Darwin from Orchids to Variation
Encyclopedia
The life and work of Charles Darwin
from the publication of Orchids to the publication of Variation during the years between 1860 and 1868 continued with Darwin carrying out his research and experimentation on evolution as he worked sporadically on the first section of his "big book", carrying out tedious work to provide evidence of the extent of natural variation enabling the use of artificial selection
. He was repeatedly held up by his illness
, and continued to find relaxation and interest in the study of plants. His studies of insect pollination led to publication of his book Fertilisation of Orchids
as his first detailed demonstration of the power of natural selection, explaining the complex ecological
relationships and making testable predictions. As his health declined, he lay on his sickbed in a room filled with inventive experiments to trace the movements of climbing plants
.
Darwinism
became a movement covering a wide range of evolutionary ideas. In 1863 Lyell's
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man popularised prehistory, though his caution on evolution disappointed Darwin. Weeks later Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
showed that anatomically, humans are apes, then The Naturalist on the River Amazons
by Henry Walter Bates
provided empirical evidence of natural selection. Lobbying brought Darwin Britain's highest scientific honour, the Royal Society
’s Copley Medal
, awarded on 3 November 1864. That day, Huxley held the first meeting of what became the influential X Club
devoted to "science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas".
Admiring visitors included Ernst Haeckel
, a zealous follower of Darwinismus in a translation favouring progressive evolution
over natural selection. Wallace remained supportive, though he increasingly turned to Spiritualism.
The first part of Darwin's planned "big book", The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
, grew to two huge volumes, forcing him to leave out human evolution
and sexual selection
. It sold briskly in 1868 despite its size, and was translated into many languages. The work of Darwin from Descent of Man to Emotions
followed after this publication.
. By December 1838 he had developed the principles of his theory, but was conscious of the need to answer all likely objections before publishing. While he continued with research, he had an immense amount of work in hand analysing and publishing findings from the Beagle expedition, and was repeatedly delayed by illness.
Natural history at that time was dominated by clerical naturalists, whose income came from the Established Church of England
, and who saw their science as revealing God's plan. Darwin found two close allies: the young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker
and the ambitious naturalist Thomas Huxley
who lacked the family wealth or contacts to find a career and joined a progressive group looking to make science a profession, freed from the clerics. Darwin's correspondent Wallace
arrived independently at his own version of the theory, which brought an early announcement of the theory and the publication of On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection in 1859.
This brought a storm of argument. Many naturalists attacked what they saw as an assault on established beliefs about the natural world, and perhaps the ideological foundations of the British social order, while liberal theologians and a new generation of scientists welcomed the theory. Charles Lyell
and Hooker, as well as Asa Gray
in America, gave support despite difficulty in coming to terms with natural selection and man's descent from animals. Huxley's interest in aggressively attacking the scientific establishment earned him the moniker "Darwin's bulldog" in a ferocious dispute with the leading anatomist Richard Owen
as to whether the anatomy of brain structure was consistent with humans and apes having shared ancestry. The campaign was devastatingly successful for the Darwinian cause and brought new recruits.
Lyell began work on a book examining human origins. He toured archaeological sites in Britain and France
, examining such evidence as the pre-glacial stone scrapers Falconer had found in a cave at Brixham
in Devon
in 1858 and flint tools in a Bedford, Bedfordshire, gravel pit. After touring the Abbeville
flint site in France in 1859, Lyell announced that he had overcome thirty years of denial of such antiquity and accepted that ancient man pre-dated the ice age. A delighted Darwin responded "It is great. What a fine long pedigree you have given the human race." Lyell questioned Huxley about the Neanderthal
fossil found near Düsseldorf
and described by Hermann Schaaffhausen
in 1858 which Huxley examined at the College of Surgeons
in London
. Lyell still, however, remained deeply critical of Darwin's idea of natural selection.
In the spring of 1861 John Stevens Henslow
, the botany professor whose natural history course Charles had joined thirty years earlier who was also Hooker's father-in-law, lay dying of heart disease. Darwin's own health was precarious, and he had recently suffered 24 hours of vomiting after the excitement of a few minutes of speaking at the Linnean Society
. He agonised about visiting the man who had made the Beagle trip possible and had given him much support since, but on 23 April sent his apologies and when Henslow died on 18 May was racked with guilt for not having seen him: "I never felt my weakness [a] greater evil".
Darwin was well into his work on domestication, obtaining skeletons of fowl and animals, borrowing specimens or stewing pigeons he had bred and rabbits he had requested, "I want it dead for the skeleton, not knocked on the head". This would eventually lead to his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.
He continued to suffer from illness and worries about the health of his children, and felt "incessant anxiety" about his daughter Henrietta
. She had suffered a typhoid infection the previous month, and was an invalid at only 18, close to death and needing three attendants round the clock. Emma Darwin
was used to nursing, but was at her wit's end: "I have succeeded pretty well in teaching myself not to give way to despondency, [but can] only live from day to day." She wrote another touching letter to Charles, saying the "only relief [was to take] affliction as from God's hand [and] try to believe that all suffering & illness is meant to help us to exalt our minds & look forward with hope to a future state... When I see your patience, deep compassion for others, self command & above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to Heaven for the sake of your daily happiness... It is feeling & not reasoning that drives one to prayer." Charles wrote "God Bless you" at the bottom of the note.
Lyell attended Huxley's continuing working-men's lectures, and was "astonished at the attentiveness and magnitude of the audience...[who would] devour any amount of your anthropoid ape questions". Human origins had been taboo to the scientific élite, but had long been featured in the radical
press and the secularist Reasoner was currently running a series about evolution to combat "Theological Theories of the Origin of Man" with information about human fossils and Darwin's book. Huxley was tailoring his lectures to bring Darwinism to this wider constituency, saying that "Brought face to face [with chimpanzees or apes] these blurred copies of himself, the least thoughtful of men is conscious of a certain shock... It is as if Nature herself has foreseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his intellect by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust." Man might have come from the brutes, but "he is assuredly not of them... [man is not] degraded from his high estate [by descent from a] bestial savage,... [but] once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has sprung, the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will discern in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future." This was Darwinism supporting the creed of working class self improvement.
to the seaside village of Torquay
. Darwin was diverted by spending hours considering the variety of wild orchids to be found along the shore, continuing an interest in insect pollination dating back to the late 1830s when on the recommendation of Robert Brown
he had read Christian Konrad Sprengel
on the subject. He wrote a brief paper on the topic. On returning home he looked for these plants near Downe, and found a beautiful spot teeming with orchids which his family named "Orchid Bank". His requests to the wealthy enthusiasts who had taken up growing rare orchids brought large numbers of specimens. These would be a test of his theory: Huxley had once asked "Who has ever dreamed of finding an utilitarian purpose in the forms and colours of flowers?"
He explored the intricacies of how the petals guided specific bees or moths
, and found that what had been thought to be three different genera of flowers growing on the same plant (a mysteriously monstrous specimen that puzzled the Linnean Society) were actually the male, female and hermaphrodite forms of the orchid Catasetum
. This unusual plant, Darwin discovered, fired arrows with a sticky pollen head as the insects brushed past – to which Hooker responded "Do you really think I can believe all that!" In this, Darwin followed his grandfather Erasmus Darwin
in exploring the sex life of plants, but instead of writing an erotic poem he analysed how parts of the plants were "homologous", having evolved from an original structure to meet different functions in different species. He persuaded John Murray
that this would be a fashionable book to publish, but his illness returned, causing delay.
