Despite their differences, Darwin retained his respect for his mentor. So he should have done. When the tenth edition of Lyell’s Principles, much enlarged, came out in two volumes in 1867 it revealed that Lyell had indeed changed his view. After what he called ‘Mr. Darwin’s epoch-making work’, he wrote that he now accepted the descent of man from ape.21
In the year of Lyell’s death, his friend Hooker paid a moving tribute to his intellectual courage: Lyell had abandoned ‘a theory, which he had for forty years regarded as one of the foundation-stones of a work that had given him the highest position attainable among contemporary scientific writers . . . and to substitute a new foundation not only more secure, but more harmonious in its proportions than it was before’.22
The world of science was completely converted to Darwin’s views. In 1869 the publisher Alexander Macmillan founded a weekly scientific journal, Nature, with a polemical purpose: to argue Darwin’s scheme. Half a dozen articles in Nature’s first year did just that, and Darwin became a lifetime subscriber.23
The friendship between Darwin and Lyell endured as Lyell’s health failed and Mary Lyell died in the spring of 1873. In November 1874 when Lyell attended the fiftieth anniversary of the Geological Society Club, of which he had been a founding member, his friends were surprised at his vigour. He died not long after, on 22 February 1875, at the age of seventy-eight. By then blind, he had fallen down the stairs at his Harley Street home.
Darwin lamented the loss of the best friend he had ever had. He was glad that he had died with his faculties intact and praised his ‘freedom from all religious bigotry . . . How grand, also, was his candour & pure love of truth.’24 He gave his valedictory words on Lyell to his friend Hooker (now president of the Royal Society): ‘How completely he revolutionised Geology: for I can remember something of pre-Lyellian days. I never forget that almost everything which I have done in science I owe to the study of his great works.’25 Yet when Hooker arranged for the great geologist to have the honour of burial in Westminster Abbey, Darwin declined the invitation to be a pallbearer. He could not even bring himself to go to the funeral – for fear of becoming ill, he said. As he put it: ‘I should so likely fail in the midst of the ceremony, and have my head whirling off my shoulders.’26 Thus Lyell was buried with benefit of clergy, but without that of Darwin.
In its commemoration, the journal Nature praised Lyell’s decision to give up law for geology: ‘it was well for science that he was induced to prefer the quieter study of nature to the subtle bandying of words or the excitement of forensic life’.27 Lyell knew very well what he had done. As he had said in a letter to Thomas Spedding in May 1863, ‘the question of the origin of species gave much to think of, and you may well believe that it cost me a struggle to renounce my old creed’.28
But renounce it he had.
18
MUSEUM PIECES
Charles Lyell’s legacy lies in his writings. His Principles of Geology and Travels in North America retain a freshness and intelligence today. Lyell’s significance was acknowledged at Westminster Abbey on his tombstone (which was made of Carboniferous limestone and small fossils). For the inscription Sir Joseph negotiated with Lyell’s sister Katherine a form of words that was not too religious: ‘Throughout a long and laborious life he sought the means of deciphering the fragmentary records of the earth’s history in the patient investigation of the present order of Nature enlarging the boundaries of knowledge and leaving on scientific thought an enduring influence. “O Lord how great are thy works and thy thoughts are very deep”. Psalm XCII.5.’1
The abbey holds Darwin’s final resting place as well. When Darwin died in February 1882, he was buried in the nave – not as close to Lyell as his wife Emma had wished, but appropriately near those other giants of British science, Sir John Herschel and Sir Isaac Newton. Among the pallbearers were his old friends Hooker, Huxley and Wallace. At the time, Darwin’s stone was inscribed only with his name and dates. Later the Royal Society added words on his contribution to science. Huxley led the memorial committee to pay homage to the distinguished scientist and £4,500 was raised, half of which was used for the statue in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Darwin’s white marble form now sits like a deity at the top of the main staircase at the museum. For years, it looked down at the school children crowded around the symbol of the museum’s collection – the giant skeleton of the dinosaur Diplodocus – although in 2016 this was taken down, to be replaced by a blue whale, in a decision to focus on the living, not the fossil past.
