Charles Darwin Read online

  Many vessels will necessarily come out of this great [metaphorical] furnace in wrong shape. These will be broken and thrown away as useless; while those vessels whose forms are full of truth, grace, and loveliness will be wafted into happier situations, nearer the presence of the mighty maker.6

  Limitations to food production

  In another work entitled A Summary View of the Principle of Population (first published in 1830), Malthus wrote of how ‘The scarcity of [fertile] land [and] the great natural barrenness of a very large part of the surface of the earth,’ set limits to the amount of food which may be produced.7

  Factors which favoured an increase in population

  Malthus listed these factors as freedom ‘from scarcities and epidemics …, the healthiness of the country [and] the introduction of vaccination’.8

  Ireland as an example

  Malthus cites Ireland where, between the years 1695 and 1821, the population had increased from 1,034,000 to 6,801,827, which was equivalent to a doubling ‘in about forty-five years’. And he points out that this increase had caused ‘great distress among the labouring classes of society’ and had led to ‘the practice of frequent and considerable emigration’.9

  The problem in a nutshell

  ‘It may be safely asserted …’ said Malthus, ‘that population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical progression of such a nature as to double itself every twenty-five years’.10 In contrast, whereas

  each farm in the well-peopled countries of Europe might allow of one or even two doublings [of food production], without much distress … the absolute impossibility of going on at the same rate is too glaring to escape the most careless thinker.11

  A way forward: the perils of failure

  the only mode of keeping population on a level with the means of subsistence which is perfectly consistent with virtue and happiness … [was] moral restraint … [which] may be defined to be, abstinence from marriage, either for a time or permanently … . All other checks … resolve themselves into some form of vice or misery [such as] war and violent diseases … plagues, famines, and mortal epidemics …12

  However, Malthus admits that ‘Prudence [i.e. sexual abstinence] cannot be enforced by laws, without a great violation of natural liberty, and a great risk of producing more evil than good’.13

  In conclusion, Malthus declared that:

  The evils arising from the principle of population [outstripping the food supply] as are of exactly the same kind as the evils arising from the excessive or irregular gratification of the human passions in general, and may equally be avoided by moral restraint.14

  It will be acknowledged that in a state of probation [the process or period of testing or observing the character or abilities of a person in a certain role15], those laws which seem best to accord with the views of a benevolent Creator which, while they furnish the difficulties and temptations which form the essence of such a state, are of such a nature as to reward those who overcome them, with happiness in this life as well as in the next.16

  Malthus, a clergyman, regarded his advocacy of moral restraint as a means of limiting the population as being entirely in accordance with the views of the ‘Creator’ – i.e. God, whom he viewed as being a ‘benevolent’ entity.

  Malthus’s influence on Darwin

  Malthus’s Essay had a profound influence on Darwin and would provide key building blocks when it came to the formulation of his great theory. Having read Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, Darwin declared that

  being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations [the occurrence of an organism in more than one distinct color or form17] would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.18

  Whereas Malthus has elegantly described the phenomenon of ‘natural selection’ (defined as the process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring,19 though it was Darwin who was the first to coin this phrase), it was Darwin who went one step further, by asserting that ‘the result of this would be the formation of new species’.20 Said he, ‘Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work …’.21

  Darwin was aware that, without variation, there could be no divergence. However, both the mechanism by which variations occurred, and the mechanism by which species in which favourable variations had been preserved continued to ‘diverge’ in character, remained a mystery.22 However,

  that they have diverged greatly is obvious from the manner in which species of all kind can be classed under a genera, genera under families, families under sub-orders, and so forth; and I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me; and this was long after I had come to Down [Down House, his future marital home]. The solution, as I believe, is that the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature.23

  Here, Darwin is evidently postulating, as a complete or partial explanation for variation, that ‘species of all kind’ have some innate (but unexplained) ability to adapt to their environment. He would return to this matter in due course.

  NOTES

  1. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, and A Summary view of the Principle of Population, p.217

  2. Ibid, p.70.

  3. Malthus, op. cit., p.71.

  4. Ibid, pp.158–9.

  5. Ibid, p.159.

  6. Ibid, p.160.

  7. Ibid, p.225

  8. Ibid, pp.231–2.

  9. Ibid, p.236.

  10. Ibid, p.238.

  11. Ibid, pp.242–3.

  12. Ibid, pp.250, 253.

  13. Ibid, p.251.

  14. Ibid, p.271.

  15. Oxford Dictionaries Online.

  16. Malthus, op. cit., p.272.

  17. Oxford Dictionaries Online.

  18. Darwin, Francis, op. cit., p.57.

  19. Oxford Dictionaries Online.

  20. Darwin, Francis, op. cit., p.57.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid, pp.57–8.

  23. Ibid.

  Chapter 12

  Romance: Marriage: Darwin’s Theory Takes Shape

  In his letter to Henslow of 3 November 1838, Darwin indicates that he is on the trail of something quite remarkable.

