by Bill Mesler
That same year, workers in a nearby limestone quarry stumbled upon the entrance to a fantastic cave filled with aragonite crystals, which would come to be called Holwell Cavern. As a teenager, Crosse would spend hours sitting alone and watching the crystals glow in the dim flicker of candlelight, as if emanating some strange energy. He became convinced that their beauty was related to this mysterious force he was learning about, electricity. The crystals appeared to reach for each other, in mirror image, as if drawn together by an invisible force. Crosse guessed that the force was magnetic attraction.
Two years after Holwell Cavern’s discovery, Crosse left for Brasenose College, Oxford. Crosse was a loner at heart and found his university years trying. Oxford, he wrote his mother, was “a perfect hell on earth.” Many years later, he would say that his years at Oxford had taught him that “ridicule is a terrible trial to the young.” He found solace in studying the Greek classics. Crosse always fancied himself a poet. He tended to wax on the beauty of nature, and Holwell Cavern became a favorite subject. In later years, his poetry frequently focused on his melancholia or the religious zealots who would turn on him at the end of his life.
When Crosse was twenty-one, his mother passed away, and he returned to Fyne Court. He found himself the master of a large estate with tenant farmers to manage. When it came to business, Crosse was a disaster. At some point, he was swindled out of much of his wealth, although he was rich enough that he never quite fell into a desperate state of affairs. As the years passed, he turned ever more eagerly to his electrical experiments, encouraged by the man who had by then become his closest friend, the electrical scientist George Singer.
When he was twenty-seven, Crosse devised his first electrical experiment, which he carried out at Holwell Cavern. He even began experimenting on local farmers who came to him with various ailments. It was said he could cure arthritis and even hangovers. Soon he was investigating all manner of possible uses for electric currents. Crosse’s electrical investigations into the formation of crystals prompted a pilgrimage to Fyne Court by one of Britain’s most celebrated scientists, Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society. Davy had become a national hero in England after his invention of a lamp that could be used safely in methane-heavy coal mines. He was also a brilliant chemist who had used electricity to great effect in his chemical explorations, and his interest in Crosse’s work stemmed from his own experiments. Using an electric current from a voltaic pile, Davy had discovered the process of electrolysis, enabling him to separate substances into their component chemical elements.
By 1836, interest in electricity was booming in England’s scientific community, and Crosse was gaining in prestige, as well as in confidence. In the fall of that year, he traveled to Bristol to deliver a rare public address before the newly formed British Association for the Advancement of Science. His theories on the electrical formation of minerals were hailed as visionary and brought him enough notoriety that anyone involved in science knew who he was, as did many with no particular ties to science at all. By the time Crosse undertook his most famous experiment later that year, his scientific career was at its pinnacle.
Later, after events turned out very badly for Andrew Crosse, he would often protest that he was little more than the victim of unscrupulous newspapermen. The truth is somewhere in between. While he did at first keep the discovery of his insects to himself, eventually he confided the story to the editor of a new local newspaper, the Somerset Gazette. He could hardly have been surprised that an enthusiastic story was published shortly thereafter.
On December 31, 1837, the first story about Crosse’s fantastic insects appeared in the Gazette, under the title “An Extraordinary Experiment.” Eventually, the story reached London and the paper of record of the day, the Times. From there, news of the real “Dr. Frankenstein” went into syndication and spread like wildfire to all of the British Empire and beyond. Soon, newspapers were reporting—falsely, it would turn out—that Michael Faraday, the most famous electrical scientist of his time, had confirmed Crosse’s results in his own laboratory. The press gave Crosse’s insects a proper Latin species name. They called them Acarus crossii.
