Evolution's Captain (29 page)

Four months later, the pages Wallace wrote in his hut trembled in Darwin's hands. Darwin was staggered. He could hardly believe what he read. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” he wrote in dismay to a friend. “If Wallace had my ms. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract. Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.”

Darwin was devastated. The work that had preoccupied him for twenty years, the theory he had thought his own, which he had delayed making public for so long, had now been neatly summed up by a nobody on the other side of the world. He didn't know what to do. He felt paralyzed, irresolute. So he sent Wallace's essay, as requested, to Lyell.

Lyell immediately wrote back insisting that Darwin get something of his own, a very short summary, into print immediately.
Darwin balked. “I shd be
extremely
glad
now
to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so,” he wrote back. “But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably.” He was also suddenly distracted by the illness of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Henrietta, and his and Emma's tenth child, Charles, nineteen months old, both of whom suddenly came down with raging fevers. Darwin left his dilemma in Lyell's hands.

There were none better. After thirty years in the scientific limelight, defending his own revolutionary views and commanding respect, Lyell knew everything there was to know about intellectual turf and reputation. He consulted Joseph Hooker, who was also familiar with Darwin's work, and the two of them, eager to protect their friend's interests, came up with a seemingly fair solution. They would have extracts from Darwin's notes, and dated letters describing his ideas, read out together with Wallace's essay at the next meeting of the Linnean Society. This was the pre-eminent naturalist's society—Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker were members—the sort of august old boys club where Wallace ordinarily couldn't hope to have his work taken notice of. By this tactic, Darwin's years of study on the subject could be established, while Wallace would be offered the sort of respect and exposure he had never experienced.

The readings took place on July 1, 1858. Darwin's baby boy had just died and he did not attend. Nor, of course, did Wallace, then in New Guinea and entirely unaware of the whole business. The items were read. Darwin's claim to his ideas was established, along with Wallace's, and the world went about its business.

Darwin now threw aside his usual parsonly deliberation and began swiftly to do what he realized he should have done many years earlier. He began writing for publication.

 

The world did not suddenly shift on its axis as Darwin's and
Wallace's papers were read at the Linnean Society. No outrage or damnation was voiced. Very little attention was paid to them.
History has, in retrospect, paid rapt attention to these documents and the moment of their portentous appearance, but on that July day they were simply scientific papers routinely read into the record in droning voices to a sleepy audience. Darwin was not yet Darwin, so to speak—merely a respected, reclusive naturalist noted for his works on travel, zoology, and barnacles; and Wallace was an obscure collector. What was to come of it all was still to come.

In fact, creationism, the other side of the species coin, had never been so widely and popularly discussed. In response to the challenges raised by cold science—mainly by the Lyellian view of geology and the worldwide proliferation of fossil finds, which suggested with increasing weight the enormous age of the earth and a creation that was ongoing—a slew of books appeared in the 1850s offering explanations and proofs of divine creation. Most notable and most radical among these was
Omphalos
by Philip Henry Gosse, published in 1857.

Gosse was a naturalist of growing renown. He had already published countless articles and more than twenty books (recently at the rate of four per year) on natural history, most of them about the seashore and coastal sea creatures. His self-illustrated book,
A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast
(1853) was a smash best-seller.

Gosse's
Rambles
was responsible for sending tens of thousands of Victorians to the seaside and started a craze for collecting shells and small sea creatures. As the pursuit and study of natural history developed into a nationwide obsession, Gosse's influence grew so great that it was reported that England had been “Gosse-ified.” He was the David Attenborough of his time. His son Edmund Gosse, in his biography of his father, wrote of an incident on the rocky coast near Torbay, Devon, when Gosse, out fossicking, came upon a group of ladies who believed they had found a rare species of sea creature. Curious, but without identifying himself, Gosse asked if he might see their prize. When they showed it to him, he politely disagreed and told them
it was something else, much more common. The ladies were indignant and informed him he was mistaken. “Gosse is our authority,” they told him witheringly.

Gosse was the inventor of the aquarium. As a boy he had tried keeping sea anemones in a jug of seawater, but it had become cloudy and malodorous and the anemones died. He had since spent years gazing into coastal rock pools, sometimes by night with a candle or lantern. He learned that “animals absorb oxygen, and exhale or throw off carbonic acid gas; plants, on the contrary, absorb carbonic acid, and throw off oxygen.” He made experiments to see how long he could keep captive sea creatures and plants together in artificial, glass-walled tanks. In 1854, he published
The Aquarium
(a term Gosse coined). It contained beautiful, expensively reproduced illustrations and plans for making “a marine aquarium for the Parlour or Conservatory.” It was also about Gosse's further rambles along the seashore. It was rapturously reviewed.

He had become Jacques Cousteau as well. The book was another best-seller, and very financially rewarding for Gosse. No author could ask for more.