When after eight years’ construction the great Victorian museum, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and created by the driving force of Richard Owen, opened in April 1881, The Times called it the ‘Temple of Nature, showing, as it should, the Beauty of Holiness’.2 It had been established as a separate entity from the British Museum when the natural history collections became so large as to require a home of their own. In a new twenty-first-century wing, the museum offers the less beautiful but technically advanced Darwin Centre, which allows visitors to see into the museum’s laboratories and to interact with exhibits.
On the ground floor is a sight not to be missed. Displayed along a gallery wall is the Plesiosaurus giganticus that Mary Anning dug out of a cliff in 1823 – along with her brother Joseph’s great discovery of 1811, the wide-eyed skull of the first ichthyosaur, and also her own 1830 find, the Plesiosaurus macrocephalus. On the wall hangs a portrait of Anning in a black cloak and straw bonnet, with her dog Tray; she is described as ‘the greatest fossil-hunter ever known’.3 The museum also offers a costumed ‘Mary Anning’, who talks about helping to discover the first specimen of an ichthyosaur when she was only ten.
Those who visit Down House in Kent are rewarded with a strong sense of where and how the reclusive Darwin lived for forty years with Emma and his children. The modest Victorian villa, built in the 1730s but later modernised, is an English Heritage site and one of the main tourist attractions in southeast England. It holds his library, his study with his chair, notebooks, microscopes, and other scientific instruments, and his greenhouse where he raised plants to study their adaptations. There is also a replica of his cabin on the Beagle. The garden holds the paths where he walked, especially during the ailing last years of his life.
The man to whom Darwin was apprenticed in his youth, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, died in Cambridge in January 1873 at the age of eighty-seven, having finished his Norwich residence only months before and returned happily to his beloved Trinity College, Cambridge. He died with a prayer on his lips, heard by his niece: ‘Wash me clean in the blood of the Lamb – Enable me to submit to Thy Holy Will – Sanctify me with Thy Holy Spirit.’4
Sedgwick remained as Woodwardian Professor of Geology to the last. As early as 1850 he had written: ‘after thirty laborious geological tours, I have brought together and placed in the Cambridge Museum, a very noble Collection’.5 Indeed he had, placing his acquisitions in the Woodwardian Museum. Three years before his death he expanded his intentions: ‘There were three prominent hopes which possessed my heart in the earliest years of my Professorship,’ he wrote. ‘First, that I might be enabled to bring together a Collection worthy of the University, and illustrative of all the departments of the Science it was my duty to study and to teach. Secondly, that a Geological Museum might be built by the University, amply capable of containing its future Collections; and lastly, that I might bring together a Class of Students who would listen to my teaching, support me by their sympathy, and help me by the labour of their hands.’6
Upon Sedgwick’s death, the university decided that his memorial should take the form of a new and larger museum. The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences was opened in 1904, with King Edward VII in attendance. Now part of the university’s Department of Earth Sciences, it offers a superb collection of fossils, rocks and minerals from around the world, representing 550 million years of the earth’s history.
For the last part of his life, the Reverend William Bu
ckland lived in London as Dean of Westminster. He dropped out of active geological research, yet still encouraged a respect for the natural sciences within the Church of England. He continued to give the annual lecture course (begun in 1814) on geology at Oxford until 1849, when mental disability forced him to retire. He then moved to Islip, northeast of Oxford. In the churchyard, in what was perhaps his last joke, he reserved a plot which he knew lay over an impenetrable outcrop of solid Jurassic limestone. Upon his death in 1856, a hole had to be blasted to accommodate his wishes and his coffin.
The Buckland Collection forms the centrepiece of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’s holdings of zoological, entomological and geological specimens. His prized Megalosaurus jaw is on display there. Among the other treasures of the collection is a cast of the ferocious marine predator Mosasaurus, bearing an inscription: ‘Given by the Museum of Natural History at Paris to Dr Buckland’. The donor was identified as Georges Cuvier of the French Musée Nationale, who made the gifts as evidence of his friendship and the high esteem in which he held Buckland.
