The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

by David Quammen

  The answer to each of these questions, I think, is yes. The real uncertainty lies in how all the factors interacted—their relative importance, their intricate synergies—and that isn’t likely to be settled by psychobiography or squinty textual analysis at a distance of a century and a half. Charles Darwin was a complicated man, courageous but shy, inspired but troubled, with a brilliant mind and a soft heart and a stomach that jiggled like a paint-mixing machine. If he were more unitary and transparent, he wouldn’t be so interesting.

  But a bit of tabulation and arithmetic, at this point, might help bring him into closer focus. In autumn of 1846, he was thirty-seven years old. During the decade since leaving the Beagle at Falmouth harbor, he had published three books, all dealing with the voyage: two geological treatises (one on coral reefs, one on volcanic islands) and his Journal from the Beagle. The Journal, a popular success, had lately gone into a second edition. His third geological volume (on South America) was in printer’s proofs and would appear soon. He had also edited five volumes in his Zoology of the Beagle series and published about two dozen scientific papers. Most of the papers were short and slight, but the one on those strange terraces lining the slopes of Scotland’s Glen Roy was long and ambitious, covering forty-two pages in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. In it he argued that the shelves were old sea beaches, formed when ocean levels had risen into the glen during ancient episodes of landscape subsidence; this agreed with his larger view, absorbed from Lyell, that rising and falling land levels play a big part in shaping geological features and placing fossil deposits. The Glen Roy paper, a major contribution to a prestigious journal, containing a bold theoretical assertion, was important to his reputation and self-image at the time, and important in a different way later when it proved embarrassingly wrong. In fact, you could add the Glen Roy embarrassment to the list of possible reasons why he delayed offering his theory of evolution.

  The Journal was important too, and less ambivalently so, having made him a famous young scientific traveler back in 1839. It had originally been released as volume three of FitzRoy’s set, under the dismissive title Journal and Remarks. Darwin was cast as a supportive voice to the main authors—FitzRoy himself and an earlier captain—of that Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle. (After all, he’d begun the voyage in an unofficial capacity and succeeded to the naturalist’s role almost accidentally.) But at publication time Darwin had stepped out toward the footlights and stolen the show because his volume, unlike the other two, was a good read, full of robust adventures amid exotic landscapes as told by an affable narrator. People liked it. Three months later, sensitive to demand, the publisher had reissued Darwin’s volume alone, which must have put an additional crook in Robert FitzRoy’s imperious snoot. Darwin’s revised title was more expansive and confident, in the windy Victorian way: Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle. That edition sold well but, since Darwin was still bound by the contract FitzRoy had arranged, it never earned him a penny. Six years later he made a better deal on his own, signing over the copyright to a new publisher for £150, which in 1845 was real money. He did an energetic revision, cutting passages that seemed tedious, adding others that offered more flavor, inserting new results from the experts who had worked on his collections, reversing the order of Geology and Natural History in the title as a subtle reflection of the fact that geology was no longer his own primary interest.

  His most notable changes to the Journal appeared in its Galápagos chapter. He added a drawing of four finches, showing the gross differences among their beaks, which John Gould had helped him appreciate. He wrote: “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” In the earlier(1839) edition he had muttered a safe, vaguely theistic comment about how “the creative power” had been busy in the Galápagos. In the new (1845) text, he changed that to marveling at “the amount of creative force,” a subtly different formulation, more quantitative than pious, and he admitted feeling “astonished” at the abundance of unique species inhabiting such a small archipelago, especially since the islands were formed by relatively recent volcanic action. “Hence, both in space and time,” he wrote, “we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.” It was a teaser line. In mentioning “that mystery of mysteries,” Darwin was echoing a phrase coined by the eminent science philosopher John Herschel; the mystery Herschel meant was “the replacement of extinct species by others,” as evidenced in the fossil record but not easily explained by natural theology. Adopting Herschel’s phrase gave Darwin a respected authority for viewing the origin of species as an unsettled matter, and it allowed him to hint his interest in solving that mystery. Then he shifted blandly to a discussion of Galápagos rodents.

