There followed perhaps his most famous sentence (now engraved on a wall of the Royal Society’s dining room): ‘It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.’21
Thus the struggle for life was ‘a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms’. Then came his peroration: ‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.’22
The book proved the bestseller Murray’s had hoped. It aroused international interest and went into many editions – six by 1876. The first review, using the words that Darwin had not, claimed that he had said that men came from monkeys.
As usual, Adam Sedgwick came up with the fiercest critical blast. Not exhausted by condemning Vestiges, he attacked his old student (for that is how he regarded Darwin) after the publication of Origin. He wrote to Darwin himself to tell him that he had read the book ‘with more pain than pleasure’: ‘Parts of it I admired greatly, parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore.’ But other parts he read ‘with absolute sorrow, because I think them utterly false and grievously mischievous – You have deserted – after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth – the true method of induction – & started up as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkin’s locomotive that was to sail us to the moon.’ He felt that Darwin’s argument rested on ‘assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved’. Darwin used ‘natural selection’ as if it implied ‘causation’ but omitted to explain the cause. For himself, Sedgwick said, ‘I call (in the abstract) causation the will of God; and I can prove that He acts for the good of His creatures. He also acts by laws which we can study and comprehend.’ But to him, Darwin had ignored the link between the material and moral. In essence, what was the cause of the development of species of which he wrote?23
He also disliked Darwin’s tone of triumphant confidence – the same tone he had deplored in Vestiges of Creation. Darwin’s reasoning would ‘sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history’. What Darwin had to do was to accept God’s revelation.24
Signing off his letter as ‘a son of a monkey and an old friend of yours’, Sedgwick reported that his health was somewhat better but that he ‘humbly accepted God’s revelation of Himself both in His works and in His word . . . If you and I do all this, we shall meet in heaven.’25
Speaking to others, Sedgwick was fiercer, calling Darwin’s book ‘a dish of rank materialism cleverly cooked and served up’.26 He called Darwin himself ‘the teacher of error instead of the apostle of truth’. The book ignored the ‘God of Nature’ as manifested in His works and denied the moral and metaphysical aspects of humanity. It was an unsurprising response from a clergyman who every Sunday attended three services and preached twice.
Wallace, for his own part, in a long letter to Darwin sent from the East Indies warmly praised the book of which Darwin had sent him a copy and generously wrote:
As to the theory of Natural Selection itself, I shall always maintain it to be yours and yours only. You had worked it out in details I had never thought of, years before I had a ray of light on the subject, and my paper would never have convinced anybody, or been noticed as more than ingenious speculation, whereas your book has revolutionised the study of Natural History and carried away captive the best men of the present age. All the merit I claim is having been the means of inducing you to write and publish at once.27
The success of On the Origin of Species did not take the sting out of Darwin’s recognition in 1861 that he had been completely wrong about Scotland’s Parallel Roads of Glen Roy. Long before, in 1847, Darwin had written to Hooker: ‘I have been bad enough for these few last days, having had to think & write too much about Glen Roy (an audacious son of dog (Mr Milne) having attacked my theory) which made me horribly sick.’28
What David Milne, a Scottish geologist, had done was to visit Lochaber, believing Darwin’s sea-beaches theory to be correct. Yet when he got to Glen Roy he discovered a gap previously unnoticed on the level of the middle road. He gave the gap the unpoetic name of ‘Col R2’ (‘col’, from the Latin ‘collum’ for neck, a geological term for a pass or gap between two mountain peaks). Milne (later Milne-Home) recognised the col, correctly, as the gap through which the overflowing glacial water had escaped from the lake.
What Darwin and his predecessors (notably the Scottish geologists John MacCulloch, FRS, and Sir Thomas Dick-Lauder, whose 1818 paper ‘The Parallel Roads of Glenroy’ first drew attention to Scotland’s geological mystery) lacked was the essential information: knowledge of glaciers and glaciology – the origins of the roads being finally explained by the palaeontologist Agassiz in 1840.
In 1892, looking back at the prolonged search for the Glen Roy explanation, John Tyndall commented at the Royal Institution on the manner in which the origins of the roads had been considered by Darwin and other eminent geologists of an earlier time: ‘Two distinct mental processes are involved in the treatment of such a question. Firstly, the faithful and sufficient observation of the data; and secondly, that higher mental process in which the constructive imagination comes into play, connecting the separate facts of observation with their common cause, and weaving them into an organic whole.’29 Tyndall called attention to the handicap under which Darwin and the early Glen Roy investigators had laboured: ‘A knowledge of the action of ancient glaciers was the necessary antecedent to the next explanation, and experience of this nature was not possessed.’30
And the vital lesson? According to Tyndall: ‘In the survey of such a field two things are especially worthy to be taken into account – the widening of the intellectual horizon and the reaction of expanding knowledge upon the intellectual organ itself.’31
The rise of aggregated scientific thinking, characterised by the theories of the Glen Roy roads from 1776 to 1876, shifted the balance between speculation and observation. The Parallel Roads showed what could be achieved by collective thought built on known causes and rational deduction: observation, deduction, supposition and calculation were now the ways to approach a problem. A purely Romantic view was a hindrance.
