Journal of the History of Biology Springer 2012 DOI 10.1007/s10739-012-9345-5

Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance and Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals in Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies

PIERS J. HALE Department of the History of Science University of Oklahoma 601 Elm Ave, Rm. 610 Norman, OK 73019 USA E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. The nineteenth century theologian, author and poet Charles Kingsley was a notable populariser of Darwinian evolution. He championed Darwin’s cause and that of honesty in science for more than a decade from 1859 to 1871. Kingsley’s interpretation of evolution shaped his theology, his politics and his views on race. The relationship between men and apes set the context for Kingsley’s consideration of these issues. Having defended Darwin for a decade in 1871 Kingsley was dismayed to read Darwin’s account of the evolution of morals in Descent of Man. He subsequently distanced himself from Darwin’s conclusions even though he remained an ardent evolutionist until his death in 1875.

Keywords: Charles Kingsley, Evolution, Hipocampus minor, Darwin, British Associa- tion, Water Babies, Nineteenth century, Race, Morant Bay, Eyre affair, Thomas Huxley, Descent of Man, Origin of Species, Biology, England, Politics, Theology, Science and religion

Jack (who has been reading passages from the ‘‘Descent of Man’’ to the wife whom he adores, but loves to tease). ‘‘SO YOU SEE, MARY, BABY IS DESCENDED FROM A HAIRY QUADRUPED, WITH POINTED EARS AND A TAIL. WE ALL ARE!’’

Mary. ‘‘SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, JACK! I’M NOT DES- CENDED FROM ANYTHING OF THE KIND, I BEG TO SAY; AND BABY TAKES AFTER ME. SO THERE!’’

(image courtesy of Punch, Ltd., London) PIERS J. HALE

Figure 1. A logical refutation of Mr. Darwin’s theory

For the Victorians evolution was a moral question as much as it was one of biology. The suggestion that even the most respectable of Victorian ladies might share common ancestry with apes was only a part of the concern, although it was this that most engaged the public – and certainly it was this that most engaged Victorian cartoonists and caricaturists (Browne, 2001; Figure 1). A greater moral challenge was posed by uncertainties about the evolutionary process itself, for although the Victorian era was nothing if not an age of progress, even the most pro- gressive of Victorians were aware that evolution had a darker side, and threatened degeneration just as readily (Chamberlin and Gilman, 1985). Further, the contingent and often capricious nature of adaptation and selection that Darwin had described in Origin raised the question of whether a simple anthropocentric hierarchy of progress and regress was even an appropriate way to think about the world (Mu¨ller-Wille, 2009). Even though Darwin had made little mention of the implications of evolutionformankindinOrigin of Species (1859), noting only that ‘‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’’, the human-ape connection dominated the evolution debates of the 1860s both in the pages of scientific and popular journals and at successive meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Darwin, 1859, p. 488; Hesketh, 2009; Browne, 2001). What made this particular MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS taxonomy so controversial was that it raised some of the most pressing questions of the day, regarding religion, race and the nature of humanity. The questions that evolution raised of traditional exegesis and the prevailing views of mankind were significant. Nevertheless, and despite some initial outrage at the suggestion that man might be an evolved animal rather than one of God’s separate and special creations, there were a few notable individuals who embraced a simian ancestry for mankind, and even a capricious and contingent evolutionary process, as quite compatible with a Christian world view. In particular, the Anglican theologian, novelist, naturalist and science populariser Charles Kingsley led the way in theorising a Darwinian natural theol- ogy. Historians have long noted Kingsley’s embrace of evolution. Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots will be the most familiar to historians of biology, but Colin Manlove, Amanda Hodgson and more recently Jessica Straley, John Beatty and Jonathan Conlin have also commented upon this aspect of Water Babies (Beer, 1983; Manlove, 1975; Hodgson, 1999; Straley, 2007; Beatty and Hale, 2008; Conlin, 2011).1 Kingsley was deeply interested in evolution and all it implied. More recently histori- ans have turned to consider Kingsley’s role as a populariser of science, Bernard Lightman has noted Kingsley’s significance in this regard in both Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) and in his 2010 article ‘‘Darwin and the Popularization of Evolution’’, and I have recently argued elsewhere that Kingsley was one of Darwin’s most important advocates in the early years of the Darwinian revolution (Hale, 2012). In this essay I comment not so much on Kingsley’s role as a popu- lariser, but upon the understanding of evolution that he sought to popularize. This is the result of an ongoing and larger research project on Kingsley that I have been pursuing in collaboration with John Beatty. Here I make the case that Kingsley not only embraced evolu- tion, but appreciated the deeply contingent and capricious nature of adaptation and selection that Darwin had described in Origin. Acknowledging the chanceful nature of evolution, Kingsley argued that the question of whether mankind would undergo an evolutionary pro- gress or degeneration was entirely contingent upon their actions. John C. Hawley has argued that progress and degeneration in Water Babies is the result of the changing moral state of Tom, the main character in the

1 An near-exhaustive bibliography of twentieth-century Kingsley scholarship is available through Boston College’s website: Charles Kingsley: The 20th Century Critical Heritage. Works currently listed include those published between 1900 and 2006. https://www2.bc.edu/rappleb/kingsley/kingsleyhome.html. PIERS J. HALE story. However, the lesson that Kingsley hoped to teach through his fairy tale is more sophisticated than this – he hoped to teach science and the reasons why we should do science, as well as morality. Indeed, a knowledge of science was necessary if one was to understand how to act morally. Kingsley believed that the reason why God had chosen to govern the world by such an apparently chanceful process as natural selection was that He intended mankind to learn about the world He had created and the laws by which He governed. It was only by doing so that mankind could discover God’s intentions for them and, leaving nothing to chance, ensure that their own development was a progressive one – as God surely intended. Evolutionary degeneration was a con- sequence of man following his own will rather than the will of God. As a result Kingsley saw science as the light to the path of human progress – in mind, in body and in spirit, and he championed scientific education accordingly. Importantly, though, he also engaged in arguments about the importance of honesty and integrity in pursuit of the truths that science might reveal about man and his place in the world. I wish to show that Kingsley considered the moral implications of evolution much more deeply than historians have hitherto acknowl- edged. Although Kingsley initially thought the human-ape connection of little moral import, in fact it brought him to reflect upon the sig- nificance of science, and the fundamental importance of scientific integrity; upon the politics of race and empire; and finally upon the origin and nature of morality itself. Kingsley commented upon many of these issues in his fairy tale Water Babies, others only became apparent after the book had been published. In this essay I focus on six episodes. The first episode revolves around the moral significance of an evolu- tionary relationship between man and ape and the debate between the two great men of nineteenth-century English comparative anatomy, Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen. Moral concerns about the implied link between man and ape had a long history, and it was this that had been the crux of the debate between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Owen had pressed the issue later in the week, insisting that there was a significant point of morphological difference between the brain of a man and the brain of an ape, called the hippocampus minor. This point of human exceptionalism was further debated at the 1862 meeting of the British Association. Kingsley witnessed the proceedings and lampooned them, and the protagonists, beautifully in Water Babies. Kingsley thought such a small point of morphology irrelevant to morality. As I have suggested above, MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS and in the second episode I discuss here, what Kingsley did think morally relevant, was that mankind should learn about the world and the laws by which it was governed in order to know how to place themselves in such a position as to benefit from them. To this end Kingsley believed that it was important for people to study science and to understand the laws of natural and sexual selection. They would need to understand evolutionary science if they, their nation, and the race were to continue in their progressive development; to fail would lead to an evolutionary degeneration. Kingsley taught this lesson in Water Babies as well through the story he told of ‘the great and famous nation of the Doasyoulikes’. Kingsley’s belief that God meant for man to study nature so that he might discover the place in the world that God in- tended for him was what lay behind his harsh judgment that the many thousands of people killed in the earthquake that destroyed the Chilean city of Arica in 1868 were responsible for their own demise. By refusing to enquire into the geology of the region, and act on the information that they might find there, Kingsley thought them guilty of ‘‘tempting God’’.2 The third episode covers two separate but related events; both concern scientific integrity. The first reflected the outcome of the Hux- ley-Owen debate over the hippocampus minor. Kingsley was not alone in perceiving that Owen had behaved dishonestly, and had ignored the evidence in favour of his preconceptions. In celebration of Huxley’s victory over Owen, between them Huxley and Kingsley formed the ‘‘Thorough Club’’, a club intended to promote ‘‘a Thorough and ear- nest search after Scientific truth’’.3 The second occurred years later, at the 1868 meeting of the British Association. This time the debate was between two of Kingsley’s friends, each of whom were politicians who wrote on anthropology, the banker, John Lubbock and the Duke of Argyll, George John Douglas Campbell. At stake was the legitimacy of assuming that present-day ‘savages’ were analogous to the ancestors of civilised Englishmen. The same concern for honesty and integrity that had led Kingsley to side with Huxley against Owen led him to side with the Duke of Argyll against Lubbock. The fourth episode concerns Kingsley’s views on race and empire. The evolution debates erupted in a period in which slavery was passionately debated in England, and was deemed a cause for civil war in the United States and as a result the politics of race and emancipation became inextricably linked to ideas of common ancestry and evolved racial hierarchy (Desmond and Moore, 2009; Stocking, 1987; Stocking, 1982). The story of the Doasyoulikes is

2 See below, p. 000. 3 See below, p. 000. PIERS J. HALE again relevant here. In addition to teaching his readers about natural and sexual selection, the story of the Doasyoulikes was also Kingsley’s comment upon the emancipation of slave labour in the Caribbean. Kingsley echoed the position that Thomas Carlyle has laid out in his 1853 essay ‘‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’’. The paternalism of forced labour was better for the emancipated slaves than was the idleness that he believed now characterized their lives. Kings- ley’s views on the relationship between evolution, race and empire also led him to take the position he did in support of the Governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre. Eyre had ordered the suppression of an armed uprising in a manner that was judged by many of Kingsley’s more liberal contemporaries to be no better than brutal and bloody murder. Kingsley, on the other hand, thought Eyre’s actions not only justifiable, but laudable. The fifth episode I discuss concerns Darwin rather than Kingsley. In Descent of Man (1871) Darwin had given an account of human evolution that not only described his physiological development, but also the evolution of language, mind and morals. In opposition to those who sought to establish a last bastion of human exceptionalism in human morals and conscience Darwin argued that the contingent and capricious forces of natural and sexual selection could account for even these highest attributes of mankind. In the sixth and final episode I turn to Kingsley’s response to Descent and here touch on something that has not been commented upon by any Kingsley scholar before now. Kingsley, who had been among Darwin’s most dedicated disciples for over a decade, was shocked and perturbed by what Darwin had written. Having been elected President of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and the Arts, Kingsley used his presidential address to distance himself from Darwin’s conclusions. Indeed, not only did he criticize Descent as misguided, he suggested that his audience accept the account of evolution that the Catholic anatomist St. George Jackson Mivart had laid out in his deeply theistic book The Genesis of Species (1871) that was published that same year.