  You may recollect how often I have talked over the marvellous fact of the species of birds being different, in those different islands of the Galapagos. Lately I have gained some curious facts, bearing on the same points, regarding the lizards & tortoises of those same islands, & now I want to know whether you can tell me anything about the plants. [In particular] … whether in casting your eye over my plants [i.e. those specimens which Darwin had sent home from the Galapagos], how many cases there are of near species, of the same genus; one species coming from one island & the other from a second island.1

  On 12 November, Darwin wrote from Shrewsbury to Lyell to announce that he was shortly to be married.

  The lady is my cousin, Miss Emma Wedgwood, the sister of Hensleigh Wedgwood [born 1803], and of the elder brother [Josiah Wedgwood (II), born 1795, of Leith Hill Place, Surrey] who married my sister [Caroline, on 1 August 1837], so we are connected by manifold ties, besides on my part by the most sincere love and hearty gratitude to her for accepting such a one as myself.2

  For Darwin, it seems, mutual love did come into the marital equation, after all! As for Emma, she said of Darwin

  He is the most open, transparent man I ever saw, and every word expresses his real thoughts. He is particularly affectionate and very nice to his father and sisters, and perfectly sweet tempered, and possesses some minor qualities that add particularly to one’s happiness, such as not being fastidious, and being humane to animals. We shall live in London, where he is fully occupied with being [Honorary] Secretary
to the Geological Society and conducting a publication upon the animals of Australia [i.e. The Zoology of HMS Beagle under the Command of Captain FitzRoy].3

  In that year of 1838, Darwin formulated some questions for a ‘Mr Wynne’ (unidentified) on the subject of inheritance, such as ‘Are offspring like fathers or mothers?’ and, ‘When wild animals cross with tame does [their] offspring favour the former … [i.e. in their characteristics]?’4

  Darwin reported to Emma on 2 January 1839, from the couple’s intended new abode, which was to be 12 Upper Gower Street, Bloomsbury, London:

  All my goods are in their proper places, and one of the front attics (henceforward to be called the Museum) is quite filled, but holds everything very well.5

  In other words, it was here that Darwin would keep his specimens relating to natural history. On 20 January Darwin wrote to Emma to say

  I was thinking this morning how it came that I, who am fond of talking and am scarcely ever out of spirits, should so entirely rest my notions of happiness on quietness and a good deal of solitude. But I believe the explanation is very simple. It is that during the five years of my voyage … the whole of my pleasure was derived from what passed in my mind while admiring views by myself, travelling across wild deserts or glorious forests, or pacing the deck of the poor little Beagle at night.6

  Darwin and Emma were married at the Parish Church of St Peter in the Staffordshire village of Maer on 29 January.

  On 5 February Emma wrote to her sister (Sarah) Elizabeth Wedgwood to say that her pianoforte had arrived at Gower Street and that she had ‘given Charles a large dose of music every evening’.7 Elizabeth, having recently visited Darwin and Emma at the Darwin family home at Shrewsbury, declared on 5 June, ‘Charles [i.e. Darwin] goes to his own room to work after breakfast till 2 o’clock …’.8

  That October, Darwin told Fox that Hensleigh Wedgwood had made

  a curious discovery regarding our august family, which I must tell you, that a W. Darwin my great grandfather is described in the Phil. Transacts [Philosophical Transactions] for 1719, as a person of curiosity, who discovered the remains of a giant, evidently an Ichthyosaurus.- so that we have a right of hereditary descent to be naturalists & especially geologists.9

  Here, Darwin has the wrong initial. It was, in fact, Robert Darwin (1682–1720), his great grandfather, who had discovered the skeleton in question.

  Despite being a meticulous observer, Darwin was not always correct in his conclusions. He himself, confessed as much in respect of ‘the parallel roads of Glen Roy’ in the Lochaber region of the Scottish Highlands, which, from a distance, can easily be mistaken for man-made creations. Having put forward (in a paper published in Philosophical Transactions, 1839) the idea that the so-called ‘roads’ were caused by ‘the action of the sea’, he was obliged ‘to give up this view when Swiss palaeontologist, glaciologist and geologist Louis Agassiz propounded his glacier-lake theory’. In essence, Agassiz proposed that, during some previous ice age, the glen had been dammed by a glacier and this, in turn, had created lakes which had varied in depth over time. At the perimeter of these ancient frozen lakes, the ice had sculpted out the underlying rock – hence the appearance of ‘roads’, which were, of course, not roads at all.10

  When the Darwins’ children arrived a governess was employed to look after them. On 27 December 1839, William Erasmus was born. The couple would subsequently have nine more children (three of whom would not survive to adulthood): Anne Elizabeth (2 March 1841–23 April 1851); Mary Eleanor (23 September 1842–6 October 1842); Henrietta Emma (‘Etty’, born 25 September 1843); George Howard (born 9 July 1845); Elizabeth (born 8 July 1847); Francis (born 16 August 1848); Leonard (born 15 January 1850); Horace (born 13 May 1851), and Charles Waring (6 December 1856–28 June 1858).