  Readers of the revised Journal, in 1845, were left to admire the finch drawing and wonder what the hell it meant. Maybe these islands did bring Darwin “somewhat near” the big question; but he wouldn’t go nearer, not in print, for another thirteen years.

  Despite his detachment from society and his devotion to science, Darwin liked earning money, and not just as an author. He kept a birdwatcher’s eye on his investments, one of which was a 324-acre farm near a village called Beesby, in Lincolnshire, bought with inheritance money advanced by his father and eventually yielding profit as a rental property. Owning the farm made him a landlord, “a Lincolnshire squire,” as he mockingly called himself. He also held shares in canals and, later, in railroads. At the start of their married life, he and Emma had received about £1,200 annually, mostly in interest on those gift trusts from their fathers. Of that amount, despite running a big household, they managed to save a little. Their income rose gradually for a decade and then, after Dr. Darwin’s death in 1848, abruptly. The doctor’s estate, split in unknown ways among the two brothers and their sisters, seems to have brought Charles a lump of about £45,000. That was a fortune. During the years immediately afterward, Charles and Emma’s joint income went above £3,700 annually, of which they managed to reinvest half. Their wealth continued adding up. Compared to the revenues from family legacies and savvy investments, his profits from book publications were small, though not too small to figure in his meticulous financial accounting. The Journal, after its unremunerative first edition, had brought him that modest but gratifying payment for the second. Suddenly he was not just a published author but a paid professional. He stuck with this new publisher, John Murray. The Origin of Species, fourteen years later, would be a financial success for both of them, as well as a towering scientific milestone. From just the first two editions of The Origin (released in late 1859 and early 1860), Darwin would make £616 13s. 4d. And that was only a start.

  He wasn’t miserly, just a bean-counter by habit. Details mattered. There are account books in Darwin’s hand that show all his income and expenditures for forty-three years, from his marriage to his death, including such particulars as the £25 annual wages paid in 1842 to his butler, Parslow, and the 18 shillings he spent on snuff for himself in 1863. His outlay for shoes in 1863 also came to 18 shillings; shoes might be expensive but they lasted, even for a walking man, and snuff was his main vice. After five years at Down House, he put £58 into improving the garden and grounds. The beer bill for the household that year totaled £32. No tally exists of who drank how much.

  In 1846, he had four surviving children—two boys, two girls—with another on the way. There would always be, until Emma was almost fifty, another on the way. She delivered ten children in all, of whom three would die young. Neither her rate of recurrent pregnancy nor the mortality among her offspring was unusual for the times. Darwin eventually became tormented, though, by concern over the health of his children (besides the three lost, seve
ral others were sickly) and a guilty sense that maybe they had inherited his bad constitution. He even entertained the dark notion that inbreeding—because he and Emma were cousins—might be part of the problem.

  In the village, he was a pillar. He befriended the local curate, a young fellow who had just arrived during the mid-1840s, and played a helpful role in business affairs of the parish, though he stopped attending services, leaving that to Emma and the kids. Slightly later, he consented to be treasurer of the church’s Coal and Clothing Club, and eventually also of a cooperative benefit society for the working folk, the Downe Friendly Society, founded at his suggestion. Expanding his own domain, he leased an additional strip of land along the back edge of the property, west of the big meadow, and planted it with birches, hornbeams, dogwoods, and other trees, plus a hedge of holly. Circled with a gravel path, it became known as “the Sandwalk,” his daily route for cogitative strolls. The loop wasn’t long, roughly a quarter mile, so sometimes he made a number of circuits, keeping track of his distance by kicking rocks onto the path like abacus beads each time he passed a certain point. He watched his children at play. He noticed birds’ nests. He liked the tranquility and the balm of routine. He disliked provocation and upheaval. “My life goes on like Clockwork,” he confided to FitzRoy, when they communicated for the first time in years, “and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it.”

