Inception of Darwin's theory
Encyclopedia
The inception of Darwin's theory occurred during an intensively busy period which began when Charles Darwin
returned from the survey voyage of the Beagle
, with his reputation as a fossil
collector and geologist
already established. He was given an allowance from his father to become a gentleman naturalist
rather than a clergyman, and his first tasks were to find suitable experts to describe his collections, write out his Journal and Remarks
, and present papers on his findings to the Geological Society of London
.
At Darwin's geological début, the anatomist Richard Owen
's reports on the fossils showed that extinct species were related to current species in the same locality, and the ornithologist John Gould
showed that bird specimens from the Galápagos Islands
were of distinct species related to places, not just varieties. These points convinced Darwin that transmutation of species
must be occurring, and in his Red Notebook he jotted down his first evolutionary ideas. He began specific transmutation notebooks with speculations on variation in offspring "to adapt & alter the race to changing world", and sketched an "irregularly branched" genealogical
branching of a single evolutionary tree
.
Animal observations of an orangutan
at the zoo showed how human its expressions looked, confirming his thoughts from the Beagle voyage that there was little gulf between man and animals. He investigated animal breeding and found parallels to nature removing runts and keeping the fit, with farmers deliberately selecting breeding animals so that through "a thousand intermediate forms" their descendants were significantly changed. His speculations on instincts and mental traits suggested habits, beliefs and facial expressions having evolved, and considered the social implications. While this was his "prime hobby", he was struggling with an immense workload and began suffering from his illness
. Having taken a break from work, his thoughts of marriage turned to his cousin Emma Wedgwood
.
Reading about Malthus
and natural law led him to apply to his search for the Creator's laws Malthusian logic of social thinking of struggle for survival with no handouts, and he "had at last got a theory by which to work". He proposed to Emma, and was accepted. In his theory he compared breeders selecting traits to natural selection
from variants thrown up by "chance", and continued to look to the countryside for supporting information. On 24 January 1839 he was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society
, and on the 29th married Emma. The development of Darwin's theory
followed.
family, Charles Darwin developed his interest
in natural history
. At Edinburgh University his work as a student of Robert Edmund Grant involved him in pioneering investigations of the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
and Erasmus Darwin
on homology
showing common descent
, but he also saw how controversial and troubling such theories were. Robert Jameson
's course taught Darwin stratigraphic
geology
, and closed with lectures on the "Origin of the Species of Animals". At Christ's College, Cambridge
to qualify as an Anglican clergyman, Darwin became passionate about beetle collecting, then shone in John Stevens Henslow
's botany course. He was convinced by Paley's Natural Theology which set out the Teleological argument
that complexity of "design" in nature proved God's role as Creator, and by the views of Paley and John Herschel
that creation was by laws which science could discover, not by intermittent miracles. The geology course of Adam Sedgwick
and summer work mapping strata in Wales
emphasised that life on earth went back over eons of time.
Then on his voyage on the Beagle
Darwin became convinced by Charles Lyell
's uniformitarian
theory of gradual geological process, and puzzled over how various theories of creation
fitted the evidence he saw.
In the third edition of On the Origin of Species Darwin provided a historical sketch of his predecessors in writing of descent with modification or natural selection, including those who he had only learned of after the 1859 publication of The Origin. His account essentially deals with 19th century authors; "Passing over authors from the classical period to that of Buffon
, with whose writings I am not familiar, Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on this subject excited much attention." However, in a footnote he remarks on how his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Goethe
and Geoffroy Saint Hilaire
came to the same conclusion on the origin of species in the years 1794-5, anticipating Lamarck.
There is no direct evidence linking Darwin to Benjamin Franklin
's treatise "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.
." However, Franklin was a friend and colleague of both Erasmus and Robert Darwin, and it has been suggested that this work may have influenced Darwin's study of Malthus' belief on the relationship between population and subsistence.
in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, late at night on 4 October 1836. He went straight to bed, then greeted his family at breakfast and began catching up with news of his family and of the country: "all England appears changed". The Reform Bill had brought what the Tory Duke of Wellington
described as a shift in power from decent Tory
Anglicans to Whig
manufacturers, shopkeepers and atheists. Everyone was discussing the writings of Thomas Malthus
on population outstripping resources as the New Poor Law
described by opponents as "a Malthusian bill designed to force the poor to emigrate, to work for lower wages, to live on a coarser sort of food" brought the construction of workhouse
s in the southern counties despite riots and arson. The government had not yet dared introduce these measures to London and the industrial north, and recession was bringing threats of mass unemployment.
