Fossils, Finches and Fuegians

Charles Darwin's Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle (Text Only)

Richard Keynes

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780007571673
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Wissenschaftsgeschichte

CHAPTER 1

The Man who Walks with Henslow

Charles Robert Darwin was born at The Mount, Shrewsbury, on 12 February 1809, the second son and fifth child of Dr Robert Waring Darwin.

His genetic make-up in the male line was strongly scientific, although his father combined a position as one of the leading physicians in the Midlands not with science, but with acting widely as a private financial adviser to the gentry of the region. Charles would later have high praise for his father’s powers of observation, and for his sympathy with his patients, but considered that his mind was not truly scientific. Robert’s wealth was nevertheless as valuable an inheritance for his son as a gene for science, not only paying for Charles’s board and lodging on the Beagle when he sailed as an unofficial scientist and companion to the Captain, but also enabling him to pursue a scientific career single-mindedly for the rest of his life, without ever having to earn his living.

However, his grandfathers, Dr Erasmus Darwin of Lichfield and Josiah Wedgwood I the potter, who built a model factory at Etruria near Stoke-on-Trent, were two of the leading scientists and technologists of their time. Both Fellows of the Royal Society, they were also founding members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which played the principal intellectual part in the establishment of the Industrial Revolution in England. Erasmus Darwin¹⁹ was primarily a practising physician, but his prodigious energies overflowed in many other directions, as a poet, an inventor of mechanical devices of various kinds, a pioneer in meteorology and in the description of photosynthesis, and not least as author of an immense medical treatise entitled Zoonomia,^* and of a fine poem, The Temple of Nature, in which as we shall see he made an important contribution to his grandson’s Theory of Evolution. Josiah Wedgwood I made radical improvements in the handling of china clay, founded a famous pottery, and developed a canal system for the transport of his products. The chemists of Europe came to him for their glassware and retorts, and in due course his son Josiah Wedgwood II provided his nephews Erasmus and Charles with fireproof china dishes manufactured at the pottery, and an industrial thermometer for their private laboratory.

Charles recorded that at a very early age he had a passion for collecting ‘all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and minerals … which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso or a miser’. Throughout his life he also exercised a scientifically useful taste for making careful lists, whether of his various collections, of the game that he had killed, of books that he had read or intended to read, of the pros and cons of marriage, or of his household accounts.

During his formal education at Shrewsbury School, where like his elder brother Erasmus he boarded for some years, he was taught mainly classics, ancient geography and history, and a little mathematics, but there was no place for science in the curriculum. However, their grandfathers’ strong interest in chemistry managed to break through in both boys, first in Erasmus and then in Charles, and together they set up in an outhouse at home what they grandly called their ‘Laboratory’. Here they could pursue a hobby fashionable at the time in the upper classes for investigating the composition of various domestic materials, sometimes after purification of their constituents by crystallisation, though they were seldom able to extract sufficient funds from their father to provide any really sophisticated chemical apparatus. For a while the application of elementary crystallography to his collection of rocks and stones was one of Charles’s favourite occupations.

In 1822 Erasmus left school, and was sent to study at Cambridge, where he wrote a helpful series of letters to Charles with detailed instructions for further experiments. This encouraged Charles to examine the effect on different substances of heating them over an open flame, sometimes with a blow-pipe at the gaslight in his bedroom at school, earning him the nickname of ‘Gas’ and the strong disapproval of the headmaster. Over this period, Charles delighted in devising simple instruments for performance of his tests, and under the tuition of Erasmus served a useful initial apprenticeship in the art of scientific experimentation.

Robert Darwin now decided that Erasmus should proceed from Cambridge to Edinburgh University as he had done himself in order to take an M.B. degree, and that Charles should leave school at the age of sixteen and accompany his brother to Edinburgh in October 1825 with the same object. The plan did not quite work out, for although Erasmus did eventually pass the Cambridge M.B. exam in 1828, his poor health led to his retirement to London as a gentleman of leisure, and he never practised. Charles, on the other hand, having signed up for the traditional courses on anatomy, surgery, the practice of physic, and materia medica, the remedial substances used in medicine, which his father and grandfather had taken in their day, soon found that many of the lectures were now sadly out of date, and that conditions in the dissecting room and on two occasions in the operating room were so highly distasteful that he felt unable to continue on the course. It was not until the end of his second year that he was at last able to confess to his father his determination to abandon medicine as a career, but in the meantime Edinburgh provided other avenues to fill his time that assisted materially in his development as a scientist.

During his first year at Edinburgh, Charles took regular walks with Erasmus on the shores of the Firth of Forth, where he made his first acquaintance with some of the marine animals that later occupied him so intensively on the Beagle. At the same time he maintained his interest in ornithology, and arranged to have lessons on stuffing birds from a ‘blackamoor’ who had been taught taxidermy by the naturalist Charles Waterton. He and Erasmus also revived their knowledge of chemistry and related areas of geology by attending the stimulating lectures and demonstrations given by Thomas Charles Hope, Professor of Chemistry in the university from 1799 to 1843.