  FitzRoy was just back from New Zealand, having been sacked from his governorship there by the Colonial Office. Darwin’s letter was written on October 1, 1846, one day short of ten years since he had jumped impatiently off the Beagle. If he was feeling a surge of nostalgia, plus some sympathy and lingering gratitude toward this man he had never found likable, he was also feeling something else: years passing quickly relative to his own pace of accomplishment. In his diary he noted the decade mark, and that he had just finished correcting the last page proofs of his Geological Observations on South America. The geology trilogy, by his reckoning, had cost him four and a half years. “How much time lost by illness!” he groused.

  But during the healthy intervals he was a hard, steady worker—nowadays we’d call him a workaholic—grinding along without breaks for vacation or celebration between one project and another. He wasn’t a man to uncork a champagne bottle and kick up his heels just because some book had been finished. On that same day he set the geology page proofs aside, October 1, 1846, Darwin turned to his single remaining container of preserved specimens from the Beagle. It held about a dozen barnacles of a very odd sort, minuscule creatures that drilled burrows into the shells of certain marine snails; he had collected them eleven years earlier in the Chonos archipelago off the coast of Chile. Now he meant to dissect these little beasties, get a grip on their identity, write a paper.

  He started work under a happy delusion that it wouldn’t take long. He didn’t foresee being swallowed up by barnacle taxonomy for eight years.

  14

  From 1846 to 1854, he did almost nothing else but. At a low bench near one window of his study, seated on a revolving stool, he dissected barnacles through a microscope. He drew what he saw. He saved the parts of his dissected specimens on carefully sealed slides. He filed the slides in a drawer. He composed intricate technical descriptions, species by species. He read the barnacle literature, muddled and spotty as it was. He made decisions about how to classify the species he described, correcting bad choices of previous classifiers. Barnacles weren’t easy. They came in two types, one type (the sessile barnacles) resembling limpets armored in boilerplate, the other type (the stalked barnacles) resembling mussels mounted on golf tees. Confusing things further, their larvae swam around like larval shrimp. Darwin wrote to barnacle experts and barnacle fanciers, cadging the loan of specimens that he would minutely dismantle before returning what was left. He commissioned a new style of dissecting scope from an instrument maker in London and paid £16, half a year’s beer money, to get it built. His study must have smelled like a pub, from the evaporation of pickling alcohol off his specimens. His eyes were bleary at the end of a day’s work. Emma delivered another daughter and three more sons during the barnacle period, superintending Down House and all its human activities while Charles labored fervidly. There’s a story often told about the impression this eight-year effort made on his young children; the second son, George, visiting one day at the house of some playmates, asked them: “Where does your father do his barnacles?”

  Barnacle taxonomy was an unplanned detour leading away from, then eventually back toward, transmutation. It started as a modest task, the describing of one species, and gradually became an obsession—something he wanted to do, something he had to do, something that wouldn’t be done until it was done completely and right. But the detour wasn’t random or accidental. The guiding impetus had shown itself earlier, within an exchange of letters between Darwin and Hooker in 1845, long before Darwin uncorked the Chonos bottle. They were discussing a certain book on the nature of species, by a French botanist named Frédéric Gérard. Evidently the work was slipshod. Hooker, always rigorous on botanical matters, told Darwin: “I am not inclined to take much for granted from any one who treats the subject in his way & who does not know what it is to be a specific Naturalist himself.” Although Hooker meant no slight to his friend, only to Gérard, Darwin was defensive. Having established his credentials in geology but not in systematic biology—that is, he had never studied any single group of animals or plants with the plodding attention and descriptive purposes of a taxonomist—he took Hooker’s comment as a personal criticism. Immediately he wrote back: “How painfully (to me) true is your remark that no one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many.” Thirteen months later, not wanting to seem a hare-brained theorist ungrounded in the details of how one species differs from another—like Gérard, or the author of Vestiges—Darwin began describing barnacles.