Monkeys Into Men

Darwin may have censored himself when he wrote Origin, commenting only that ‘‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’’, but the implications of his theory for mankind were not lost on his readers (Darwin, 1859, p. 488). Evolutionary ideas already linked man and ape in the public mind, both the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck and the anonymous author of the sensational evolutionary MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) had made sure of that (Elliott, 2009; Secord, 2000). Charles Lyell was thus saying nothing new when he noted the genealogy that Lamarck drew between apes and man in the second volume of his Principles of Geology (1832). Lyell rejected Lamarck’s transmutationism, ‘‘whereby, the orang-ou- tang, having already evolved out of a monad, is made slowly to attain the attributes and dignity of man’’, as preposterous (Lyell, 1832, p. 14). Ironically it was Lyell’s rejection of Lamarck that prompted Darwin to take the Frenchman seriously.4 It was the suggestion of this dreadful paternity that had provided the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, with the punch line in his as- sault on Darwin and Origin at the 1860 meeting of the British Associ- ation for the Advancement of Science. Reaching the climax of his invective against what he saw as the irreverence of the Darwinian hypothesis he had reportedly demanded of the young anatomist Tho- mas Huxley ‘‘Is it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?’’ (Huxley, 1913, vol. I, pp. 265–256; Hesketh, 2009, p. 81).5 The relationship between apes and men had also been at stake in the debate that Huxley had been drawn into by Richard Owen, England’s foremost comparative anatomist, earlier in the week of meetings. Aiming to defend the dignity of man from such associations Owen had long insisted that there were significant morphological differences between the brains of apes and men that denied the connection that evolution implied. Only the human brain had ‘‘the ‘hippocampus minor’ which characterized the hind lobe of each hemisphere’’, he argued (Owen, 1858).6 According to the anthropologist E.B. Tylor, who wit- nessed the proceedings, however, ‘‘This was met by professor Huxley with a flat denial, he declaring that the brains of man and the highest monkeys differ less than the brains of the highest and lowest monkeys’’ (Rolleston, 1884, p. xxxiv). Huxley promised to demonstrate his point in print, and did so in a number of publications shortly thereafter, in 1861 (Ruse, 1999, p. 242; Huxley, 1861a, b).7 Despite Huxley’s publications Owen continued to press his case, even though he was seen to be doing

4 Lyell’s rejection of Lamarck also impressed the opposite conclusion upon the radical journalist Herbert Spencer, (Spencer, 1904, vol. I, p. 176). 5 Thomas Huxley to Frederick Dyster, September 9, 1860. Huxley Papers, [hereafter cited as HP] Imperial College, London: 15.117. 6 Rupke has demonstrated that Owen was no crass anti-evolutionist, entertaining transmutationist views himself (Rupke, 1994). 7 Huxley also wrote a number of letters, which were published in the press about the unseemliness of Owen’s insistence despite the evidence. PIERS J. HALE so against the evidence. It was thus with the intention of re-engaging Owen on this point that Huxley attended the 1862 meeting of the British Association in Cambridge. The debate was quickly to become as much a point of honour as of morphology. Not everyone who had deep religious convictions found the impli- cations of evolution disturbing. Darwin had had his publisher, John Murray, send an advance copy of Origin to Kingsley who had at once responded favourably. Origin confirmed the evolutionary ideas that Kingsley had already been exposed to by the radical writers who pop- ulated the London literary scene he had frequented in the early 1850s – the philosopher and radical journalist Herbert Spencer, the critic and popular writer G.H. Lewis and the physiologist William B. Carpenter in particular (Hale, 2012). In addition, his familiarity and appreciation of selection in animal breeding had opened the door to the analogy be- tween artificial selection and natural selection that Darwin had em- ployed in Origin. Kingsley had written to Darwin that: I have gradually leant to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful, pro tempore & pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas wh. He himself had made, I question whether the former be not the loftier thought (Burkhardt et al., 1991, vol. 7, pp. 379–380).8 Although he was far from conventional, Kingsley was well connected and became increasingly influential in the decade that followed. Darwin later had cause to be thankful for all that Kingsley had done to advance evolutionary ideas, but even in 1859 he could see the importance of being able to point to a prominent Churchman who was not adverse to his argument. As I have already pointed out, Darwin quoted from Kingsley’s letter in the second and subsequent editions of Origin, noting that ‘‘a celebrated author and Divine’’ found an evolved world an even more remarkable creation than one requiring what Kingsley later referred to as ‘‘an interfering God – a master-magician, as I call it’’. In light of Darwin’s work, people now had ‘‘to choose between the abso- lute empire of accident, and a living, immanent, ever-working God’’ (Darwin, 1860, p. 481).9 This had clearly been exactly how Darwin had hoped people might read his book, having quoted the renowned his- torian and philosopher of science, the Revered William Whewell to this

8 Charles Kingsley to Charles Darwin, 18 November 1859. 9 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice, July 1863. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS effect as a preface (Origin 1859). Darwin wrote enthusiastically of Kingsley’s support to Huxley, Lyell and his friend the banker, politician and anthropologist John Lubbock (Darwin, 1860, p. 481; Burkhardt et al., 1991, pp. 404–405, 409–410, 432–433, 449–450). As the 1862 meeting of the British Association approached Kingsley was well aware that many people had theological objections to Darwin’s views. The fact that he had come to see Darwinian science as quite compatible with faith, even to the point of embracing the most con- tingent and capricious aspects of evolution as being well within God’s Providence, only increased his desire to defend Darwin’s views. Kingsley had discussed these issues in private correspondence with Huxley, who for a time became one of his closest friends, and the two arranged to meet when the Association convened.10 Kingsley, who resided for a good part of the year in Cambridge as a result of his appointment in 1860 as Regius Professor of Modern History at the University, was on home ground, and while Huxley had long since promised Darwin ‘‘I am sharpening up my beak and claws in readiness’’ (Burkhardt et al., 1991, vol. 7, pp. 390–391), Kingsley, in turn, had promised Huxley that ‘‘if anybody tries to get up a ‘religious’ controversy (which I think no Cambridge man will) then will I shew you that I too have teeth and claws and [take] especial pleasure in worrying a parson’’. In contrast to Huxley’s motivation, though, Kingsley added that he did so ‘‘just because I am a good churchman’’.11 Kingsley was confident that science and theology had the same author and thus that the two – properly understood – could never truly be in conflict. This being the case, he was determined to defend Darwin from what he perceived to be the misplaced attacks of Owen and Wilberforce. He wrote to his mentor in theology, the broad church Anglican Frederick Maurice on this point, reassuring him over both his outspoken venture into Darwinian science and his increasingly intimate confederacy with Huxley. ‘‘I am not going astray into materialism as yet’’, he wrote, ‘‘but I must be utterly confi- dential and trustworthy with these men if I am to do any good, and undo the horrible mischief wh. Owen and Oxford have done’’.12 Kingsley, held open house throughout the 1862 meetings of the Association, and entertained many of the Darwinian circle, including

10 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 18 July 1862, HP 19:206; 4 August 1862, HP 19:207–208. 11 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 4 August 1862, HP 19:207–208. Emphasis in the original. 12 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice 17 May 1863, British Library Additional Manuscript [hereafter BL Add Ms.] 41297:147. PIERS J. HALE

Alfred Russel Wallace, who recalled ‘‘the pleasure of spending an evening with Charles Kingsley in his own house, and enjoying his stimulating conversation’’ (Wallace, 1905, vol. II, p. 46). It was in the evenings too that Kingsley wrote installments of the evolutionary parable Water Babies for ongoing serial publication in Macmillan’s Magazine, and caricatured the key events of the meeting as they unfolded, reflecting upon the broader moral significance of evolution as he did so (Kingsley, 1862; 1863).

And Men Into Monkeys

That Kingsley should choose a fairy tale as the appropriate venue to discuss such matters is not as peculiar as it might seem to the modem reader. As both Eileen Fyfe (2003) and Bernard Lightman (2007) have pointed out, the literary devices of the genre lent themselves well to the didactic intentions of the natural theologian, and there was an estab- lished tradition of nature writers who put them to use in this manner. Thus, albeit a fairy story, in Water Babies Kingsley tackled the moral import of evolution head on. He not only weighed in on the debate between Owen and Huxley, but also demonstrated his embrace of both the capriciousness that Darwin had seen in nature and the deep contin- gency of natural selection. Kingsley was quite open to the fact that human evolution could be a downward road just as easily as it could be in the ascendant. He believed that there were moral lessons that God sought to teach man through this arrangement of things, and it was these moral lessons that Kingsley sought to teach the readers of Water Babies – whatever their age. It was in this light that Kingsley urged Maurice, his mentor in the- ology, to read the book. When you read it, I hope you will see that I have not been idling my time away. I have tried, in all sorts of queer ways, to make children and grown folks understand that there is a quite miraculous & divine element underlying all physical nature… AndifIhavewrappedupmy parable in seeming Tom-fooleries, it is because so only could I get the pill swallowed by a generation who are not believing, with anything like their whole heart, in the Living God… Meanwhile, remember that the physical science in the book is not nonsense, but accurate, earnest, as far as I dare speak yet. I am busy working out points of Natural Theology, by the strange light of Huxley, Darwin & Lyell.13

13 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice, May 17 1863, BL Add. Ms. 41297:147. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

Water Babies is the story of a young orphaned chimney sweep named Tom who is apprenticed to the master sweep, the beastly, filthy, and aptly named Mr. Grimes. At the start of the tale Tom knows nothing of cleanliness or Godliness and is clearly well along the downward road that leads to no good. Tom is becoming ever more like Grimes, and Kingsley describes him quite literally as a young ape (Figure 2). Things are thus not looking good for young Tom, but echoing what Kingsley recognised from his reading of Darwin to be the capriciousness of nature, in the story, by a chance sequence of events Tom’s circum- stances change – and as a result so too do his prospects. One day Tom and Mr. Grimes are contracted to clean the chimneys of the local squire’s mansion and as a result of getting lost in the branching network of chimneys that spanned the various wings of the house – each generation of occupants had added rooms, wings, and chimneys to the house as they deemed necessary, (even this echoing the adaptive character of selection at work) – Tom comes down, quite by chance, into a different room from that in which he had started. Finding himself in the bedroom of the squire’s beautiful and clean and very, very white daughter Ellie, Tom becomes aware of his own beastliness and, from the soot, his blackness, and seeks to make good his mistake by climbing back up the chimney. However, in the process he upsets the fire irons waking Ellie. Upon seeing such ‘‘a little black ape’’ as Tom in her room Ellie screams and brings on a hue and cry after Tom, the whole household now taking him for a thief (Kingsley, 1863, pp. 28–29). Making good his escape, Tom scaled down a drainpipe and ran away across the hills and fields until he grew quite hot and tired. Seeing a stream, and now fully aware of his dirtiness, he climbed in, but being so tired he instantly fell asleep. Upon awakening – for this is a fairy story, and children do not drown in fairy stories – Tom finds that he has been reborn into a most fantastic underwater world – reborn not as a land baby, of course – but as a water baby, complete with external gills, just like an eft, or salamander. Tom has many adventures in his new environment, and meets many different creatures, and in the process he learns a great deal about their natural histories of development and transformation. This being a fairy story, Tom also meets two fairy sisters: Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid. Each represents one of the two sides of God’s will – and of Kingsley’s Darwinian natural theology. Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby represents the bountiful side of nature and of God, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, the stern immutability of God’s laws – the laws that He had placed in nature. Tom does not simply learn by PIERS J. HALE