In 1826, Erasmus had remained at home, and Charles was left to fend for himself. He attended Robert Jameson’s popular series of extracurricular lectures covering meteorology, hydrography, mineralogy, geology, botany and zoology, but said many years later that ‘they were incredibly dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology or in any way to study the science.’ Although it was true that Jameson’s style of lecturing did not inspire his audience, Charles’s copy of Jameson’s Manual of Mineralogy is heavily annotated, and provided him with a valuable source of practical information for his subsequent geological studies. He also benefited from exposure to the critical clash between Hope’s Huttonian views and Jameson’s preference for the Wernerian doctrine,^* soon coming down firmly on Hope’s side. In any case, any temporary prejudice that Charles may have had against geology did not last long, and in due course was banished by Professors Henslow and Sedgwick after his arrival at Cambridge.

In November, Charles became a member of the Plinian Society, named after Pliny the Elder, author of a famous account of the natural history of ancient Rome, at which a small group of undergraduates would meet informally for discussions of natural history or sometimes to go on collecting expeditions, but from participation in which the university professors were traditionally banned. He was also taken as a guest from time to time to the august Wernerian Society, whose membership was restricted to graduates, and whose proceedings were published in a series of learned memoirs. At a meeting of the Wernerian Society on 16 December 1826, he listened attentively to a paper on the buzzard in which the great American ornithologist and artist John James Audubon, who had recently arrived in Edinburgh to find an engraver for the first ten plates of his Birds of America, exploded the currently fashionable view of the extraordinary power of smelling possessed by vultures. When nine years later Charles was making observations in Chile on the behaviour of condors, he was happy to find himself in agreement with Audubon’s conclusions.

The senior member of the Plinian Society was at that time Robert Grant, then aged thirty-three and a mere lecturer on invertebrate animals at an extramural anatomy school, who had graduated as a doctor in 1814, travelled extensively on the Continent, and studied in Paris with the zoologist and anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). Soon Charles was taken by Grant to collect a variety of animals along the shores in the neighbourhood of Leith, and to go out with fishermen on the waters of the Firth of Forth. On these trips he was sometimes accompanied by another medical student, John Coldstream, who later advised him helpfully about fishing nets. Grant also taught Charles how to dissect specimens under sea water with the aid of a crude single-lens microscope, and gave him a valuable training in marine biology, with an emphasis on the importance of developmental studies on invertebrates, which was taken up with enthusiasm by a pupil who all too quickly outshone his master.

Among Grant’s favourite subjects for research were the not very glamorous ‘moss animals’ of genus Flustra that encrusted the tidal rocks in bunches like a miniature seaweed, and which consisted of large numbers of microscopic polyps whose precise relationship with one another was unclear. There had long been controversy as to whether they should be classified as animals or plants, and the Swedish botanist and founder of the system of binomial nomenclature of species Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) had christened them Zoophyta, an intermediate form. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it had been widely but not yet universally accepted that these organisms were indeed sedentary aquatic animals, which formed colonies often containing millions of individual polyps or zooids with specialised functions. In 1830 the phylum^* to which they belonged was termed Polyzoa by J. Vaughan Thompson, and nowadays the animals are classified as Bryozoa.

Charles set to work on the reproductive particles of Flustra and other marine animals, and to his great excitement confirmed Grant’s observation that the eggs of Flustra were coated with fine cilia, hairlike vibrating organs whose coordinated movements endowed the ova with some degree of motility. He also noted that the ‘sea peppercorns’ often found attached to old shells were not as previously assumed buttons of seaweed, but were the eggs of the marine leech Pontobdella muricata. This he duly reported in his first scientific paper, presented in a talk to the Plinian Society on 27 March 1827; but he had been seriously put out when three days earlier Grant read a long memoir to the Wernerian Society that included his pupil’s findings without any proper acknowledgement of their source. What had happened was later described by Charles’s daughter Henrietta:

When he was at Edinburgh he found out that the spermatozoa [ova] of things that grow on seaweed move. He rushed instantly to Prof. Grant who was working on the same subject to tell him, thinking, he wd be delighted with so curious a fact. But was confounded on being told that it was very unfair of him to work at Prof. G’s subject and in fact that he shd take it ill if my Father published it. This made a deep impression on my father and he has always expressed the strongest contempt for all such little feelings – unworthy of searchers after truth.²⁰

At around the same time, as Charles recalled long afterwards, he had a significant conversation with Grant:

He one day, when we were walking together, burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution. I listened in silent astonishment, and as far as I can judge, without any effect on my mind. I had previously read the Zoonomia of my grandfather, in which similar views are maintained, but without producing any effect on me. Nevertheless it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views maintained and praised may have favoured my upholding them under a different form in my Origin of Species. At this time I admired greatly the Zoonomia; but on reading it a second time after an interval of ten or fifteen years, I was much disappointed, the proportion of speculation being so large to the facts given.²¹

