Reading the Rocks

by Brenda Maddox

  In 1853, in the ninth edition of Principles, Lyell gingerly expanded his discussion of the disappearance of species. As a man of religious faith, he had shied away from the mystery of mysteries: how had man emerged? He pleaded a religious excuse: ‘To assume that the evidence of the beginning or end of so vast a scheme lies within the reach of our philosophical inquiries, or even of our speculations, appears to us inconsistent with a just estimate of the relations which subsist between the finite powers of man and the attributes of an Infinite and Eternal Being.’11

  Yet what laws governed their emergence? Perhaps each year one new species appeared and an old one became extinct?12 He speculated, tentatively edging into the big question of: ‘whether the human species is one of the most recent of the whole?’13

  It was in September the following year, 1854, that Charles Darwin recorded in his journal: ‘Began sorting notes for Species Theory’. Two more years would pass before he revealed to Lyell, his closest friend, that he had his own ideas on the emergence of new species: that they appeared through the process of natural selection. Darwin’s proposals directly contradicted Lyell’s own beliefs, but as a scientist of utmost integrity, Lyell accepted that, in science, existing ideas must give way when superseded by new discoveries.

  16

  ORIGIN OF ORIGIN

  Clergymen who engaged in the fashionable hobby of fossil-collecting also had to consider why certain species had vanished and, more unsettlingly, whether the new were more advanced than the old. In 1840 the Reverend George Young, a Scottish Presbyterian clergyman and scholar who had discovered a reptile ichthyosaur in 1819, posed the delicate question in ‘Scriptural Geology’ – an essay on the high antiquity ascribed to organic remains found imbedded in stratified rocks. ‘Some have alleged,’ wrote Young, ‘that in tracing the beds upwards we discern among the enclosed bodies a gradual progress from the more rude and simple creatures, to the more perfect and completely organised; as if the Creator’s skill had improved by practice.’ But he immediately backed away, saying: ‘But for this strange idea there is no foundation: creatures of the most perfect organisation occur in the lower beds as well as the higher.’1

  The idea that man had evolved from lower forms of life was so controversial that perhaps the first book boldly putting it in print was published anonymously. In 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation offered the proposition that fossils showed life had advanced through a series of stages by natural means. ‘The simplest and most primitive type . . . gave birth to the type next to it and so on to the very highest.’2 Vestiges, later known to have been written by the Scottish publisher and editor, Robert Chambers, was an intelligent and lengthy summary of geological history. It concluded that, considering the whole system of nature, ‘we cannot well doubt that we are in the hands of One who is both able and willing to do us the most entire justice’.3

  Vestiges, with what one critic called its ‘clear, pleasant, racy, self-sufficient style’, rode the wave of scientific popularisation started by Lyell’s Principles and also by the Scottish geologist Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone in 1841. Edition after edition of Vestiges was quickly snapped up by an eager public. While generally well received by Victorian society, the book infuriated the clergy. In the Edinburgh Review, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick exploded in rage and rhetoric. In an anonymous essay of which he was widely known to be the author, he filled over eighty-five pages to attack Vestiges for telling people that they were not made in the image of God but were the children of apes. ‘Degrading materialism’, he called the book. He was particularly worried about its appeal to young women and wrote to a friend that ‘God willing, I will strive to abate the evil.’4 Sedgwick seemed to forget that he himself had told a Geological Society audience in an anniversary address in 1834 that in ‘the repeated and almost entire changes of organic types in the successive formations of the earth . . . we have a series of proofs that there has been a progressive development of organic structure subservient to the purpose of life’.5

  Vestiges galvanised the new Young Men’s Christian Association, formed the year the work was published. The YMCA began a series of free public lectures intended to protect young men from the threats to faith posed by the book, especially after it became more widely available in a cheap format. The religious newspaper Christian Observer let fly a volley of insults: the book was ‘undisguised materialism’, ‘atheistic in its tendencies’, even ‘pigology’.6 The questions the book raised went beyond the physiological. If humans were descended from monkeys, where did their sense of morality come from? How could they be expected to exercise independent judgement?

  The mystery of its authorship was ended in 1884 with the twelfth edition of Vestiges. Published after Chambers’s death, it carried his name on the cover, spine and title page.

  The question of progress had dogged geology from the beginning. Were the older rocks without fossils inferior to the fossiliferous laid down later? Speculation inexorably shifted to life itself. Were tiny trilobites a step on the way up to dinosaurs? Was humankind the destination of the changes shown in fossils? How did one species lead to another – if ‘lead’ it did? What had caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago? And did mammals then grow in size because there was no competition for eating the vegetation?7

  The wider general understanding was expressed in Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.. Completed in 1849, the poem is thought to have been inspired by Vestiges of Creation. Written to express Tennyson’s unhealing grief for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died of a brain haemorrhage in 1833, the poem succinctly summarises the new awareness of the vastness of time and the indifference of nature to man. Man might trust that:

  . . . God was love indeed

  And love Creation’s final law–

  Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

  With ravine shriek’d against his creed–

  but he knew also that human existence and love were nothing to an impersonal, relentless nature which allows forms of life to disappear:

  ‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

  From scarped cliff and quarried stone

  She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

  I care for nothing, all shall go . . .8

  The pessimism of the poem did not trouble Queen Victoria. After the sudden death of Prince Albert in 1861 at the age of forty-two, she found great consolation in Tennyson’s grieving conclusion: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all.’

