 April. The most likely date therefore that Huxley sent the mollusc paper, which he would have had to copy out by hand before sending, would have been in the two or three days after his mother died.
12 T. H. Huxley, ‘On the Morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca, as illustrated by the anatomy of certain Heteropoda and Pteropoda collected during the voyage of the H.M.S. Rattlesnake in 1846–50, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London vol. 143 (1853), pp. 29–65.
13 CH to T. H. Huxley, 23 April 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 133.
14 Ibid., p. 133–4.
15 CD had first read Liebig’s book in November 1844 (Correspondence 4: p. 469); he read it again in October 1851, CD to William Darwin, 3 October 1851, Correspondence 5: p. 63. I owe a debt of gratitude to Randal Keynes, who is currently writing a book on the garden of Down House, for talking through the history of the tank building and sewage works with me and for drawing my attention to new sources of information.
16 For an intriguing interpretation of Chadwick’s schemes and their place in nineteenth-century culture see David Trotter, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
17 CD to E. A. Darwin, 26 April 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 136.
18 CD to Susan Darwin (CD’s sister, who had a special interest in Darwin’s live stock), 27–8 April 1843: ‘You ask also about the liquid manure; part of my apparatus is complete & the tank is made & is now beginning to fill: I hope to try one cask this spring.’ Correspondence 2: p. 360.
19 CD to Gardeners’ Chronicle, c.27 April 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 138.
20 Gutta percha was derived from trees growing around the Pacific Basin. It became flexible when heated, yet rock-hard when cool. It had been one of the star new products of the Great Exhibition. The London gutta percha factory burned down in June that year. An accidental fire took hold of the highly inflammable stocks and the fire would have caused massive destruction across this part of London if the fire service had not intervened. Annual Register, vol. 95 (1853), p. 68.
21 CD paid £32/3s to the builder and bricklayer Issac Laslett on 22 April, and a second instalment of £40/15s on 4 July. The pipes cost him £1/7s and £1/15s in two payments in June and August. See Corr
espondence 5: p. 140, note 1. I am grateful to Randal Keynes for supplying me with the following information about water tanks from George William Johnson, F.R.H.S. The Cottage Gardener’s Dictionary; describing the plants, fruits & vegetables desirable for the garden, etc (London: 1852), which claims that the best water ‘for the gardener’s purposes is rain water, preserved in tanks sunk in the earth, and rendered tight either by puddling, or bricks covered with Parker’s cement. To keep these tanks replenished, gutters should run round the eaves of every structure in the garden and communicate with them.’ The water from the well in the chalk was presumably hard and therefore, in the words of the Dictionary, ‘invariably prejudicial’ to plants.
22 CD to W. D. Fox, 17 Jury 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 147.
23 Darwin’s account book registers a final payment to the builders for 4 July. The invoice for the last instalment of gutta percha pipes is dated 18 August.
24 CD to J. A. H. de Bosquet, 18 June 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 143.
25 Now Marine Parade, Eastbourne.
26 Godfrey Charles Munday, Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian colonies. With a glimpse of the Gold Fields (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), vol. 3, p. 385.
27 CD to W. D. Fox, 17 July 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 147.
28 ‘Darwin’s Observations on his Children’, Appendix 3 in Correspondence 4: p. 426.
29 This account is based on descriptions of the Darwin children from Darwin’s own observations, reprinted as Appendix 3: ‘Darwin’s Observations on His Children,’ Correspondence 4: pp. 410–33, and on the accounts given in Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box (London, Fourth Estate, 2000).
30 Francis Galton, The Narrative of An Explorer in Tropical South Africa (London: John Murray, 1853), p. v. Darwin lists this book in his reading notebooks.
31 CD to Francis Galton, 24 July 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 149–50.
32 CD to W. D. Fox, 29 July 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 151.
33 CD to W. D. Fox, 10 August 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 151.
34 Etty described the Chobham visit later: ‘Our visit was planned in order to see what we could of the camp with its mimic warfare. I well remember my father’s intense enjoyment of the whole experience. Admiral Sulivan, his old shipmate on board the Beagle, showed us about and greatly added to our pleasure.’ Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters (London: John Murray, 1915), vol. 2, p. 154. My description of Chobham Camp is based upon an eyewitness account produced in Annual Register, vol. 95 (1853), pp. 78–9.
35 In the Preface to Living Cirripedia (1854) Darwin wrote: ‘I had originally intended to have published a small volume on my anatomical observations; but the full abstract given in my former volume, which will be illustrated to a certain extent in the plates appended to this volume, together with the observations here given under the Balanidae, appear to me sufficient, and I am unwilling to spend more time on the subject.’ I am grateful to Shelley Innes of the Darwin Correspondence Project for this information.
36 [George Henry Lewes] ‘Lyell and Owen on Development’, Leader, 18 October 1851, p. 996.
37 For an account of the changes in the intellectual liberal debates in London in the early 1850s see Jim Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 479–93.
38 Although there may have been letters that have not survived, the surviving correspondence suggests that the two friends exchanged no letters between April 1852 and September 1853. See Correspondence 5.