When in 1793 Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck was appointed as Professor of the ‘inferior animals’ in Paris, he earned good marks for renaming them in a less uncomplimentary fashion as ‘invertebrates’, i.e. animals without backbones. He also came up with new and valid reasons for believing in the evolution of new species. But he then spoiled his case by endowing all animals with a special power to interact directly with their environment and acquire ever greater complexity or perfection, supposing for example that the length of a giraffe’s neck was the result of the animal constantly reaching up for food, or that the length of an anteater’s nose and loss of its teeth resulted from perpetual sniffing into anthills, and was inherited over many generations. In the absence of any good evidence for such an inheritance of acquired characteristics, the term ‘Lamarckian’ soon had pejorative connotations. The occasion to which Charles referred was possibly the first when Grant revealed his extreme views on transmutation in invertebrates, and metamorphoses in extinct fossils. At the end of 1827 Grant became the first Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London,^* and his strongly Lamarckian approach was more widely disseminated. He held this post until his retirement in 1874, and though he was reported by Charles’s friend Frederick William Hope in 1834 to be ‘working away at the Mollusca & Infusoria publishing at a great rate’, in 1867 he was still teaching a defunct 1830s zoology in a frayed swallow-tail coat. Charles later noted that ‘he did nothing more in science – a fact which has always been inexplicable to me’. Grant’s excessively radical attitude, coupled with the disillusionment stemming from their falling out that March, may help to explain why their subsequent relations were never close, and there is no suggestion that Charles was ever subjected to the intimate approaches from Grant that may eventually have led to the nervous breakdown suffered by another of his students, John Coldstream.

Robert Darwin was far from pleased with Charles for giving up medicine, and told him angrily, and as Charles thought somewhat unjustly, ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’²² After careful consideration, Robert decided that the only alternative for which there were several precedents in the Darwin and Wedgwood families would be for Charles to go up to Cambridge to take an ordinary Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican clergyman. In order to fulfil in due course the requirements for entry into the university, he had to brush up the Latin and Greek that he was supposed to have learnt at school, and a private tutor was therefore engaged for the last eight months of 1827. The period was not a very happy one for Charles, though he managed to escape to Uncle Josiah Wedgwood’s house at Maer Hall in Staffordshire, seven miles from Stoke-on-Trent, for at least the start of the shooting season, and made his first and only visit to France to collect his youngest Wedgwood cousins from Paris. But he did not record whether he also fitted in a visit to Cuvier’s famous Musée d’Histoire Naturelle.

Charles duly matriculated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in January 1828. Here he quickly fell in with a new circle of young men from his own background and sharing his own tastes, one of whom described him at the time as ‘rather thick set in physical frame & of the most placid, unpretending & amiable nature’. Some years later, Charles advised his eldest son William at school:

You will surely find that the greatest pleasure in life is in being beloved; & this depends almost more on pleasant manners, than on being kind with grave & gruff manners. You are almost always kind & only want the more easily acquired external appearance. Depend upon it, that the only way to acquire pleasant manners is to try to please everybody you come near, your school-fellows, servants & everyone. Do, my own dear Boy, sometimes think over this, for you have plenty of sense & observation.²³

Charles’s own amiability and good relations with the rest of the world at every level were always among his most outstanding characteristics, and he had a true genius for friendship.

His new acq...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Prologue
• 1. The Man who Walks with Henslow
• 2. The Strange Consequences of Stealing a Whale-Boat
• 3. Preparations for the Voyage
• 4. From Plymouth to the Cape Verde Islands
• 5. Across the Equator to Bahia
• 6. Rio de Janeiro
• 7. An Unquiet Trip from Monte Video to Buenos Aires
• 8. Digging up Fossils in the Cliffs at Bahia Blanca
• 9. The Return of the Fuegians to Their Homeland
• 10. First Visit to the Falkland Islands
• 11. Collecting Around Maldonado
• 12. A Meeting with General Rosas on the Ride from Patagones to Buenos Aires and Santa Fé
• 13. The Last of Monte Video
• 14. Christmas Day at Port Desire, and on to Port St Julian and Port Famine
• 15. Goodbye to Jemmy Button and Tierra del Fuego
• 16. Second Visit to the Falkland Islands
• 17. Ascent of the Rio Santa Cruz
• 18. Through the Straits of Magellan to Valparaiso
• 19. Valparaiso and Santiago
• 20. Chiloe and the Chonos Archipelago
• 21. The Great Earthquake of 1835 Hits Valdivia and Concepción
• 22. On Horseback from Santiago to Mendoza, and Back Over the Uspallata Pass
• 23. A Last Ride in the Andes, from Valparaiso to Copiapó
• 24. The Wreck of HMS Challenger
• 25. From Copiapó to Lima
• 26. The Galapagos Islands
• 27. Across the Pacific to Tahiti
• 28. New Zealand
• 29. Australia
• 30. Cocos Keeling Islands
• 31. Mauritius, Cape of Good Hope, St Helena and Ascension Island
• 32. A Quick Dash to Bahia and Home to Falmouth
• 33. Harvesting the Evidence
• 34. Farewell to Robert FitzRoy
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Other Books By
• About the Publisher