Huxley's argument, that natural selection was unproven until evolving varieties could be shown to form species which could not interbreed, turned Darwin's attention to experimenting, pollinating plants and sifting seeds. By collating his results in January 1862 he showed that primroses
and cowslips
, thought to be varieties, produced sterile hybrids. He convinced Huxley with letters sent to Edinburgh
where Huxley was "preaching Darwinism pure & simple as applied to man.... [and] I made 'em listen.. I told them in so many words that I entertained no doubt of the origin of man from the same stock as the apes. Everyone prophesied I should be stoned and cast out of the city gate, but I met with unmitigated applause!"' Darwin was impressed that he had "attacked Bigotry in its strong-hold". Huxley published his lectures as a slim book on Man's Place in Nature.
Darwin persevered with his orchids, and the book, On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects and the good effects of intercrossing
, was published on 15 May 1862, just in time to give Wallace a copy on his return from the far East. While demonstrating that orchids evolve mechanisms that allow for cross-fertilisation, and offering strong evidence for Darwin's larger arguments about variation, the volume also countered natural theology in what Darwin himself admitted was a "flank movement against the enemy." By showing that the "wonderful contrivances" of the orchid have discoverable evolutionary histories, he countered claims by natural theologians that the organisms were examples of the perfect work of the Creator. His interest in orchids continued and he had a hot-house built at Down House, as well as experimenting with other seedlings and "slaving on bones of ducks and pigeon" and variations in other farmyard animals. His illness led to his skin becoming inflamed and shedding, taking "the epidermis a dozen times clean off".
Because of the problems with eczema, Emma told him to grow a beard, and in December his friend Mary Butler commented on the idea of this "long beard".
In January 1863 he got word from Hugh Falconer
of a "mis-begotten-bird-creature" fossil, the archaeopteryx
, which Owen bought for the British Museum
. It fulfilled Darwin's prediction that a proto-bird with unfused wing fingers would be found. Though Owen described it unequivocally as a bird, the subsequent finding that it had teeth left no doubt of its relevance to the Origin of Species. This sudden finding showed just how patchy the known fossil record was.
Huxley continued with his lectures to the working men, and a member of the audience took notes and published six fourpenny pamphlets which were brought together into a book which Darwin thought "capitally written... I may as well shut up shop altogether." On 4 February Lyell published his Antiquity of Man. To Darwin's disappointment Lyell had still not brought himself to clearly endorse Darwin's theory on species or on man, though he had "spoken out... even beyond my state of feeling as to man's unbroken descent from the brutes". Darwin's disappointment brought on ten days of vomiting, faintness and stomach distress. He was much better pleased to then receive Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, printed with a frontispiece showing a line of skeletons, with a gibbon at the end, stooping apes in the middle and upright man at the head, exclaiming "Hurrah, the Monkey Book has come". It included a jibe at Owen's ambiguous "ordained continuous becoming", and though some were horrified at this line of "gibbering, grovelling apes" the 1,000 copies sold quickly, requiring a reprint within weeks.
, and he found it "just the sort of niggling work which suits me". After some delays Emma managed to get him to Dr. Gully's
spa at Malvern
in September 1863, but the prescribed six months rest meant only six months sickness. He was too ill to write, so Emma took dictation.
He began to recover in April 1864, sitting in his greenhouse at home and becoming fascinated by the purple loosestrife (Lythrum) he had been breeding for years. This has three kinds of flowers and Darwin explored the eighteen possible sexual combinations, counting the resulting seeds and testing their fertility. Only six "marriages" proved "legitimate", showing that this was another mechanism for cross-pollination. He tabulated the results of his experiments on seeds and wrote them up for the Linnean Society of London
. Around this time a Mrs. Becker wrote requesting something edifying for her ladies' literary society, so he sent her On the Sexual Relations of the Three Forms of Lythrum salicaria.
His bedroom, study and greenhouses became filled with climbers, creepers and coiling tendrils, and in May he began a short paper on these plants. He marked their tips to time their movements, and brought Hops indoors, using weights to try to slow their ascent as he sat ill in bed. By 13 September his paper had grown to a 118 page monograph, published by the Linnean Society.
sent news of the American Civil War
, but to Darwin "the destruction of slavery would be well worth a dozen year's war".
Wallace, stirred by the Origin and by Herbert Spencer
's Social Statics, had presented his first paper to the racist pro-slavery Anthropological Society of London
. He, along with Darwin and the others, supported the abolitionist Ethnological Society of London
, but Wallace tried to reach a truce by proposing that races had long been separate, but had emerged from a single stock after the ape stage. His view was that competition was between groups, leading "to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which the Europeans come into contact", Darwin's experience supported this and he wrote on his copy "natural selection is now acting on the inferior races when put into competition", giving the example of Māoris in New Zealand
"dying out like their own native rat".
Where they differed was that Wallace saw mankind evolving mentally but not physically, and this would bring a utopia
where everyone would "work out his own happiness" free from policing "since the well balanced moral faculties will never permit any one to transgress on the equal freedom of others... every man will know how to govern himself" and so government would be "replaced by voluntary associations for all beneficial public purposes". Darwin responded that the mental / physical distinction was "grand and most eloquently done" but physical selection continued, through "constant battles" of savages, and unimpeded competition was vital to English society. Wallace replied that wars tended to kill the most fit at the battlefront, and he demurred from "sexual selection
". He disputed Darwin's idea that the aristocracy was handsomer than the middle classes by saying that mere manner and refinement were being confused with beauty.
Wallace also thought that the caves of Borneo
might reveal "our progenitors" and Lyell tried to organise an expedition hoping to find "extinct ourangs, if not the missing link itself"', but in the absence of funding the consul agreed to have a look.
The scandal of the liberal Anglican theologians' acceptance of evolution and rejection of miracles in Essays and Reviews
continued. The two essayists convicted of heresy had the judgement overturned on appeal. Samuel Wilberforce
, the High Church and evangelicals organised petitions and a mass backlash against evolution. At the Anglican convocation they tried to make a declaration reaffirming their faith in the harmony of God's word and his works a "Fortieth Article" of the Church of England
, and at the British Association moved to overthrow Huxley's "dangerous clique".
's highest honour, the Copley Medal
, their careful preparations and lobbying succeeded in voting their nomination through despite furious politicking in opposition. Darwin was awarded the medal at the Council meeting on the evening of 3 November 1864.
Huxley had made arrangements for a dining club of close friends as select supporters of the evolutionary "new reformation" in naturalism, united by a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas", and it held its first meeting that same day. Those present were all Fellows of the Royal Society: Huxley, Hooker
, John Tyndall
, George Busk
, Edward Frankland
, Herbert Spencer
, John Lubbock
, and Thomas Archer Hirst
. At the December meeting they were joined by William Spottiswoode
, and while the club had no agreed name at first, it subsequently became known as the "X Club
".
The medal was formally presented at a full meeting on 30 November, which Darwin was unable to attend due to illness. The President, Edward Sabine
, used his address to give the Origin faint praise and claim that "Speaking generally and collectively, we have expressly omitted it from the grounds of our award." After the address Huxley called for the Council minutes to prove this false. The minutes made no reference to such an exclusion, or to the Origin, to which Sabine argued that no allusion equalled express exclusion. The row continued afterwards, and the offending passages were altered in the official record of the address. Lyell used his after-dinner speech at the meeting to give guarded support to Darwin's theory in which he gave a "confession of faith as to the Origin", and said that he "had been forced to give up my old faith without thoroughly seeing my way to a new one." Darwin subsequently said that his friend's congratulations "are the real medal to me, and not the round bit of gold".
Early in 1865 Darwin's sickness worsened and he was overcome for almost eight months, lying in bed for weeks at a time, with Emma reading aloud to him. In May he heard of the suicide of Robert FitzRoy
, who had been captain of HMS Beagle
, and commented that "I never knew in my life so mixed a character. Always much to love & I once loved him sincerely; but so bad a temper & so given to take offence, that I gradually quite lost my love & wished only to keep out of contact with him. Twice he quarrelled bitterly with me, without any just provocation on my part. But certainly there was much noble & exalted in his character."