  The queen took some comfort also in a private visit for which she had summoned Sedgwick in 1863. As he had known her and Albert in their happiness at Osborne, she asked him to come to see her at Windsor Castle. He believed he was the first person outside her own family to whom she fully opened her heart and told her sorrows. As he wrote in his journal: ‘After the first greeting, when I bent one knee and kissed her hand, there was an end of all form, and the dear sorrowing Royal lady talked with me as if I had been her elder brother,’ – Sedgwick was then seventy-eight. ‘Her great aim is to carry out the intentions of the great and good Prince whom God has removed from her side. “He had the greatest regard for you,” she said, “and that is why I had a strong desire to talk with you without reserve.”’9

  Darwin traced his own first thoughts on the origin of species to the late 1830s, well before the publication of Vestiges. In November 1839 he wrote to Henslow, his mentor in Cambridge, that he was ‘steadily collecting every sort of fact, which may throw light on the origin & variation of species’.10 By 1842 he had written the first sketch of his idea that new species were produced by natural selection. Two years later he wrote out a publishable essay on the subject in case he died before completing the full version, which he wanted to be on the scale of Lyell’s Principles.

  His work on evolution may possibly have sprung from his poor health. Had he been in full strength and vigour, Darwin might have continued as a geologist hammering rocks in the open air rather than plunging into
speculative theorising in his study. His appalling ailments, which included palpitations and chronic vomiting, prevented fieldwork and turned him into a reclusive country gentleman. His attention turned to breeding flowers (orchids in particular) in his quiet Kent garden and greenhouse and also to describing and classifying barnacles from all over the world. As always he was thorough. In 1854 he informed Sir Joseph Hooker that he was ‘sending ten thousand Barnacles out of the house all over the world . . . I shall in a day or two begin to look over my old notes on species’.11 The bespectacled Hooker, whom Darwin told Lyell was ‘a most engaging young man’, would become Darwin’s close friend.12 As deputy director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew he knew very well that Darwin’s enthusiasm for gardening and horticulture was shared by thousands of middle-class Victorians. Indeed, the whole country seemed gripped by a passion for greenhouses and exotic plants.

  The temptation to read progress into the fossil record had long existed – Lamarck having called attention in 1809 to the manner in which the characteristics of species changed over generations. For religious believers, in any event, the meaning of the fossil record was always obvious: a succession of constant changes led to the divinely ordered destination: man.

  An eccentric solution to the apparent contradiction between fossils and God’s handiwork was offered in 1857 by Philip Henry Gosse, a field naturalist and respected anatomist who spent much time in Devon. Two years before Darwin’s great book, Gosse came up with the theory that God had created the world to look as if it had already existed, placing fossils in the rocks as evidence of a ‘past’, just as He had created Adam with a navel even though the First Man had neither umbilical cord nor mother. Gosse’s book was called Omphalos (Greek for ‘navel’) from its central idea, with its arch subtitle: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. Fossils, in Gosse’s reasoning, were not evidence of a past but rather of God’s intention to make the world appear old. (When Omphalos came out, it was ridiculed. Yet some Jehovah’s Witnesses today subscribe to this theory of the deceptive age of fossils.) Gosse, needless to say, had no patience with Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and its assumption that the fossil record showed the world’s long history. Of the anonymous author, he joked ‘this writer has hatched a scheme, by which the immediate ancestor of Adam was a Chimpanzee, and his remote ancestor a Maggot!’13

  On 18 June 1858, the following year, Darwin received a shock from the other side of the world: a devastating letter from another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin instantly saw that Wallace, a much-travelled explorer who had felt out of place in London and was now working in Borneo, had independently come up with the theory of natural selection through the struggle for existence.

  There can be no greater measure of Darwin’s integrity than what he did in response. Rather than throwing the letter away, as he could easily have done, he complied with Wallace’s request and passed the essay on to Lyell. (Wallace knew Lyell only from his Principles.) In his covering letter to Lyell, his closest friend, Darwin wrote: ‘Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd. be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views of “Natural Selection” depending on the struggle for existence.’ Lyell had urged Darwin to present a simple sketch of his views, but Darwin declined, saying that to give a fair sketch would be impossible without supporting his propositions with facts. He admitted, ‘yet I should certainly be vexed if any one were to publish my doctrines before me’.14 ‘Though,’ Darwin added, ‘my Book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated, as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.’15

  Lyell could see that the radical new idea of human evolution had emerged through his own description in Principles of the gradual accumulation of changes through minor adaptations. He urged Darwin to hurry up and get on with writing and publishing what his friend now called his ‘big book on species’. Indeed, the unfinished book was already 250,000 words long. After a polite letter to Wallace explaining that he himself was writing a large book on species and variation, Darwin got back to work.