  An illustration of how Darwin employed his enquiring mind and of his capacity for minute observation, is provided by an article which he wrote for the Gardeners’ Chronicle (16 August 1841), a horticultural magazine founded that year. It covered every aspect of gardening and contained articles submitted by both gardeners and scientists. The article related to the manner in which ‘humble-bees … bore holes in flowers and thus extract the nectar’.11

  It was in 1842, for reasons of ill health, that Darwin decided to seek peace and quiet, and to this end he and Emma relocated, on 14 September, to Down House, situated near to Downe in Kent and only sixteen miles from the centre of the London. (The cause of Darwin’s illness, which proved to be a chronic one, will be discussed shortly.) The village consisted of forty or so dwellings, the thirteenth-century Church of St Mary the Virgin, the George and Dragon Inn, and a butchers and bakers. A carrier journeyed to London once a week to collect special orders.12

  Down House was a Georgian mansion, set in eighteen acres of land with a fifteen-acre meadow. Over the next four decades, the Darwins would enlarge it to include a new drawing room, billiard room, and extra bedrooms. The drawing room contained Emma’s beloved Broadwood pianoforte, and a chaise longue, on which Darwin reclined as she played to him. Either that, or the couple would enjoy their daily, hotly-contested game of backgammon.13 In the grounds, Darwin erected greenhouses, in order to cultivate and study tropical plants, such as orchids.

  Down House became not only the family home, but also a nerve centre from which Darwin’s tentacles reached out far and wide, to his natural-scientist friends (most notably, Lyell and Henslow) wherever in the world they might be. In this way he was able to draw on their knowledge of such diverse subjects as the temperatures of sea water at different depths on the west coast of South America; coral reefs; whirlwinds; earthquakes; the effects of glaciation; and the possible reasons for the different distribution of various species throughout the world. For the Beagle voyage had fuelled Darwin’s interest in the natural world on a truly global scale. And just as fellow experts and enthusiasts were, almost invariably, willing to share their knowledge with him, so he was more than willing to reciprocate, as his immense, world-wide correspondence confirms.

  Darwin wrote to Captain FitzRoy on 31 March 1843, happy that the latter had been appointed Governor of New Zealand, but sad that the captain would be ‘leaving the country without me seeing you again’.14

  Darwin’s uncle and father-in-law Josiah Wedgwood (II), died on 12 July of that year after a long illness.

  Two weeks later Darwin wrote to naturalist George Robert Waterhouse on the subject of how species were to be classified and what part, if any, the laws of ‘God the Creator’ should play in this process, whatever these laws might be.

  Linnaeus confesses profound ignorance. Most authors say it [i.e. the attempt at classification] is an endeavour to discover the laws according to which the Creator has willed to produce organized beings [those which are arranged into a structured whole15]; But what empty high-sounding sentences these are – it does not mean order in time of creation [i.e. the chronological order in which such ‘beings’ were ‘created’], nor propinquity to any one type, as man. In fact it means just nothing. According to my opinion … classification consists in grouping beings according to their actual relationship, i.e. their consanguinity, or descent from common stocks.16

  In other words Darwin completely rejected the notion of ‘Creationism’.

  In January 1844 Darwin told Hooker, who was then engaged in classifying and cataloguing the specimens of Galapagos flora which Darwin had sent him:

  Besides a general interest about the Southern lands, I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work & which I know no one individual who wd not say a very foolish one. I was so struck with distribution of Galapagos organisms, &c &c & with the character of the American fossil mammifers [mammals], &c &c that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact, which cd bear any way on what are species … . At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to [the] opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend [avert] me from Lamarck[
‘s] nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression’ ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals’ &c, but the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his – though the means of change are wholly so – I think have found out (here’s presumption) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.17

  Jean Baptiste P. A. de Monet de Lamarck, to whom Darwin refers, was a French naturalist who was appointed Professor of Botany at the Jardin de Plantes, and subsequently Professor of Zoology at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

  Lamarck believed that simple organisms are continually created by ‘spontaneous generation’; that species do not become extinct but, instead, change into other species; that species change their behaviour in response to environmental changes, and that this changed behaviour modifies their organs – the ‘improved’ structure being inherited by their offspring. To give an example, the giraffe has a long neck and long legs. By virtue of its great height, it is therefore able to reach up and graze off the leaves of high trees. According to Lamarck (about whom more will be said later), the giraffe has brought about these variations in its anatomy by its own volition – a proposition about which Darwin was highly sceptical.

  Just as Darwin had hoped, a small army of experts was now at work on the specimens which he had collected from South America. For example, his specimens of Galapagos beetles (Coleoptera and Heteromera) were the province of naturalist George R. Waterhouse. As for Hooker, he and Darwin were more than professional colleagues. They had become friends who recommended reading matter to one another, and lent one another books on natural history