  That first creature he worked on was puzzling in several ways. No bigger than a pinhead, it belonged among the limpetlike type, the sessile barnacles, he thought, but instead of cementing itself onto a rock and secreting a cone-shaped array of body armor, it found shelter by drilling into a snail shell. Darwin recognized that it represented an unknown genus, provisionally named it Arthrobalanus, and began mentioning it fondly as “Mr. Arthrobalanus” in his letters to Hooker. After two weeks of dissecting he was charmed, feeling that he might spend another month on it and uncover some beautiful new structural surprise every day. He rigged a couple blocks of wood to support his wrists while he worked, and told Hooker how glad he was, following all the years of geological write-ups, to be using his eyes and fingers in this way again. After a month, having dug deeper, he was perplexed at the sexual peculiarities of Mr. Arthrobalanus. Most barnacles were known to be hermaphroditic, each individual carrying both male and female organs. This one, so far as Darwin could make out, had two penises and no egg sac. That was his first hint of what would emerge as an important finding from the whole study: Some barnacle species are hermaphroditic, some are separated into males and females, and some are frozen in complicated arrangements halfway between. The sex lives of the Cirripedia (the technical name for all barnacles), varying in progressive stages from hermaphroditism to distinct males and females, suggest a trail of transmutation.

  In late November 1846, he sent a draft of his Arthrobalanus paper to the anatomist Richard Owen, asking for feedback and confessing that he had gotten so intrigued by barnacles that he was now dissecting a half dozen other genera. During the following spring he lost more weeks to bad health, this time including boils. He also interrupted his work with trips to London for the Geological Society and, the following June, to Oxford for the annual conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the last of those big meetings he would attend. Most of his networking was now done by mail. He borrowed a sizable hoard of specimens from a rich private collector and made contact with several museum curators to get more. The consensus amon
g experts was that barnacle classification was in disarray, and at least two of these men told Darwin that he was the guy to fix it. By the end of 1847 he had set himself to do a comprehensive monograph on barnacles, describing new species, revising earlier descriptions, bringing systematic order to the entire group.

  He persuaded officials at the British Museum to send him their barnacle holdings on a long, trusting loan, and put out calls in every other imaginable direction. He even dropped a note to Sir James Clark Ross, the captain who had commanded Hooker’s Antarctic voyage and was now preparing an Arctic expedition in search of Sir John Franklin, a fellow explorer, mortally stuck somewhere amid the frozen straits west of Baffin Island. While you’re up there dodging icebergs and looking for Franklin, Darwin asked, would you please get me some northern barnacles? You’ll be busy, of course, but it wouldn’t take long to scrape a few off the rocks. Preserve them in spirits, he demanded sweetly, and make sure you don’t damage their bases. Ross evidently ignored him.

  The scientific confusion over barnacles included a disagreement about just where to place them within the animal kingdom. Are they mollusks? They seemed to be, given that they enclose themselves in shells (the adults do, anyway), live sedentary lives, and gargle seawater through their interior cavities. That misconception was corrected in 1830 by a researcher named J. Vaughan Thompson, who had noticed that the larval stages of barnacles, swimming freely, resemble crustaceans. By the time Darwin came along, it was agreed that the barnacles are crustaceans, more or less. The name Cirripedia (meaning “hairy-footed”) reflects the fact that within each shelly exterior lurks a strange little being like a misshapen crawfish, with its head glued to the substrate and its wispy legs waving upward to grab food. Darwin’s chosen task was to make sense of the Cirripedia, species by species, genus by genus, family by family, and to assign them collectively a rank and a place within the great phylum of joint-legged animals that in those days was called Articulata. Did the Cirripedia constitute a distinct class of articulates, separate from and parallel to the crustaceans, the insects, the arachnids? Or were they merely a minor division within one of the subclasses of Crustacea already known? Based on his close study of barnacle anatomy, making comparisons among species and matching larvae to adults, Darwin eventually called them a subclass unto themselves. Within the subclass he recognized two main families, the sessile barnacles and the stalked barnacles, plus several aberrant forms that fit into neither. One of the aberrant forms was Mr. Arthrobalanus, the starting point of all his barnacle travails.