Charles Darwin* (3 page)

He did spend time at Edinburgh University’s natural history museum, one of the best in Europe. He made friends with John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who mounted specimens there. Edmonstone was someone Darwin greatly admired, and from him he took private lessons in taxidermy, the art of preserving and stuffing dead animals.

He also liked his chemistry teacher, the popular Thomas Charles Hope. The brothers had outgrown the lab, which had turned back into a toolshed. But chemistry still intrigued them, and they both fell for Hope’s showmanship. Hope attracted classes as large as five hundred for his highly visual lectures, conducting experiments with equipment so expensive he did not allow students to touch it. So the class was all talk, no hands-on experimentation.

After a year of medical school, the most important thing seventeen-year-old Darwin had learned was this: he did not want to be a doctor. He was interested in everything in nature
except
the human body. To avoid an argument, he kept this news from his father. Another reason for his silence was money: he now had a clearer understanding about just how rich his father was. Darwin realized he would probably never have to work for a living, much less practice medicine, if he didn’t want to. So there was no reason to make waves.

Thus he dutifully returned to Edinburgh for his second year, without Ras, who was off to attend a school of anatomy in London.

This year Charles avoided corpses and blood as much as possible. He missed Ras, but he started hanging out with other students, got new calling cards, and became very fashionable. Darwin even started to take snuff (smokeless tobacco sniffed through the nose). He joined the Plinian Natural History Society, named for Pliny the Elder, an ancient Roman with vast interests, who had written a famous natural history of Rome. It was a science club—favoring botany, geology, zoology—that met in an underground room to read and discuss papers. The club had been founded by Robert Jameson, a noted professor of geology, a few years earlier.

Jameson had translated the works of French biologist Georges Cuvier, who came up with the important new theory of Catastrophism: at one point, long ago, Cuvier believed, the earth had undergone a series of violent geologic changes. These catastrophic events explained why the earth had different layers of rocks and why certain species had died out.

In his introduction to the translation of Cuvier’s work, Jameson wrote that the biblical flood could be counted among these world-changing catastrophes. This statement made the Church very happy. As for Darwin, he found Jameson stiflingly boring (he called him “that old brown dry stick”), but he did learn something about geology from him.

Robert Grant, a thirty-three-year-old lecturer in zoology, took Darwin under his wing. For some four months he worked with Grant in marine zoology. Grant taught him how, with the help of a microscope, to dissect marine life—simple creatures like sea worms, sea slugs, mollusks. The unusually open-minded naturalist began taking Darwin as his guest to lectures and meetings not open to undergraduates. Grant shared his latest ideas with Darwin, thrilled to be conversing with the grandson of the famous Erasmus Darwin.

One day Grant dropped his guard and praised Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s views. Lamarck was a French biologist, a professor of zoology, who had proposed an early theory of evolution, which he called transmutation. He suggested that life had started with a few simple species that changed and developed over time into the vast array of complex animals and plants of the modern world. Lamarck believed that nature was on the move, not static. However, he mistakenly believed species could will these changes to happen and pass them along to future generations.

Someone, either Grant or Jameson, had published an anonymous paper in 1826 praising “Mr. Lamarck” for explaining how the higher animals had “evolved” from the “simplest worms.” It was the first use of the word “evolved” in the sense we use it today. Darwin was probably the first person with whom Grant shared his thoughts on evolution. Not until he was an established professor would Grant come forth publicly.

Darwin had already encountered these ideas in his grandfather Erasmus’s
Zoönomia
. Erasmus proposed that one of the scientific laws that governed the natural world was transmutation by acquired characteristics. “Would it be too bold to imagine, that . . . perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, all warm-blooded animals have . . . arisen from one living filament?” he wrote. Life possesses “the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!” Erasmus believed the “first great cause” created that “living filament.” By “first great cause” he meant God.

Thanks to his work with Grant, Darwin made his first Plinian presentation with his own discovery: the black particles found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech, not seaweed spores, as previously thought. Then he went on to discuss something else he’d discovered under his microscope: what he first thought were eggs were actually larvae. Why? Because they were moving by themselves, something eggs can’t do. Darwin had seen under his microscope that what he had thought were the spores of a type of seaweed called
Flustra
seemed to be able to move by themselves. This had never been observed before. He had rushed to tell Grant—this was Darwin’s first taste of the thrill of scientific discovery.

But Grant’s reaction was not at all what Darwin had expected. Grant was miffed; he felt Darwin was treading on his territory. He warned Darwin not to publish his findings. Darwin was heartsick and embarrassed.

Never enthusiastic about his future career in medicine, Darwin—with help from the sisterhood—tried to convince his father to let him quit. Dr. Darwin was furious. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” he yelled, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

He remembered this humiliating scolding, word for word, until his death. It was probably the low point in Charles Darwin’s life.

CHAPTER THREE

A Beetle in His Mouth

HE EVER-PRACTICAL Dr. Darwin came up with a Plan B. If Charles couldn’t be a doctor, then he could be a clergyman in the Church of England, a country Anglican parson.

As usual, Charles didn’t argue. He agreed with his father that it was wrong to be merely “an idle sporting man.” He had to have some profession, and this was a respectable one that would allow enough free time to continue studying nature. Most naturalists at the time were clergymen in the tradition of Gilbert White, who viewed exploring the “wonders of God’s creation” as part of a minister’s duties. Charles had some concerns about the requirement to declare a belief in
all
the dogmas of the Church of England, but he still believed in the truth of everything in the Bible.

