by Bill Mesler
The men decided to keep their membership small. No more than ten would be allowed in. Eventually, they added a ninth member, but the tenth position was never filled. The position might as well have been held in absentia by Charles Darwin. Roughly half of the group was drawn from Darwin’s inner circle, and the X Club quickly became an informal operational command center for advancing the evolutionist cause in Great Britain. One of the club’s first acts was to ensure that Darwin was granted the Copley Medal, the highest honor of the Royal Society. The competition for the award pitted Darwin against Adam Sedgwick, who had been nominated by Richard Owen. Darwin barely edged out his old professor in a vote by the award committee, a highly symbolic moment that showed just how quickly the face of British science was changing. Darwin characteristically avoided the presentation ceremony, citing ill health.
Huxley had argued furiously on Darwin’s behalf. He managed to win over many voters still skeptical of Origin’s message. Huxley himself had once been a skeptic of evolutionary theory. But over the previous decade, he had become one of its most zealous defenders. He called himself “Darwin’s Bulldog.” The nickname stuck.
Darwin was not a gifted speaker. He could easily become sidetracked when speaking in public, and he had a habit of overzealously waving his hands through the air in a way that made people uncomfortable. Huxley, on the other hand, was a skilled orator and filled that role when it was called for. The first and most famous time was in 1860, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that has since assumed an almost mythical status in evolutionist history. It was held at Oxford, in the diocese and auspices of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, an old-guard Tory whom the liberal Daily Telegraph once called a representative of those who never “advanced one iota beyond their ancient notions.”
Wilberforce and Huxley joined in a debate, arranged by the conference organizers, over the merits of evolutionary theory. Seven hundred people showed up to watch the proceedings—so many that the event had to be moved to Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, a grand hall designed in the Gothic Revival style, with an engraving of an angel hovering prominently above the entrance. At the end of his own presentation, Wilberforce, who had been coached by Richard Owen, asked Huxley whether his descent from an ape could be traced to his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side. The audience, already tense over the gravity of the issue being discussed, reacted in loud rancor. Struggling to make himself heard over the din, Huxley replied that he would rather be descended from an ape than from one who impeded the cause of science. A woman fainted. In the pandemonium, Robert FitzRoy, Darwin’s old captain aboard the HMS Beagle, stood up and raised an enormous Bible over his head, commanding the audience to return to God.*
IT WAS THE FIRST time Christianity had ever been pitted in a formal debate against science. Huxley emerged from it as a hero not just to evolutionists, but to rationalists of many stripes, even among many liberal-minded Christian theologians, a group both he and Darwin hoped to cultivate. Clergymen actually made up a majority of the audience at the Oxford debate. Huxley understood that among them were many who could be won over to the evolutionary cause. Though he could be at times uncompromising, he often took more nuanced views toward religion, especially in his public comments. Wherever possible, Huxley tried to ensure that the secularist camp didn’t go too far. He coined the term “agnostic” to describe his own materialistic lack of religious faith. It made him seem less threatening than the outright atheists.†
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT tasks of the X Club was to build up a new class of professional British scientists. Natural philosophy had long been the exclusive purview of the rich and the privileged, and roughly half of the Royal Society’s five hundred members had been selected on the basis of nothing more than their social standing. The first woman would not be admitted until 1945. The X Club advocated for a smaller institution composed of actual scientists drawn from all classes, rather than a bloated organization full of highborn men for whom science was merely a fanciful pastime. Men like Alfred Russel Wallace and Louis Pasteur had risen through the ranks of a scientific world that was increasingly becoming a meritocracy. So, too, had the self-educated Huxley.
The eighth child of a seldom-employed math teacher, Huxley had received a mere two years of formal schooling, the last of which ended when he was ten. Nonetheless, he had taught himself German, Latin, and Greek. Deeply in debt after putting himself through medical school, Huxley had signed on as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy, assigned to the HMS Rattlesnake for an exploratory voyage to Australia and New Guinea. His well-received observations on marine invertebrates convinced him to concentrate solely on naturalism.
Huxley knew firsthand how difficult it was to be a self-supporting scientist, and he relished the task of mentoring budding young evolutionists in Great Britain and abroad. He not only advised them on theory and their use of experiment, but also tried to instill his idea of scientific decorum and character. Charged with guiding evolution through the treacherous waters of theology and entrenched scientific thinking, Huxley, who was usually known for his combativeness, often preached caution and the value of knowing when to retreat from unsupportable assertions. When he did, he often used the phrase “eat your leek,” meaning “take your medicine.” It wasn’t long before he had a brilliant young scientist on his hands who would not take that bit of advice when it came to the subject of the origin of life, a physician named Henry Charlton Bastian. Before he was through, Bastian would become the first of a long line of Darwinists to try to experimentally prove the critical moment that Darwin himself had shied away from: the origin of life. Bastian would also become the last serious scientist to try to prove the old doctrine of spontaneous generation, at least in the way spontaneous generation had been conceived of since Aristotle, as a common ongoing occurrence.