Darwin wrote to Henslow
that he was still "giddy with joy & confusion... I want your advice on so many points, indeed I am in the clouds" and on 15 October went on to Cambridge
to get advice from Henslow and Sedgwick
on the task of organising the description and cataloguing of his collections accumulated from the Beagle expedition. Henslow took on the plants, and Darwin was given introductions to the best London naturalists with a warning that they would already be busy with other work.
Charles went on to stay with his brother Erasmus
in London
, near the scientific institutions which were in the throes of renovation, while the city itself was being torn up to install new sewers and gas lighting. He went round the British Museum
, the Royal College of Surgeons
, the Linnean
, the Zoological Society
and Geological Society
, trying to get the experts to take on his collections. Henslow had already established his former pupil's reputation during the Beagle expedition by giving selected naturalists access to fossil specimens sent back as well as having Darwin's geological writings privately printed for distribution. Darwin went "in most exciting dissipation amongst the Dons in science", and as Charles Bunbury
reported, "[he] seems to be a universal collector" finding new species "to the surprise of all the big wigs". While geologists were quick to take on the rock samples, zoologists already had more specimens arriving than they could deal with. Their institutions were in turmoil as democrats argued for reforms replacing the aristocratic amateurs with professional salaried scientists as in the French
research institutes. At the Zoological Society the reformers were led by Darwin's tutor from Edinburgh days, Robert Edmund Grant. Darwin now had an allowance plus stocks from his father, bringing him around £400 per year, and his sympathies were with the amateur clerical "Dons in science" of Cambridge.
invited Darwin to dinner on 29 October 1836. Over dinner Lyell listened eagerly to Darwin's stories (which supported Lyell's uniformitarianism
) and introduced him to Richard Owen
and William Broderip
, Tories
who had just been involved in voting Grant out of a position at the Zoological Society. Owen was rapidly ousting Grant as the country's leading anatomist. Darwin went to visit him at his Royal College of Surgeons
, and Owen agreed to work on some animal specimens in spirits and the fossil bones. Owen shared Darwin's enthusiasm. He was a proponent of German ideas of "organising energy" and vehemently opposed to Grant's evolution. At around this time Grant was one the few to volunteer his help with cataloguing the collection. Darwin turned down the offer, not wanting to be associated with a disreputable radical
who denounced his Cambridge friends.
On 12 November Darwin visited his Wedgwood relatives at Maer Hall
and they encouraged him to publish a book of his travels based on his diary, an idea his sisters picked up when he visited his home.
On 2 December he returned to London and began finding takers for his specimens, with Thomas Bell
and the Revd. William Buckland
interested in the reptiles. Darwin's reputation was being made by the giant mammal fossils. Owen's first surprising revelation was that a hippopotamus
sized fossil skull 2 feet 4 inches (710 mm) long which Darwin had bought for about two shillings near Mercedes
while on a "galloping" trip 120 miles (190 km) from Montevideo
was of an extinct rodent
-like creature resembling a giant capybara
, which Owen named Toxodon
. Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline that "[the fossils] are turning out great treasures" and of the Toxodon, "There is another head, as large as a Rhinoceros which as far as they can guess, must have been a gnawing animal. Conceive a Rat or a Hare of such a size— What famous Cats they ought to have had in those days!" The College of Surgeons distributed casts of the fossils to the major scientific institutions.
Darwin paid a visit to his brother Eras's lady friend the literary Whig
Miss Harriet Martineau
who had strong views on egalitarianism and whose writings had popularised the ideas of Thomas Malthus
. "She was very agreeable" and they discussed the "process of world making" that she had seen on her visit to the Niagara Falls
. While he later remarked on "how ugly" she was, she described Charles as "simple, childlike, painstaking, effective".
an coast and the South America
n land-mass was rising slowly, and discussed his ideas with Lyell. To Lyell's delight, Darwin went further in balancing the rising continent with sinking mountains forming the basis of coral atoll
s. Darwin briefly returned to London to read his paper to the Geological Society
on 4 January 1837. Despite Darwin's nerves about his début, the talk was so well received that he felt “like a peacock admiring his tail”.
On the same day Darwin presented 80 mammal and 450 bird specimens to the Zoological Society
. The Mammalia were ably taken on by George R. Waterhouse
.