So at age eighteen, Darwin went off to Cambridge University to study theology. Former classmates of Ras’s helped Charles get settled. He was jazzed to live in rooms that the theologian William Paley had once lived in. Darwin admired Paley’s
Natural Theology
, which took as proof of God’s existence the complexity of living beings. Nature’s design could be used to prove the existence of God. Charles wrote, “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s
Natural Theology
: I could almost formerly have said it by heart.”

He later said that these years at Cambridge were his happiest. His schedule was undemanding, allowing time for foxhunting, pigeon shoots, fishing, exploring the countryside around Cambridge. In the evenings he drank claret and played blackjack, freely spending Dr. Darwin’s money. He joined the Glutton Club, which met for dinners of “birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate.” The members feasted on hawks, herons—though they disbanded after the owl dinner. His interests included music—he couldn’t carry a tune but greatly enjoyed attending concerts. He also began going to museums and studying art books, another way of learning how to see.

In his cousin William Darwin Fox, who was older by four years, Darwin found a kindred spirit, almost a second Ras. Fox was on the same career path as Charles, and like him also much happier outdoors than in. Both of their rooms overflowed with stuffed birds, baby chicks, various specimens.

The competitive collecting of beetles was a national craze, and Darwin became crazed. He hunted for them, tearing bark off dead logs, scooping through swamp gunk, burying a snake and digging it up weeks later to check for insects. Then he’d put his finds in a tin box until he could get back and pin them. He spent hours mounting and cataloguing his collection. He even hired assistants to bring him bags of moss scraped off old trees in the hope of finding more rare specimens. Once a friend sketched Darwin riding a beetle, with the caption “Go it Charlie!”

On one memorable day, ripping off some old bark, he found two rare beetles and grabbed one in each hand: “Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped one into my mouth. Alas ...”

The third beetle spewed out a terrible-tasting fluid that burned Charles’s tongue so badly, he spit out the beetle. Two out of the three beetles escaped.

With better results, he sent his beetle records to the entomologist James Francis Stephens. To Darwin’s delight, Stephens published about thirty of these records in
Illustrations of British Entomology
. This marked the first appearance of Darwin’s name in print as an author.

He found a first love in one of his neighbors, Fanny Owen, though her letters revealed she knew perfectly well she was competing with beetles for his attention.

He began spending a lot of time with John Henslow, a professor who was making botany the most exciting subject at Cambridge. Charles had already heard from Ras about this fascinating teacher. Author of
A Catalog of British Plants
, Henslow lectured on the chemical properties of plant tissues, plants that could be used in medicine, how plants adapted to different environments, how they were fertilized. His classes included hands-on dissection of plants—so much nicer than cutting into humans, Darwin thought.

“What a fellow that Darwin is for asking questions!” said Henslow, who began inviting him to a weekly open house for heady chats with professors and serious students. In general, the Cambridge atmosphere stifled independent thought—it was even stuffier and more orthodox than Edinburgh. But a few professors, like Henslow, were liberal thinkers. Yes, God’s laws were the ultimate authority, but conventional theology and science could coexist. These progressive thinkers were shifting from a literal interpretation of the Bible to a metaphorical one. In this light, studying nature was seen as studying God’s work, with no conflict between science and religion. Science was not the enemy of religion; falsehood was the enemy of both

Thirteen years older than Darwin, Henslow became a father figure: “He is quite the most perfect man I ever met with,” Darwin said of him. He ate his meals with Henslow’s family and went for many long walks with him. He used Henslow’s microscope to study the structure of cells in orchids and geraniums. In contrast to Darwin’s old teacher Robert Grant, Henslow rejoiced in whatever discoveries Darwin made, and was kind when pointing out which of his “discoveries” weren’t actually new.

To remain teacher’s pet, Darwin sometimes would go to foolish lengths. One day Henslow led students on a field trip to hunt for bladderwort plants. They were given poles in case they encountered muddy ditches and needed to vault themselves across. Darwin spotted a perfect specimen, but when he tried to vault across to get it, his pole got stuck in the straight-up position. Undeterred, he slid down the pole and into the muck, got his specimen, and proudly if sloppily carried it over to his laughing professor.

Henslow’s influence was both academic and personal. He once wrote to Charles about his tendency to be oversensitive: “One of your foibles is to take offence at rudeness of manners and of any thing bordering upon ungentlemanlike behavior, and I have observed such conduct often wounds your feelings far more deeply than you ought to allow it.”

He also spurred Darwin to read John Herschel’s new
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy
. Herschel believed that nature was governed by laws, and that the highest aim of natural philosophy was to discover these laws through an orderly process of active induction balancing observation and theorizing. The scientific method, as it would come to be called.

Henslow probably also got him to read Alexander von Humboldt’s sensational
Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent
, about his five-year journey to the Canary Islands and around South America. Humboldt and Hershel sparked in Darwin “a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.” He drifted into fantasies about making discoveries in exotic locations. Writing to his sister Caroline, he said, “My enthusiasm is so great that I cannot hardly sit still on my chair. . . . I have written myself into a Tropical glow.”