The Westminster magazine publisher John Chapman
was now a qualified specialist in sickness and psychological medicine, and Darwin invited Dr. Chapman to Downe and gave him a long list of the symptoms he had suffered from for 25 years. A spinal freezing treatment seemed to help, and Darwin pressed on with his Variation Under Domestication.
Times were changing. Lyell became embroiled in a row for having incorporated into Antiquity of Man whole paragraphs of a paper by Lubbock. The "X Club" continued to gain power in the British Association. Huxley's lectures were drawing huge crowds. Darwin had relapsed, but found a new doctor who put him on a crash diet
. It seemed to work, but the photographic calling cards popular at the time recorded his deteriorating appearance.
His beard grew bushy and he had to reintroduce himself to friends when he emerged into society at a Royal Society reception on 28 April 1866. Emma recalled that "He was obliged to name himself to almost all of them, as his beard alters him so." This image was made famous by Julia Margaret Cameron
's iconic portraits taken during the Darwin family's 1868 holiday in her Isle of Wight
cottage. Spencer, in his Principles of Biology, had coined the phrase "survival of the fittest", and though Darwin had struggled with the "detestable style" of the turgid tome, he now agreed with Wallace that it avoided the troublesome anthropomorphism of "selecting", though it "lost the analogy between nature's selection and the fanciers'."
the Guardian reported that Darwin's theory "was everywhere in the ascendant... it was impossible to pass from Section to Section without seeing how deeply these views have leavened the scientific minds of the day."' The President, W.R.Grove, said it should be seen "in the history of our own race... the product of slow adaptions, resulting from continuous struggles. Happily in this country, practical experience has taught us to improve rather than remodel; we follow the law of nature and avoid cataclysms." Darwinism was now justifying British society rather than destroying it.
Hooker's speech ended by satirising their opponents of evolution at the 1860 meeting as an uncivilised tribe who saw "every new moon as a new creation of their gods" and ate "the missionaries of the most enlightened nation" for explaining the truth. "The priests first attacked the new doctrine and with fury... the medicine men, however, sided with the missionaries – many from spite to the priests, but a few, i could see, from conviction." Now after six years, the elders were baptised in the new faith and applauded their president for leading them out of the wilderness. Darwin was told of the stunned silence at first, followed by roars of laughter.
The religious press was "surprised and grieved" at this, but now the radical audience splintered into different directions. Following popular interest in Modern Spiritualism, winning over Robert Chambers and Wallace, they printed a pamphlet The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural.
, who over the years had built support for Darwin in Germany
, now getting huge classes at Jena
for his lectures on Darwinismus. He had gone further, extending selection and struggle to society where it would "drive the peoples onward... to higher cultural stages." He had set out to rearrange all biological knowledge along Darwinian lines in his Generelle Morphologie. He was taken "by storm" when they met and, overawed, began speaking quickly in broken English, then found he could not understand Darwin's reply. They stared at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter and managed to communicate more slowly.
When the two volumes of Morphologie arrived later Darwin struggled for weeks with the number of new words like "phylogeny" and "ecology" as well as with the German, before giving up. His only hope was a translation, but the anti-clerical comments would prevent this. He gathered glimpses of Haeckel's ambition to achieve a universal Theory of Development embracing all human knowledge, if not his ideas of German Volk and support for Bismarck
's unification of Germany.
Spencer roped Darwin into giving a donation and adding his name, along with Huxley, Wallace and Lyell, to the "Jamaica
Committee" seeking to bring to justice Governor Eyre whose troops had brutally crushed a peasant revolt, with over 400 blacks being executed. Some of his other friends supported the opposing "Eyre Defence and Aid Committee", outraging Darwin's feelings against slavery and oppression. When Darwin's son William, now a banker in Southampton
, had his name published "by accident" as having attended a banquet in Eyre's honour, Darwin wrote to the Lord Chancellor
to rectify the error. Then the family got together at the house of Erasmus Alvey Darwin
, where William made a disparaging remark about the "Jamaica Committee". A furious Charles shouted that if he felt that way, he "had better go back to Southampton". The next morning Charles entered his son's bedroom and told him that he hadn't slept a wink, his anger had been cruel and he was sorry.
and human expression.
Murray had to make two volumes of it, and being advised that it was hard going planned only 750 copies, though he later doubled that. Translators were eager to get to work: Carus into German, and Vladimir Kovalevsky
into Russian - he was sent Murray's proofs, and successfully beat his publication date so that the earliest edition of Variation was in Russian.
During the Spring Darwin tried to find explanations in Sexual Selection for variations in that "eminently domesticated animal", mankind, and for the plumage of birds. As well as drawing on information, he experimented with dying pigeons red and trimming the feathers of game-cocks to see if this affected their desirability as a mate. The Duke of Argyll had thrown down a challenge with his book The Reign of Law, which collected criticisms of the Origin and put forward theories of divine design and providential law in a way that struck Darwin as "very well written, very interesting, honest, & clever & very arrogant". It made a particular point of the iridescent colours of hummingbird
s, claiming that this was beauty for God's sake without any earthly reason, not explicable by struggle. Wallace gave Reign of Law a withering review, pointing to the existence of stink bugs as well as beauty, and then became entangled in an exchange of detailed arguments with the Duke. To Darwin's despair, Wallace refused to accept a rôle for Sexual Selection.
Further damage to the Origin came from professor Sir William Thomson
(later Lord Kelvin) used calculations of heat loss to estimate a much younger age for the earth than Darwin had been assuming. Thomson's partner in a submarine cable business, the engineer Fleeming Jenkin
, then argued convincingly that any single variation would be blended back into the population, so that to form a new species numerous variations would have to be created simultaneously, reintroducing the need for divine intervention.
By June Lyell was struggling to revise his Principles of Geology, though Darwin still hoped that he would at last "speak out plainly about species". Lyell found Darwin's proofs of Variation "most persuasive", but Darwin was struggling to sort out the changes and corrections he wanted. Encouragement came from the Reverend professor Charles Kingsley
who sent the previously unthinkable news that "the best and strongest men" at the University of Cambridge
were "coming over [to] what the world calls Darwinism... The younger M.A.'s are not only willing, but greedy, to hear what you have to say, and... the elder... are facing the whole question in quite a different tone from that they did three years ago... I have been surprised at the change since last winter."
The proofs were finished on 15 November, and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication went on sale on 30 January 1868, thirteen years after Darwin had begun his experiments on breeding and stewing the bones of pigeons. He was feeling deflated, and concerned about how these large volumes would be received, writing "if I try to read a few pages I feel fairly nauseated... The devil take the whole book". The public were undeterred, and the 1,500 copies went within a week with a second printing at eleven days. The Pall Mall Gazette praised its "noble calmness... undisturbed by the heats of polemical agitation" which made the far from calm Darwin laugh, and left him "cock-a-hoop".
See Darwin from Descent of Man to Emotions
for his life and work in the following period.
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
from the publication of Orchids to the publication of Variation during the years between 1860 and 1868 continued with Darwin carrying out his research and experimentation on evolution as he worked sporadically on the first section of his "big book", carrying out tedious work to provide evidence of the extent of natural variation enabling the use of artificial selection
Artificial selection
Artificial selection describes intentional breeding for certain traits, or combination of traits. The term was utilized by Charles Darwin in contrast to natural selection, in which the differential reproduction of organisms with certain traits is attributed to improved survival or reproductive...
. He was repeatedly held up by his illness
Charles Darwin's illness
For much of his adult life, Charles Darwin's health was repeatedly compromised by an uncommon combination of symptoms, leaving him severely debilitated for long periods of time...