While the birds seemed almost an afterthought the ornithologist John Gould
took them on and was quick to notice the significance of specimens from the Galápagos Islands
. He startlingly revealed at the next meeting on 10 January that what Darwin had taken to be wrens, blackbirds and slightly differing finches were "a series of ground finches which are so peculiar" as to form "an entirely new group" of 11 species. The story of what we now call "Darwin's finches
" was covered by the daily newspapers, though Darwin was in Cambridge and did not get details at this stage. In the minutes of the meeting the number was extended to 12 species.
Owen was finding unexpected relationships from the fossils: the batch included the horse sized Scelidotherium
which appeared to be closely allied to the anteater
, a gigantic ground sloth
, and an ox-sized armoured armadillo
which he called Glyptodon
. The Patagonia
n spine and leg bones from Port St Julian
which Darwin had thought might be from a Mastodon
were apparently from a gigantic guanaco or Llama
, or perhaps camel
, which Owen named Macrauchenia
. Lyell saw a "law of succession" with mammals being replaced by their own kind on each continent, and on 17 February used his presidential address at the Geographical Society to present Owen's findings to date on Darwin's fossils, pointing out this inference that extinct species were related to current species in the same locality. He invited Darwin to come along, and the speech drew Darwin's attention to the question of why past and present species in one place should be so closely related. At the same meeting Darwin was elected to the Council of the Society. For Lyell this was "a glorious addition to my society of geologists", gentlemen (and amateurs of independent means) with duty only to scientific integrity, social stability and responsible religion, for Darwin it meant joining the respectable élite of eminent geologists developing a science dealing with the age of the earth and the Days of Creation.
Darwin had already been invited by FitzRoy to contribute his Journal, based on his field notes, as the natural history section of the captain's account of the Beagle's voyage, and this ended up keeping him fully occupied from March 13th to the end of September. He also plunged into writing a book on South American Geology, putting his and Lyell's ideas forward against the cataclysmic explanation of mountain formation Alcide d'Orbigny
was promoting in a multi-volume account of the continent begun two years previously.
On Monday 27 February Darwin presented a talk to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on glassy tubes he had found amongst Maldonado
sand dunes, explained by lightning having fused the sand.
To supervise his collections Darwin had to return to London, and on Lyell's advice he planned to arrive on Friday 3 March 1837, in time for one of Charles Babbage
's Saturday parties, talking shops about the latest developments "brilliantly attended by fashionable ladies, as well as literary and scientific gents" and "a good mixture of pretty women", bankers and politicians, where Babbage promoted such projects as his mechanical computer. At first Darwin stayed with Eras, in his journal written up later he put his date of moving as 6 March 1837. On the 13th he moved to nearby lodgings, joining Eras's circle of friends including Martineau and Hensleigh
and enjoying his intimate dinner parties with guests such as Lyell, Babbage and Thomas Carlyle
.
In their first meeting to discuss his detailed findings, Gould told Darwin that the Galápagos mockingbird
s from different islands were separate species, not just varieties, and the finch group included the “wren
s”. The two rheas
were also distinct species, and on 14 March Gould's announcement of this finding to the Zoological Society of London
was accompanied by Darwin, who presented a paper on how distribution of the two species of rheas changed going southwards.
. In a letter to Lyell, John Herschel
had written of “that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others”. This was circulated and widely discussed, with scientists sharing Herschel's approach of looking for an answer through laws of nature
and rejecting ad hoc
miracles as an explanation. Charles Babbage
described God as a programmer of such laws. Darwin's freethinking
brother Erasmus
was part of this Whig
circle and a close friend of the writer Harriet Martineau
who promoted the Malthusianism
underlying the controversial Whig Poor Law reforms
to stop welfare from causing overpopulation and more poverty, which were then being implemented piecemeal in the face of opposition to the new poorhouse
s. As a Unitarian
she welcomed the radical
implications of transmutation of species
, which was promoted by Grant
and some medical men but anathema to Darwin's Anglican friends who saw it as a threat to the social order. Transmutation threatened the essential distinction between man and beast, and implied progressive improvement with the implication that the lower orders could aspire to the privileges of their aristocratic overlords.