Crosse tried his best to remain aloof from the celebrity, and he distanced himself from any larger implications of what had happened in his organ-room lab. His subsequent experimental work continued to focus on finding a way to make crystals using electricity. His few follow-up attempts to understand how the insects appeared in his apparatus were fruitless. One scientist—William Weeks, a popular lecturer with a large public following—claimed to have replicated Crosse’s experiment and found the same insects. But others who tried found nothing. The deeply religious Faraday, though sympathetic to Crosse, denied the reports that he himself had replicated the experiment. Faraday’s protestations were virtually ignored in the press, which didn’t want to diminish the sensational story, but in the scientific community, they were taken as just more evidence that the experiment was faulty. Crosse’s story might have ended there.
Crosse’s diagram of what would be called Acarus crossii.
IN 1844, CROSSE ONCE AGAIN found himself in the public spotlight when a new anonymously authored work appeared on the shelves of England’s booksellers. It was called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and the British public had never seen anything like it. The novelist and future prime minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli, excitedly wrote his sister to tell her of the book that was “convulsing the world.” The first edition sold out within days.
Vestiges was a naturalistic history of the universe, beginning with the creation of the stars and the heavens and running right up to the present time, fueled by what the unnamed writer called “the universal gestation of nature.” The history of life on Earth was traced to an original act of spontaneous generation, with Andrew Crosse’s Acarus crossii held up as evidence. From this natural act of creation, Lamarckian transmutation became the engine for the creation of new species. In the original handwritten manuscript, next to the section on the origin of life, the author scrawled in the margin that the “great plot comes out here.”
In Victorian England, the book created a scandal, but the kind of scandal that made its publishers very rich. People rushed to get their hands on a copy. Prince Edward said he read it aloud to Queen Victoria every afternoon at tea. The fact that it was published anonymously only added to its appeal. Newspapers speculated endlessly about the identity of the mysterious author. Some said it was Andrew Crosse. Some said it was Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, Charles. Still others suggested the author had to be a woman, many because they thought only a woman could pen such a shoddy, ill-informed work. Maybe it was the radical political economist Harriet Martineau, they guessed, or Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, writer of the first machine algorithm, which she had produced for mathematician Charles Babbage’s never completed computational machine.§
Not until after his death some thirty years later was the journalist and publisher Robert Chambers finally revealed to be the book’s true author. Chambers went to great lengths to conceal his identity, even having his wife copy the original manuscript by hand, for fear his handwriting would be recognized by editors. He burned his notes and kept the manuscript in a locked drawer. Chambers was terrified of the inevitable religious backlash he would face if his identity was revealed. He and his brother owned a publishing house that earned most of its income from producing religious textbooks in their native Scotland. Discovery would have meant financial ruin.
Though Chambers was a religious skeptic, he went to great lengths in his book to insist that the process he described was, at its root, the work of a divine hand. Even the title was a concession. The content of the book still proved too much of a challenge to biblical accounts of creation for the religiously inclined. Even though it sold astoundingly well, after the floodgates of religious indignation opened, Vestiges admirers largely kept silent, while its critics were relentless. Perhaps the most scathing review appeared in the
enormously influential Edinburgh Review. At eighty-five pages, it was the longest article the journal had ever published. The reviewer was the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, the esteemed geologist and vice-dean of Cambridge’s Trinity College, who fulminated about the absence of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and ridiculed the notion that human beings came from apes. Sedgwick was among those who were sure the book had been written by a woman, and he devoted much of his sprawling article to proving his case.
Sedgwick didn’t spare Andrew Crosse. He sent Crosse a personal letter admonishing him never to “meddle again with animal creations; and without delay to take a crow-bar and break to atoms” his “obstetrico-galvanic apparatus.” Sedgwick wasn’t alone. Following the publication of Chambers’s book, Crosse was widely vilified, and he became a Dr. Frankenstein in the most pejorative sense. His experiment had usurped the very role of the creator. A deluge of hate mail began pouring in: he was a “heretic,” a “blasphemer,” a practitioner of “dark arts.” Many newspapers took the same tone. In print, he was branded “a reviler of our holy religion” and a “disturber of the peace of families.” Local farmers stopped speaking to him. He was blamed for an infestation of locusts near Fyne Court. A reverend with a reputation as something of a fanatic was called in to conduct a public exorcism of the hills surrounding Crosse’s estate.
