Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  And there was Mr Arthrobalanus himself, granted his Latin name here: Cryptophialus minutus – a whole drawerful of him. My guide, delighted with my speechlessness, opened the Cryptophialus drawer and placed a slide in my hand. Darwin had himself sealed these two pieces of thin glass together with a ring of dried black asphalt, I remembered; the black circle contained in its centre what the label claimed was a Cryptophialus ‘mouth part’, too small to see with the naked eye.

  Confronted by the remains of the microscopic creature that had so confounded Darwin, I was lost for words at the scale of his self-imposed task. Barnacle dissection of the kind he undertook would have been staggeringly difficult – day after day spent with his eye glued to the microscope and his large hands gripping tiny pins, teasing mandibles from other mouth parts in order to prepare a perfect slide; day after day spent following with his eye the thread of an oesophagus or labrum to discover where it led to, note-taking, meticulous systematic comparisons between one thorax and another.1

  We carried the slides back to the curator’s office from the Mollusc Room in a small wooden box in order to examine Mr Arthrobalanus under a microscope. The room was bright, full of books and skulls of mammals in plastic boxes. On the wall, over a row of coffee mugs hanging on pegs, a calendar showed the skeleton of a bat in flight against a black background. Dr Friday lifted out his old Beck microscope from its carrying case and set it up. I was nervous, not sure what to expect. Somehow I wasn’t sure I did want to see Darwin’s Mr Arthrobalanus after all this time. My guide was not confident that we would see anything at all – after all, it was nearly 150 years since Darwin had prepared them. No microscope specimen should have lasted that long.

  There were ten Cryptophialus slides in the box, numbered from 255 to 265 (one was listed as missing). According to Darwin’s handwritten catalogue and the labels on the slides themselves, there was only one specimen of a whole creature; the rest were body parts labelled ‘parts of mouth’, or ‘prehensile antennae’, or ‘oesophagus showing teeth and mouth’. We laid the ten slides out on the desk under the anglepoise lamp, each with its dark-brown ring of asphalt encircling a mouth or stomach part, too small to see even as a fleck. Some of these rings were now flat circular smudges of brown – the ring had closed inwards. We selected the slide that looked the cleanest of them all and placed it on the microscope stage. We were looking for a labrum, a kind of upper lip. Cryptophialus is unique in the barnacle world for the length both of its penis and of its extendible, spoon-shaped upper lip.

  Tick, tock – the clock seemed to be louder than it had been. Perhaps it was the suspense of Mr Arthrobalanus’s imminent appearance; perhaps it was also the sound of Darwin’s impatience pressed here between two slivers of glass – the ghost of a sound, the ghost of perseverance. Under the microscope the labrum shone, a silvery semi-transparent spoon shape against amber – a labrum that Darwin had removed from Mr Arthrobalanus’s mouth with patience and with pins. It was exactly the same shape as the drawing George Brettingham Sowerby Jr had prepared for the Cryptophialus plate of drawings. Looking at this very same labrum, Darwin had speculated, struggling with words:

  We have seen the great lancet-formed appendage of the labrum, literally fringed with fine hairs, can be erected; and I do not doubt that the prey when entangled by the expanded cirri, is borne against this appendage, and is then, by the retraction of the thorax, dragged down its smooth surface to the mouth, where it is seized by the mandible and the maxillae, which lie like a trap at the bottom of an inclined and movable plane.2

  It was microscope slide number 260, labelled by Darwin in his catalogue as ‘two perfect specimens’, that I had hopes for; but here it was immediately apparent that the black circle had almost closed. The asphalt had seeped inwards slowly, like imperceptibly moving lava, in the 150 years since Darwin had sealed the slide. Under the microscope, where I had hoped to see two perfect full specimens, there was only a dark-brown mass, at its edges an explosion of brown and gold. But right at the centre, almost entirely engulfed by the amber lava, the tip of a small foot was just visible, a feathery cirrus, like a small black fan, not waving but drowning.

  32 Microscopic image of the remains of Mr Arthrobalanus (Cryptophialus minutus)

  The asphalt curtain had closed on Mr Arthrobalanus.

  Notes

  1 Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-grandson, tells me that his grandmother always said that Darwin’s hands were distinctively long. His son, Francis, described him as a daddy-long-legs.

  2Living Cirripedia (1854), p. 577.

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