The rise of the scientific study of landscape in the early nineteenth century coincided with the demise of Romanticism. The relationship between science and literature showed the difference between the instructed and the uninstructed imagination. Romantic literature teemed with impulse, spirit and will. In contrast, science was interested in origins, outcomes and predictions. In essence, literature gradually withdrew from the material world throughout the nineteenth century. While William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were looking inwards, Darwin, Lyell and other scientists looked outwards – hence their visits to Glen Roy.
But, unlike poets, scientists could be proved wrong. Darwin had to accept the evidence on Glen Roy. But not until 1861 did he finally surrender: ‘I give up the ghost. My paper was one gigantic blunder.’32
But he never had to use the word ‘blunder’ about Origin of Species.
17
THE WHOLE ORANG
Did Lyell realise, after the publication of Origin, that his pupil was now his teacher? Without acknowledging that they had changed places, with intellectual honesty Lyell swiftly and completely rewrote his Manual of Elementary Geology for its tenth and much-enlarged edition in 1867, spelling out the evidence of evolutionary ancestry for man.
Evolution remained controversia
l. A year after Origin’s publication, in November 1864 – when, after some of the older members were afraid, in Lyell’s words, ‘of crowning anything so unorthodox as the “Origin”’1 – the Royal Society’s distinguished Copley Medal was awarded to Darwin. (Darwin as ever did not attend.) The citation cagily praised Darwin’s achievements in geology, physical geography, zoology, physiological botany and genetic biology, but deliberately omitted any mention of On the Origin of Species. Evolutionary theory was still unmentionable in polite scientific society.
Lyell gave the after-dinner speech usually given by the medallist. Darwin wrote and thanked him. In reply Lyell related to Darwin what he had told the Royal Society: ‘I said I had been forced to give up my old faith without thoroughly seeing my way to a new one. But I think you would have been satisfied with the length I went.’2
Lyell was a reluctant evolutionist. He believed in a creator and the distinctiveness of man, who was ‘of higher dignity than were any pre-existing beings on the earth’. Yet his attention had been caught by the discovery of flint tools that seemed to him evidence of primitive man. In 1859 he had taken himself to France to inspect the gravel beds of the Somme and Abbeville as well as to question palaeontologists who knew the site, with its indications that humans had lived in the same era as mammoths and cave bears. The flint tools discovered among fossils, he said, were some signs of ‘the likely barbarism of early humanity’.3 He found the tools contemporaneous with the mammoth and wrote to his friend George Ticknor that he regarded ‘the Pyramids as things of yesterday in comparison of these relics’.4 He obtained sixty-five of the tools and was pleased when a former governor of New Zealand recognised them as similar to spearheads found in Australia and hatchets such as the natives of Papua New Guinea used for digging up roots.5
Four years later, Lyell elaborated on the theme in The Antiquity of Man. In this detailed book subtitled The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation, he traced the fossil evidence of living creatures from the earliest Cambrian era to the present day, and recorded in one work all the documented evidence on human antiquity back to the eighteenth century. He considered his latest book to be the story of the relations of the early history of man to the glacial period – the period crucial to understanding the origin of man.6 In April 1863 the Royal Society’s Proceedings supported his argument with its report on the first human jawbone ever discovered, found in the same French gravel pit that contained the ancient flint tools.
Published by Murray, Antiquity sold out almost immediately in the first week of February 1863 and was reprinted three times that year. Mudie’s Circulating Library bought several thousand copies for a public hungry to read about the controversial process of evolution. According to the Darwin biographer Janet Browne, Antiquity was ‘the first significant book after Darwin’s Origin to shake humanity’s view of itself’.7 It gave people their geological past. Darwin, however, poring over its pages, could not find any open endorsement of evolution.