The religious-tinged criticism hurt Crosse, but it was his fall from grace in the scientific community that really crushed him. Before Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation appeared, most of England’s important scientific bodies simply avoided addressing the nature of Crosse’s insects. The subject of life’s origin was so sensitive that they would touch upon it only reluctantly. But the elevation of his experiment in this now infamous book meant he could no longer be ignored. He was subjected to an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Every aspect of his experiment was carefully parsed and found wanting. Acarus crossii, many of his peers mused, was nothing more than the common dust mite. He became a laughingstock in the scientific community. The nervous attacks of his youth returned with a vigor. He immersed himself in poetry and tried his hand at fiction, but he had never been much of a writer.
Many years later, Crosse was asked to write a comment for a book about the great historical events of the first half of the nineteenth century. He bitterly protested that he was an unwitting victim and that he had never claimed credit for any act of “creation.” He had simply been swept up by the conclusions drawn by others, caught in the tide of an increasingly acrimonious debate between those who saw the world and all its workings as explainable by science and those who saw the world through the lens of biblical creation.
DECADES AFTER the general public had forgotten Andrew Crosse, his name was still invoked among scientists. As the world of science grew more professionalized and science became a career rather than a pastime, Crosse came to humorously symbolize the “gentleman scientist” of a bygone era. The mere mention of his name could be invoked as a synonym for unprofessional quackery.¶
But the public saga of Andrew Crosse left behind another legacy, one shared by the publications of Frankenstein and Vestiges. Each had whetted the appetite of a lay public that was hungry for popular science and ready to entertain ideas that might once have seemed too heretical even to imagine. They were the precursors of a scientific literary phenomenon that would culminate in the publication of one of the most famous and influential science books ever written.
The man who was going to write it had returned to England late in 1836, only a couple of months before Andrew Crosse began his experiment. He was a young naturalist who had just completed a long sea voyage that had fatefully taken him to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of South America.
* In her preface to Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley noted the extraordinary weather of the year 1816, since remembered as “the year without a summer.” An abnormal cold had settled throughout the Northern Hemisphere during the summer months that year. Thirty inches of snow fell in Quebec City. In China, rice crops failed and water buffalo died off by the thousands. Heavy rains caused a cholera outbreak in the Ganges River in India that spread as far as Moscow. Summer frosts led to food riots in France and England. The freakish weather was probably caused by the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history. On the island of Sumbawa, in modern-day Indonesia, Mount Tambora had erupted with four times the force of Krakatoa and eight hundred times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Some seventy thousand people were killed. The atmospheric effects could be seen as far away as London, where for weeks the sunsets turned bright orange and purple. Many devout Christians saw these as signs of the coming of Armageddon.
† In 1928, the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler had stumbled upon a chemical reaction that enabled him to convert ammonium cyanate into urea. This first synthesis of an organic compound is often mistakenly held up as the end of vitalism, but in reality very little significance was placed on the discovery at the time. Even Wöhler himself remained a vitalist.
‡ Benjamin Franklin was the first to prove that the electricity was stored in the glass casing, not the water, as people had believed. He also used a Leyden jar in his famous kite experiment, from which we get the phrase “to catch lightning in a bottle.”
§ Babbage had first announced plans to build the machine in 1837, the same year Crosse’s story appeared in the British press. It was a huge machine, meant to perform basic arithmetic. Had it not proved too expensive to complete in Babbage’s lifetime, it would have become the first computer. Lovelace constructed her algorithms on punch cards not unlike those that would be used for the first computers of the twentieth century.