, and continued to find relaxation and interest in the study of plants. His studies of insect pollination led to publication of his book Fertilisation of Orchids
Fertilisation of Orchids
Fertilisation of Orchids is a book by Charles Darwin published on 15 May 1862 under the full explanatory title On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing...
as his first detailed demonstration of the power of natural selection, explaining the complex ecological
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...
relationships and making testable predictions. As his health declined, he lay on his sickbed in a room filled with inventive experiments to trace the movements of climbing plants
Vine
A vine in the narrowest sense is the grapevine , but more generally it can refer to any plant with a growth habit of trailing or scandent, that is to say climbing, stems or runners...
.
Darwinism
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
became a movement covering a wide range of evolutionary ideas. In 1863 Lyell's
Charles Lyell
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation...
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man popularised prehistory, though his caution on evolution disappointed Darwin. Weeks later Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature is an 1863 book by Thomas Henry Huxley, in which he gives evidence for the evolution of man and apes from a common ancestor. It was the first book devoted to the topic of human evolution, and discussed much of the anatomical and other evidence...
showed that anatomically, humans are apes, then The Naturalist on the River Amazons
The Naturalist on the River Amazons
The Naturalist on the River Amazons, subtitled A Record of the Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature under the Equator, during Eleven Years of Travel, is an 1863 book by the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates about his expedition to the...
by Henry Walter Bates
Henry Walter Bates
Henry Walter Bates FRS FLS FGS was an English naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. He was most famous for his expedition to the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection in a shipwreck...
provided empirical evidence of natural selection. Lobbying brought Darwin Britain's highest scientific honour, the Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
’s Copley Medal
Copley Medal
The Copley Medal is an award given by the Royal Society of London for "outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science, and alternates between the physical sciences and the biological sciences"...
, awarded on 3 November 1864. That day, Huxley held the first meeting of what became the influential X Club
X Club
The X Club was a dining club of nine men who supported the theories of natural selection and academic liberalism in late 19th-century England. Thomas Henry Huxley was the initiator: he called the first meeting for November 3, 1864...
devoted to "science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas".
Admiring visitors included Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel
The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1920, in the book "The First World War 1914-1918" by Charles à Court Repington, that the term "First World War" was used as the official name for the conflict.-Research:...
, a zealous follower of Darwinismus in a translation favouring progressive evolution
Orthogenesis
Orthogenesis, orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution or autogenesis, is the hypothesis that life has an innate tendency to evolve in a unilinear fashion due to some internal or external "driving force". The hypothesis is based on essentialism and cosmic teleology and proposes an intrinsic...
over natural selection. Wallace remained supportive, though he increasingly turned to Spiritualism.
The first part of Darwin's planned "big book", The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is a book written by Charles Darwin that was first published in January 1868.A large proportion of the book contains detailed information on the domestication of animals and plants but it also contains in Chapter XXVII a description of...
, grew to two huge volumes, forcing him to leave out human evolution
Human evolution
Human evolution refers to the evolutionary history of the genus Homo, including the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and as a unique category of hominids and mammals...
and sexual selection
Sexual selection
Sexual selection, a concept introduced by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, is a significant element of his theory of natural selection...
. It sold briskly in 1868 despite its size, and was translated into many languages. The work of Darwin from Descent of Man to Emotions
Darwin from Descent of Man to Emotions
The life and work of Darwin from Descent of Man to Emotions during the period from 1868 to 1872 continued with aspects of Charles Darwin's intended "Big Book" on evolution through natural selection...
followed after this publication.
Background
Darwin's ideas developed rapidly from the return in 1836 of the Voyage of the BeagleThe Voyage of the Beagle
The Voyage of the Beagle is a title commonly given to the book written by Charles Darwin and published in 1839 as his Journal and Remarks, bringing him considerable fame and respect...
. By December 1838 he had developed the principles of his theory, but was conscious of the need to answer all likely objections before publishing. While he continued with research, he had an immense amount of work in hand analysing and publishing findings from the Beagle expedition, and was repeatedly delayed by illness.
Natural history at that time was dominated by clerical naturalists, whose income came from the Established Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
, and who saw their science as revealing God's plan. Darwin found two close allies: the young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM, GCSI, CB, MD, FRS was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend...
and the ambitious naturalist Thomas Huxley
Thomas Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution....
who lacked the family wealth or contacts to find a career and joined a progressive group looking to make science a profession, freed from the clerics. Darwin's correspondent Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace, OM, FRS was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist...
arrived independently at his own version of the theory, which brought an early announcement of the theory and the publication of On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection in 1859.
This brought a storm of argument. Many naturalists attacked what they saw as an assault on established beliefs about the natural world, and perhaps the ideological foundations of the British social order, while liberal theologians and a new generation of scientists welcomed the theory. Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation...
and Hooker, as well as Asa Gray
Asa Gray
-References:*Asa Gray. Dictionary of American Biography. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928–1936.*Asa Gray. Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.*Asa Gray. Plant Sciences. 4 vols. Macmillan Reference USA, 2001....
in America, gave support despite difficulty in coming to terms with natural selection and man's descent from animals. Huxley's interest in aggressively attacking the scientific establishment earned him the moniker "Darwin's bulldog" in a ferocious dispute with the leading anatomist Richard Owen
Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen, FRS KCB was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist.Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
as to whether the anatomy of brain structure was consistent with humans and apes having shared ancestry. The campaign was devastatingly successful for the Darwinian cause and brought new recruits.
Ape-men
Lyell was troubled both by Huxley's belligerence and by the question of ape ancestry, but got little sympathy from Darwin who teased him that "Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was a hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind... mankind will progress to such a pitch [that 19th century gentlemen will be looked back on] as mere barbarians". Huxley was busy attacking the old theory of divine providence as "anthropomorphism" and promoting the new Darwinian orthodoxy of "the passionless impersonality of the unknown and unknowable". He told Lyell that the range of brain sizes between people was greater than the difference between small-brained people and gorillas, and "Under these circumstances it would certainly be well to let go the head (as a way of distinguishing species) though I am afraid it does not mend matters much to lay hold of the foot."Lyell began work on a book examining human origins. He toured archaeological sites in Britain and France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, examining such evidence as the pre-glacial stone scrapers Falconer had found in a cave at Brixham
Brixham
Brixham is a small fishing town and civil parish in the county of Devon, in the south-west of England. Brixham is at the southern end of Torbay, across the bay from Torquay, and is a fishing port. Fishing and tourism are its major industries. At the time of the 2001 census it had a population of...
in Devon
Devon
Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...
in 1858 and flint tools in a Bedford, Bedfordshire, gravel pit. After touring the Abbeville
Abbeville
Abbeville is a commune in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France.-Location:Abbeville is located on the Somme River, from its modern mouth in the English Channel, and northwest of Amiens...
flint site in France in 1859, Lyell announced that he had overcome thirty years of denial of such antiquity and accepted that ancient man pre-dated the ice age. A delighted Darwin responded "It is great. What a fine long pedigree you have given the human race." Lyell questioned Huxley about the Neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
fossil found near Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
and described by Hermann Schaaffhausen
Hermann Schaaffhausen
Hermann Schaaffhausen studied medicine in University of Berlin and received his doctor degree in 1839, and became a Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn. Schaaffhausen is credited with identifying the remains of Neanderthal 1...
in 1858 which Huxley examined at the College of Surgeons
Royal College of Surgeons of England
The Royal College of Surgeons of England is an independent professional body and registered charity committed to promoting and advancing the highest standards of surgical care for patients, regulating surgery, including dentistry, in England and Wales...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Lyell still, however, remained deeply critical of Darwin's idea of natural selection.
In the spring of 1861 John Stevens Henslow
John Stevens Henslow
John Stevens Henslow was an English clergyman, botanist and geologist. He is best remembered as friend and mentor to his pupil Charles Darwin.- Early life :...
, the botany professor whose natural history course Charles had joined thirty years earlier who was also Hooker's father-in-law, lay dying of heart disease. Darwin's own health was precarious, and he had recently suffered 24 hours of vomiting after the excitement of a few minutes of speaking at the Linnean Society
Linnean Society of London
The Linnean Society of London is the world's premier society for the study and dissemination of taxonomy and natural history. It publishes a zoological journal, as well as botanical and biological journals...