THE MIDDLE-CLASS son of a simple merchant from Cornwall, Henry Charlton Bastian was part of that growing group of English scientists from modest backgrounds whom Huxley was predisposed to support. A prodigy, Bastian had authored a sophisticated book on botany by the time he was nineteen. Before graduating at the age of twenty-three from University College London, taking four degrees, he had published an important zoological study that revealed one hundred new species of nematoid worms.
Upon graduation, Bastian’s first position was assistant conservator of the university’s Museum of Morbid Anatomy. Soon after, he accepted a medical residency at the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, England’s first prison for the criminally insane. Both were jobs most people would have found distressing, but they were right up Bastian’s alley. His specialty was neuroscience, and he was deeply interested in the mystery of consciousness. He came at it from a perspective called physicalism. In the nineteenth century, most people understood consciousness to be ethereal. Physicalists, by contrast, maintained that consciousness was a purely physiological construct. It was controlled by a body organ, the brain, just as the heart controlled the flow of blood. All components of a person’s ability to think could be traced to corresponding areas of the brain, such that injuries in certain brain areas could result in changes in mental functioning and even personality.
Guided by this concept of the material basis of thought, Bastian made huge strides in our understanding of aphasia, a condition that follows strokes. By 1868, his work had earned him membership in the Royal Society, a sterling reputation in the world of British medicine, and an appointment to the National Hospital, Britain’s first hospital to specialize in neurological disorders. Previously, people with brain injuries such as aphasia had often been confined to insane asylums.
At the National Hospital, Bastian began to undertake a series of experiments hoping to reopen the door to spontaneous generation, a door that had, for many, been authoritatively closed by Pasteur. Behind a privacy screen in an examination room, Bastian set up a lab and began conducting experiments on boiled hay infusions that had been hermetically sealed. Like John Needham’s bef
ore him, Bastian’s experiments seemed to support the occurrence of spontaneous generation.
Bastian believed he was simply forging ahead to answer the question that Darwin had left woefully unresolved: how the whole unfolding evolutionary procession had begun. Spontaneous generation had always been a key part of Bastian’s concept of evolution, a concept he learned about from the same man who had first instructed Charles Darwin: the radical professor Robert Grant, who had moved on from Edinburgh to University College London, an institution founded on the principle of secular education. There, Grant continued to preach evolution in the broad Lamarckian sense, which included an explanation for the origin of life. To stress spontaneous generation as not simply a source of life in the old Aristotelian sense, but the source of all life in the evolutionary sense, Bastian began using a different word to describe the phenomenon. He called it “archebiosis,” Greek for “the beginning of life.”
The medical establishment embraced Bastian’s efforts to revive the question of spontaneous generation. Medicine then had a reputation as the most radical field in British science, one that still welcomed the ideas of men like Robert Grant. Many of Bastian’s initial writings on spontaneous generation were published in Britain’s premier medical publications. In the pages of the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, Bastian argued against there being any impassable boundary between the living and nonliving worlds. Nature did not work in one way through the long history of evolution only to allow for some kind of irreproducible miraculous event at its beginning. To Bastian, evolution was a continuous process that had begun before any living organism appeared on the planet Earth. Combined with his experimental results, the articles would form the basis of his first book on the subject, The Beginnings of Life.
Many evolutionists were thrilled that someone was filling the gap Darwin had deliberately left open. Alfred Russel Wallace wrote a glowing review, and Darwin read Bastian’s book at Wallace’s recommendation. In a letter to Wallace, Darwin called Bastian’s general argument that organic matter must have been formed out of inorganic “wonderfully strong.” Still, he remained skeptical of Bastian’s claim that there was compelling experimental evidence in favor of spontaneous generation, although, he added, “I should like to live to see archebiosis proved true, for it would be a discovery of transcendent importance.”
Though his book was initially well received, Bastian and the question of spontaneous generation were about to become perilously linked to another argument that was gaining steam in the scientific community. It revolved around the question of the nature of disease.
In Great Britain, it was a question of some urgency. For the previous four decades, Britain had been devastated by deadly outbreaks of cholera morbus, a condition first encountered by British soldiers in India in 1817. By 1831, the disease had spread throughout Russia and from there on a British ship to the English port of Sunderland, where local officials had ignored orders for a quarantine. The first outbreak killed more than fifty thousand people. By the time Bastian began working at the National Hospital, successive waves of the disease had claimed more than 250,000 lives. On the streets, people started calling it the “blue death,” after the color that would appear on the faces of many of its victims.
A century later, cholera would be known as a relatively benign condition easily treated by intense hydration and replacement of mineral salts. In Bastian’s time, the typical treatment for such diuretic conditions was to actually restrict the amount of water that those afflicted drank, which usually made the disease fatal.