Figure 2. ‘‘What was such a black ape doing in her room?’’ (image: Kingsley, Water Babies, London, MacMillan, 1863, p. 3) being told how things work, though. Rather, and in good Baconian fashion – for like many of his contemporaries in science, Kingsley was an ardent Baconian – Tom has to learn by doing, by experimenting, by experience, and by trial and error. The fairies watch over Tom as he learns his lessons and as he does so, just like the creatures he has encountered in the stream, he too passes through stages of development. Leaving his eft-like stage behind him he follows the path of embryological recapitulation, recently made popular in the anonymous and sensational work Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), onwards and upwards. Needless to say, perhaps, in this second chance at life in this most evolutionary of underwater worlds – in this ‘‘replaying of life’s tape’’, as Stephen Gould would have called it – Tom’s evolution takes a very different path to that along which he had been proceeding under the rough tutelage of Mr. Grimes. Indeed, MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS this time around he is well on his way to attaining to what, at least in Kingsley’s mind, was the very top of the evolutionary tree: to becoming a young Christian English gentleman. However, and this is Kingsley’s point, Tom’s development along this path is by no means inevitable, and yet – and in this respect unlike the chanceful turn that saw Tom enter Ellie’s room – neither is it the result of mere caprice. Rather, it is the result of a number of contingencies. Tom’s development is contin- gent upon his having learnt the lessons that the fairies have set him to learn, upon his finding out for himself how nature works, and crucially, upon his acting upon this knowledge appropriately. As long as Tom abided by the rules that he had learnt all was well and he continued in his progressive development. However, much to Tom’s detriment, he strayed from the path and stole sweets from the fairies cupboard, and then, to make matters worse, he lied about it. In doing so he at once found himself transformed into one of the very lowest forms of life – a spiny echinoderm (in Kingsley’s book, lying was one of the very worst, and the most unmanly things a young man could do). Unsurprisingly, Tom is quite dismayed at this turn of events – for he is too spiky to even be cuddled – and he begs Mrs. Doasyouwouldbe- doneby to help him. However, and as she informs him, he alone can remedy his condition, by learning his lessons over again, by learning about the world he lives in and the laws by which it operates, and by learning to place himself in just the right position so as to do well by them. Tom also has to learn the importance of doing the things that he sometimes might rather not do; it was following his own will, indifferent to the will of God that had caused Tom’s degeneration, after all. In order for Tom to relearn his lessons the fairies send him back to school to be tutored by young Miss Ellie, who through her own chance turn of events has now joined Tom in the underwater world. Of course, Tom does learn his lessons: how to be a good Christian, a good scientist, and the necessity of sometimes having to do the things he might rather not do, and he successfully moves on in his development as a result (Beatty and Hale, 2008, p. 143). But this is to race ahead, and to miss the importance of Kingsley’s didactic message. Tom’s own degeneration taught him a hard lesson: that he needed to learn the rules that effected his own development. These were moral rules certainly, but they were also laws that were very much grounded in nature, the laws of natural and sexual selection that Darwin had explained in Origin were among the most important. The PIERS J. HALE fairies taught this to Tom by means of a fairy story within the fairy story, which Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid read to both Tom and Ellie from a colour waterproof picture-book, called ‘‘The Story of the Great and Famous Nation of the Doasyoulikes.’’ The Doayoulikes were a race of people who had left the land of Hardwork and moved to the land of Readymade, making their home at the foot of the happy-go-lucky mountains. In their new environment they did not have to labour because everything they might want – just as you might expect – was readymade. They sat under the flapdoodle trees, and let flapdoodle drop into their mouths; and under the vines, and squeezed the grape-juice down their throats; and if any little pigs ran about ready roasted, crying ‘‘come and eat me’’, as was their fashion in that country, they waited till the pigs ran against their mouths and then took a bite, and were content, just as so many oysters would have been. They needed no weapons, for no enemies ever came near their land; and no tools, for everything was readymade to their hand; and the stern old fairy Necessity never came near them to hunt them up, and make them use their wits or die (Kingsley, 1863, p. 241). Tom thought that this sounded like an excellent way to live, and he said as much to the fairies. ‘‘Do you really think so?’’ Mrs. Bedonebyas- youdid asked, and urged Tom to tum the pages of the book to see what had become of the Doasyoulikes 500 years later. Again, by the caprice of nature, circumstances had changed – and with significant results. The happy-go-lucky mountains had turned out to be a smoking volcano, which erupted suddenly one day, killing one- third of the Doasyoulikes as well as the last of the ready-roasted little pigs. Their numbers had been in sharp decline anyway, as pigs tend not to reproduce themselves once cooked and eaten. Because the Doas- youlikes had become so well adapted to their world of plenty they had not troubled themselves to find out about the world they lived in and thus were quite unprepared to deal with such altered circumstances. Indeed, they had been so inactive and unthinking for so long that they had actually lost the faculties through which they might have coped with such a change. The development or atrophy of faculties through use or disuse in such a manner was quite in line with Darwin’s views on heredity (Darwin, 1859, pp. 134–135). The climate changed too, becoming wet and cold. Those Doasyou- likes who were not particularly hairy caught consumption and died, and a further selection occurred when lions moved into the area. Only the MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS strongest Doasyoulikes could climb into the trees for safety – and, notably showing his comprehension of sexual selection – Kingsley added that the lady Doasyoulikes would only marry those who were strong enough to lift them into the trees (Kingsley, 1863, p. 246). Turning the pages of time even further into the future, Tom is aghast to find that the Doasyoulikes, ever more hairy and ever more adapted to their environment, have evolved through circumstance and selection in retrograde direction, just as he had done. Tom looked askance at Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, but as she solemnly points out to him, it was not her duty to force the Doasyoulikes to do things that they might rather not do – like work hard to discover things about their environment, and how their actions or inactions might benefit or harm them. She had provided them with the where withal to explore their circumstances and discover such things through good inductive science, the rest, however, had been up to them (Kingsley, 1863, p. 247; Beatty and Hale, 2008, p. 145). Of course, the Doasyoulikes did not learn from the errors of their ways – indeed, by this point they had degenerated so far that they no longer had the wits to do so. ‘‘‘Why,’ cried Tom, ‘I declare they are all apes.’’’ And indeed they were ‘‘something fearfully like it… they are grown so stupid now, that they can hardly think’’ the fairy told Tom, ‘‘They have almost forgotten, too, how to talk’’ (Kingsley, 1863, p. 247). They became fewer and fewer in number, ‘‘all dead and gone, by bad food and wild beasts and hunters.’’ The last of the Doasyoulikes, came face to face with a hunter, he had ‘‘remembered that his ancestors had once been men, and tried to say, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ but had forgotten how to use his tongue; and then he had tried to call for a doctor, but he had forgotten the word for one. So all he said was, ‘Ubboboo!’ and died’’ (Kingsley, 1863, p. 248) (Figure 3) Turning to Tom the fairy tells him the moral of this tale:

‘‘Folks say now that I can make beasts into men, by circumstance, and selection, and competition, and so forth. Perhaps they are right; and perhaps, again, they are wrong… [At any rate] whatever their ancestors were, men they are [now]; and I advise them to behave as such, and act accordingly. But let them recollect this, that there are two sides to every question, and a downhill as well as an uphill road; and, if I can turn beasts into men, I can, by the same laws of cir- cumstance, and selection, and competition, turn men into beasts.

You were very near being turned into a beast once or twice, little Tom. Indeed, if you had not made up your mind to go on this PIERS J. HALE

Figure 3. The last of the Doasyoulikes (image: Kingsley, Water Babies, London: Macmillan, 1885, p. 266)

journey, and see the world, like an Englishman, I am not sure but that you would have ended as an eft in a pond’’ (Kingsley, 1863, pp. 249–250). And this is the crux – For Kingsley it was clear, as it was for Darwin, that the nature revealed through the Malthusian mechanism of natural selection was not all progress and improvement – at least in the way that Victorians conventionally understood the words. However, where Darwin came to believe, as he told his good friend the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, that there was simply ‘‘too much suffering in the world’’ to believe that such a blind and wasteful process as natural selection could possibly be God’s designed method of creation, Kingsley could readily reconcile even this most Darwinian view of nature with his belief in a stern but ultimately benevolent creator (Burkhardt et al., 1993, vol. 8, p. 223–226).14

14 Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, 22 May [1860]. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

Although Malthus, the author of the political economy that had led Darwin to see fecundity amidst scarcity as the key to natural selection, is often thought of as the profit of gloom, for Kingsley this was all a part of a much grander economy of nature (Beer, 1983). The incommensu- rable ratio that Malthus had pointed out between population and resources was but one of the stern rules that God had set out in nature to prompt mankind to rouse himself from idleness and indolence. As Malthus had put it, The first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body. They are the first stimulants that rouse the brain of infant man into sentient activity…The savage would slumber for ever under his tree, unless he were roused from his torpor by the crav- ings of hunger, or the pinchings of cold, and the exertions that he makes to avoid these evils, by procuring food, and building himself a covering, are the exercises which form and keep in motion his faculties, which otherwise would sink into listless inactivity (Mal- thus, 1798). By learning about the fixed laws of nature, such as the laws of natural and sexual selection, humans were in a unique position in the animal kingdom to use their free will to place themselves in just the right circumstances so as to ensure the best possible outcome. Unlike the rest of brute Creation that encountered the ever changing and capri- cious circumstances of nature in blind ignorance, for humanity – a species with the faculties of reason, of foresight, and enquiry that might facilitate their conscious adaptation to circumstance – such changes might be anticipated and avoided. A thorough training in good inductive science would fit mankind to recognise how to best place themselves in relation to the working out of God’s immutable laws. Only through an appreciation of natural science – and of natural selection in particular – might individuals, nations, and the species as a whole, hope to continue their onward and upward evolution, from monkeys into men and beyond.

‘‘A Thorough and Earnest Search After Scientific Truth’’

Act One: monkeys Into Men Again

Because Kingsley believed that scientific enquiry was the means by which man might recognise God’s intentions for humanity, in good PIERS J. HALE

Baconian fashion, he thought it imperative that science should be unfettered by preconceptions, whether they were religious or secular in nature. To this end Kingsley was outspoken on the importance of honesty and integrity in scientific investigation. When the British Association met in Cambridge in 1862 he had indeed met up with Huxley, as he had promised to do, and had witnessed his clash with Owen in section D over the hippocampus minor. Kingsley clearly sided with Huxley over the truth of the matter, and in doing so stood alongside some of the most eminent men in the field. George Rolleston, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Oxford had been motivated by the personal attacks that Owen and Wilberforce had made upon Huxley at the 1860 meeting to make the study of the subject his own personal area of expertise; and William Flower, who had recently been appointed conservator at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons was also among those who backed Huxley’s conclusions. According to the Times, it was Flower who decided the question with the somewhat improbable announcement: ‘‘I happen to have in my pocket a monkey’s brain’’. The production of the said organ allowed Huxley to demonstrate that it did indeed exhibit the debated character (Fletcher, 2004). With such a weight of evidence in favour of Huxley’s position, added to the fact that Owen had quite blatantly chosen to ignore the well-known published works of both Rolleston and Huxley on the subject, Owen was soundly defeated, not only on the scientific point, but on a point of honour. Owen had been seen to put his own petty concerns above the standards of good science, he had been tempted to lie rather than admit the truth of his opponent. As A.F.R. Wollaston later wrote about the proceedings, ‘‘about the Gorilla, Owen, I do not think, gained any glory; he asserted the old story, about the Hippocampus minor, etc., as if it had never been questioned’’ (Woll- aston, 1921, p. 123). This was not the behavior of a scientist, or a gentleman.15 In celebration of Huxley’s victory, and the victory for free investi- gation over prejudice, Huxley and Kingsley founded the ‘‘Thorough Club’’, a drinking and dining club that adopted as its aim ‘‘the pro- motion of a Thorough and earnest search after scientific truth partic- ularly in matters relating to Biology’’.16 The club was short lived, but both Kingsley and Huxley remained true to its founding principle. (Figures 4, 5)

15 Gentlemanly behavior became fundamental to defining the scientific community in the nineteenth century (White, 2003; Hale, 2012). 16 HP 3:120. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

Figure 4. Professors Huxley and Owen dispute the anatomy of a water baby at the British Association (image: Kingsley, Water Babies, London: Macmillan, 1885, p. 80.)