Oxford also holds (to the dismay of the Natural History Museum of Wales) the remnants of Buckland’s celebrated find, inescapably if inaccurately known as ‘the Red Lady of Paviland’. Although analysis long ago revealed the bones to be those of a male, genetic facts have not dimmed the Red Lady’s fame. The bones are carefully stored in the museum’s basement.
Cardiff nonetheless does hold one of the most important geological archives in the world. Henry De la Beche in 1837 moved his Geological Survey to Swansea because of the economic importance of the Welsh coalfields. Knighted in 1842, he became active in the local scientific scene; his daughter Elizabeth married the son of a Swansea naturalist, Lewis Weston Dillwyn (of the family who led Buckland to the Paviland Cave in Gower). Dillwyn later became mayor of Swansea.
De la Beche died in April 1855 aged fifty-nine, having spent his last years in a wheelchair suffering from progressive paralysis. He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London. More than a century later documents revealed that an illegitimate daughter, Rosalie Torrie, is buried beside him. On De la Beche’s death his early papers, journals and sketches remained with the Dillwyn family, who in the 1930s gave them to the National Museum of Wales. The vast collection includes some of De la Beche’s finest art works, notably the brilliant Duria Antiquior, the watercolour created for Anning in 1830. The museum also holds significant Buckland papers. Given through the same Dillwyn family connections, they show details of his discovery of the Paviland Cave.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, founded by the efforts of Louis Agassiz in 1859, is stuffed with prehistoric and extinct animals, many on display, including the largest turtle shell ever found, a fifty-foot-long skeleton of a mastodon and another of a killer whale. The museum, sometimes called the Agassiz Museum, also houses contributions from a dozen academic departments reflecting the new breadth of zoology, from biological oceanography to vertebrate palaeontology.
With his great map, William Smith made his own memorial in 1815. One of the original copies hangs reverentially, like the ‘Last Supper’ of geology, in the entrance hall of the Geological Society’s headquarters in Burlington House, London, with curtains drawn to protect it from the light. The map is not small: covering such a wide area of Britain, emphasising sequence of strata, and drawn on a scale of five miles to the inch, it reaches more than eight feet in height and over six feet across.7 There is also a fine portrait of Smith, painted in 1837, two years before his death at the age of seventy.
As for Roderick Murchison, despite all the geographic features around the world bearing his name (including the Murchison Oil Platform in the North Sea), the only Murchison museum appears to be in the town of Murchison on the west coast of South Island in New Zealand, where it was built to commemorate the earthquake that devastated the area in 1929. A large slab of rock bearing the inscription: ‘To Roderick Impey Murchison, Scottish geologist, explorer of Perm Krai, who gives to the last period of Palaeozoic era the name of Perm’ stands in the central Russian city of Perm. Murchison is more grandly remembered in London, with a grave in the Brompton Cemetery covered by an imposing multi-layered engraved tomb.
19
THEN AND NOW
One could weep for all that the Victorian geologists did not know that is common knowledge today. Darwin, who died in 1882, never heard of genes or chromosomes, nor did other scientists of his time.
But science is a continuous process of discovery. Darwin could never know the secret of life found in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. They recognised that genetic information is transferred from parent cells to new through the twisted and paired threads of the nucleic acid, DNA. More cause for regret is that Darwin and his scientific contemporaries worked without the benefit of a paper published in 1866, now considered the foundation of modern genetics. In Experiments with Plant Hybrids, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, described the transmission of hereditary characteristics, basing his observations on the results of crossing thousands of pea plants. Yet Mendel’s paper appeared in an obscure journal and was largely ignored at the time. Indeed, not until the end of the nineteenth century were the terms ‘gene’ and ‘genetics’ coined by William Bateson, a Cambridge student of heredity who recognised the strength of Mendel’s ideas and brought them to scientific attention.
