A Brief History of Creation (16 page)

 

D
ECADES AFTER
the general public had forgotten Andrew Crosse, his name was still invoked among scientists. As the world of science grew more professionalized and science became a career rather than a pastime, Crosse came to humorously symbolize the “gentleman scientist” of a bygone era. The mere mention of his name could be invoked as a synonym for unprofessional quackery.
^¶

But the public saga of Andrew Crosse left behind another legacy, one shared by the publications of
Frankenstein
and
Vestiges
. Each had whetted the appetite of a lay public that was hungry for popular science and ready to entertain ideas that might once have seemed too heretical even to imagine. They were the precursors of a scientific literary phenomenon that would culminate in the publication of one of the most famous and influential science books ever written.

The man who was going to write it had returned to England late in 1836, only a couple of months before Andrew Crosse began his experiment. He was a young naturalist who had just completed a long sea voyage that had fatefully taken him to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of South America.

*
In her preface to
Frankenstein
, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley noted the extraordinary weather of the year 1816, since remembered as “the year without a summer.” An abnormal cold had settled throughout the Northern Hemisphere during the summer months that year. Thirty inches of snow fell in Quebec City. In China, rice crops failed and water buffalo died off by the thousands. Heavy rains caused a cholera outbreak in the Ganges River in India that spread as far as Moscow. Summer frosts led to food riots in France and England. The freakish weather was probably caused by the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history. On the island of Sumbawa, in modern-day Indonesia, Mount Tambora had erupted with four times the force of Krakatoa and eight hundred times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Some seventy thousand people were killed. The atmospheric effects could be seen as far away as London, where for weeks the sunsets turned bright orange and purple. Many devout Christians saw these as signs of the coming of Armageddon.

†
In 1928, the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler had stumbled upon a chemical reaction that enabled him to convert ammonium cyanate into urea. This first synthesis of an organic compound is often mistakenly held up as the end of vitalism, but in reality very little significance was placed on the discovery at the time. Even Wöhler himself remained a vitalist.

‡
Benjamin Franklin was the first to prove that the electricity was stored in the glass casing, not the water, as people had believed. He also used a Leyden jar in his famous kite experiment, from which we get the phrase “to catch lightning in a bottle.”

§
Babbage had first announced plans to build the machine in 1837, the same year Crosse's story appeared in the British press. It was a huge machine, meant to perform basic arithmetic. Had it not proved too expensive to complete in Babbage's lifetime, it would have become the first computer. Lovelace constructed her algorithms on punch cards not unlike those that would be used for the first computers of the twentieth century.

¶
The historian Trevor Pinch has drawn an analogy between Andrew Crosse's
Acarus crossii
and the announcement of the discovery of cold fusion in 1989. Both events were propelled into the limelight by major newspapers of the day, which drew conclusions beyond the experimental evidence. In Crosse's case, it was the
Times
; in the case of cold fusion, the
Financial Times
. The central figures in both stories went through periods of unwarranted celebrity followed by a descent into equally unwarranted ridicule and infamy. Even the apparatuses used in the two experiments were uncannily similar: electrical conductors that were run through solutions containing potassium salts.

BREATHED BY THE CREATOR INTO A FEW FORMS OR ONE

It is not enough to discover and prove a useful truth previously unknown, but that it is necessary also to be able to propagate it and get it recognized
.

—JEAN-BAPTISTE LAMARCK,
Zoological Philosophy
, 1809

 

I
N OCTOBER OF 1835
, a British Royal Navy sailing ship made its way out of an old pirate cove on an island at the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Ecuador. The HMS
Beagle
was a ten-gun sloop outfitted with an extra mast for an ambitious voyage of exploration and discovery. For the previous four years, the
Beagle
had sailed southwest from Britain, through the Azores and Cape Verde, hugging the coast of most of South America, until finally reaching the Galápagos Islands.

The ship's captain, the young but well-seasoned Robert FitzRoy, had decided to search elsewhere for the freshwater needed for the next leg of the ship's journey, the long trek west across the Pacific to Tahiti. But he left four men behind, to be picked up on the ship's return ten days later. The party included the
Beagle
's surgeon Benjamin Bynoe, two servants, and the ship's twenty-six-year-old gentleman-naturalist Charles Darwin.

Darwin took any opportunity to escape the
Beagle
and explore on his own, frequently with Bynoe in tow. As the ship naturalist, Darwin was responsible for observing and collecting samples of the flora and fauna
they encountered. But sometimes he just needed to get away. Darwin's relationship with the captain could be cantankerous. Often they argued about politics. FitzRoy was an impassioned Tory; Darwin, a committed Whig. Sometimes they bickered about slavery. Darwin's grandfathers were two of England's most prominent abolitionists—Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood—and he adamantly opposed the institution. Usually, though, Darwin and FitzRoy simply got on each other's nerves. Being confined on a small ship for years on end has that effect on people. Yet, as FitzRoy well knew, loneliness could be far worse. The previous captain of the
Beagle
, Pringle Stokes, had taken his own life when FitzRoy was under his command. FitzRoy chose Darwin as much for his suitability as a companion as for his strengths as a scientist. Many years later, the captain would come to regret that decision, after he turned to a form of religious fundamentalism that Darwin would do so much to undermine.

James Island was one of the bigger islands at the center of the Galápagos archipelago. It had been named by the seventeenth-century buccaneer Ambrose Cowley, whose maps FitzRoy still used. Until the ship returned in a week and a half, Darwin's small party would be left to fend for itself.