¶ The historian Trevor Pinch has drawn an analogy between Andrew Crosse’s Acarus crossii and the announcement of the discovery of cold fusion in 1989. Both events were propelled into the limelight by major newspapers of the day, which drew conclusions beyond the experimental evidence. In Crosse’s case, it was the Times; in the case of cold fusion, the Financial Times. The central figures in both stories went through periods of unwarranted celebrity followed by a descent into equally unwarranted ridicule and infamy. Even the apparatuses used in the two experiments were uncannily similar: electrical conductors that were run through solutions containing potassium salts.
BREATHED BY THE CREATOR INTO A FEW FORMS OR ONE
It is not enough to discover and prove a useful truth previously unknown, but that it is necessary also to be able to propagate it and get it recognized.
—JEAN-BAPTISTE LAMARCK, Zoological Philosophy, 1809
IN OCTOBER OF 1835, a British Royal Navy sailing ship made its way out of an old pirate cove on an island at the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Ecuador. The HMS Beagle was a ten-gun sloop outfitted with an extra mast for an ambitious voyage of exploration and discovery. For the previous four years, the Beagle had sailed southwest from Britain, through the Azores and Cape Verde, hugging the coast of most of South America, until finally reaching the Galápagos Islands.
The ship’s captain, the young but well-seasoned Robert FitzRoy, had decided to search elsewhere for the freshwater needed for the next leg of the ship’s journey, the long trek west across the Pacific to Tahiti. But he left four men behind, to be picked up on the ship’s return ten days later. The party included the Beagle’s surgeon Benjamin Bynoe, two servants, and the ship’s twenty-six-year-old gentleman-naturalist Charles Darwin.
Darwin took any opportunity to escape the Beagle and explore on his own, frequently with Bynoe in tow. As the ship naturalist, Darwin was responsible for observing and collecting samples of the flora and fauna they encountered. But sometimes he just needed to get away. Darwin’s relationship with the captain could be cantankerous. Often they argued about politics. FitzRoy was an impassioned Tory; Darwin, a committed Whig. Sometimes they bickered about slavery. Darwin’s grandfathers were two of England’s most prominent abolitionists—Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood—and he adamantly opposed the institu
tion. Usually, though, Darwin and FitzRoy simply got on each other’s nerves. Being confined on a small ship for years on end has that effect on people. Yet, as FitzRoy well knew, loneliness could be far worse. The previous captain of the Beagle, Pringle Stokes, had taken his own life when FitzRoy was under his command. FitzRoy chose Darwin as much for his suitability as a companion as for his strengths as a scientist. Many years later, the captain would come to regret that decision, after he turned to a form of religious fundamentalism that Darwin would do so much to undermine.
James Island was one of the bigger islands at the center of the Galápagos archipelago. It had been named by the seventeenth-century buccaneer Ambrose Cowley, whose maps FitzRoy still used. Until the ship returned in a week and a half, Darwin’s small party would be left to fend for itself.
The ship’s crew had first set foot on the Galápagos three weeks earlier, on Chatham Island. FitzRoy described the volcanic beach where they had landed as “black, dismal-looking.” Darwin imagined that hell would look much the same. The heat was oppressive, and he had measured the sand on the beach at 137°F. The more abundant black sand, volcanic and hard to the touch, was even hotter. In his journal, Darwin wrote that it was difficult to walk on even “in thick boots.”
Volcanoes abound in the Galápagos, and the signs of volcanic activity intrigued Darwin. He was well trained as a geologist. At Christ College, Cambridge, he had taken courses taught by two of the most esteemed geologists of their day, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick—who so attacked Andrew Crosse and Vestiges—and John Henslow. The two were his closest mentors. Before the Beagle set out, Henslow had recommended a book to occupy Darwin’s long days at sea: Principles of Geology. The book was published in three volumes, and Darwin had received the first volume from FitzRoy as a gift. Though Henslow, a clergyman like Sedgwick, had warned him not to take the book too seriously, Darwin couldn’t help himself. He was captivated.