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Chapter 1 Darwin's Life Chapter 1 Darwin’s life Darwin’s biographers are faced with an embarrassment of riches. His parents were both children of distinguished families who have earned biographical attention in their own right. Darwin then married his first cousin, and the family seems to have thrown practically nothing away ever since. Darwin recorded his own life in an autobiography written privately for his family, but naturally kept, and since published. The notes and records of a whole lifetime’s scientific work have been maintained virtually intact. Darwin lived in only three places during a scientific career lasting fifty years; five years aboard the Beagle while circumnavigating the world, four years in London, and the remainder in Down House, a few miles south of London. The theory of evolution started on the Beagle voyage. His library on board is known, his notes and journals from the voyage survive. Darwin wrote one long book about the voyage, while the captain of the Beagle wrote another. Many of the specimens that Darwin collected are still together. There is even a pictorial record of the Beagle voyage from the two artists that sailed with the ship. Returning home, Darwin wrote a series of personal notebooks which record the earliest developments of the theory of evolution in the most idiosyncratic and fascinating detail. Two complete preliminary versions of the theory of evolution survive, one brief and in pencil, the other longer and carefully transcribed in ink. Ill for the last forty-five years of his life, Darwin worked by means of an 1 enormous correspondence. Five volumes of his letters were edited by his son Francis, and a definitive edition of more than 13,000 letters is well underway, published by the Cambridge University Press. Many of Darwin’s correspondents were scientists of great distinction. Their own correspondence with Darwin in turn survives from an age when a ‘Life and Letters’ was the conventional celebration of a great man’s passing. Finally, Darwin prepared an immense amount of scientific material for publication, from short notes and questionnaires through longer papers to a succession of major books. His complete published work is catalogued in Freeman’s excellent bibliography (see Further reading). Had Darwin been a lesser figure, such a stupendous collection of biographical sources would still guarantee him a place in the history of nineteenth-century science. As it is, there is an almost unbelievably complete documentary record of the life of one of the great revolutionaries in the history of ideas. Small wonder, then, that the exploration of this record and its implications for the history of science Darwin has become what is sometimes referred to as the Darwin Industry. Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury in 1809. His father was a doctor, son of a more distinguished doctor and speculative evolutionist, Erasmus Darwin. His mother was a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the pottery. She died when Charles was eight, leaving him to be brought up largely by his sisters. He was educated at the local public school and went to Edinburgh University as a medical student. Unable to face confrontation with the seriously ill, Darwin abandoned medicine and moved from Edinburgh to Cambridge with the intention of becoming an Anglican priest. While at Cambridge he became the protégé of the Professor of Botany, John Stevens Henslow, through whom he became deeply interested in science, and through whose advocacy Darwin was chosen at the age of twenty-two to go on a surveying voyage with HMS Beagle as naturalist. The Beagle’s circumnavigation of the globe lasted five years, from 1831 to 1836. In his 2 autobiography Darwin summed up the impact of the Beagle voyage on his life. The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career . I have always felt that I owe to the Voyage the first real training or education of my mind. I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were already fairly developed. The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more important, as reasoning here comes into play. On first examining a new district nothing can appear more hopeless than the chaos of rocks; but by recording the stratification and nature of the rocks and fossils at many points, always reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to dawn on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less intelligible. I had brought with me the first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which I studied Darwin’s life attentively; and this book was of the highest service to me in many ways. The very first place which I examined, namely St. Jago in the Cape Verde islands, showed me clearly the wonderful superiority of Lyell’s manner of treating geology, compared with that of any other author, whose works I had with me or ever afterwards read. Another of my occupations was collecting animals of all classes, . but from not being able to draw, and from not having sufficient anatomical knowledge a great pile of MS which I made during the voyage has proved almost useless . During some part of the day I wrote my Journal, and took much pains in describing carefully and vividly all that I had seen; and this was good practice . The above various special studies were, however, of no importance compared with the habit of energetic industry and of concentrated attention to whatever I was engaged in, which I then acquired. Everything about which I thought or read was made to bear directly on what I had seen or was likely to see; and this habit of mind was continued during the five years of the voyage. I feel sure that it was this training which has enabled me to do whatever I have done in science . 3 As far as I can judge of myself, I worked to the utmost during the voyage from the mere pleasure of investigation, and from my strong desire to add a few facts to the great mass of facts in natural science. But I was also ambitious to take a fair place amongst scientific men, – whether more ambitious or less so than most of my fellow-workers I can form no opinion. (A 44–6) Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage as a promising geologist. Two discoveries, a brilliant integrative theory of the origin and distribution of coral reefs, and a more conventional but still impressive account of the rapid land elevation continuing to form the Andean mountain chain, brought him the respect of the greatest geologist of the age, Charles Lyell. It was the beginning of a lifetime’s friendship. Lyell was the outstanding exponent of scientific evolutionary geology, a methodological innovation in the study of earth history which urged that presently acting and knowable geological processes rather than miraculous interpositions of divine power were sufficient to account for the evolution of the earth’s crust. The second volume of Lyell’s Principles Darwin of Geology, dealing with biological evolution and the distribution of animals and plants, reached Darwin while the Beagle was in South America. Although Lyell rejected biological evolution, the Principles of Geology was the only work of scientific distinction that Darwin read on the Beagle, indeed one of the very few such books that he had ever read, and, as emphasized in the next chapter, its influence on the scientific outcome of the Beagle voyage was overwhelming. I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brain, and that I never acknowledge this sufficiently; . for I have always thought that the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind. (ML i. 177) Observations on the relationship between living and fossil mammals in South America, and the South American appearance of unique plant and animal species found on the Galapagos Archipelago off the coast of 4 1. The Beagle in Ponsonby Sound This drawing by Conrad Martens shows the Beagle in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern extremity of South America, in December 1834. Darwin was caught up in a bizarre social experiment initiated by Captain Fitzroy. On an earlier expedition to Tierra del Fuego, Fitzroy had captured three Fuegian Indians and taken them to England to be civilized. On Darwin’s voyage, the Beagle delivered them back to Tierra del Fuego, along with a missionary and the trappings of civilization. When the Beagle returned nine days later, the trappings of civilization had been stolen and the missionary had had enough. Ecuador, eventually convinced Darwin that Lyell was wrong about biological evolution. In the three years from 1837 to 1839, Darwin produced the complete theory of evolution in about 900 pages of private notes written in his spare time. All the main issues which occupied him for the rest of his life were dealt with piecemeal in a torrent of creative insight of extraordinary intensity. Darwin developed his evolutionary ideas on many fronts with great rapidity, and the notebooks do not convey an ordered process of accumulation and rationalization. The theory was first recorded as a consecutive argument in a 35-page ‘sketch’ written in 1842, followed by a 230-page essay in 1844. Neither of these productions was intended for publication, but Darwin made elaborate arrangements with his wife for the publication of the 1844 essay in the event of an early death. In 1839 Darwin published the first version of the Journal of Researches describing the events and discoveries of the Beagle voyage for a popular Darwin audience.
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