Despite his support for Huxley on the matter, when it came to the moral consequence, not of Huxley’s victory over Owen, but of the fact that both ape’s brains and men’s brains exhibited the hippocampus minor, Kingsley failed to see the significance that either Owen or Huxley had accorded it. Owen had sought to defend the dignity of mankind by denying their morphological similarity to apes, and had ultimately been willing to ignore the truth for his cause; Huxley sought to substantiate his belief that man could be thoroughly accounted for in material terms alone.17 In Water Babies Kingsley ridiculed both men for trying to make so much of such a small point of comparative anatomy. Caricaturing Huxley as Professor Pttmllnsprts (Put them all in spirits), chief pro- fessor of Necrobioneopalreonthydrochthonanthropithekology, Kings- ley reported of the professor that He had even got up once at the British Association, and declared that apes had hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have. Which was a shocking thing to say; for if it were so, what would become of the faith, hope, and charity of immortal millions? You may think that there are more important differences between you and an ape, such as being able to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong, and say your prayers, and other little matters of that kind; but that is a child’s fancy, my dear. Nothing is

17 Notably Owen had compared a Negro’s brain to that of a gorilla, arguing that the gap between the two indicated that even the most apelike of humans were far removed from apes in the morphology of the brain. PIERS J. HALE

Figure 5. The primary object of this club is the promotion of a Thorough and ear- nest search after Scientific truth particularly in matters relating to Biology… [image reproduced with permission: Huxley Papers 31.120, Imperial College Archives]

to be depended on but the great hippopotamus test. If you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, you are no ape, though you had four hands, no feet, and were more apish than the apes of all aperies. But if a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in one single ape’s brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grand- mother from having been an ape too (Kingsley, 1863,p.156). In his letter to Maurice, Kingsley made it clear that although he and Huxley were ‘‘most intimate and confidential’’ on this point they were ‘‘utterly opposed in thought’’.18 There were indeed other more important differences between a man and an ape – most notably the fact that men had the souls of men, where apes had the souls of apes. To Kingsley’s mind apes were not rational, and thus, like the Doasyoulikes, would not use the physiological characteristics they had – which were so similar to those of men – to raise themselves. Instead they merely adapted to their local conditions. Men, on the other hand, with a very similar physiology to the ape, had the souls of men and were capable of rational thought, and thus – if they so chose – of achieving the most wonderful things. Reading Malthus had suggested to Kingsley that both mind and body developed in response to physical stimuli (Malthus, 1798). How- ever, in light of his reading of George Combe’s popular phrenological work The Constitution of Man (1828) Kingsley came to the conclusion that an organism’s moral character might also influence its physiology, ‘‘Souls secrete their bodies, as snails do shells’’, he wrote.19 Such ideas

18 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice, [1863?] BL Add. Ms. 41299:142. 19 Such ideas were cannot be written of as mere pseudo-science even by the 1860s. Rolleston clearly allowed for similar views on the relationship between morphology and morals in his own work on the brains of apes and men, ‘‘In what other way… can we read the physical results of education’’, he wrote (Rolleston, 1884). MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS were popular at the time because they gave so much importance to personal moral responsibility, as well as to agency and education. Kingsley’s conception of the soul was clearly connected to the moral and rational state of the person, or animal, in question, and thus one of the key distinctions he drew between man and ape in his discussion with Huxley, was the fact that the one had the capacity for informed delib- eration whereas the other did not. Man might recognise the truth of his circumstances and act accordingly, an ape could only blindly adapt to whatever circumstances it encountered, or, like the Doasyoulikes, suffer the consequences of failing to do so – ultimately, the difference was between contingency and caprice. Kingsley was given cause to think about the Doasyoulikes once again, in 1868, when an earthquake devastated the Chilean city of Arica. Those who ignored God’s laws could expect little in the way of sympathy from Kingsley. Again he appealed to stern discipline, but this time to that of God’s immutable laws, and he metered out character- istically harsh judgment in his popular geology primer Madam How and Lady Why (1869) accordingly: I do not wish to be hard upon poor people in great affliction: but I cannot help thinking that they have been doing for hun- dreds of years past something very like what the Bible calls ‘tempting God’ – staking their property and their lives upon the chances of no earthquakes coming, while they ought to have known an earthquake might come any day. They have ful- filled…the parable that I told you once, of the nation of the Doasyoulikes, who lived careless and happy at the foot of a burning mountain, and would not be warned by the smoke that came out of the tip, or by the slag and cinders which lay all about them; til the mountain blew up, and destroyed them miserably (Kingsley, 1869,p.29). Just like Tom, the people of Arica who had survived the tragedy would have to go back to school and learn their lessons over – wiser, if sadder, for the experience. The prospect of degeneration as a consequence of refusing to inves- tigate and take note of the laws of nature remained central to Kingsley’s argument for science education. Indeed, it was clear to him that the pursuit of natural science through inductive reasoning was God’s inten- tion for mankind. In 1871 Kingsley was elected President of the Dev- onshire Association and in his Presidential Address he once again urged upon his audience ‘‘obedience to those laws of Nature which are non PIERS J. HALE other than the laws of God; the word of God (as Bacon says) revealed in facts’’. One must say to oneself ‘‘For only by obeying the laws of the universe can I live and thrive therein, and not be ground to powder by those ‘mills of God’ which will not stop their grinding because I am ignorant enough to entangle myself in their machinery’’, he said (Kingsley, 1871). The parable of the Doasyoulikes remained central to the moral message that Kingsley took from evolution to the end.

Act Two: Men Into Monkeys Revisited

What was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, and Kingsley demanded honesty in science from his secular friends just as ardently as he did from his theological enemies. When Darwin had first set eyes upon the native Fuegians in December 1832 he had believed that he was witnessing a people who were very much akin to his own distant ancestors – a view that was subsequently adopted quite literally by evolutionary anthropologists like E.B. Tyler and John Lubbock. In his Journal of Researches Darwin had also suggested that the Fuegians were a degenerate race that had adapted to the sparse conditions of their environment. While these two statements were by no means incom- patible, in a branching theory of evolution it did raise the question of whether existing native peoples could unproblematically be taken as ‘living fossil’ evidence of a missing link between civilized men and apes in lieu of real fossil finds. Just as the Estonian embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer had criticised linear theories of embryological recapitulation on the basis that embryos did not pass through the adult stages of fish, reptile, bird or mammal in the course of their own development, so Argyll argued that present-day degraded races could not simply be substituted for missing fossil evidence in civilized man’s own develop- mental history. Argyll thus sought to undermine a central presumption of Lubbock’s 1865 evolutionary anthropological work Prehistoric Times, As illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savage (1865). As Neal Gillespie long ago pointed out, to Argyll’s mind, Lubbock – who was a longtime friend and colleague of Darwin’s – had committed exactly this error in reasoning, and had indeed, in the last chapters of his book, invoked existing primitive tribes as a stand-in for missing fossil evidence in order to bridge the gap between apes and modern man (Gillespie, 1977; Lubbock 1865). Debate between the two men came to a head at the 1868 meeting of the British Association for the Advance- ment of Science, which met in Dundee that year. The Duke later wrote MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS up his side of the argument in his own book on the subject, Primeval Man (1869). Significantly, and as Gillespie makes clear, despite the fact that Argyll very clearly laid out his objections, rather than refuting Argyll’s criticism with a substantive argument to the contrary, Lubbock responded by attempting to link Argyll’s concerns about degeneration to the very different degeneration theory that had only recently been articulated by the Bishop of Dublin, Richard Whately (Gillespie, 1977, p. 49). Whately had suggested that rather than evolution being a story of a progressive development from monad to man, at least as far as humans were concerned, it was rather a case of the degenerational fall of man from the perfection of God’s creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. By Whately’s reckoning other races were thus the degraded forms of the most noble form of mankind (Bowler, 1989, pp. 236–237). Not only could this account be made to fit well enough with traditional exegesis regarding the Fall in Genesis, but it also con- veniently avoided the necessity of any theologically problematic link between man and animals. Lubbock was well aware that Argyll’s argument was of a different stripe, and his own attempt to link the two was clearly disingenuous. However, such had been the sea-change in British science that by 1868 methodological naturalism was not only accepted, but expected, and Argyll’s only too evident religious moti- vations allowed Lubbock to win the day with rhetoric rather than substance (Gillespie, 1977, p. 40). Kingsley was a close friend of both Argyll and Lubbock, and Lub- bock had had Macmillan, his publisher, send a copy of Primitive Times to Kingsley. Macmillan had misplaced the book, however, and so it was 1867 before Kingsley actually received it; but once he had read it, he wrote to say he thought it ‘‘excellent’’ (Hutchinson, 1914, vol. I, p. 92). Kingsley did disagree with Lubbock on one point, however, ‘‘the question whether certain races of man are degraded. You think not – (as it seems to me) – I am as certain of it as we both are that whales are degraded quadrupeds’’, he wrote (Hutchinson, 1914, vol. I, p. 92). Kingsley, who had read the reviews, and spent considerable time dis- cussing evolution with Argyll, was doubtless aware of the Duke’s thoughts on degeneration, as well as of the coming meeting in Dundee (Hale, 2012, p. 1006). Playing both peacemaker and truth-seeker, Kingsley pressed Lubbock to see that degeneration was just as much orthodox Darwinism as was progress, and that if this raised problems for the kind of inference that Lubbock wanted to make between savage and civilized man, then so be it. PIERS J. HALE

Degeneration was certainly a likely outcome for any race that simply adapted to its environment and the members of which did not apply whatever reason they had to understand and take advantage of their circumstances. ‘‘The nearer man is to the animals, and the less civilised, [he is] therefore the more the puppet of circumstances’’, he wrote, just as the closer he was to civilisation the more he was in control of his environment, the more he would progress.20 Here again Kingsley pressed the need for honesty and following the evidence rather than one’s preconceptions or presumptions. Baconian inductive reasoning had warned against just such idols. ‘‘I am sure that, side by side with Darwin’s true theory of development by natural causes, lies a theory of degradation by the same natural causes; which I sketched once in serious jest in the Water Babies; and it will be part of our future work to investigate the methods of Natural Degradation’’, he wrote to Lub- bock.21 Indeed, Kingsley was so enamoured by the possibility of degeneration that he also urged Rolleston to entertain the possibility that the ape’s skulls he was working upon might actually be degenerate forms of human skulls–one could not simply presume progressive development, after all.22 Kingsley’s point was clearly not to use degeneration to score points against Lubbock on behalf of Argyll, but rather appears to have been an attempt to draw his friend away from the sort of argumentation that he had witnessed Owen make in Cambridge, (and which Lubbock did indeed employ against Argyll in Dundee). Where many of his contem- poraries were hung up on the fact that there seemed an impassible gap between even the highest ape and the lowest man, Kingsley made it clear that he did not feel the need of any fossil missing link–‘living’ or otherwise–to convince him of the truth of the evolutionary link between man and apes. As early as 1862, at the height of the debate between Huxley and Owen, Kingsley had suggested to Darwin that the existence of semi- human mythical creatures in all cultures was surely testament to the fact that some kind of intermediate creature had existed between ape and man in the long distant past. ‘‘I want now to bore you on another matter. This great gulf between the quadrumana & man; & the absence

20 Charles Kingsley to John Lubbock, 27 May 1867, Life of Sir John Lubbock, pp. 91–92. 21 Charles Kingsley to John Lubbock, 27 May 1867, Life of Sir John Lubbock, pp. 91–92. 22 Charles Kingsley to George Rolleston, 12 October 1862, Welcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, Western Ms. 6119:8. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS of any record of species intermediate between man & the ape’’, he wrote. It has come home to me with much force, that while we deny the existence of any such, the legends of most nations are full of them. Fauns, Satyrs, Inui, Elves, Dwarfs – we call them one minute mythological personages, the next conquered inferior races… The mythology of every white race, as far as I know, contains these creatures, & I (who believe that every myth has an original nucleus of truth) think the fact very important… That they should have died out, by simple natural selection, before the superior white race, you & I can easily understand.

