Evolution's Captain (11 page)

Grant also talked with Darwin about the heretical theory of evolution. “He one day, when we were walking together, burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution,” Darwin wrote much later. In 1800, Frenchman Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck suggested that Earth's species had not been created in their only and unalterable form at the biblical dawn of Creation, but that they had gradually and continually altered, adapting to a constantly changing environment, becoming and generating new species by transmutation. This was a direct contradiction of the Bible, and in an earlier age Lamarck would have been burned at a stake for his views. In Lamarck's time, most people, even forward-looking scientists, still believed that God had created Earth, and all life upon it, as a “Great Chain of Being” from the smallest—that is, lowest—creatures, to the highest, Man, with each species occupying its own predetermined, unchangeable link in that chain. Lamarck's claim that creatures evolved from lower to higher—and that Man had also evolved from lower forms, most recently apes—was a blasphemy. But such views were not new to Darwin. His own grandfather, the first Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a doctor and a naturalist, had been a famous evolutionary thinker in England before Lamarck and had expressed his ideas in the form of popular, if controversial, poetry:

Views such as these, and Lamarck's, were heretical thinking in the early nineteenth century. Most scientists saw the clear hand of God in the design and perfection of a well-ordered Heaven and Earth, not a world of destructive change that wiped out whole species through a process of slow attrition. That would surely be a godless Universe, a living anathema, the third, hellish panel of a Bosch triptych. But a few did believe exactly this, and Robert Grant was one of them.

Darwin's studies with Grant produced his first scientific paper, read to the Plinian Society on March 27, 1827. He had observed through a poor microscope what apparently had not been seen or noted by anyone else: the frenzied swimming of tiny eggs that explained the fertilization of the species
Flustra
, a seaweed-like creature. Darwin was thrilled by what appeared to be a first, but his pleasure was shortlived. Grant appropriated his findings, without crediting Darwin's efforts, passing them off as his own observations in a paper read to the more august Wernerian Natural History Society on March 24, 1827, three days before Darwin's presentation to the Plinian Society. Years later, Darwin told his daughter Henrietta that his first scientific discovery had provided his first glimpse of “the jealousy of scientific men.”

Relations between professor and student cooled, but Grant's influence on Darwin was profound: it was his first exposure to the deep inductive exploration of a science. The science became the foundation of Darwin's evolutionary theories, and the scientist provided him with a model for obsession.

At the end of the school year, Darwin came home and told his father he could not continue his studies to be a doctor. Dr. Darwin was furious. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Darwin later agreed with him: “He was very properly vehement against my turning into an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination.”

Darwin's problem was that he had no ambition. The Darwins were landed gentry, wealthy property owners, and there was no financial incentive for Charles to find a career; he would always be wealthy. He enjoyed shooting and hunting more than anything else. In between such outings, he liked collecting and studying small creatures. It was all he wanted to do. But Robert Darwin wasn't going to see his son turn into a wastrel and dilettante, so he told him to prepare for the church.

The profession of clergyman was just as respectable as being a medical man, requiring much the same sort of bedside manner.
The Church of England was then a gentleman's club with the most impeccable credentials, and in many places extremely well-appointed. Parish ministers were provided with houses, an adequate income (which Darwin could amply supplement), and instantly acquired social status. They had servants, bred fine dogs and horses, and maintained good wine cellars. The role had the same comfortable, tweedy informality as a schoolmaster's, but with a higher social profile and a lot more leisure time. For the vicar-with-a-hobby it was a platform upon which to develop a full-blown avocation. Many of the notable writers and scientists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were clergymen who studied and wrote books during their great stretches of spare time. An appointment in the right place would be perfect for him, allowing him to shoot with the gentry, ride with the local hunt, botanize, geologize, collect to his heart's content, write papers and monographs, and achieve status in the scientific community, if that's where his enthusiasm led him. Such a man had been the eighteenth-century parson William Paley, whose book,
Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity
had become a standard textbook for theological students. In 1798, Thomas Malthus, another country parson, wrote
An Essay on the Principle of Population
that would become one of the most influential works of the next fifty years—it would play a crucial role in the evolution of Darwin's later thinking. Here were the perfect role models for a scientifically distracted clergyman.

Darwin was happy with his father's sensible suggestion, as long as he could carry it off in good conscience.

The training would not be difficult. A bachelor of arts degree at a university, followed by a period of divinity study, would get him his holy orders. In January 1828, he went to Christ's College, Cambridge.