39 Joseph Dalton Hooker, Flora Novae-Zelandiae (London: Lovell Reeve, 1853–5), Introductory essay, p. viii.
40 William Henslow Hooker was born on 25 January 1853; see CD to W. D. Fox, 29 February 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 113.
41 CD to J. D. Hooker, 25 September 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 155.
42 I am grateful for Jim Endersby’s comments on Hooker’s difficulties with species arguments and taxonomy at this point in his career.
43 Joseph Dalton Hooker, op. cit., Introductory essay, p. xii.
44 CD to J. D. Hooker, 25 September 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 155–6.
45 Ibid., p. 156.
46 CD to J. D. Hooker, 9 October 1853, Correspondence 5: pp. 158–9.
47 CD to J. D. Hooker, 10 October 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 161.
48 See note 32 above.
49 CD to J. D. Hooker, 5 November 1853, Correspondence 5: p. 166.
50 CD to Palaeontographical Society [before 24 February 1854], Correspondence 5: P. 177.
51 J. D. Hooker to CD, 26 February 1854, Correspondence 5: p. 178.
52 CD to J. D. Hooker, 26 March 1854, Correspondence 5: p. 187.
53 J. D. Hooker to CD, 29 June 1854, Correspondence 5: p. 199.
54 CD to J. D. Hooker, 7 September 1854, Correspondence 5: p. 214–15.
12
The Universe in a Barnacle Shell
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold inanity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’
Late October 1854; early evening. Darwin’s study looks bigger now that he has banished his barnacles either to the British Museum or back to their collectors across the world. Many, shrouded in pill boxes, are still making their way through the British or European postal systems in the luggage compartments of railway carriages or sailing across night seas in the holds of ships.
Darwin, in a brightly coloured dressing gown, sits at a desk on which four books are arranged side by side; their polished leather surfaces catch the soft light from the oil lamp.1 There are two thick volumes and two slim ones. The two thick volumes have the gold letters ‘RS’ embossed on the front cover, the mark of the Ray Society. Darwin runs his finger around the intricate design. There is also a pile of loose, thick milky-white papers on his desk – the 1844 version of the species essay, copied out for him in September 1844 in a delicate, small hand by Mr Fletcher from a nearby village.2 It has been locked away for ten years. The ink is blue – cobalt blue – and Darwin has already begun to annotate the script. He has also prepared another list of questions for Hooker.
Joseph and Frances Hooker are here in Down House staying for a few days with Charles and Mary Lyell.3 John Lubbock has been invited, too, and Darwin listens out for the familiar sound of his pony’s hooves on the gravel outside. The house guests are all upstairs, dressing for dinner, but Darwin has slipped away to the study to look again at the full set of four barnacle volumes, which he plans to show Hooker and Lyell after dinner. On his shelf they take up more space than the combined width of his other four published books – on coral reefs, the Beagle voyage, volcanic islands and South America. Several weighty inches of shelf space. Eight years of his own close work; millions of years of nature’s seabed metamorphoses mapped. These wretched barnacles had confounded him, driven him to distraction so that, at times, he had come to hate them; but now, looking through the plates interleaved into the Ray Society volume, he can see again how beautiful they are. Right now around the world, in darkened rock pools, in the coal blackness of the seabed, on the coppered bottoms of sailing ships and on the fleshy sides of whales, barnacles feed in millions upon millions on plankton, pulsing their jointed, delicate, feathery legs, like an aquatic orchestra.
What has he achieved, he wonders now, in bringing light to this small corner of the living world? He has produced a definitive monograph, he knows – probably one that will continue to be used by cirripedologists long after his death. The books are unique, the sum of all barnacle knowledge; they have pushed out the frontiers of the known world. But what have they done for him? Who is he now that he has finished the barnacle labours? A changed man without doubt. He thinks differently, reasons differently. Classifying the barnacles has given him new skills, language and understanding; they have shar
pened his mind and his comprehension of theoretical principles in zoology, embryology and homology in particular; they have forced him to confront and solve problems of nomenclature; they have made him a skilled dissector.
More than anything, they had enabled him to ruminate over his species theory and strengthen his grasp of natural and sexual selection. The search for means of survival and reproduction had taken these barnacles every which way, since their earliest ancestral forms: some had developed thicker shells for defence, others faster unfurling of cirri for feeding; here a species was hermaphrodite, there it had begun to develop separate sexes. The variation of body structure across the group as a whole was extraordinary. Barnacles had shown him that it was almost impossible to mark a line where a variation with species stopped and where distinct species began – nature produced no such lines of absolute demarcation. When he began, he had been tormented by these doubts about demarcation. Now he had come to terms with this wateriness out there; he had come to understand that variations between one form and another ‘blend into each other in an insensible series’. ‘Trace gradation between associated & non associated animals. – & the story will be complete,’ he had written in 1837. Now he understood that a small variation in a valve or leg was the first step that marked an incipient species: a small variation of that kind would lead to a well-marked variation, thus to a subspecies and eventually to a species.4 Blending, seeping, mutating, nature was – and always had been – incontrovertibly on the move but imperceptible to the naked eye, like Lyell’s hour hand.5