Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Thousands of seeds would not germinate, but amongst them and against all the odds a few rare seeds would burst into green shoots in the most hostile of conditions: seeds with swimming legs, seeds with the ability to withstand the effects of seawater, seeds that cemented themselves to rocks. Nature had devised extraordinary means of survival amongst all her carnage. Seeds and seawater had been at the heart of his experiments with Robert Grant on the seashore of Leith in the 1820s; seeds and seawater were at the heart of his experiments in Down thirty years later.

  Darwin was gathering all these infinitely small facts as part of the evidence needed to support his species theory, for now that he had demonstrated his ability to observe and map nature on the very smallest of scales, he had returned to the most ambitious and epic projects of all, as he described it to his cousin William Fox:

  I forget whether I ever told you what the object of my present work is, – it is to view all facts that I can master (eheu, eheu, how ignorant I find I am) in Nat. History, (as on geograph. Distribution, palaeontology, classification Hybridism, domestic animals & plants &c &c &c) to see how far they favour or are opposed to the notion that wild species are mutable or immutable: I mean with my utmost power to give all arguments & facts on both sides. I have a number of people helping me in every way, & giving me most valuable assistance; but I often doubt whether the subject will not quite overpower me.21

  Gosse, without realizing it, had been enlisted on to the international team who were helping Darwin with the series of experiments that would result in the publication, in 1859, of Origin of Species by Natural Selection, a book that would trouble him profoundly and overpower him, for whilst Gosse the scientist would thrill at Darwin’s arguments and evidence, Gosse the fundamentalist member of the Plymouth Brethen would quail at its implications.22

  The barnacle years had been no cul-de-sac in the development of Darwin’s ideas. Mr Arthrobalanus and his tribe helped him fine-tune the way he used homology and embryology to think about species’ origins and relations, they had provided the foundation on which he had continued to build his credibility, reputation and authority as a systematist, and they had been the means by which he had established a network of correspondents that would hold together and bolster that authority.

  The relentless task of putting barnacles into words also crucially sharpened Darwin’s writing abilities both in terms of the need for hard, uncompromising accuracy in describing the curve of a valve, the texture of a shell, the colour of an oesophagus, or the striated ridges of the cirri, and in terms of the need for rhetorical hesitancy when the evidence for a hypothesis was as thin as it was with the Ibla complemental males for instance: ‘it might reasonably be assumed that’, ‘there is some evidence to suggest that’, ‘it could be assumed that’. Such rhetorical dexterity, the ability to craft sequences of clauses that moved relentlessly but cautiously from evidence drawn from the commonplace creatures such as pigeons or barnacles to extraordinary hypotheses, underpinned by modest, tactful common sense, would be crucial to the success of the On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Through such sentences as these, Darwin could appear at once hesitant, judicious and absolutely certain as he was in the opening pages of The Origin:

  Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgement of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained – namely, that each species has been independently created – is erroneous.

  In 1851, a young American journalist, Herman Melville, had published a book in England entitled simply, The White Whale, already published in America as Moby Dick. Its English title caused confusion for some readers who assumed it was a natural history of the whale. In it he wrote about his struggle to put the white whale into words. Though Melville was writing about a whale, he might have been describing Darwin’s encounter with a creature too small to see with the naked eye but which had taken a brilliant man eight years to comprehend:

  One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

  Now that the barnacles were classified, mapped, crossed every which way, Darwin could turn his mind to the species theory – his mighty book – waiting in the wings. He could no longer prevaricate, bury himself in his mountain of minute facts. ‘I am like Croesus overwhelmed with my riches in facts’, he wrote to his cousin, ‘& I mean to make my book as perfect as ever I can.’ Now those facts needed to be marshalled, put to use, assembled to support a revolutionary theory that would be at once careful, reasoned and tactful. Now, pen in hand, he would begin to make his transition from one Herculean task to another.

  Notes

  1 Francis recalls his father’s brightly coloured dressing gown in The Completed Edited Manuscript of Francis Darwin’s Preliminary Draft of the ‘Reminiscences of My Father’s Everyday Life’, ed. Robert Brown, Independent Study. Manuscript in the Darwin Correspondence Project office.

  2 DAR 113. I am grateful to Shelley Innes of the Darwin Correspondence Project for this information.

  3 Emma Darwin’s diary. John Lubbock writes in his diary for October 1854: ‘Dined at Darwins to meet Lyell and Hooker’, John Lubbock, Diary for 1853–63, British Library Add 62679. I am grateful to Randal Keynes for this information.

  4 In the Origin, Darwin concluded that ‘no clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species and subspecies – that is, the forms which in the opinion of some naturalists come very near to, but do not quite arrive at the rank of species; or, again, between sub-species and well-marked varieties, or between lesser varieties and individual differences. These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage … Hence I look at individual differences, though of no small interest to the systematist, as of high importance for us, as being the first step towards slight varieties … And I look at varieties which are in any degree more distinct and permanent, as steps leading to more strongly-marked and permanent varieties; and at the latter, as leading to sub-species, and to species … Hence I believe a well-marked variety may be called an incipient species. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 53.