What is also now understood is why Lamarck was wrong. Changes in structure did not arise from new conditions – despite the dogged insistence today by Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and researcher into parapsychology, that the giraffe’s long neck was produced by countless generations stretching their necks to reach for fresh foliage on higher branches and the mole’s blindness by burrowing in the earth and not needing the use of eyes. The reason why some organisms survived over others is that the fittest survived in the competition for food, not that individual organs adapted themselves to life’s conditions.
Another major discovery was that of the Burgess Shale in 1909 in the Canadian Rockies. It was found in 1876 by a young palaeontologist, Charles Doolittle Walcott, and is considered the most spectacular fossil deposit anywhere in the world.1 This rich fossil bed first opened the world’s eyes to the vast array of animals that had been living in the Cambrian seas 505 million years ago. The profusion in the area of trilobites and other soft-bodied animals with no hard parts was found during the building of a railway hotel in Yoho National Park and was described as ‘the finest and largest series of Middle Cambrian fossils yet discovered in any formation in any country’.2 Walcott, a self-made man who, without a degree in geology, became director of the United States Geological Survey and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, is now considered to have contributed more than anyone before or since to the understanding of the life of the Cambrian world.
The condescension of hindsight quickly vanishes in the face of the certainty that today’s scientific knowledge will be superseded even more quickly than yesterday’s. Almost every weekly issue of the still-thriving Nature carries new information that renders some previous knowledge obsolete. ‘Two-billion-year-old fossils are the first sign of multicellular life,’ the journal asserted on 1 July 2010. Fossils large enough to be seen with the naked eye were found in southeastern Gabon in rocks known to be 2.1 billion years old. ‘Early Life’, a report in Nature by P. C. J. Donoghue and J. B. Antcliffe, concluded that: ‘The discovery and continuing elucidation of the Precambrian fossil record has met Darwin’s predictions on the extent and structure of evolutionary history.’3
From the beginning of geology, calculating the age of the earth has been a preoccupation, and the Comte de Buffon’s guess at 75,000 years, derived from his experiment with heating and cooling iron spheres, had earned its place in the science’s history. By 1870, however, Nature could declare that it had ‘become possible that, by means of changes which are known to have occurred in a given number of years, some mea
surement of the time represented by the whole series of geological formations might be obtained’. These changes had occurred very slowly, the journal conceded, ‘yet not so slowly as to be quite imperceptible in historical time’.4
The actual age of the earth was determined in the mid-twentieth century by the dating of meteorites formed at the same time as the planet. The distinguished geologist Arthur Holmes (1890–1965) of Edinburgh University and fellow of the Royal Society and Imperial College found a way to use the radioactive decay of uranium to measure the age of rocks. He had performed the first radiometric dating while on the staff of Imperial College, the result being published in 1911. He used the fact that radioactive decay converts an isotope of uranium into a form of lead at a predictable rate. He calculated that ‘a gramme-molecule of lead would take the place of a gramme-molecule of uranium in 8,200 million years’.5 With this decay rate established, scientists had for the first time a clock by which to tick off the millennia that had passed since the elements had been formed. According to this clock, the age of the planet stood and stands at 4.54 billion years.
Yet not until 2.45 billion years ago did oxygen become a significant component of the earth’s atmosphere. The cause of what is now dubbed ‘The Great Oxidation Event’ is unknown but the event is believed to have originated from algae which poured oxygen into the atmosphere, making possible the appearance of more complex, air-breathing forms of life.
The age of the human race is proving harder to calculate. The dates for the appearance of the Neanderthals and others who shared common ancestors with modern man keep changing; evidence has emerged that they used stone tools about 800,000 years earlier than had been thought. The discovery of sharp-edged shaped bones in Ethiopia has suggested that early people chipped stones to make them more effective in cutting and scraping bits of flesh from the carcasses of animals. Our ancestors can thus be seen to have been butchers and carnivores about 3.2 million years ago.
Reading the Rocks Page 20