. He agonised about visiting the man who had made the Beagle trip possible and had given him much support since, but on 23 April sent his apologies and when Henslow died on 18 May was racked with guilt for not having seen him: "I never felt my weakness [a] greater evil".
Darwin was well into his work on domestication, obtaining skeletons of fowl and animals, borrowing specimens or stewing pigeons he had bred and rabbits he had requested, "I want it dead for the skeleton, not knocked on the head". This would eventually lead to his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.
He continued to suffer from illness and worries about the health of his children, and felt "incessant anxiety" about his daughter Henrietta
Etty Darwin
Henrietta Emma "Etty" Darwin, was a daughter of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood.Etty was born in Down House, Downe in 1843. She was Darwin's third daughter and the eldest daughter to reach adulthood after the eldest Annie died aged 10, and second daughter Mary died before becoming a...
. She had suffered a typhoid infection the previous month, and was an invalid at only 18, close to death and needing three attendants round the clock. Emma Darwin
Emma Darwin
Emma Darwin was the wife and first cousin of Charles Darwin, the English naturalist, scientist and author of On the Origin of Species...
was used to nursing, but was at her wit's end: "I have succeeded pretty well in teaching myself not to give way to despondency, [but can] only live from day to day." She wrote another touching letter to Charles, saying the "only relief [was to take] affliction as from God's hand [and] try to believe that all suffering & illness is meant to help us to exalt our minds & look forward with hope to a future state... When I see your patience, deep compassion for others, self command & above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to Heaven for the sake of your daily happiness... It is feeling & not reasoning that drives one to prayer." Charles wrote "God Bless you" at the bottom of the note.
Lyell attended Huxley's continuing working-men's lectures, and was "astonished at the attentiveness and magnitude of the audience...[who would] devour any amount of your anthropoid ape questions". Human origins had been taboo to the scientific élite, but had long been featured in the radical
Radicals (UK)
The Radicals were a parliamentary political grouping in the United Kingdom in the early to mid 19th century, who drew on earlier ideas of radicalism and helped to transform the Whigs into the Liberal Party.-Background:...
press and the secularist Reasoner was currently running a series about evolution to combat "Theological Theories of the Origin of Man" with information about human fossils and Darwin's book. Huxley was tailoring his lectures to bring Darwinism to this wider constituency, saying that "Brought face to face [with chimpanzees or apes] these blurred copies of himself, the least thoughtful of men is conscious of a certain shock... It is as if Nature herself has foreseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his intellect by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust." Man might have come from the brutes, but "he is assuredly not of them... [man is not] degraded from his high estate [by descent from a] bestial savage,... [but] once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has sprung, the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will discern in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future." This was Darwinism supporting the creed of working class self improvement.
Orchids
For July and August 1861 they took their daughter HenriettaEtty Darwin
Henrietta Emma "Etty" Darwin, was a daughter of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood.Etty was born in Down House, Downe in 1843. She was Darwin's third daughter and the eldest daughter to reach adulthood after the eldest Annie died aged 10, and second daughter Mary died before becoming a...
to the seaside village of Torquay
Torquay
Torquay is a town in the unitary authority area of Torbay and ceremonial county of Devon, England. It lies south of Exeter along the A380 on the north of Torbay, north-east of Plymouth and adjoins the neighbouring town of Paignton on the west of the bay. Torquay’s population of 63,998 during the...
. Darwin was diverted by spending hours considering the variety of wild orchids to be found along the shore, continuing an interest in insect pollination dating back to the late 1830s when on the recommendation of Robert Brown
Robert Brown (botanist)
Robert Brown was a Scottish botanist and palaeobotanist who made important contributions to botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope...
he had read Christian Konrad Sprengel
Christian Konrad Sprengel
Christian Konrad Sprengel was a German theologist, teacher and, most importantly, a naturalist. He is most famously known for his research into plant sexuality....
on the subject. He wrote a brief paper on the topic. On returning home he looked for these plants near Downe, and found a beautiful spot teeming with orchids which his family named "Orchid Bank". His requests to the wealthy enthusiasts who had taken up growing rare orchids brought large numbers of specimens. These would be a test of his theory: Huxley had once asked "Who has ever dreamed of finding an utilitarian purpose in the forms and colours of flowers?"
He explored the intricacies of how the petals guided specific bees or moths
Pollination syndrome
Pollination syndromes are suites of flower traits that have evolved in response to natural selection imposed by different pollen vectors, which can be abiotic or biotic, such as birds, bees, flies, and so forth. These traits include flower shape, size, colour, odour, reward type and amount, nectar...
, and found that what had been thought to be three different genera of flowers growing on the same plant (a mysteriously monstrous specimen that puzzled the Linnean Society) were actually the male, female and hermaphrodite forms of the orchid Catasetum
Catasetum
Catasetum, abbreviated as Ctsm in horticultural trade, is a genus of the Orchid family , subfamily Epidendroideae, tribe Cymbidieae, subtribe Catasetinae, with 166 species....
. This unusual plant, Darwin discovered, fired arrows with a sticky pollen head as the insects brushed past – to which Hooker responded "Do you really think I can believe all that!" In this, Darwin followed his grandfather Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin was an English physician who turned down George III's invitation to be a physician to the King. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave trade abolitionist,inventor and poet...
in exploring the sex life of plants, but instead of writing an erotic poem he analysed how parts of the plants were "homologous", having evolved from an original structure to meet different functions in different species. He persuaded John Murray
John Murray (publisher)
John Murray is an English publisher, renowned for the authors it has published in its history, including Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Byron, Charles Lyell, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Melville, and Charles Darwin...
that this would be a fashionable book to publish, but his illness returned, causing delay.
Huxley's argument, that natural selection was unproven until evolving varieties could be shown to form species which could not interbreed, turned Darwin's attention to experimenting, pollinating plants and sifting seeds. By collating his results in January 1862 he showed that primroses
Primula vulgaris
Primula vulgaris is a species of Primula native to western and southern Europe , northwest Africa , and southwest Asia...
and cowslips
Primula veris
Primula veris is a flowering plant in the genus Primula. The species is found throughout most of temperate Europe and Asia, and although absent from more northerly areas including much of northwest Scotland, it reappears in northernmost Sutherland and Orkney.-Names:The common name cowslip derives...
, thought to be varieties, produced sterile hybrids. He convinced Huxley with letters sent to Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
where Huxley was "preaching Darwinism pure & simple as applied to man.... [and] I made 'em listen.. I told them in so many words that I entertained no doubt of the origin of man from the same stock as the apes. Everyone prophesied I should be stoned and cast out of the city gate, but I met with unmitigated applause!"' Darwin was impressed that he had "attacked Bigotry in its strong-hold". Huxley published his lectures as a slim book on Man's Place in Nature.
Darwin persevered with his orchids, and the book, On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects and the good effects of intercrossing
Fertilisation of Orchids
Fertilisation of Orchids is a book by Charles Darwin published on 15 May 1862 under the full explanatory title On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing...
, was published on 15 May 1862, just in time to give Wallace a copy on his return from the far East. While demonstrating that orchids evolve mechanisms that allow for cross-fertilisation, and offering strong evidence for Darwin's larger arguments about variation, the volume also countered natural theology in what Darwin himself admitted was a "flank movement against the enemy." By showing that the "wonderful contrivances" of the orchid have discoverable evolutionary histories, he countered claims by natural theologians that the organisms were examples of the perfect work of the Creator. His interest in orchids continued and he had a hot-house built at Down House, as well as experimenting with other seedlings and "slaving on bones of ducks and pigeon" and variations in other farmyard animals. His illness led to his skin becoming inflamed and shedding, taking "the epidermis a dozen times clean off".