The medical establishment controlling the London teaching hospitals, including the Royal College of Surgeons
, was restricted to Anglicans
and dominated by the aristocracy who saw perfect animal design as proof a natural theology
supporting their ideas of God-given rank and privilege. Since the 1820s large numbers of private medical schools joined by the new had introduced the "philosophical anatomy" of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
based on unity of plan
compatible with the transmutation of species, implying ideas of progressive improvement and hence radical support for democracy. This anatomy had already spread from Paris to the medical schools of Edinburgh, and the new London schools attracted Scots including Grant. Numerous journals new promoted these radical ideas, including Thomas Wakley
's The Lancet
started in 1823 with support from William Cobbett
and William Lawrence
, whose 1819 publication of evolutionary ideas had been prosecuted for blasphemy
. In response, the medical establishment gave support to the idealist biology of Joseph Henry Green
and his younger protégé Richard Owen
, based on the vitalism
of German Naturphilosophie
and Platonic idealism
which held that anatomical forms were "archetype
s" in the Divine mind, imposed through "descensive" powers of delegation of divine authority in accordance with traditional hierarchies.
which resembled a giant version of the modern guanacos that Darwin had hunted in the same area of Patagonia
. Darwin speculated as to why the territories of the rheas overlapped without intermediate species, wondering if mutations (known then as "monsters" or "freaks") "present an analogy to production of species". His Cambridge tutor Adam Sedgwick
had described those promoting similar ideas as "infidel naturalists..[adopting] false theories". Even for Lyell, this was a heresy which implied ape ancestry, destroying mankind's "high estate".
Darwin was more open to new speculation. He had seen the bestial life of the natives of Tierra del Fuego
, apparently happy in their harsh environment, and Jemmy Button
's reversion to savagery. To him the need was to explain how both Fuegians and civilised Europeans could be "essentially the same creatures" from the hand of the same Creator. At the Geographical Society meeting on 2 May 1837, when Darwin read his next paper on the Pampas, the first discoveries of ancient fossil monkeys were announced. Lyell uncomfortably joked that from "Lamarck's view" this gave a long time "for their tails to wear off", but Darwin was beginning to look at these "wonderful" fossils in an evolutionary light.
At their frequent meetings, Owen argued that intrinsic "organising energy" in the "embryonic germ" set the lifespan of the species and precluded transmutation. The botanist Robert Brown
showed Darwin a different concept, of "swarming atoms" inside the germ, allowing nature's self development. Embarrassed by his lack of labels for his finch specimens, he examined FitzRoy's in the British Museum
and contacted seamen including Syms Covington
for their collections. From this he was able to relate the finches to separate islands, with distinct species on each island. As well as pressing on with his Journal, he started an ambitious project to get the expert reports on his collection published as a multi-volume Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. A search for sponsorship was answered when Henslow used his contacts with the Chancellor of the Exchequer
Thomas Spring Rice to arrange a Treasury grant of £1,000, a sum equivalent to about £ in present day terms.
During the Beagle voyage Darwin had noted the distribution of the two species of Galápagos iguanas and suspected that "this genus, the species of which are so well adapted to their respective localities, is peculiar to this group of Isds." He had identified the sea iguanas from a book on board as having been named Amblyrhyncus Cristatus by Bell from a specimen which had arrived in Mexico, probably found on the Pacific shore. In June he gave this information to William Buckland
. As the Victorian era
began, Darwin pressed on with writing his Journal, and in August 1837 began correcting printer's proofs
.
In mid July 1837 Darwin began a notebook on "transmutation of Species", his "B" notebook, having been "greatly struck from about month of previous March on character of S. American fossils — & species on Galapagos Archipelago. — These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views." The title page was headed Zoönomia
, referring to his grandfather's evolutionary ideas.
He scribbled down a framework for his speculations, jotting down thoughts on the lifespan of individuals and of species, including Richard Owen
's idea that complexity of a species was inversely related to its life span. Darwin thought about reproduction, with asexual reproduction
resulting in copies of the original, but sexual reproduction
producing variation in the offspring which made it possible "to adapt & alter the race to changing world". This could explain the divergence from a common ancestor of Galápagos tortoise
s and mockingbirds, and of the rheas which remained distinct species with their overlapping territories. He sketched branching descent, then a genealogical
branching of a single evolutionary tree
, in which "It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another". He was thinking of life as arising only once and discarding the independent lineages
progressing to higher forms as proposed by Lamarck
and Grant
as well as rejecting Lamarck's gradual progression in favour of what Darwin called "inosculation
", a clear distinction between even the most closely related species. Still influenced by Paley, he assumed that variants emerged perfect, and developed the hypothesis that, for example, where every island in the Galápagos Archipelago had its own kind of tortoise, these had originated from a single tortoise species and had adapted to life on the different islands in different ways. Thinking of how ancestors could have spread to islands, he noted possible experiments.