That no sculls, &c. of them have been found, is a question wh. may bother us when the recent deposits of Italy & Greece have been as well searched as those of England. Till then, it concerns no man. As for having no historic evidence of them – How can you have his- toric evidence in pre-historic times? (Burkhardt et al., 1997, vol. 10, pp. 62–64).23 Darwin was quick to reply, ‘‘That is a grand and awful question on the genealogy of man to which you allude’’, he wrote. He appreciated Kingsley’s thoughts on the evidence that might be derived from myth. It was, he wrote, ‘‘a very curious subject’’. Kingsley was surely right to suggest that the large gap between savage and civilised man was the result of the systematic extermination of the former by the latter – Darwin had witnessed as much in his travels in South America. There he had seen Spanish Christians systematically exterminating the native tribes of Buenos Aires, although he was led to wonder whether such barbarism could really be the mark of civilised men (Darwin, 2004, p. 90). Darwin told Kingsley that the idea that man had such savage ancestry was perhaps not as troubling to him as it was to the majority of their contemporaries, ‘‘partly from familiarity & partly, I think, from having seen a good many Barbarians’’, but he confessed that this had not always been the case. ‘‘I declare the thought, when I first saw in T. del Fuego a naked painted, shivering hideous savage, that my ancestors must have been somewhat similar beings, was at that time as revolting to me, nay more revolting than my present belief that an incomparably more remote ancestor was a hairy beast’’ (Burkhardt et al., 1997, vol.10, pp. 71–72).24 Where, in Water Babies, Kingsley had portrayed both

23 Charles Kingsley to Charles Darwin 31 January 1862. 24 Charles Darwin to Charles Kingsley, 6 February 1862. PIERS J. HALE savages and apes as too degraded to realize the significance of their situation and thus secure their own progressive development, Darwin was more sanguine. In his Journal of Researches he had contrasted the stoic loyalty of the natives with the barbarism of the ostensibly more civilized and Christian Spaniards, and he wrote to Kingsley too that ‘‘Monkeys have downright good hearts, at least sometimes, as I could show if I had space’’. But added, ‘‘How I shd. be abused if I were to publish such an essay!’’ (Darwin, 2004, p. 90; Burkhardt et al., 1997, vol. 10, pp. 71–72).

Kingsley’s Politics of Science, Race and Empire

‘‘Am I a man and a Brother?’’

The human-ape connection quickly became the defining trope of evo- lutionary ideas in the context of mid-nineteenth century politics and policy, and although Adrian Desmond and James Moore may not have convinced many people of their claim that Darwin’s primary motivation in pursuing transmutation was a hatred of slavery, they have at least demonstrated that the questions that evolution raised of the relationship between human races were part and parcel of the debate about the relationship between man and the rest of the animal kingdom (Des- mond and Moore, 2009). Indeed, the brotherhood of all men, which was at least implicit in an evolutionary worldview, pressed many who were sympathetic towards slavery either to oppose Darwin outright, or to argue that the different races had issued from different ‘centres of cre- ation’ – arguing, in effect, that the white man and the negro were dif- ferent species (Rolleston, 1884, pp. xxxii–xxxiii; Desmond and Moore, 2009, pp. 111, 242). This was a view held by many in the Anthropo- logical Society of London. In 1864 Alfred Russel Wallace proposed a compromise that he thought might chart a middle ground and thus bring the reluctant members of the Anthropological Society into the evolutionary fold. He presented a paper at a meeting of the society in which he suggested that although all men ‘‘must have been, once a homogeneous race’’, they had diverged a very long time ago, prior to the full development of language, intellect and morality, ‘‘at a period when he had the form but hardly the nature of man’’ (Wallace, 1864, p. clxvi). Wallace’s attempt at a compromise satisfied no one, however. Even this distant connection was too close for comfort for the Anthropologicals, the record of the meeting show that Wallace’s paper was badly received, MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS and while Darwin thought the paper excellent in many respects, he too was discomfited by what Wallace was prepared to give up (Wallace, 1864, pp. clxx–clxxxvii). Clearly disturbed by the fact that Wallace’s stance allowed those who wished to continue to deny the humanity of the Negro, he confessed to Hooker ‘‘I am not sure that I fully agree with his views about man’’ (Burkhardt et al., 2001, vol. 12, pp. 203–204). (Figure 6)25 Kingsley certainly acknowledged that all men of all races were of the same species, even if he did believe that they could be categorized in a hierarchy in which the Englishman occupied the highest rank while the aborigine held the lowest station, in many ways indistinguishable from an ape.26 In light of this Kingsley found Darwin’s suggestion ‘‘that the whole human race sprang from one pair’’ was ‘‘strangely orthodox’’.27 This was no fixed hierarchy, however. It was quite possible even for white men to degenerate into the most ape-like of states. Kingsley had been horrified upon a visit to Ireland in 1860 to see the degradation of the people even fifteen years after the onset of the potato famine. He wrote to his wife, ‘‘to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours’’ (F. Kingsley, 1901, vol. III, p. 111). For Kingsley racial hierarchy was an inevitable conclusion to be drawn from evolution, even as he was aware that the Englishman’s rise to the top was the result of a number of contingencies. The last words of the last of the Doasyoulikes are indicative of the ties that bound nineteenth-century conceptions of racial hierarchies to evolution. ‘‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’’, he had tried to ask. This was the demand and motto of the anti-slavery campaign that had long been championed by the Wedgwoods, Darwin’s in-laws. (Desmond and Moore, 2009). The story of the Doasyoulikes was thus not just a moral message about the importance of doing science, about natural and sexual selection, and of the need to do the things you might not want to do; it was also Kingsley’s comment on the anti-slavery campaign and what he perceived to have been the negative effects of the abolition of slavery in the Jamaican colonies. In telling the story of the Doasyoulikes Kingsley quite consciously echoed the concerns that Thomas Carlyle had raised in his 1849

25 Charles Darwin to Joseph Dalton Hooker, 22 May 1864. 26 Michael Banton (1975) discusses Kingsley’s views on race and notes that we should be wary of evaluating Kingsley’s views on race by our present day standards, but rather should view them in the context of the times. 27 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice, 20 May 1863, BL Add. Ms. 41297. PIERS J. HALE

Figure 6. Monkeyana: am I a man and a brother? (image: Punch, Ltd., London)

‘‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’’, which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine. Carlyle had republished the essay in 1853 as a pamphlet with the more offensive title The Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, the change in title underlining his argument that the former slaves were lazy, ignorant and in need of the paternal oversight of white planters. Carlyle had been horrified at the consequences for the plantation owners of the ending of slavery throughout the Empire, believing the compensation paid to these former slave owners was both inadequate and wasteful. Further, it was a recipe that seemed designed to give the economic advantage to the Americans, who still employed slave-labour. He was much more offended, though, by the fact that once freed, the former slaves were apparently happy to let sugar cane rot in the fields ‘‘with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins’’ MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS rather than work for a living (Carlyle, 1849, p. 671). The racial slur in which Carlyle describes the former slaves in animalistic terms is obvious enough, the reference to pumpkins a catch-all for watermelon and other staple crops. Carlyle, who saw the British Empire as a benign and paternal force for good in the world and who had long preached the ‘gospel of work’, could only wonder at the degeneration of the eman- cipated slaves once the reforming effect of hard work was removed. Kingsley, whose mother’s family descended from formerly slave-worked plantation owners, shared Carlyle’s opinion. He too had long advocated for the dignity of labour and the moral improvement to be gained from it (Carlyle 1853; Vance, 2009). To Kingsley’s mind, God’s intention for man was clear, he should seek to understand the world around him in order to raise himself by doing so – science, work and civilisation were God’s aim for man. Kingsley had already said to Lubbock that the further from civilisation man was the closer he was to the animals, and thus the further from God, and, as ended up being the case for the Doasyoulikes, closer to the point of being too far gone to remedy the situation. Echoing Carlyle, Kingsley believed that this was clearly the point that the Caribbean slaves had reached. Without the paternal hand of the plantation owners to force them to do things they would rather not do, they would sink into slothful degeneracy and live off flapdoodle and pumpkins. As Conlin has recently argued, Kingsley sought to assimilate natural his- tory with national history in a narrative that endorsed the evolutionary rise of the white Teutonic race at the expense of other lesser races whose fate was either to be assimilated or eradicated (Conlin, 2011, p. 170). It was this firm belief in the need for a stern hand and discipline that also dictated Kingsley’s stance on the ‘Eyre Affair’, which became national news in 1865. The Governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre, had put down a political rebellion using what some judged to be excessive force. Fearing an Island-wide revolt he had overseen the hanging of hundreds of black peasants, the flogging of hundreds of others and, by at least one account, troops under his command burned houses and killed men women and children indiscriminately. In England John Stuart Mill led a campaign to prosecute Eyre for murder, while Carlyle established a committee for Eyre’s defense. Huxley and Darwin lined up behind Mill, Kingsley, and, amongst others, the author, Charles Dickens, behind Carlyle. Eyre’s defenders claimed he had acted decisively to restore discipline and order with a firm hand (Semmel, 1962; Heuman, 1994, p. 172; Hall, 2002). The satirical magazine Punch caricatured the argument of Eyre’s defenders in a cartoon depicting a PIERS J. HALE

Figure 7. The Jamiaca question white planter: am not I a man and a brother, too, Mr. Stiggins? (image: Punch, Ltd., London) white planter, now bereft of his workforce appealing to the Evangelical Mr. Stiggins, a character from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, asking ‘‘Am not I a man and a brother, too, Mr. Stiggins?’’ (Figure 7).28 It was Kingsley’s stance on the Eyre affair that led to a cooling of the friendship he had with Huxley.

‘‘Nothing for Any Purpose’’: The Evolution of an Agnostic

Darwin had written ‘‘Nothing for any purpose’’ on the cover of his Red notebook in 1838. It is not clear that this was a reference to his new

28 As Ford (1948) points out, Kingsley later wavered in his support of Eyre as a result of the negative response he received. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS understanding of a world of chance and contingency, but as Sandra Herbert notes, it is an ‘‘ominous epigram’’ (Herbert, 1980, p. 5). Although Darwin stated that he began the Beagle voyage with con- ventional religious beliefs, what he saw on the voyage ultimately drove him to very different conclusions. Despite the fact that he could not help but conceive of the differences between the Fuegian savage and the average English gentleman in terms of progress and hierarchy, it was not long before he was reminding himself that the anthropocentric concepts of higher and lower were simply inappropriate. He addressed the issue directly – although at some remove from the debate about the implications of his theory for mankind – in his work on barnacles. These organisms exhibited such complex adaptations and yet were so humble that they confounded traditional hierarchies. ‘‘Barnacles in some sense, eyes and locomotion, are lower, but then so much more complicated, that they may be con- sidered higher… leave out the term higher & lower’’, he counseled himself (Stott, 2003, p. 108). Despite his initial impressions to the contrary, Darwin also quickly recognized that even the Fuegians – the very lowest of men – were of the same species as himself. ‘‘Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’s self believe that they are fellow creatures’’, he wrote (Darwin, 2004, p. 188). And yet he did. On Beagle’s previous voyage Captain FitzRoy had captured several Fuegians, and had taken them back to England to be educated and civilised. Now he intended their return in the company of a missionary, Mr. Matthews, in order to bring the light of Christianity to their Godless homeland. Darwin had befriended one of the Fuegians during the voyage, a young man whom FitzRoy had christened Jemmy Button. With Jemmy as evidence, it was clear that the savages who gesticulated so wildly from the shore were far from being a separate species, even though he at first declared the difference ‘‘greater than between a wild and domesticated animal’’, and as Jemmy’s own experience showed, it was clear that the transformation from one to the other was by no means impossible (Darwin, 2004, p. 181). From the first Darwin believed that the differences between savage and civilized man were largely the result of adaptation to circumstance. Given the harshness of the Fuegian’s environment it was hardly sur- prising that they had adapted in such a manner that Darwin thought degenerate. ‘‘How little is there for imagination to picture, for reason to compare, for judgment to decide upon? to knock a limpet from a rock does not even require cunning, that lowest power of the mind’’, he wrote PIERS J. HALE