Because of the problems with eczema, Emma told him to grow a beard, and in December his friend Mary Butler commented on the idea of this "long beard".
In January 1863 he got word from Hugh Falconer
Hugh Falconer
Hugh Falconer MD FRS was a Scottish geologist, botanist, palaeontologist and paleoanthropologist. He studied the flora, fauna and geology of India, Assam and Burma, and was the first to suggest the modern evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium...
of a "mis-begotten-bird-creature" fossil, the archaeopteryx
Archaeopteryx
Archaeopteryx , sometimes referred to by its German name Urvogel , is a genus of theropod dinosaur that is closely related to birds. The name derives from the Ancient Greek meaning "ancient", and , meaning "feather" or "wing"...
, which Owen bought for the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
. It fulfilled Darwin's prediction that a proto-bird with unfused wing fingers would be found. Though Owen described it unequivocally as a bird, the subsequent finding that it had teeth left no doubt of its relevance to the Origin of Species. This sudden finding showed just how patchy the known fossil record was.
Huxley continued with his lectures to the working men, and a member of the audience took notes and published six fourpenny pamphlets which were brought together into a book which Darwin thought "capitally written... I may as well shut up shop altogether." On 4 February Lyell published his Antiquity of Man. To Darwin's disappointment Lyell had still not brought himself to clearly endorse Darwin's theory on species or on man, though he had "spoken out... even beyond my state of feeling as to man's unbroken descent from the brutes". Darwin's disappointment brought on ten days of vomiting, faintness and stomach distress. He was much better pleased to then receive Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, printed with a frontispiece showing a line of skeletons, with a gibbon at the end, stooping apes in the middle and upright man at the head, exclaiming "Hurrah, the Monkey Book has come". It included a jibe at Owen's ambiguous "ordained continuous becoming", and though some were horrified at this line of "gibbering, grovelling apes" the 1,000 copies sold quickly, requiring a reprint within weeks.
Tendrils and loosestrife
The sickness grew worse, and Darwin could only lie on his couch watching the growing tendrils of plants. This interest started with wild cucumber seeds sent by Asa GrayAsa Gray
-References:*Asa Gray. Dictionary of American Biography. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928–1936.*Asa Gray. Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.*Asa Gray. Plant Sciences. 4 vols. Macmillan Reference USA, 2001....
, and he found it "just the sort of niggling work which suits me". After some delays Emma managed to get him to Dr. Gully's
James Manby Gully
Dr James Manby Gully , was a Victorian medical doctor, well known for practising hydrotherapy, or the "water cure". Along with his partner James Wilson, he founded a very successful "hydropathy" clinic in Malvern, Worcestershire, which had many notable Victorians, including such figures as Charles...
spa at Malvern
Malvern, Worcestershire
Malvern is a town and civil parish in Worcestershire, England, governed by Malvern Town Council. As of the 2001 census it has a population of 28,749, and includes the historical settlement and commercial centre of Great Malvern on the steep eastern flank of the Malvern Hills, and the former...
in September 1863, but the prescribed six months rest meant only six months sickness. He was too ill to write, so Emma took dictation.
He began to recover in April 1864, sitting in his greenhouse at home and becoming fascinated by the purple loosestrife (Lythrum) he had been breeding for years. This has three kinds of flowers and Darwin explored the eighteen possible sexual combinations, counting the resulting seeds and testing their fertility. Only six "marriages" proved "legitimate", showing that this was another mechanism for cross-pollination. He tabulated the results of his experiments on seeds and wrote them up for the Linnean Society of London
Linnean Society of London
The Linnean Society of London is the world's premier society for the study and dissemination of taxonomy and natural history. It publishes a zoological journal, as well as botanical and biological journals...
. Around this time a Mrs. Becker wrote requesting something edifying for her ladies' literary society, so he sent her On the Sexual Relations of the Three Forms of Lythrum salicaria.
His bedroom, study and greenhouses became filled with climbers, creepers and coiling tendrils, and in May he began a short paper on these plants. He marked their tips to time their movements, and brought Hops indoors, using weights to try to slow their ascent as he sat ill in bed. By 13 September his paper had grown to a 118 page monograph, published by the Linnean Society.
Changing times
Meanwhile, as Darwin worked from his sickbed his friends continued with debates. Asa GrayAsa Gray
-References:*Asa Gray. Dictionary of American Biography. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928–1936.*Asa Gray. Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.*Asa Gray. Plant Sciences. 4 vols. Macmillan Reference USA, 2001....
sent news of the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, but to Darwin "the destruction of slavery would be well worth a dozen year's war".
Wallace, stirred by the Origin and by Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
's Social Statics, had presented his first paper to the racist pro-slavery Anthropological Society of London
Anthropological Society of London
The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863 by Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt. It broke away from the existing Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, and defined itself in opposition to the older society...
. He, along with Darwin and the others, supported the abolitionist Ethnological Society of London
Ethnological Society of London
The Ethnological Society of London was founded in 1843 by a breakaway faction of the Aborigines' Protection Society . It quickly became one of England's leading scientific societies, and a meeting-place not only for students of ethnology but also for archaeologists interested in prehistoric...
, but Wallace tried to reach a truce by proposing that races had long been separate, but had emerged from a single stock after the ape stage. His view was that competition was between groups, leading "to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which the Europeans come into contact", Darwin's experience supported this and he wrote on his copy "natural selection is now acting on the inferior races when put into competition", giving the example of Māoris in New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
"dying out like their own native rat".
Where they differed was that Wallace saw mankind evolving mentally but not physically, and this would bring a utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
where everyone would "work out his own happiness" free from policing "since the well balanced moral faculties will never permit any one to transgress on the equal freedom of others... every man will know how to govern himself" and so government would be "replaced by voluntary associations for all beneficial public purposes". Darwin responded that the mental / physical distinction was "grand and most eloquently done" but physical selection continued, through "constant battles" of savages, and unimpeded competition was vital to English society. Wallace replied that wars tended to kill the most fit at the battlefront, and he demurred from "sexual selection
Sexual selection
Sexual selection, a concept introduced by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, is a significant element of his theory of natural selection...
". He disputed Darwin's idea that the aristocracy was handsomer than the middle classes by saying that mere manner and refinement were being confused with beauty.
Wallace also thought that the caves of Borneo
Borneo
Borneo is the third largest island in the world and is located north of Java Island, Indonesia, at the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia....
might reveal "our progenitors" and Lyell tried to organise an expedition hoping to find "extinct ourangs, if not the missing link itself"', but in the absence of funding the consul agreed to have a look.
The scandal of the liberal Anglican theologians' acceptance of evolution and rejection of miracles in Essays and Reviews
Essays and Reviews
Essays and Reviews, published in March 1860, is a broad-church volume of seven essays on Christianity. The topics covered the biblical research of the German critics, the evidence for Christianity, religious thought in England, and the cosmology of Genesis....
continued. The two essayists convicted of heresy had the judgement overturned on appeal. Samuel Wilberforce
Samuel Wilberforce
Samuel Wilberforce was an English bishop in the Church of England, third son of William Wilberforce. Known as "Soapy Sam", Wilberforce was one of the greatest public speakers of his time and place...
, the High Church and evangelicals organised petitions and a mass backlash against evolution. At the Anglican convocation they tried to make a declaration reaffirming their faith in the harmony of God's word and his works a "Fortieth Article" of the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
, and at the British Association moved to overthrow Huxley's "dangerous clique".
The X Club
Darwin's friends energetically lobbied for his recognition, and after failed attempts in 1862 and 1863 to have him awarded the Royal SocietyRoyal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
's highest honour, the Copley Medal
Copley Medal
The Copley Medal is an award given by the Royal Society of London for "outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science, and alternates between the physical sciences and the biological sciences"...