  Haste was in the air. Two weeks later at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, Darwin’s theories on natural selection were presented by the secretaries of the society, preceded by introductory notes prepared by Lyell and Darwin’s good friend Hooker. The Linnean Society was the chosen venue because the subject of both papers – living species – was considered unsuitable for the rock-centred Geological Society.

  At the meeting, the introductory comments made clear that Darwin had already expressed his ideas on divergence of species in an essay sketch sent in a letter to a Harvard botany professor, Asa Gray. These ideas were now being laid out fully in the big work Darwin had in progress. The thesis of this new book was then explained, followed by a reading of the essay Wallace had sent to Darwin. The sequence of the Linnean programme made Wallace’s work seem a ‘me-too’ offering, subordinate to Darwin’s original thinking. Darwin was, as usual, not present at the meeting. Charles, his tenth and last child, had died of scarlet fever, increasing his (justified) anxiety that his family, by marrying their close cousins as many of them had done, had inflicted genetic weakness on their children.

  The Darwin and Wallace papers were first on a long programme at the Linnean Society. Read aloud, one after the other, they passed without discussion. With too much to digest, the members and guests left exhausted. The news that he and Darwin had been given simultaneous airing was posted to Wallace, who was surprised to learn that his own original idea had also occurred to Darwin. From then on, both men – undisputedly co-discoverers of one of nature’s great truths – behaved with exceptional courtesy and tolerance.

  Both papers were published in the Linnean Society journal in September 1858. Asa Gray brought the ideas to Louis Agassiz at Harvard. Agassiz was surprised to learn that Gray was inclined to believe the theory, because he himself was passionately opposed to the very idea of evolution. When later he read Darwin’s book, he pronounced it ‘poor – very poor!!’

  Darwin got down to writing in earnest and finished the 500-page manuscript in May 1859. As he worked he tightened his style. According to his biographer Janet Browne, he omitted all footnotes, compressed his material, discovered a voice that was ‘in turn dazzling, persuasive, friendly, humble, and dark’, and produced a masterpiece of readable, genial scientific text.16 For the process he was describing, he did not use the word ‘evolution’ but rather ‘descent with modification’. It was his friend, Herbert Spencer, who in 1864 gave Darwin’s theory the label, taken from Darwin’s text, which has stuck: ‘survival of the fittest’. Darwin’s actual words were: ‘we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or in any degree, tends to produce a distincter image’.17

  The ground had been prepared by Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. But Chambers’s book made the development of fossils appear to lead towards something higher on the scale of life, while Darwin carefully omitted any sense of progress or purpose or striving towards a goal. Unlike Chambers, he filled his book with scientific facts and did not discuss how life began.

  Darwin was perhaps more worried about how his own life could continue. Two months before publication, his vomiting started again and he took himself off for a water cure or, as he called it, ‘hydropathy and rest’.

  When Darwin asked Lyell’s advice on bringing out his new book, Lyell steered him towards his own publisher and fellow Scot, John Murray. Murray undoubtedly knew that controversy was good for business. Very soon Darwin’s butler was on his way to Murray’s offices in Albemarle Street, bearing a brown-paper parcel containing the battered manuscript.

  Lyell gave his friend Darwin’s book a powerful blast of advance publicity. Speaking in Aberdeen in September 1859 (after lunching with Queen Victoria
and Prince Albert at Balmoral), he delivered a public lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, alerting his scientific audience to the imminence of a work to be published in two months’ time which would throw ‘a flood of light on many classes of phenomena connected with the affinities, geographical distribution and geological succession of organic beings, for which no other hypothesis has been able, or has even attempted to account’.18

  The British Association speech was a public acknowledgement that Lyell would stand by Darwin through the storm he saw about to break. In his lecture he spelled out the important new evidence uncovered by excavations in France: Stone Age tools that indicated human beings were coexistent with fossils of mammals which lived about 2.5 million years ago.

  On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life hit the world on Thursday 24 November, 1859. George Eliot and her partner George Henry Lewes read it on the Saturday. The book opened with a tribute from Darwin to Lyell: ‘He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology . . . yet does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.’ Eliot’s own tribute came the following year with the publication of her novel The Mill on the Floss, whose concluding scene features a great flood sweeping away Maggie and Tom, sister and brother, reconciling all their past differences as they drown in an embrace.

  Darwin’s work is one of the greatest books of all time. In clear language it deals with the sudden appearance of species after the long Primary period represented by the earlier rocks from which fossils were absent. It describes what is now understood as ‘the Cambrian explosion’ (545 million years ago), when a great burst of varieties of life, trilobites not least but also other forms of arthropods (invertebrate animals having an external skeleton, a segmented body and jointed appendages), left their traces in the rocks. Darwin wrote simply: ‘the amount of organic change in the fossils of consecutive formations probably serves as a fair measure of the relative, though not actual lapse of time’.19 Then, as ‘all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those who lived before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world’.20