From 53 Harley Street, on 11 March 1863, Lyell wrote to Darwin to explain his position. He knew that the public ‘have regarded me as the advocate of the other side’ – that is, anti-evolution and transmutation – but, he told Darwin, ‘you much overrate my influence’: ‘My feelings, however, more than any thought about policy or expediency, prevent me from dogmatising as to the descent of man from the brutes . . . I cannot admit that my leap at p. 505 [in Antiquity of Man] which makes you “groan” is more than a legitimate deduction . . . I think the old “creation” is almost as much required as ever, but of course it takes a new form if Lamarck’s views improved by yours are adopted.’8
Lyell remained convinced that there was a huge gulf between man and beast. How the gulf had been bridged remained ‘a profound mystery’.9
‘Oh,’ commented Darwin in the margin of his copy.10
In Antiquity, Lyell avoided any mention of God by name. Instead he employed graceful allusions to ‘the Author of Nature’, ‘the Supreme Cause’ or ‘the Supreme Will and Power’. He had been unable to abandon his religious beliefs, telling Darwin in May 1869: ‘I feel that progressive development or evolution cannot be entirely explained by natural selection, I rather hail Wallace’s suggestion that there may be a Supreme Will and Power which may not abdicate its functions of interference, but may guide the forces and laws of Nature’.11 He concluded Antiquity with a ringing endorsement of what is now called ‘intelligent design’. Evolution, he wrote, ‘leaves the argument in favour of design, and therefore of a designer, as valid as ever’. He reminded his readers that Isaac Newton, originator of the theory of gravitation, was religious as well as philosophical: ‘the improvable reason of Man himself presents us with a picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter’.12
Darwin invited the Lyells for the weekend at Down House to celebrate the publication of Lyell’s book, but he wrote to his confidant Joseph Hooker that he was ‘deeply disappointed at Lyell’s excessive caution’: ‘the best of the joke is that he thinks he has acted with the courage of a Martyr of old.––I hope I may have taken an exaggerated view of his timidity . . . I wish to Heaven he had said not a word on the subject.’13 Yet when his health forced cancellation of the visit, Darwin wrote a candid letter to Lyell saying Lyell was not doing enough to help him.
Lyell, smarting at the charge, wrote his own answer to Hooker: ‘Darwin has sent me a useful set of corrigenda and criticisms for the new edition I am busy in preparing. He seems much disappointed that I do not go farther with him, or do not speak out more. I can only say that I have spoken out to the full extent of my present convictions, and even beyond my state of feeling as to man’s unbroken descent from the brutes, and I find I am half converting not a few who were in arms against Darwin and are even now against Huxley.’14
The question would haunt Lyell until his death. He could not bring himself to go ‘the whole orang’, as he sardonically put it to the biologist and writer T. H. Huxley.
Huxley in 1868 coined the word ‘agnostic’ to describe his own position as neither believer nor disbeliever. He had become known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ for his passionate defence of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin had shared his theory with him before publication, positioning Huxley to become the leading supporter of the theory.
In a celebrated confrontation at Oxford at the new Gothic-style Museum of Natural History, where the British Association for the Advancement of Science was meeting on 30 June 1860, the great public speaker Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, ridiculed Darwin’s theory. Wilberforce had earlier attacked Robert Chambers’s Vestiges. On this occasion he asked Huxley (accounts of the famous exchange vary, usually relying on Hooker’s account in a long letter to Darwin) whether he would prefer a monkey for his grandfather or his grandmother.15 Huxley’s retort has variously portrayed him as calm, as white with anger, or simply calling Wilberforce ‘unscientific’. In Lyell’s account Huxley replied ‘that if he had his choice of an ancestor, whether it should be an ape, or one who having received a scholastic education, should use his logic to mislead an untutored public, and should treat not with argument but with ridicule the facts and reasoning adduced in support of a grave and serious philosophical question, he would not hesitate for a moment to prefer the ape’.16 However, he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts for ‘the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion’. (The British Association quickly moved to provide a sanitised account of the afternoon.17)
Another surprising Darwin critic that day was the former captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy, now head of the government’s Meteorological Department. As Hooker described it, ‘lifting an immense Bible first with both hands and afterwards with one hand over his head, [FitzRoy] solemnly implored the audience to believe in God rather than man’. FitzRoy then admitted that Origin of Species had given him ‘acutest pain’.18 He had already written to Darwin –
‘My dear old friend’ – that ‘I, at least, cannot find anything “ennobling” in the thought of being a descendant of even the most ancient Ape.’
Hooker sent Darwin an exuberant report of the confrontation – which had been so heated that one woman fainted and crowds waited outside the door hoping to get in. However, the meeting appears to have ended cheerfully, with all going off to dine together afterwards. Each speaker thought he had won. Yet the confrontation lived on in history as the defining moment when religion faced the claim of science to explain the origin of human beings.19 But the question remained open: were humans descended from monkeys or were they created by God?
For Lyell, it was not so much the hope of an afterlife to which he clung but rather to his belief that man was unique – not just another creature on the biological chain. He did not hold this belief out of any sentimentality as a father. The contrast between him and Darwin in fecundity was glaring. There is no record that Lyell ever alluded to his childlessness; one wonders if he and Darwin, with their mutual interest in reproduction, ever discussed it. Darwin seems to have taken to heart Thomas Malthus’s stricture that contraception was a vice. ‘Moral restraint’ was the only permissible barrier to pregnancy.20 Charles and Emma Darwin did not practise much restraint. By the time Origin was published, they had seven living children, three others having died.
Reading the Rocks Page 19