(Darwin, Voyage p. 236). Branching out, he followed his observations to their logical conclusions: ‘‘Nature by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and the pro- ductions of his country’’ (Darwin, 2004, p. 191). But what had brought these men and women to live in such an inhospitable place? Darwin was aware that a consequence of the scarcity of even the most basic resources among the Fuegian’s led to almost constant conflict between the various tribes, and even before he was thinking in terms of natural selection he conjectured that the ancestors of the Fuegians must have been driven to their present location from the more amenable and abundant habitation to the north by the forebears of the tribes who currently occupied those regions. These northern natives were superior to the Fuegians in every way, Darwin thought, and so too must their ancestors have been. Once the Fuegians had been forced to this most wretched outpost they had adapted only too well to their surroundings. Clearly though, it required much longer than the three years that Jemmy had spent in England for the civilized characteristics he had acquired there to become fixed. This was brought home to Darwin by the speed with which Jemmy regressed once left to his own devices. Seeing this, Darwin despaired of the Fuegians ever raising themselves – their habits and social conventions not only reflected, but exacerbated the effects of their environment. Expressing sentiments that Kingsley would later echo in his story of the Doasyoulikes, Darwin noted that they appeared to have neither the wit nor the will to recognize that there were useful plants flourishing all around them (Darwin, 2004). He contrasted the strange conventions of Fuegian society to those with which he was familiar. It would clearly take more than Mr. Matthews and the Gospel to raise these men from their depravity. Rather, Darwin thought that only a change in their economic and social structure could effect such a transformation. The Fuegian’s seeming ignorance of pri- vate property as an incentive to labour was anathema to him compared to the vigour and industry that had made England the workshop of the world. The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilisation… until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved. At present even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another. On MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise until there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power (Darwin, 2004, pp. 202–203). His reading of Malthus in the September of 1838 would only strengthen the political and economic assumptions that informed his conception of nature (Young, 1969; Desmond and Moore 1994; Radick, 2003). Darwin kept his own council as he worked through the full impli- cations of his theory for his understanding of human evolution. It was not until 1868 that he was prepared to put pen to paper, the argument between Lubbock and Argyll was in full swing, and even though Des- cent of Man (1871) was written in his familiar considered and reasonable tone, he held nothing back. Mere morphology was no longer the issue, Huxley had won that battle. Rather, debate had moved on to the more sensitive ground concerning the origin of language, mind, and morals, the characters that seemed most definitive of mankind’s humanity. Darwin found this issue particularly pressing, for there appeared to be a growing consensus – even among his scientific colleagues – that these qualities were beyond naturalistic explanation, and thus were being set up as the last bastion of human exceptionalism and a point of entry for the divine. What distressed Darwin the most was that in 1869 even Wallace had declared for this kind of unscientific nonsense. Wallace had raised these issues in a review article in 1869, which he fleshed out the following year in an article entitled ‘‘The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man’’ (Wallace, 1869, 1870). How could a mere struggle for survival have resulted in the far superior intellect of mankind over and above that of any other species, when natural selection would have been content with only a slightly more intelligent ape? Wallace asked. What of the facility and complexity of human language? Again, natural selection could hardly be invoked to explain the abyss this opened between man and animal. And what of our sense of aesthetics, our ability to appreciate beauty, to enjoy the harmonies of song? How did these serve in a mere struggle for existence? (Wallace, 1869, 1870). ‘‘The moral and higher intellectual nature of man,’’ Wallace now maintained, was ‘‘utterly inconceivable as having been produced through the action of a law which looks only, and can look only, to the immediate material welfare of the individual or the race’’ (Wallace, 1870, p. 359). Where Wallace found natural selection wanting, like the American theist and botanist Asa Gray (1861) and Charles Lyell (1863), he invoked supernatural intervention in its stead. Like them he hoped that recognition of this fact might prepare the ground for a reconciliation of science and religion. PIERS J. HALE

Having risked so much and worked so hard to get this far Darwin would make no such compromise. If there was evidence of human degeneration anywhere, he thought, it was in Wallace’s thinking! ‘‘You write like a metamorphosed (in retrograde direction) naturalist’’, Wal- lace’s defection pained him deeply; he signed off, ‘‘Your miserable friend’’ (Burkhardt et al., 2010, vol. 18, p. 17).29 Thus, having set out his stall on the relatively uncontroversial ground of the animal origin of man’s morphology in the early chapters of Descent, in what followed Darwin quickly set about documenting incidence upon incidence of incipient moral qualities across the animal kingdom. Far from being detrimental in the process of natural selection, he argued that in a social species such as man, intelligence and language could easily have evolved in tandem, each serving to increase the social coherence of the group and increasing the likelihood of it defeating its competitors. Man’s appreciation of beauty and his sense of aesthetics were no divine gift that man might enjoy God’s Creation, but rather were the contingent and fully material results of eons of sexual selection. Likewise morality, loyalty, courage and a willingness to help others, even at some cost to oneself, would also clearly be characters that would be favoured by natural selection. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection (Darwin, 1871, vol. 1, p. 166). Indeed, Darwin suggested that even that most ancient of ethics, the Golden Rule, which had subsequently been embraced by Christianity, was but a natural outcome of circumstance and selection (Darwin, 1871, vol. 1, p. 106). In fact, and ironically, Wallace had laid the groundwork for much of this work himself in his 1864 paper to the Anthropological Society. There he had first suggested that – as a contingency of human history – once man had become a social animal, it was his mental and moral faculties that had been naturally selected more than his morphology (Wallace, 1864, p. clxiv). Given the growing evidence of man’s vast antiquity a large moral and mental gap between apes and humans was to be expected.

29 Charles Darwin to Alfred Russel Wallace, January 26th 1870. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

Stepping Back from the Brink

Kingsley clearly had no problem with the notion of man’s physical evolution, or that mental and moral qualities could be enhanced or lost through natural selection. He was also one of only a handful of Dar- win’s contemporaries to fully appreciate the importance of sexual selection. Thus, when Darwin wrote to Kingsley that he imagined he would be roundly abused were he to write an essay on the evolution of man from apes, he could hardly have imagined that Kingsley would be among those that did so. In Descent Darwin had not only offered an explanation of the evo- lution of mind and morals as the result of no more than the contingent history of circumstance and selection, but had also suggested that the various religious beliefs and superstitions that were in evidence among the many races and nations of the world also had an evolutionary origin. Indeed it was this realization that forced Darwin to recognize that his own religious beliefs and those of his countrymen deserved no special privilege regarding their claim to be the word of the one true God (van Wyhe and Pallen, 2012, pp. 110–111). This much was too much for Kingsley. While Kingsley was quite happy to see that much of the world, and even much of our own history, had been the result of mere circumstance and selection, the materialist conclusions that Darwin had drawn from such a fact were beyond the pale. Kingsley could not accept a scheme that denied a grander purpose to the inexorable operation of nature’s laws than that of mere chance and contingency. After all, the outcomes of natural selection, however chanceful, were well within God’s boundless ken, he reasoned. Shortly after finishing Water Babies Kingsley had written to the naturalist Henry Walter Bates that he looked at the whole of nature as tending ‘‘not towards the omnipotence of Matter’’ as materialists might conclude, ‘‘but towards the omnipo- tence of spirit’’. On the whole, men did learn their lessons, study nature and profit from doing so, becoming ever more rational and manly as a result – developing the man’s soul that they had awakened in the pro- cess. This was far from nature having no purpose. Chance might rule the lives of the animal kingdom, but as he told Bates, while natural history thus ‘‘looks like a chapter of accidents [it] is really… a chapter of special Providences of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and whose greatness, wisdom, and perpetual care I never understood as I have since I became a convert to Darwin’s views’’ (F. Kingsley, 1901, PIERS J. HALE vol. III, pp. 179–180).30 It was by just such an arrangement that God had provided the means whereby man might raise himself – as God had surely planned, but as He had also left man to choose. Kingsley was clearly blind-sided by Darwin’s apparent embrace of materialism. This was a far cry indeed from the man who had formerly quoted Kingsley’s own words in defense of a theistic reading of evolu- tion. In 1871 Kingsley had been elected President of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, and he made this most serious turn of events the subject of his presidential address, delivered in the town of Bideford. What upset Kingsley most was not so much Darwin’s evolutionary account of language, aesthetics and morality, per se, but that he had tied it to the notion that religious beliefs were similarly evolved by the same contingent processes of natural selection, and were, at least by impli- cation, adaptations of earlier ignorance and superstition. Such meta- physical speculation was both unwarranted and unfounded, Kingsley argued – and this from the man whom he had come to call ‘‘master’’. I deeply regret that a most illustrious man of science, whom I can never mention without reverence and gratitude, and who is himself neither materialist nor atheist, should have entangled (quite need- lessly, as it seems to me) his recent speculations on The Descent of Man – especially where he treats of Language, of the sense of Beauty, and of the origin of Morality – with a metaphysic which only cramps thefreeplayofhisnobleintellect,hesaid(Kingsley,1871,p.383). Clearly reeling, Kingsley was even willing to recommended The Genesis of Species (1871), which had just been published by the talented Cath- olic anatomist St. George Jackson Mivart, ‘‘as a specimen of what can be said on the other side by a sound man of science, who is also a sound metaphysician’’ (Kingsley, 1871, p. 383). Kingsley had never been backwards in coming forwards with his negative opinion of Catholics, but for once he looked beyond his immediate prejudices in defense of a theistic reading of evolution. In fact Kingsley’s views were quite different from Mivart’s. In Genesis of Species, Mivart argued that evolution was, to all intents and purposes, a foreordained unfolding of God’s intentions (Mivart, 1871). However, as is clear from the tale of the Doasyoulikes and the frequency with which he returned to this tale, Kingsley believed that while God’s laws were immutable, the progress or degeneration of an organism – animal or human – was entirely contingent in how they placed themselves vis a vis