Darwin thought that the possibility of common ancestry could not be denied when such strange forms as the platypus
existed. He believed at that time that the Creator used laws to create, and felt this was shown by the unique plants and animals on the Galápagos islands sharing features with mainland American species, while wandering birds such as sandpipers
were unchanged. A similar relationship in time was shown by the extinct armoured giant Glyptodon
resembling the modern South American armadillo
. He considered that the way that astronomers once thought that God ordered the movement of individual planets was comparable to individual creation of species in particular countries, but divine powers were "much more simple & sublime" in creating the first animals so that species then arose by "the fixed laws of generation". A hypothesis of "fresh creations" was "mere assumption, it explains nothing further".
Under pressure with organising Zoology and correcting proofs of his Journal which had to have the introduction revised when FitzRoy complained that he was "astonished at the total omission of any notice of the officers" for their help, Darwin's health suffered. On 20 September 1837 he suffered "an uncomfortable palpitation of the heart". His doctors advised him "strongly to knock off all work" and leave for the country. Two days later he went to Maer Hall
, the Wedgwood's home, for a month of recuperation. His relations wore him out with questions about gaucho
life. His invalid aunt was being cared for by the as yet unmarried Emma
, and his uncle Jos
pointed out an area of ground where cinders had disappeared under loam which Jos though might have been the work of earthworm
s. Darwin returned to London on 21 October and on 1 November gave a talk on the role of earthworms in soil formation
to the Geological Society, a mundane subject which to them may have seemed eccentric. William Buckland
subsequently recommended Darwin's paper for publication, praising it as "a new & important theory to explain Phenomena of universal occurrence on the surface of the Earth—in fact a new Geological Power", while rightly rejecting Darwin's suggestion that chalkland could have been formed in a similar way.
Darwin's notebooks developed an essentially materialist
and deterministic
view of human beings, with the conclusions that freewill was an illusion and the brain was mechanistic. He had avoided taking on official posts which would take valuable time, turning down William Whewell
's request that he become Secretary of the Geological Society with excuses including "anything which flurries me completely knocks me up afterwards and brings on a bad palpitation of the heart", but by March 1838 he accepted the post. On 7 March he read to the Society his longest paper yet, which explained the earthquake he had witnessed at Concepción, Chile
, in terms of gradual crustal movements, to the delight of Lyell. Despite hours of practice "I was so nervous at first, I somehow could see nothing all around me, & felt as if my body was gone, & only my head left." At the same time Darwin was privately scorning Whewell's faith in a human-centred universe being perfectly adapted to man and writing of "my theory" which he thought "would give zest to recent & Fossil Comparative Anatomy", transforming the "whole metaphysics".
Darwin's ideas fitted with the radical
Unitarianism of his brother Erasmus
's circle including Harriet Martineau
, but were heretical to his Anglican friends in the scientific establishment. Despite stomach upsets Darwin explored in his notebooks the metaphysical implications of a consistent positivist creed, arguing that a person can be “congratulated for doing good” but the act is actually purely conditioned and “deserves no credit”. Indeed, “wickedness is no more a man’s fault than bodily disease!”. His Anglican friends would have found this deterministic materialism more shocking than his ideas of evolution. Such materialist ideas had been seized on by socialist agitators, red Lamarckians
who stirred the mob to overthrow the social order and Chartists who even demanded the vote for working men! The establishment and the Tory
press were quick to crush such ideas, using the full force of the law at a time when blasphemy was a criminal offence. Many were denounced and overthrown for such scandalous ideas, including the surgeon William Lawrence who was forced to resign his post and lost copyright on his book Lectures on Man. This book was promptly pirated by the notorious agitator and pornography publisher William Benbow
, and then published in cheap editions such as the copy that Darwin now read. He was cautious about giving away his half-formed ideas, but openly mentioned his interest in the species question to friends and colleagues.
Dissenters such as John Wesley
abhorred slavery and privilege, and had a bleaker view of nature than Paley. Darwin reflected these ideas in his notes, writing "Animals – whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. – Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind? Animals with affections, imitation, fear, pain, sorrow for the dead." and "if we choose to let conjecture run wild then animals our fellow brethren in pain, disease death & suffering & famine; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amusements, they may partake, from our origin in one common ancestor we may all be netted together."
at the Zoological museum a fund of knowledge, and questioned if breeders weren't going against nature in "picking varieties". He was now writing of "Descent" rather than transmutation, and hinting at ideas of "adaptation" to climate.