Cholera is caused by a bacterium now known as Vibrio cholerae, but in the nineteenth century, most British medical men believed that illnesses were passed through the air as vapors. These were called “miasmas,” from the Greek for “pollution,” and the theory came to be called the miasmatic theory of disease. Medical vernacular is still filled with words suggesting an airborne source of illness. “Malaria,” for instance, means “bad air.” In London, where industrialization and its concomitant burning of coal had led to the persistent grayish-brown “London fog”—what we would now call smog—the idea that air could be bad for one’s health had a particular salience. So did the fact that disease spread rapidly among the growing ranks of the urban poor, who lived in filthy, overcrowded slums without proper sewage. To combat cholera, people took steps to contain the unhealthy vapors that had become associated with its spread. Barrels of tar and vinegar were set afire in infested streets to purge the air. Houses were doused with solutions made from lime.
Burning barrels of tar to ward off miasmas during the Manchester cholera outbreak of 1832.
By the time of Bastian’s investigations into spontaneous generation, a competing theory had started to gain traction. The zymotic theory, now more commonly known as the germ theory of disease, held that many illnesses were caused by microscopic organisms. It was not a new theory, but the biggest hurdle it faced was a simple fact that almost everyone who dealt with disease understood: one did not actually have to touch an infected person to catch a disease like cholera, but could merely be in the presence of an infected person, breathing the same air. The means of transmission in such cases was unknown but was about to be solved by Louis Pasteur.
IN 1865, PASTEUR RECEIVED a letter from Jean-Baptiste Dumas, a famous chemist and devout Catholic supporter of Napoleon III. From the south of France, the heart of France’s growing silk industry, Dumas wrote that, “misery is greater here than anything one can imagine.”
Since the late eighteenth century, France had been steadily encroaching on the Chinese monopoly of silk production. Most of the silk production was centered around the city of Lyon, which had become the silk capital of Europe. Whole forests had been cut down to make room for the golden-leaved mulberry trees that supplied the leaves upon which the silkworms fed. But a mysterious disease spreading among the silkworms had begun to cripple the economy of the region. In desperation, the silk producers turned to Pasteur. Though he had little experience in biology outside his work on fermentation, Pasteur devoted himself to finding the source of the disease, which he eventually traced to parasitic microbes that preyed on silkworm eggs.
Pasteur’s discovery saved the silk industry. It also led him to realize that he could turn his expertise to the problem of infectious disease in people, where he would make his most lasting impact as a scientist. Pasteur’s interest in disease had a personal dimension: he had lost two young daughters to typhoid fever.
Soon, Pasteur brought his experience with the spontaneous generation question to bear on the notion that germs were the cause of most disease. If his theory of airborne bacteria was indeed true, it stood to reason that bacteria could spread disease in the same way. The transmission of the disease by bacteria would solve germ theory’s biggest conundrum, the mystery of infection without direct contact.
Initially, the idea of airborne bacteria causing disease was a notion on the fringes of the medical community, particularly in Britain. Doctors could often see bacteria in samples taken from infected patients, but they usually attributed their presence as a side effect—a result of the disease—rather than the cause. Most British physicians believed these bacteria were spontaneously generated, and they doubted Pasteur’s assertion that germs could travel through the air. Bastian became a champion of miasmatic theory and argued that his own experiments on spontaneous generation provided a more sensible explanation for the presence of bacteria. Rather than floating through the air, they were spontaneously generated results of infection. The conflict over spontaneous generation thus became wrapped up in the conflict between the zymotic and miasmatic theories of disease.
AFTER HUXLEY, the next-most-important member of the X Club was the brilliant physicist John Tyndall, holder of England’s singularly most prestigious scientific post, Professor of Natural Philosophy of the Royal Institution, where he had succeeded the great Michael Faraday. Tyndall built a sterling reputation through his experimental work on the electromagnetic properties of c
rystals. Later, he made huge strides in explaining the effects of infrared radiation on the atmosphere and the composition of ozone.
In his spare time, Tyndall was an avid mountain climber. He was the first person to climb the Weisshorn, one of the tallest peaks in the Swiss Alps, and he was one of the first to climb the Matterhorn. During an alpine expedition in 1869, Tyndall slipped in a rocky pool, severely cutting his leg on a granite outcropping. The resulting abscess had nearly killed him. Tyndall became convinced that airborne bacteria were responsible for his brush with death. He became a leading advocate of Pasteur’s theory that germs carried through the air were the cause of disease.
Tyndall’s advocacy of germ theory put him at odds with Bastian. Soon, the two men were facing off over germ theory and spontaneous generation in a series of letters to the editor published in the Times. Tyndall saw this as a battle to encourage the idea of a professional scientist as opposed to the “quackery” he railed against in the medical community. Bastian meanwhile became the champion of physicians, defending them against encroachment by interlopers from other branches of science who had no experience in medicine.