30 Charles Kingsley to Henry Walter Bates, April 13 1863. See also Matthew ch. 10. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS these laws (Kingsley, 1863, pp. 248–249). Despite their differences on the process of evolution, though, Kingsley could not deny that Mivart was indeed a talented anatomist, and one who saw God at work in evolution. Kingsley was thus concerned that Darwin and Huxley were attempting to marginalize Mivart’s views for reasons that appeared to be less than scientific. Mivart had already stated much of his case in a series of articles published in the Catholic journal The Month, (Mivart, 1869), and had written a stinging review of Descent in the Quarterly Review ([Mivart] 1871). Huxley had taken up the cudgels in reply, writing the essay ‘‘Mr. Darwin’s Critics’’ (1871) in which he criticized both Wallace and Mivart. Huxley had written it for the Contemporary Review ensuring a wide cir- culation, and took pains to expose the differences between Mivart and Wallace’s views – this was no united front. He reserved particularly harsh words for Mivart, however, whose treatment of Darwin had been ‘‘unjust and unbecoming’’ (Huxley, 1871, p. 475). He had also made it clear that Mivart was influenced in his thinking by his Catholic faith, implying that this was reason enough to discount his opinions. In a way it was, and it is ironic that Kingsley had been complicit in ensuring that this was the case, for no one had done more than Kingsley to demonize and defame Catholics. His most popular novel Westward Ho! was a celebration of the superiority of Protestantism over Catholicism from start to finish (Schiefelbein, 1998); and in his infamous attack on John Henry Newman – that most famous of all defectors to the Roman Church – Kingsley had insinuated that Catholics had a tendency to put blind adherence to papal authority before the truth (Kingsley, 1864).31 Now though, and referring to Mivart’s work, Kingsley appealed to his audience to join with him in rising above such prejudicial and unscientific grounds for discounting a theistic account of evolution. Clearly referring to the treat- ment that Darwin and Huxley between them had metered out to Mivart, Kingsley said, ‘‘You will believe, I am sure, that I deprecate the attempt to silence this or any other form of philosophic thought; and, most of all, by appeals to popular prejudice or superstition, on the grounds of its supposed tendencies’’ (Kingsley, 1871,p.383).Atthesametime,Kingsleywasequally at pains to make clear that he did not object to Darwin’s conclusions simply because they were offensive to his religious sensibilities. Rather, he believed that Darwin’s argument was based on presumptions that had yet to be

31 This charge was coupled with the suggestion that there was something inherently effeminate in Catholicism, and thus in stark contrast to the muscular, manly and Protestant science that Kingsley promoted (Buckton, 1992). FitzPatrick (1983, 1991) has argued that even though Kingsley might have been punching above his weight in taking on such a skilled orator, in fact, and in contrast to the usual reading of this clash, Kingsley’s attack struck a nerve and that Newman struggled to deflect the allegation. PIERS J. HALE proven – namely, that savage races, their customs, superstitions, and idol- atrous religions, could be taken as representative of an earlier stage in the evolution of the civilised and Christian peoples of the world. In Descent Darwin had sided with Lubbock against Argyll on this point, glossing over the substance of Argyll’s argument, just as Lubbock had done in Dundee. Indeed, Darwin had virtually quoted from Lubbock’s Primitive Times, thereby allowing the association that Lubbock had drawn in Dundee between the theories of Argyll and Whately to go unchallenged: The arguments recently advanced by the Duke of Argyll [in Primeval Man] and formerly by Archbishop Whately, in favour of the belief that man came into the world as a civilised being and that all savages have since undergone degradation, seem to me weak in comparison to those advanced on the other side (Darwin, 1871, vol. I, p. 181) ‘‘To believe that man was aboriginally civilised and then suffered utter degeneration in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of human nature’’, he added (Darwin, 1871, vol. I, pp. 183–184).32 Even though Darwin was willing to admit that ‘‘Many nations, no doubt, have fallen away in civilization’’, again echoing Lubbock, this was something for which, he wrote, ‘‘I have not met with any evidence’’, and was certainly by no means a generalizable phenomenon (Darwin, 1871, vol. I, p. 181).33 Nineteenth-century science, of course, was only really con- cerned with establishing the general and the lawful, rather than what might be locally interesting exceptions. Kingsley, like Argyll, had long insisted upon the possibility of evo- lutionary degeneration, and he was well aware that Darwin had

32 As Neal Gillespie has pointed out though, the case for human degeneration as argued by the George Douglas Campbell, the Duke of Argyll, was more sophisticated than this, Argyll argued that the possibility of degenerate adaptation to a relatively unstimulating environment was quite plausible, and that if this was the case then it undermined the case, which had been made by Darwinian anthropologists like John Lubbock, that primitive tribes could stand in as ’living fossils’; evidence of the kind of life that ancestors of modem western man endured (Gillespie, 1977). 33 Darwin’s adjudication of the matter, which was all the more decisive for its mea- sured tone, deferred further consideration of the contingencies of degeneration until the 1880s when it became a central concern of E. Ray Lankester and August Weismann. Thomas Huxley would also return to the subject in his famous Romanes Lecture, Evolution and Ethics in 1893 inspiring his onetime student, H. G. Wells, to popularize the ideas of each of these men in his science fiction story Time Machine (1895)–In each of these cases, however, the theological implications had been expunged even as the moral questions remained (Hale, 2010). MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS acknowledged it too. Now, however, it appeared to Kingsley, at least, that like Lubbock, Darwin was also willing to dismiss possibilities that did not fit with his preconceptions. Thus, in addition to reading Mivart, Kingsley also recommended that his audience read Argyll’s Primeval Man. Surely Darwin’s branching tree of selection and adaptation accommodated the degeneration of organisms to fit their niche, just as it did the progressive development of those that became more complex. Given this presumption, an awareness of the contingencies of time and place meant that it was quite possible that present day savages had no place in the genealogy of civilized Englishmen. He told his audience that of the authors who held different opinions on the matter ‘‘more than one of them are personal friends of mine’’ – here referring to Argyll and Lubbock. He quoted Aristotle’s Nichomachaean Ethics to the effect that ‘‘both are dear to us, but we must prefer the truth’’.34 Speaking of the ‘‘Esquimaux-like savages, whose implements of flint or bone are found in caves and river gravels’’ across Europe, Kingsley stated that beyond the fact that it seemed that they were among the first men to have appeared or reappeared in Europe, there were no grounds for further extrapolation. ‘‘As for their being the original type of man, as for our being able to argue from their habits what were the habits of our remotest ancestors’’ as Lubbock and now Darwin had done, ‘‘that I must deny, as utterly as I deny it of any and every savage now existing’’, he wrote (Kingsley, 1871, p. 386). Kingsley did not mean to deny that man had a simian ancestry, indeed, he acknowledged that the physical origin of man ‘‘seems, moreover, less important to me than it does to many persons on both sides’’, he said (Kingsley, 1871, p. 394). However, the very history that Darwin had given of the Fuegians being driven from the more abundant regions and degenerating as a result, which was echoed too by the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who had accounted for the barbarism of the natives of American and Northern Asia as ‘‘perhaps, less owing to a primitive absence of all kinds of civilisation, than to the effects of long degeneration’’ (Kingsley, 1871, p. 387). ‘‘Those who talk of a continual progress upward in man, forget how many facts are against them’’, Kingsley added (Kingsley, 1871, pp. 386–387). Indeed, it seemed that degeneration was rather more often the rule than the exception when it came to accounting for savage life. Almost by definition they were inferior peoples who had been driven from the topical regions by better men, and, like the Doasyoulikes, had

34 The text in the original is in Greek script, I am grateful to Professor Kerill O’Neill for identifying and translating this passage for me. PIERS J. HALE adapted to their meager surroundings. ‘‘Undeniably the facts show that degradation in mankind is as easy and as common as progress. You have only to leave civilized human beings to themselves for them to become savages’’ (Kingsley, 1871, p. 388). This much was just the story he had told of Tom, ‘‘Is not an average street-Arab as very a savage as a Fuegian…? That is the natural tendency of man by the laws of his nature.’’ Even though Kingsley had read and appreciated Darwin’s account of the education and civilisation of the Fuegians who had been brought back to England, what Kingsley found impossible to entertain was the notion that such savages would ever be able, or that their like had ever been able, to raise themselves to the heights of English morals and civilisation of their own accord. This had been Darwin’s opinion too, in fact. Having witnessed Jemmy’s quick regression he had speculated that the only thing that might allow the Fuegians to rise was some event to change their system of political economy – the imposition of some chief, perhaps. Kingsley, by contrast, could only think that if science did one day actually prove that such had been our ancestors, then, siding with Wallace, he could only suppose that such an improvement must have been the result of divine intervention. If it was ever proven that civilized Englishmen had arisen from such savages, he told his audience, ‘‘then I must hold… that man never would have risen out of that state without some special influence – supernatural, if you will – (I am not afraid of the word) – which has made him what he could never have made himself – a moral, and civilized, and even a decently decent being’’ (Kingsley, 1871, p. 389). Such an unlikely and, to Kingsley, counter - intuitive improvement would certainly require a supernatural explanation, however much modern men of science might baulk at the notion. Despite his rejection of the materialist conclusions that Darwin had taken from the contingency and chancefulness of the natural history of mankind, Kingsley did not give up on his own commitment to the truth of evolution, or its compatibility with orthodoxy. He did, however, realize that science was increasingly only willing to speak to the physical universe – and perhaps this was best – it was for the theologians to speak for the spiritual evolution of mankind. Indeed Kingsley had anticipated this position in a lecture he had delivered to Sion College on January 1871 under the title ‘‘The Natural Theology of the Future’’. There he had told his assembled audience, that ‘‘If it be said that the doctrine of evolution, by doing away with the theory of creation, does away with that of final causes – let us answer boldly, Not in the least. We might accept what Mr. Darwin MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

and Professor Huxley have written on physical science, and yet preserve our natural theology on exactly the same basis as that on which Butler and Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, I do not deny. That we should have to relinquish it I do’’ (Kingsley, 1874, p. xviii). This was still sufficiently Kingsley’s view some three years later when he chose to publish this essay as the preface to his Westminster Sermons, which appeared in 1874, the year before his untimely death. In the letter that Darwin had written to Kingsley about the ‘‘dreadful subject’’ of the genealogy of man, Darwin had confessed that when he had first set eyes upon the naked painted hideous [and] savage’’ Fue- gians, that he had found the notion that his ancestors must have been ‘‘somewhat similar beings’’, ‘‘as revolting to me, nay more revolting than my present belief that an incomparably more remote ancestor was a hairy beast,’’ and he recognized that many of his contemporaries would doubtless feel the same. This was perhaps especially so in light of the prominence of the ongoing debate about slavery and the relation- ship between the races. Besides, Darwin had continued, the connection with apes was not as dreadful as it might at first appear. ‘‘Monkeys have downright good hearts, at least sometimes, as I could show if I had space’’, he wrote (Burkhardt et al., 1997, vol. 10, pp. 71–72). In Descent Darwin did indeed attempt to show that there was much merit in a monkey, regaling his readers with the story if one monkey who rescued a youngster from a vicious pack of dogs, and another that had risked its own life to save that of its keeper (Darwin, 1871, vol. I, p. 78). He used these anecdotes to repeat the sentiment he had expressed to Kingsley a decade earlier. ‘‘For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper… as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions’’ (Darwin, 1871, vol. II, p. 405). So too, it seems, would Kingsley.