There he started having fun. He met a like-minded cousin, William Darwin Fox, also studying for holy orders, and the two were soon spending most of their time together, rambling through the countryside on collecting expeditions and doing only just enough work to pass their exams.

Another major preoccupation at Cambridge was to serve him as well as any of his studies. Darwin had become a crack shot at age fifteen, and he loved shooting a rifle more than anything else. “How I did enjoy shooting,” he wrote later. “If there is bliss on earth, that is it.”

Darwin studied books about guns and the practice of shooting. He kept a “game book,” a ledger of everything he shot, and lists of what bores of shot were right for different game. He went on shooting parties with Fox and other Cambridge students. It was as much an accepted and desirable part of a young gentleman's training for life as anything else, and probably of more subsequent value to Darwin than any of his academic studies.

The only competition for the long hours and days spent shooting was an obsession he picked up from his cousin William Fox.

Darwin was made for entomology. It sent him outdoors in all weathers, on foot or horseback, to spend hours with friends and dogs, kicking over fallen logs and feeling at the same time, at last, useful. It was early days in the natural sciences, and a dedicated amateur could soon gather a collection of mounted insects that could rival a museum's. Darwin's enthusiasm was all-consuming.

Darwin began his beetle hunting at the beginning of the great Victorian mania for collecting—rocks, fossils, ferns, seashells, natural objects of every possible kind, to be taken home, cataloged, occasionally discovered and named, mounted and set up on boards and in cabinets for display. It was an era of newness in the natural sciences when only the degree of industry separated the enthusiastic amateur from the expert.

The rage for local discoveries produced a wonderful range of collecting jars, tins, nets, and, most importantly, clothing and accoutrements for purchase by the generally well-to-do classes that had the leisure time and the money to follow, and be seen to follow, such pursuits. Darwin naturally outfitted himself completely.

“He would have made you smile,” wrote John Fowles of a young Victorian gentleman, another Charles, and the clothes he wore for a geologizing walk along a beach, in his novel
The French Lieutenant's Woman
.

His disinterest in more formal studies notwithstanding, these pursuits brought Darwin into close contact with other naturalists, notably professors Henslow and Sedgwick. He became a part of their coteries, joined them for field trips, attended Henslow's soirées. He began to feel his true calling, whether it was something that could be properly considered a profession or not. He began, with considerable excitement, to think of himself as a scientist. He read of naturalists who had ranged far beyond the fen country around Cambridge: von Humboldt's account of his adventures in Tenerife and Brazil inflamed his imagination. He longed to travel.

 

Darwin got the news of the voyage around the world after walking
across north Wales for three weeks on a geological tour with Cambridge Professor Adam Sedgwick, who was hoping to correct and add to George Greenough's 1820 map of the geology of England and Wales. He had invited young Darwin along to help him, and also to give Darwin a chance at some practical field geologizing before the Tenerife expedition that he liked to talk about.

The two left from Darwin's family home in Shrewsbury on August 5th, riding in Sedgwick's carriage to Llangollen in north Wales. From there they walked along the bald rock-rimmed Vale of Clwyd toward Caernarvon on the coast. At Saint Asaph, Sedgwick sent Darwin off on his own to look for signs of a stratum of Old Red Sandstone shown on Greenough's map. When they met up again that evening in Colwyn, neither had seen a trace of Old Red. Sedgwick told Darwin that the structure of the Vale of Clwyd would now be revised on the basis of their work. Impressed and grateful for Sedgwick's trust in him, Darwin was “exceedingly proud.”

He returned to his family home, The Mount, on August 29, to find a note from Henslow accompanying the now dog-eared letter from George Peacock. The invitation was breathtaking; it laid before Darwin opportunities that his training in natural science was only beginning to enable him to imagine. At a stroke it eclipsed von Humboldt's Tenerife and Brazil. As a peruser of traveling books, he had probably also seen an edition of Captain James Cook's accounts of his circumnavigations, with drawings and watercolors by his expedition artists William Hodges and John Webber. These (which may be seen today in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England) portray the Englishmen's idealized views of the noble savages amid the sylvan sublimities of their natural settings in Polynesia and the remote, majestic fjordland of New Zealand—Paradise about to be lost—at the moment of contact with Europeans. Here Man and Nature were believed to still exist in the Edenic state, and fifty years after Cook the untrammeled world was thought to be—and surely was—a naturalist's paradise.