  5 For further studies on the influence and impact of Darwin’s barnacle work on his later work, see A. J. Southward, ‘A New Look at Variation in Darwin’s Species of Acorn Barnacles’, Biological Journal of the Linaean Society, vol. 20 (1983), pp. 59–72; Ghiselin, M. T. (1969), The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (California: California University Press, 1969); Ghiselin, M. T. & Jaffe, L. ‘Phylogenetic Classification in Darwin’s monograph on the subclass Cirripedia’, Systematic Zoology, vol. 22 (1973), pp. 132–40; D. J. Crisp, ‘Extending Darwin’s Investigations on the Barnacle Life-History’, Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, vol. 20 (1983), pp. 73–83; Martha Richmond, ‘Darwin’s Study of the Cirripedia’, in Correspondence 4: pp. 388–409.

  6 For a history of this book’s publication and reception see James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’, (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2000).

  7 Thomas Henry Huxley
, review of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Tenth Edition, London 1853, in The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review (1854), Scientific Memoirs 5.

  8 CD to Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 September 1854, Correspondence 5: p. 213.

  9 Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Science’, in Westminster Review, vol. 61 (1854), pp. 264–5.

  10 Edward Forbes, ‘Shell-Fish: Their Ways and Works’, Westminster Review, vol. 57 (1 January 1852), pp. 42; Forbes died in November 1854 from an abscess on his kidney.

  11 Philip Henry Gosse, A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (London, John Van Voorst, 1853).

  12 John Timbs, Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the Most Rare and Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis with Nearly Fifty Years’ Personal Recollections (London: David Bogue, 1855), p. 780. For further information about the history of the vivarium in the Zoological Gardens see Leonard Robert Brightwell, The Zoo Story (London: Museum Press: London, 1952); John Edwards, London Zoo from old photographs 1852–1914 (London: 26 Rhondda Grove, E3 5AP.); Philip Arthur Richard Street, The London Zoo (London: Odhams Press, 1956). For a history of the aquarium generally see Philip F. Rehbock, ‘The Victorian Aquarium in Ecological and Social Perspective’, in M. Sears and D. Merriman, eds, Oceanography: The Past (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1980).

  13 J. D. Hooker, [before 17 March 1855], Correspondence 5: p. 285.

  14 CD to J. S. Henslow, 26 March 1855, Correspondence 5: p. 292.

  15 CD wrote to Henslow on 13 March to request the Anacharis; it arrived by post on 26 March; Correspondence 5: pp. 283, 292. For further information on Anna Thynne, one of the first aquarium owners in London, who kept madrepores alive in glass tanks in Westminster Abbey, see my forthcoming Short Life biography Anna Thynne (Short Books, 2002). Thynne was one of the first to discover that a tank containing seawater and seaweed would oxygenate. See also Charles Kingsley’s description of how to build a freshwater aquarium in Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), pp. 158–9.

  16 See CD’s report on the seawater experiments to Gardeners’ Chronicle, 21 May 1855, Correspondence 5: pp. 331–4. Darwin obtained the chemical mixture from the chemist recommended by Philip Gosse, Mr Bolton. Gosse reco mends this chemist in the Handbook to the Marine Aquarium: ‘The salts are sold in packets, with all needful directions, by Mr Bolton, a chymist [sic] in Holborn.’, Philip Gosse, A Handbook to the Marine Aquarium: containing Instructions for constructing, stocking, and maintaining a tank, and for collecting plants and animals (London John Van Voorst, 1855) p. 18

  17 CD to J. D. Hooker, 24 April 1855, Correspondence 5: p. 320.

  18 CD described these experiments in letters to Hooker in March and April 1854: Correspondence 5: pp. 299, 305, 308.

  19 CD to Gardeners’ Chronicle, before 26 May 1855, Correspondence 5: pp. 337–8.

  20 CD to M. J. Berkeley, 12 June 1855, Correspondence 5: p. 353.

  21 CD to W. D. Fox, 27 March 1855, Correspondence 5: p. 294.

  22 For an account of Philip Gosse’s struggle with the doctrine of natural selection and his response to it in devising his own omphalos theory, see his son’s moving book, Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). See also the excellent recent biography by Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Henry Philip Gosse, London: Faber and Faber, 2002.

  EPIGRAPH

  The Asphalt Curtain

  Without our improved microscopes, and while the sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry were yet infantile, it was difficult to believe what was the truth; and for this simple reason that, as usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far more startling and prodigious than the dreams which men had substituted for it, more strange than Ovid’s old story that the coral was soft under the sea …

  Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; or the Wonders of the Shore (1855)

  A seventy-foot whale skeleton is suspended in mid-air above the entrance of the Cambridge Zoology Museum, hanging from wires against its modem concrete façade like a giant puppet. The vaults under the public museum contain important Darwin Beagle specimens, including the octopus that Darwin played with in the South American rock pool and then preserved in a glass jar. Dr Friday, lecturer in Zoology and museum curator, agreed to hunt it out for me to see. When he met me in the entrance hall, I asked him about the whale. The skeleton had nearly killed him, he said. In the 1960s, when the new building had been completed, he and fellow curators had devised a system for reassembling it in mid-air. Each bone had been labelled and special bolts, pulleys and wires designed and assembled. He had volunteered to work up on the scaffolding making sure that each bone part was properly bolted together in the right order. It was only when the team had almost completed the skeleton that he had realized he had inadvertently been bolted into the ribcage, his head between two of its ribs, now suspended in mid-air. He had laughed, then slipped, and it had only been by reaching out for a hanging bone that he had prevented himself from being garrotted between whale ribs.