The ship's crew had first set foot on the Galápagos three weeks earlier, on Chatham Island. FitzRoy described the volcanic beach where they had landed as “black, dismal-looking.” Darwin imagined that hell would look much the same. The heat was oppressive, and he had measured the sand on the beach at 137°F. The more abundant black sand, volcanic and hard to the touch, was even hotter. In his journal, Darwin wrote that it was difficult to walk on even “in thick boots.”

Volcanoes abound in the Galápagos, and the signs of volcanic activity intrigued Darwin. He was well trained as a geologist. At Christ College, Cambridge, he had taken courses taught by two of the most esteemed geologists of their day, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick—who so attacked Andrew Crosse and
Vestiges
—and John Henslow. The two were his closest mentors. Before the
Beagle
set out, Henslow had recommended a book to occupy Darwin's long days at sea:
Principles of Geology
. The book was published in three volumes, and Darwin had received the first volume from
FitzRoy as a gift. Though Henslow, a clergyman like Sedgwick, had warned him not to take the book too seriously, Darwin couldn't help himself. He was captivated.

The book's author was a brilliant geologist named Charles Lyell. For Lyell, geology meant something entirely different from what it meant to geologists like Sedgwick. Sedgwick was well versed in the clamors and catastrophes of the natural world, earthquakes and floods and the like. But these were, for him, isolated events, and geology was a science based on fixed positions on maps, immutable through all of time. In contrast, Lyell saw geology as a science of change, of natural processes that were constantly reshaping the world, forming entirely new mountains and seas and rivers. Treating these processes as clues, Lyell arrived at his most revolutionary contention of all, calculating that the world was at the least three hundred million years old.

Isolated at sea and immune from other distractions, Darwin immersed himself in Lyell's book. Early in their voyage, on the Island of St. Jago (modern-day Santiago) in Cape Verde, he had come across a layer of shell and coral 30 feet above sea level that contained the petrified remains of mollusks. Darwin saw these as evidence of Lyell's contention that landmasses were rising. Everywhere the
Beagle
went, Darwin seemed to stumble upon the geological processes that Lyell described. With Lyell's observations on his mind, he began to see the world anew. He grew ever more inquisitive, seeking out his own answers, even to questions that Lyell himself supposed he had answered. In the solitude of his cabin after his explorations on St. Jago, Darwin wondered whether, instead of the reefs rising, it was the ocean that was
sinking
.

J
AMES WAS ONE OF
the biggest volcanic islands in the Galápagos. Because he had found his St. Jago fossils amid volcanic sediment, any sign of volcanic activity in the Galápagos intrigued Darwin. In the three weeks before he arrived on James, he had seen volcanic cones that rose 60 feet in the air like “the Iron furnaces near Wolverhampton.” He guessed that the islands might hold two thousand cones like these, and the beach on which the
Beagle
had left Darwin's small group was flanked by two such craters, both unusually large. Darwin guessed that their past eruptions had formed the cove itself—that the Earth was living, moving, its convulsions shaping the very island upon which he stood.

After two days of exploring the volcanic beaches of James, Darwin realized he wasn't going to find fossil deposits like those he had discovered at St. Jago. So he set about collecting specimens. Other than the occasional stunted tree that seemed to be clinging just barely to life, there were few signs of indigenous species around the craters. Even insects were scarce. Only tortoises were abundant, great lumbering creatures that could grow as long as 3 feet. These held little interest for Darwin, who assumed incorrectly that the species was not native to the islands, but had been brought by colonizers. They were, however, a great source of food. Until the
Beagle
's return ten days later, Darwin and his companions survived on almost nothing besides turtle meat fried in turtle fat.

Soon the party began venturing deeper into the interior. One hike took Darwin and his companions about 2,000 feet above sea level and 6 miles from the shore. They encountered a group of Spanish whalers who took them to see a salt lake at the bottom of a crater, the water barely concealing “beautifully crystallized, white salt” and surrounded by “a border of bright green succulent plants.” Amid the bushes surrounding the lake, they encountered a local historical curiosity, the skull of a whaling captain who had been murdered by his crew. Two days later, Halley's Comet streaked across the sky. Darwin noted the event in his notebook with but a single word, “comet.” It was the Earth, not the heavens, that captivated Charles Darwin.

Darwin had promised his former professors, Henslow and Sedgwick, that he would return with all the plant and animal specimens he could. Both were exceedingly curious about what Darwin would find in the Galápagos. By the time he arrived in the islands, he needed little encouragement. The wildlife of South America had entranced him. Off the coast of Patagonia, the
Beagle
had been surrounded by a vast migration of butterflies so thick that some sailors shouted it was “snowing butterflies.” At sea, Darwin had seen phosphorescent jellyfish that glowed in
the dark of night. Other nights, they passed over patches of phosphorescence, beautiful and luminous, emanating from deep beneath the surface of the ocean.

In Patagonia, Darwin had purchased fossilized bones of strange and exotic creatures. A fossilized skull looked like it could be the head of giant rat, bigger than anything Darwin had ever imagined. He also came to possess the bones of an animal that seemed to be a large camel, which left him wondering about the natural changes the continent must have undergone to lead to the extinctions of such species. He mused about Buffon's notion from
Natural History
, that the wildlife of the Americas was weak and had no vigor. In his notebook, Darwin wrote that if Buffon could have seen what he saw, surely he would have thought differently.

Away from the volcanoes on St. Jago, Darwin discovered that the island was teeming with life. He gathered almost any plant he could lay his hands on but collected only the most interesting animals, since he had to perform his own taxidermy and had to share his cabin with the carcasses until they could be preserved. Birds were common on the islands and made up the bulk of his collection. Because they were so unaccustomed to humans, hunting them was almost too easy. Darwin once managed to get so close to a hawk that he was able to prod it with the point of his gun.