, their careful preparations and lobbying succeeded in voting their nomination through despite furious politicking in opposition. Darwin was awarded the medal at the Council meeting on the evening of 3 November 1864.
Huxley had made arrangements for a dining club of close friends as select supporters of the evolutionary "new reformation" in naturalism, united by a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas", and it held its first meeting that same day. Those present were all Fellows of the Royal Society: Huxley, Hooker
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM, GCSI, CB, MD, FRS was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend...
, John Tyndall
John Tyndall
John Tyndall FRS was a prominent Irish 19th century physicist. His initial scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he studied thermal radiation, and produced a number of discoveries about processes in the atmosphere...
, George Busk
George Busk
George Busk RN FRS was a British Naval surgeon, zoologist and palaeontologist.-Biography:Busk was born in St Petersburg, the son of the merchant Robert Busk and grandson of Sir Wadsworth Busk...
, Edward Frankland
Edward Frankland
Sir Edward Frankland, KCB, FRS was a chemist, one of the foremost of his day. He was an expert in water quality and analysis, and originated the concept of combining power, or valence, in chemistry. He was also one of the originators of organometallic chemistry.-Biography:Edward Frankland was born...
, Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
, John Lubbock
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury PC , FRS , known as Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet from 1865 until 1900, was a polymath and Liberal Member of Parliament....
, and Thomas Archer Hirst
Thomas Archer Hirst
Thomas Archer Hirst FRS was a 19th century mathematician, specialising in geometry. He was awarded the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1883.-Life:...
. At the December meeting they were joined by William Spottiswoode
William Spottiswoode
William Spottiswoode FRS was an English mathematician and physicist. He was President of the Royal Society from 1878 to 1883.-Early life:...
, and while the club had no agreed name at first, it subsequently became known as the "X Club
X Club
The X Club was a dining club of nine men who supported the theories of natural selection and academic liberalism in late 19th-century England. Thomas Henry Huxley was the initiator: he called the first meeting for November 3, 1864...
".
The medal was formally presented at a full meeting on 30 November, which Darwin was unable to attend due to illness. The President, Edward Sabine
Edward Sabine
General Sir Edward Sabine KCB FRS was an Irish astronomer, geophysicist, ornithologist and explorer.Two branches of Sabine's work in particular deserve very high credit: Determination of the length of the seconds pendulum, a simple pendulum whose time period on the surface of the Earth is two...
, used his address to give the Origin faint praise and claim that "Speaking generally and collectively, we have expressly omitted it from the grounds of our award." After the address Huxley called for the Council minutes to prove this false. The minutes made no reference to such an exclusion, or to the Origin, to which Sabine argued that no allusion equalled express exclusion. The row continued afterwards, and the offending passages were altered in the official record of the address. Lyell used his after-dinner speech at the meeting to give guarded support to Darwin's theory in which he gave a "confession of faith as to the Origin", and said that he "had been forced to give up my old faith without thoroughly seeing my way to a new one." Darwin subsequently said that his friend's congratulations "are the real medal to me, and not the round bit of gold".
Early in 1865 Darwin's sickness worsened and he was overcome for almost eight months, lying in bed for weeks at a time, with Emma reading aloud to him. In May he heard of the suicide of Robert FitzRoy
Robert FitzRoy
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy RN achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, and as a pioneering meteorologist who made accurate weather forecasting a reality...
, who had been captain of HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle was a Cherokee-class 10-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy. She was launched on 11 May 1820 from the Woolwich Dockyard on the River Thames, at a cost of £7,803. In July of that year she took part in a fleet review celebrating the coronation of King George IV of the United Kingdom in which...
, and commented that "I never knew in my life so mixed a character. Always much to love & I once loved him sincerely; but so bad a temper & so given to take offence, that I gradually quite lost my love & wished only to keep out of contact with him. Twice he quarrelled bitterly with me, without any just provocation on my part. But certainly there was much noble & exalted in his character."
The Westminster magazine publisher John Chapman
John Chapman (publisher)
John Chapman was a publisher who had medical training and was based at 142 Strand, London.His entry in the Concise Dictionary of National Biography, reads: "Chapman, John physician, author, publisher; apprencticed at Worksop and was in business in Adelaide; studied medicine in Paris and at St...
was now a qualified specialist in sickness and psychological medicine, and Darwin invited Dr. Chapman to Downe and gave him a long list of the symptoms he had suffered from for 25 years. A spinal freezing treatment seemed to help, and Darwin pressed on with his Variation Under Domestication.
Pangenesis
He now tackled the chapter of Variation setting out his hypothesis about heredity, that "pangenesis" brought "gemmules" from every cell of the body to the reproductive organs, where they formed the "true ovule or bud" that could pass on traits to the next generation. Huxley was dubious, cautiously writing "Somebody rummaging among your papers half a century hence will find Pangenesis and say, 'See this wonderful anticipation of our modern theories, and that stupid ass Huxley prevented his publishing them."Times were changing. Lyell became embroiled in a row for having incorporated into Antiquity of Man whole paragraphs of a paper by Lubbock. The "X Club" continued to gain power in the British Association. Huxley's lectures were drawing huge crowds. Darwin had relapsed, but found a new doctor who put him on a crash diet
Crash diet
A crash diet is a diet which is extreme in its nutritional deprivations, typically severely restricting calorie intake. It is meant to achieve rapid weight loss and may differ from outright starvation only slightly. It is not meant to last for long periods of time, at most a few weeks. ...
. It seemed to work, but the photographic calling cards popular at the time recorded his deteriorating appearance.
His beard grew bushy and he had to reintroduce himself to friends when he emerged into society at a Royal Society reception on 28 April 1866. Emma recalled that "He was obliged to name himself to almost all of them, as his beard alters him so." This image was made famous by Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes....
's iconic portraits taken during the Darwin family's 1868 holiday in her Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
The Isle of Wight is a county and the largest island of England, located in the English Channel, on average about 2–4 miles off the south coast of the county of Hampshire, separated from the mainland by a strait called the Solent...
cottage. Spencer, in his Principles of Biology, had coined the phrase "survival of the fittest", and though Darwin had struggled with the "detestable style" of the turgid tome, he now agreed with Wallace that it avoided the troublesome anthropomorphism of "selecting", though it "lost the analogy between nature's selection and the fanciers'."
British Association
In 1866 at the British Association meeting at NottinghamNottingham
Nottingham is a city and unitary authority in the East Midlands of England. It is located in the ceremonial county of Nottinghamshire and represents one of eight members of the English Core Cities Group...
the Guardian reported that Darwin's theory "was everywhere in the ascendant... it was impossible to pass from Section to Section without seeing how deeply these views have leavened the scientific minds of the day."' The President, W.R.Grove, said it should be seen "in the history of our own race... the product of slow adaptions, resulting from continuous struggles. Happily in this country, practical experience has taught us to improve rather than remodel; we follow the law of nature and avoid cataclysms." Darwinism was now justifying British society rather than destroying it.
Hooker's speech ended by satirising their opponents of evolution at the 1860 meeting as an uncivilised tribe who saw "every new moon as a new creation of their gods" and ate "the missionaries of the most enlightened nation" for explaining the truth. "The priests first attacked the new doctrine and with fury... the medicine men, however, sided with the missionaries – many from spite to the priests, but a few, i could see, from conviction." Now after six years, the elders were baptised in the new faith and applauded their president for leading them out of the wilderness. Darwin was told of the stunned silence at first, followed by roars of laughter.
The religious press was "surprised and grieved" at this, but now the radical audience splintered into different directions. Following popular interest in Modern Spiritualism, winning over Robert Chambers and Wallace, they printed a pamphlet The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural.
Haeckel
Darwin was visited in October 1866 by the zoologist Ernst HaeckelErnst Haeckel
The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1920, in the book "The First World War 1914-1918" by Charles à Court Repington, that the term "First World War" was used as the official name for the conflict.-Research:...