Reviewers did not remark on the religious passages in
The Aquarium
. Gosse framed many of his natural observations as proof of the existence of God, of his “wondrous contrivance in planning” and the “stable order of the universe.” Such sentiments were shared by the vast majority of Gosse's readers and reviewers and were a natural complement of the fulsome prose style of the Victorian era.

Darwin and Gosse were well aware of each other. They keenly admired each other's work and corresponded frequently. Both were members of the Royal Society. They finally met at the Linnean Society in March 1855, where Gosse was reading a paper on sea anemones. Darwin was so enamored of Gosse's experiments with aquariums that he toyed with the idea of making one for himself.

Gosse knew little or nothing of Darwin's preoccupation with species, but he too had read Wallace's deduction in the
Annals and Magazine of Natural History
, that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in Space and Time with a Pre-existing closely allied Species.” He had read Lyell, of course, as had most naturalists, amateur and professional, but the breadth and depth of Gosse's reading in geology was uncommon. He had explored the subject with a highly personal interest, and he had become disturbed by its inferential trend toward a belief in the natural, if not yet precisely described and identified, evolution of species.

Gosse and FitzRoy would have known each other as well, and met a number of times, for the same reasons: they were fellows of the same societies, frequenters of the same small scientific circles that included Lyell and Darwin—and in these, because of his reclusiveness, it was Darwin who was the odd man out. Until Gosse moved permanently to Devon in 1857, both he and FitzRoy lived in London and were highly active in intellectual affairs, regularly attending meetings, readings, gatherings at their societies and clubs, mixing and exchanging ideas with their peers. Both read widely and exhaustively on scientific matters, particularly in geology and the marine sciences. FitzRoy would have been well aware of Gosse's rising star, but his own had suffered a twenty-year-long downward trajectory, and when they met there was no reason for anyone to remark or remember such occasions.

The two men shared something else. Gosse was a fanatic, fundamentalist Christian. To him, God and nature were inseparable: “I cannot look at the Bible with one eye, and at Nature
with the other. I must take them together,” he wrote. He was a lay preacher to fellow fundamentalists who called themselves the Plymouth Brethren. He lived his life in the everyday expectation of the imminent second coming of Christ.

As marriage to Mary O'Brien had deepened FitzRoy's faith, Gosse was equally affected by the more fervent beliefs of his wife. Emily Gosse was a widely read writer of religious tracts. They had first met at an assembly of the Brethren, and their son, Edmund Gosse, wrote about the rigour of their religious faith in his book
Father and Son
.

Gosse and his wife shared an intensely tender, loving, and physically intimate relationship. When Edmund was an infant and Gosse was off rambling at the seaside for his work while Emily stayed at home with the baby, they exchanged daily letters that were full of their longing for each other. “O my sweet beloved one, my helper, my comforter, my joy, my love,” Gosse wrote Emily, “I wish I could just now throw my arms round your neck and kiss your dear mouth.” And he signed his letters, “Ever your own faithful, affectionate, devoted, longing lover and husband, P.H. Gosse.”

And Emily wrote back:

Perhaps because they married late (for the times)—Philip at age thirty-eight, and Emily, who was three and a half years older than he was, at forty-two—they were amazed and profoundly grateful for what they had found in each other. This only deepened when Emily gave birth at forty-three to their son. They couldn't believe what they had been given so late in life. “How very happy we are!” Emily wrote and said often. “Surely this cannot last!”

And it did not. In 1856, when they had been married eight years, Emily found a hard lump in her breast. After ten months of excruciating treatment, she was dead.

Philip's grief was fathomless. But he was not inconsolable: he knew for certain where Emily had gone. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” He knew too that one day he would join Emily again, and as if to obliterate any doubt about this, he turned toward God as never before.

He wrote a slim book,
A Memorial of the Last Days on Earth of Emily Gosse
. Emily's religious writing had reached a wide audience, so there was more than catharsis to this endeavor.

Then he began writing something else. Faith was under assault by the findings of geology, and, with a sense of divine mission, Gosse set out to use his knowledge of natural history, his deep erudition, and his reputation to crush such heresy for good. The resulting book was titled
Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot.
(
Omphalos
is the Greek word for navel.)

It could have been written by FitzRoy. Gosse's arguments and “proofs” were strikingly like those juggling geology and Holy Writ in the last two chapters of FitzRoy's
Beagle
narrative. Both
used an identical technique: Scientific facts, displaying an impressive depth of knowledge, were marshaled and explained with the same appealing common-or-garden logic that had the Flood compared to a coat of varnish.

Gosse posed the eternal riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The embryo or the cow? Neither, he answered. All of organic nature consists of an endless circular process: Chicken to egg to chicken, seed to tree to seed, rain to ocean to cloud to rain, baby to man to baby.

But once in the circle of life, a nanosecond after creation, the very nature of the first egg showed an apparent history of its cyclical self stretching into the past.