Conclusion

Charles Kingsley is both interesting and relevant for our understanding of nineteenth-century reactions to evolution. He was outspoken in his PIERS J. HALE views and highly influential (Hale, 2012). Unlike many High Church Anglicans, Kingsley was untroubled by the notion that God might have chosen to create humanity from apes. Indeed, as he had written to Darwin in 1859, he found that the idea that God created through law, rather than repeated acts of special creation gave him an even greater conception of God. Kingsley’s embrace of evolution was a highly moral one nonetheless. God did nothing in vain and thus Kingsley believed that his choosing to create through such an apparently chanceful and contingent process as natural selection was indicative of his intention that we learn about the world he had created, the laws through which he ordered the world, and thus how we might act so as to benefit from them. Evolution was thus no inevitable progressive development and evolutionary degeneration befell those who followed their own will ra- ther than the will of God. To Kingsley’s mind, therefore, the pursuit of science was imperative to uncovering God’s intentions for man and he thus became a staunch defender of honesty and integrity in the search after the truth. It was this that brought him so close to Huxley, which led him to distain Owen, but that also led him to side with the Duke of Argyll in his argument with John Lubbock. While Kingsley was not troubled by apes in his ancestry he was quite horrified to think that savages similar to the Fuegians might also have been among the fore- bears of civilised Englishmen. Indeed, he pointed out that in light of the fact that evolution was a branching tree, in which degeneration was as likely an outcome as progress, that there was no justification for assuming that the Fuegians, or any other such savages, had played a part in the evolutionary history of civilised men and women. Darwin had pointed out degeneration in his work on barnacles and in his commentary on the Fuegians, just as Kingsley had made it central to his tale of the Doasyoulikes. Kingsley was therefore dismayed when he read Descent of Man in 1871. Not only did Darwin now appear to reject the real significance of evolutionary degeneration as it might be applied to mankind, but he did so in what Kingsley took to be the same dishonest way as Lubbock had done in 1868. Further, and far worse, Darwin now offered an account of the evolution of mankind’s highest attributes, of their language, mind and morals in which he suggested that they were nothing more than the outcome of contingent expediencies. Such a view of morality, of what was right and what was wrong, was simply unac- ceptable. Having championed Darwin and Origin for a decade he now stepped back from the brink to which Darwin had led him. Kingsley was clearly blind-sided by what he read in Descent to the point that despite his own rabid anti-Catholicism he was willing to endorse MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

Mivart’s Genesis of Species as an alternative, despite the many differ- ences in their respective understandings of evolution. This is significant. Bernard Lightman has pointed out that the view of ‘Darwinism’ that prevailed in England owed more to what popularisers like Kingsley made of it than what Darwin himself had written (Lightman, 2010). Studies of men like Kingsley, Argyll and Mivart, will give us a valuable insight into what the English made of evolution, despite what Darwin, Huxley and others whom we might more readily think of as Darwinians intended. Kingsley’s story is especially interesting since it involves a notable change of heart about the moral implications of evolution. Kingsley quickly assimilated matters of morphology into a Darwinian natural theology, but he could not give up his belief that moral truths were absolute.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to John Beatty for years of discussion and col- laboration on Kingsley. His help in understanding Kingsley’s views on the mechanism of biology, especially with regard to Kingsley’s tale of the Doasyoulikes, has been vital to my appreciation of Kingsley and his evolutionary fairy tale Water Babies – Thanks John! Aspects of this paper were first presented in a panel at the 2009 Brisbane con- ference of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology. The paper, ‘‘Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Caprice and Contingency in Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies’’ was a part of the panel: ‘‘Thus From the War of Nature: Caprice, ‘‘Contingency and the Dreadfulness of It All.’’ Other pre- senters were Staffan Mu¨ller-Willie (panel organizer) and John Beatty.

References

Argyll, G.D. Campbell, Duke of. 1869. Primeval Man, an Examination of Some Recent Speculations. London: Strahan & Co. Banton, M. 1975. ‘‘Kingsley’s Racial Philosophy.’’ Theology LXXVIII (655): 22–30. Beatty, J., and Hale, P.J. 2008. ‘‘Water Babies: An Evolutionary Fairy Tale.’’ Endeavour 32 (4): 141–146. Beer, G. 1983. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bowler, P.J. 1989. Evolution. The History of an Idea, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California. PIERS J. HALE

Browne, J. 2001. ‘‘Darwin in Caricature: A study in the Popularisation and Dissemi- nation of Evolution.’’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 145: 496–509. Buckton, O.S. 1992. ‘‘‘An Unnatural State’: Gender ‘Perversion’, and Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua.’’ Victorian Studies 35 (4): 359–383. Burkhardt, F., et al. 1991. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1858–1859, 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——1993. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1860, vol. 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——1997. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1862, vol. 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——2001. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1864, vol. 12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——2010. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1870, vol. 18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carlyle, T. 1849. ‘‘Occassional Discourse on the Negro Question’’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, London. Vol. XL, December: 670–679. ——1969. ‘‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.’’ H.D. Traill (ed.), Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes, 29 vols. London: Chapman and Hall. Chamberlin, J.E., and Gilman, S.L. (eds.). 1985. Degeneration: The Dark Side of Pro- gress. New York: Columbia University Press. Conlin, J. 2011. ‘‘An Illiberal Descent: Natural and National History in the Work of Charles Kingsley.’’ History 95 (322): 167–182. Darwin, C.R. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. ——1860. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 2nd ed. London: John Murray. ——1869. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th ed. London: John Murray. —— 1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. London: John Murray. ——2004. The Voyage of the Beagle. Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of HMS Beagle Round the World. Washington [D.C.]: National Geographic. Desmond, A., and Moore, J. 2009. Darwin’s Sacred Cause. How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Har- court. ——1995. Darwin. The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. London: Norton & Co. Elliott, P.A. 2009. The Derby Philosophers: Science and Culture in British Urban Society, 1700–1850. Manchester: Manchester University Press. FitzPatrick, P.J. 1983. ‘‘Newman’s Apologia : Was Kingsley Right?’’ T.R. Wright (ed.), John Henry Newman: A Man for Our Time?. Newcastle: Grevatt and Grevatt, pp. 28–36. —— 1991. ‘‘Newman and Kingsley.’’ David Nicholls and Fergu Kerr (eds.), John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism. Bristol: The Bristol Press, pp. 88–108. Fletcher, K. 2004. Flower, Sir William Henry (1831–1899), Oxford Dictionary of Na- tional Biography. Oxford: University Press. Ford, G.H. 1948. ‘‘The Governor Eyre Case in England.’’ University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (April): 219–233. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

Fyfe, A. 2003. Science for Children. Seven Facsimile Volumes with Introductions. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Gillespie, N. 1977. ‘‘The Duke of Argyll, Evolutionary Anthropology, and the Art of Scientific Controversy.’’ Isis 68 (1): 40–54. Gray, A. 1861. Natural Selection not inconsistent with Natural Theology. A Free Examination of Darwin’s Treatise on the Origin of Species and of its American Reviewers. London: Tru¨bner & Co. Hale, P.J. 2010. ‘‘Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia. H.G. Wells, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw.’’ Journal of the History of Biology 43: 17–66. doi:10.1007/s10739-009-9177-0. ——2012. ‘‘Darwin’s Other Bulldog. Charles Kingsley and the Popularisation of Evo- lution in Victorian England.’’ Science and Education 21 (7): 977–1014. doi: 10.1007/s11191-011-9414-8. Hall, C. 2002. Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hawley, J.C. St. J. 1989. ‘‘The Waterbabies as Catechetical Paradigm.’’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 14 (1): 19–21. Herbert, S. (ed.). 1980. The Red Notebook of Charles Darwin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hesketh, I. 2009. Of Apes and Ancestors. Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Heuman, G. 1994. The Killing Time: The Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Hodgson, A. 1999.‘‘Defining the Species: Apes, Savages and Humans in Scientific and Literary Writing of the 1860s.’’ Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (2): 228–251. Hutchinson, H. 1914. The Life of Sir John Lubbock. Lord Avebury , 2 vols. London: Macmillan & Co. Huxley, L. 1913. Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 3 vols. London: Macmillan & Co. Huxley, T.H. 1861a. ‘‘On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower Animals.’’ Natural History Review (n.s.) 1: 67–84. —— 1861b. ‘‘On the Brain of Ateles Paniscus.’’ Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 247–260. ——1871. ‘‘Mr. Darwin’s Critics.’’ Contemporary Review 18: 443–476. Kingsley, C. 1855. Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. —— 1862. ‘‘Speech of Lord Dundreary in Section D, on Friday last, on the Great Hippocampus Question’’, reprinted in F. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley. Letters and Memories of his Life. London: Macmillan & co., vol. III, pp. 145–150. ——1863. Water Babies. London: Macmillan. ——1864. What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean? A Reply to a Pamphlet Lately Pub- lished by Dr. Newman. London & Cambridge: Macmillan. ——1869. Madam How and Lady Why; or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children. London: Macmillan & Co. ——1871. ‘‘President’s Address.’’ Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art 4 (1): 377–395. ——1874. Westminster Sermons. London: Macmillan & Co. Kingsley, F. (ed.). 1901. Charles Kingsley. His Letters and Memories of His Life, 4 vols. London: Macmillan & Co. PIERS J. HALE

Lightman, B. 2007. Victorian Popularizers of Science. Designing Nature for New Audi- ences. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ——2010. ‘‘Darwin and the Popularization of Evolution.’’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64 (1): 5–24. Lubbock, J. 1904. Prehistoric Times, As illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages [1865]. New York: J.A. Hill and Co. Lyell, C. 1832. Principles of Geology. Being An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, II vols. London: John Murray. ——1863. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, With Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. London: John Murray. Malthus, T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Con- dorcet, and Other Writers. London: J. Johnson. Manlove, C. 1975. ‘‘Charles Kingsley (1919–1875) and the Water Babies’’, in Manlove Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13–54. Mivart, S.G. 1869. The Month 11: 35–53; 134–153; 274–289. ——1871a. The Genesis of Species. New York: Appleton. ——1871b. ‘‘Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.’’ Quarterly Review 131 (July): 47–90. Mu¨ller-Wille, S. 2009. ‘‘The Dark Side of Evolution: Caprice, Deceit, Redundancy.’’ History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 31: 183–200. Owen, R. 1858. ‘‘On the Characters, Principles of Division, and Primary Groups of the Class Mammalia.’’ Journal of the Linnean Society (Zoology) 2: 1–37. —— 1862. ‘‘On the Zoological Significance of the Cerebral and Pedial Characters of Man.’’ Report of the Thirty-Second meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Cambridge in October 1862. London: John Murray. Radick, G. 2003. ‘‘Is the Theory of Natural Selection Independent of Its History?’’ G. Radick and M.J.S. Hodge (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 143–167. Rolleston, G. 1884. Scientific Papers and Addresses., 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rupke, N. 1994. Richard Owen Victorian Naturalist. New Haven, (CT): Yale University Press. Ruse, M. 1999. The Darwinian Revolution. Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Secord, J. 2000. Victorian Sensation. The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Semmel, B. 1962. ‘‘The Issue of ‘Race’ in the British Reaction to the Morant Bay Uprising of 1865.’’ Caribbean Studies 2 (3): 3–15. Schiefelbein, M. 1998. ‘‘‘Blighted’ by a ‘Upas-Shadow’: Catholicism’s Function for Kingsley in Westward Ho!.’’ Victorian Newsletter 94: 10–17. Spencer, H. 1904. An Autobiography, 2 vols. London: Williams & Norgate. Stocking, G. 1982. Race, Culture, and Evolution: essays in the history of anthropology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. —— 1987. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Stott, R. 2003. Darwin and the Barnacle. The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough. London: Faber & Faber. MONKEYS INTO MEN AND MEN INTO MONKEYS

Straley, Jessica. 2007. ‘‘Of Beasts and Boys: Kingsley, Spencer, and the Theory of Recapitulation.’’ Victorian Studies 49 (4): 583–609. van Wyhe, John, and Pallen, Mark. 2012. ‘‘The Annie Darwin hypothesis: Did the Death of His Daughter Cause Darwin to ‘‘Give Up Christianity’’?’’ Centaurus 54 (2): 105–123. Vance, N. 2009. Kingsley, Charles (1819–1875). Oxford Dictionary of National Biog- raphy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, A.R. 1864. ‘‘The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of Natural Selection.’’ Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2: clviii–clxxxvii. ——1869. ‘‘Geological Climates and the Origin of Species.’’ Quarterly Review 126: 391– 394. —— 1870. ‘‘Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man’’, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection: A Series ff Essays. London: Macmillan and Co. —— 1905. My Life. A Record of Events and Opinions. London: Chapman and Hall. White, P. 2003. Thomas Huxley. Making the ‘‘Man of Science’’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wollaston, A.F.R. 1921. The Life of Alfred Newton, Professor of Comparative Anatomy, Cambridge University 1866–1907. London: John Murray. Young, R.M. 1969. ‘‘Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Bio- logical and Social Theory.’’ Past and Present 43: 109–145.