  We made our way down through the public museum – all whitewashed walls and glass, weaving our way through the gleam of the ivory-coloured skeletons that pressed upon us on every side – giraffes, geckos, hippos and antelopes. In glass cases bleached bird skeletons sat on nests with their young. Lizards, salamanders and monkeys would have peered back at us if they had had eyes to do so.

  We crossed the threshold marking the boundary between the public and the private museums, passing through a door that appeared to open out of nowhere, down on to a narrow, steep flight of steps; white breeze blocks, brightly lit, concrete floors. Occasionally another zoologist or researcher in a white coat would brush past us and disappear into another locked room or down another corridor. On the tops of green metal storage cupboards, the skulls of antelopes and tigers flanked by ancient wooden trunks marked ‘mammal skins’ and ‘Marsupialia’ stared down at us blankly. Now we were in single file and my guide was concentrating on finding the right keys with which to open the series of locked doors that lay ahead of us. We were, he said, going to ‘The Spirit Store’. It sounded like a phrase from a Gothic Romance or from a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For a moment I imagined a room crowded with ghosts of animals and people, flickering; but it was where they kept bottled specimens, he explained, preserved in spirits of wine. The air was thick with alcohol, evaporating constantly from the bottles. Despite the air-conditioning system, we would be breathing in alcohol evaporated from the ancient bodies of snakes and snails and lizards. He had the store number for Darwin’s South American octopus, he said, and he should be able to find it quickly. Then, when I had finished with the octopus, he had something unusual to show me.

  In the Spirit Store we had to raise our voices over the whirr of the air-conditioning system. I could smell the alcohol in the air. I could taste it. Green metal shelves made long corridors down the room, each shelf crowded with bottles of different sizes and shapes – modern Kilner storage jars, or Victorian sweet jars, or jam jars, or perfume bottles – containing pickled specimens of every imaginable creature, suspended in pale amber fluid: from sea slugs, armadillos and lizards to moles and marmosets. Suckers, coils, eyes, feet: suspended, embryonic and immortalized. Some specimens were from the Beagle; others had been donated from other nineteenth-century collections. The glimpse of a dismembered snake’s head, Jaw open fiercely, seen out of the corner of my eye, made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. The lights flickered intermittently. My guide had disappeared in search of the bottled octopus.

  30 The Spirit Store

  Darwin’s handwriting was just visible on the label of the jar placed before me at eye level. It was handwriting I knew well but which I had not expected to see here in this strangest of places. The handwriting conjured the man himself, cooped up and nauseous in the cabin of the Beagle in 1832, labelling this octopus, which he had hunted down in a rock pool on a volcanic island. Then, immersed in seawater, this octopus had been luminous after dark; now it was a furled-up
mass of greyish-brown ribbed and ribboned tentacles, swaying slightly in the liquid, distorted by the curve of glass. So there were ghosts here in the Spirit Store; and writing history was a little like the work of a taxidermist or zoologist, too, I thought for a moment: working only with preserved relics, the historian was something of an articulator of bones, like Mr Venus in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, putting together the whole creature piece by piece from the jigsawed bones and fragments of dried skin.

  I had seen what I needed to see here, but Dr Friday had other Darwin relies to show me, so I followed him down more corridors and steps that seemed to be getting narrower. Eventually he unlocked another door: the Mollusc Room, he announced. Not his territory – run by the mollusc people – but they had agreed to lend him the key. Here all the specimens were dried and contained in tiny drawers in hundreds of oak cabinets. It was darker in here than it had been in the Spirit Store. We eased our way down into the room between the cabinets, careful not to push at anything, and my guide drew my attention to a smaller oak cabinet for which he had a tiny metal key. Here it was – whatever it was he had to show me. He unlocked the door and opened it.

  31 Darwin’s Barnacles – microscope specimens

  Inside, there were twenty or so narrow drawers, each about an inch deep with a tiny handle and each labelled in a small hand in black ink. Dr Friday offered no further explanation, just gestured to me to look more closely. My eye ran down over the labels, squinting slightly in the gloom, but for a few seconds I was unable to take in what the words on the labels signified: Alcippe, Verrucae, Scalpellum, Ibla, Pollicipes. Then I understood: these were Darwin’s microscope slides from his barnacle years. Each contained one of his barnacles or a barnacle body part; the Cambridge Zoology Museum had been bequeathed this unique oak-carved curiosity. There must have been nearly three hundred separate slides here – Darwin’s slides. Another talisman.