, who over the years had built support for Darwin in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, now getting huge classes at Jena
Jena
Jena is a university city in central Germany on the river Saale. It has a population of approx. 103,000 and is the second largest city in the federal state of Thuringia, after Erfurt.-History:Jena was first mentioned in an 1182 document...
for his lectures on Darwinismus. He had gone further, extending selection and struggle to society where it would "drive the peoples onward... to higher cultural stages." He had set out to rearrange all biological knowledge along Darwinian lines in his Generelle Morphologie. He was taken "by storm" when they met and, overawed, began speaking quickly in broken English, then found he could not understand Darwin's reply. They stared at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter and managed to communicate more slowly.
When the two volumes of Morphologie arrived later Darwin struggled for weeks with the number of new words like "phylogeny" and "ecology" as well as with the German, before giving up. His only hope was a translation, but the anti-clerical comments would prevent this. He gathered glimpses of Haeckel's ambition to achieve a universal Theory of Development embracing all human knowledge, if not his ideas of German Volk and support for Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck
Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg , simply known as Otto von Bismarck, was a Prussian-German statesman whose actions unified Germany, made it a major player in world affairs, and created a balance of power that kept Europe at peace after 1871.As Minister President of...
's unification of Germany.
Spencer roped Darwin into giving a donation and adding his name, along with Huxley, Wallace and Lyell, to the "Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
Committee" seeking to bring to justice Governor Eyre whose troops had brutally crushed a peasant revolt, with over 400 blacks being executed. Some of his other friends supported the opposing "Eyre Defence and Aid Committee", outraging Darwin's feelings against slavery and oppression. When Darwin's son William, now a banker in Southampton
Southampton
Southampton is the largest city in the county of Hampshire on the south coast of England, and is situated south-west of London and north-west of Portsmouth. Southampton is a major port and the closest city to the New Forest...
, had his name published "by accident" as having attended a banquet in Eyre's honour, Darwin wrote to the Lord Chancellor
Lord Chancellor
The Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, or Lord Chancellor, is a senior and important functionary in the government of the United Kingdom. He is the second highest ranking of the Great Officers of State, ranking only after the Lord High Steward. The Lord Chancellor is appointed by the Sovereign...
to rectify the error. Then the family got together at the house of Erasmus Alvey Darwin
Erasmus Alvey Darwin
Erasmus Alvey Darwin , nicknamed Eras or Ras, was the older brother of Charles Darwin, born five years earlier, and also brought up at the family home, The Mount House, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England...
, where William made a disparaging remark about the "Jamaica Committee". A furious Charles shouted that if he felt that way, he "had better go back to Southampton". The next morning Charles entered his son's bedroom and told him that he hadn't slept a wink, his anger had been cruel and he was sorry.
Variation under Domestication
Before Christmas 1866 Variation was sent to the printers, save for the last chapter. In this, Darwin wanted to overcome the persistent argument of divinely guided variation. He used the analogy of an architect using rocks which had broken off naturally and fallen to the foot of a cliff, asking "Can it be reasonably maintained that the Creator intentionally ordered... that certain fragments should assume certain shapes so that the builder might erect his edifice?" In the same way, breeders or natural selection picked those that happened to be useful from variations arising by "general laws", to improve plants and animals, "man included". Darwin was now openly including man in his theory, and wanted to add a chapter on this but the book was already too "horridly, disgustingly big" and he shortly decided to write a separate "short essay" on ape ancestry, sexual selectionSexual selection
Sexual selection, a concept introduced by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, is a significant element of his theory of natural selection...
and human expression.
Murray had to make two volumes of it, and being advised that it was hard going planned only 750 copies, though he later doubled that. Translators were eager to get to work: Carus into German, and Vladimir Kovalevsky
Vladimir Kovalevsky
This article is about the Russian statesman. For other people named Vladimir Kovalevsky, see Kovalevsky.Vladimir Ivanovich Kovalevsky was a Russian statesman, scientist and entrepreneur. He was the author of numerous articles and works on agricultural themes...
into Russian - he was sent Murray's proofs, and successfully beat his publication date so that the earliest edition of Variation was in Russian.
During the Spring Darwin tried to find explanations in Sexual Selection for variations in that "eminently domesticated animal", mankind, and for the plumage of birds. As well as drawing on information, he experimented with dying pigeons red and trimming the feathers of game-cocks to see if this affected their desirability as a mate. The Duke of Argyll had thrown down a challenge with his book The Reign of Law, which collected criticisms of the Origin and put forward theories of divine design and providential law in a way that struck Darwin as "very well written, very interesting, honest, & clever & very arrogant". It made a particular point of the iridescent colours of hummingbird
Hummingbird
Hummingbirds are birds that comprise the family Trochilidae. They are among the smallest of birds, most species measuring in the 7.5–13 cm range. Indeed, the smallest extant bird species is a hummingbird, the 5-cm Bee Hummingbird. They can hover in mid-air by rapidly flapping their wings...
s, claiming that this was beauty for God's sake without any earthly reason, not explicable by struggle. Wallace gave Reign of Law a withering review, pointing to the existence of stink bugs as well as beauty, and then became entangled in an exchange of detailed arguments with the Duke. To Darwin's despair, Wallace refused to accept a rôle for Sexual Selection.
Further damage to the Origin came from professor Sir William Thomson
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin OM, GCVO, PC, PRS, PRSE, was a mathematical physicist and engineer. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging...
(later Lord Kelvin) used calculations of heat loss to estimate a much younger age for the earth than Darwin had been assuming. Thomson's partner in a submarine cable business, the engineer Fleeming Jenkin
Fleeming Jenkin
Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin was Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, remarkable for his versatility. Known to the world as the inventor of telpherage, he was an electrician and cable engineer, economist, lecturer, linguist, critic, actor, dramatist and artist...
, then argued convincingly that any single variation would be blended back into the population, so that to form a new species numerous variations would have to be created simultaneously, reintroducing the need for divine intervention.
By June Lyell was struggling to revise his Principles of Geology, though Darwin still hoped that he would at last "speak out plainly about species". Lyell found Darwin's proofs of Variation "most persuasive", but Darwin was struggling to sort out the changes and corrections he wanted. Encouragement came from the Reverend professor Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...
who sent the previously unthinkable news that "the best and strongest men" at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
were "coming over [to] what the world calls Darwinism... The younger M.A.'s are not only willing, but greedy, to hear what you have to say, and... the elder... are facing the whole question in quite a different tone from that they did three years ago... I have been surprised at the change since last winter."
The proofs were finished on 15 November, and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication went on sale on 30 January 1868, thirteen years after Darwin had begun his experiments on breeding and stewing the bones of pigeons. He was feeling deflated, and concerned about how these large volumes would be received, writing "if I try to read a few pages I feel fairly nauseated... The devil take the whole book". The public were undeterred, and the 1,500 copies went within a week with a second printing at eleven days. The Pall Mall Gazette praised its "noble calmness... undisturbed by the heats of polemical agitation" which made the far from calm Darwin laugh, and left him "cock-a-hoop".
See Darwin from Descent of Man to Emotions
Darwin from Descent of Man to Emotions
The life and work of Darwin from Descent of Man to Emotions during the period from 1868 to 1872 continued with aspects of Charles Darwin's intended "Big Book" on evolution through natural selection...
for his life and work in the following period.
Further reading
- The Complete Works of Charles Darwin OnlineThe Complete Works of Charles Darwin OnlineThe Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online is a freely-accessible website containing the complete print and manuscript works of Charles Darwin, as well as related supplementary material.- Overview :...
– Darwin Online; Darwin's publications, private papers and bibliography, supplementary works including biographies, obituaries and reviews. Free to use, includes items not in public domain.; public domain - Darwin Correspondence Project Text and notes for most of his letters