At the zoo on 28 March he had his first sight of an ape, and was impressed at the orang-utan's antics "just like a naughty child" when the keeper held back an apple. In his notes he wrote "Let man visit Ourang-outang in domestication, hear expressive whine, see its intelligence.... let him look at savage...naked, artless, not improving yet improvable & let him dare to boast of his proud preeminence." Here Darwin was drawing on his experience of the natives of Tierra del Fuego
and daring to think that there was little gulf between man and animals despite the theological doctrine that only humanity possessed a soul.
He sent his parents the gossip that Miss Martineau had been "as frisky lately as the Rhinoceros. – Erasmus has been with her noon, morning & night: – if her character is not as secure, as a mountain in the polar regions she would certainly lose it". He began thinking about marriage himself, listing the pros and cons on the back of an old letter and noting that rather than being "a man tied down in London" going over information, "I have so much more pleasure in direct observation... In country, experiment & observation on lower animals, – more space."
Darwin found a pamphlet by Yarrell's friend Sir John Sebright
with a passage reading:
about crossing domestic breeds, he admitted for the first time that "It is my prime hobby & I really think some day, I shall be able to do something on that most intricate subject species & varieties." Pondering likely opposition to his ideas, he noted that there must have been "a thousand intermediate forms" between the otter and its land ancestor. "Opponents will say, show me them. I will answer yes, if you will show me every step between bull Dog & Greyhound."
". In private discussions with his cousin, "Hensleigh
says the love of the deity & thought of him or eternity, only difference the mind of man & animals" which conflicted with Darwin's own experience with the "savages" of Tierra del Fuego. He struggled on with the Beagle geology, overworked, worried and suffering stomach upsets and headaches which laid him up for days on end. Privately he thought of the social implications of evolution, writing "Educate all classes, improve the women. (double influence) & mankind must improve." This was similar to the position of the radical
Lamarckians
, but female education was already supported by the whole Wedgwood-Darwin family, and strongly advocated by Martineau.
Darwin wrote "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals." He thought grinning was "no doubt a habit gained by formerly being a baboon with giant canine teeth... Laughing modified barking, smiling modified laughing. Barking to tell [troop] good news. discovery of prey. – arising no doubt from want of assistance. – crying is a puzzler."
In June as he worried at these ideas and the Beagle Geology his illness intensified, with stomach upsets, headaches and heart troubles, so that he became overworked and laid up for days on end. "I hope I may be able to work on right hard the next three years... but I find the noddle & the stomach are antagonistic powers, and that it is a great deal more easy to think too much in a day, than to think too little – What thought has to do with digesting roast beef, – I cannot say."
At the same time Darwin was gaining public position, and on 21 June 1838 was elected to the establishment Athenaeum
Club, along with Charles Dickens
. He would dine there daily, feeling " like a gentleman, or rather like a Lord... I enjoy it the more, because I fully expected to detest it... one meets so many people there that one likes to see."
s were now living next door to Erasmus and were visited for a week by Catherine Darwin and Emma Wedgwood
. Charles visited and found them "a very pleasant merry company", particularly noticing Emma's remarkably pleasant manners.
Illness prompted Darwin to take a break from the pressure of work and on 23 June 1838 he took the steamboat
to Edinburgh
to go "geologising" in Scotland. After revisiting Edinburgh on 28 June (the day that Queen Victoria
had her coronation in London) he went on to Fort William
. At Glen Roy
in glorious weather he was convinced that he had solved the riddle of the "parallel roads" around the glen, which he identified as raised beaches, though later geologists would support the ideas of Louis Agassiz
that these had been formed by glaciation.
Fully recuperated and optimistic, he returned home to The Mount, Shrewsbury
. He discussed his ideas with his father and asked for advice about Emma. Speaking from experience, Doctor Robert Waring Darwin told his son to conceal religious doubts which could cause "extreme misery... Things went on pretty well until the husband or wife became out of health, and then some women suffered miserably by doubting about the salvation of their husbands, thus making them likewise to suffer." Charles drew up a list with two columns on a scrap of paper. Under Marry he listed benefits, "Children–if it please God–Constant companion & friend in old age will feel interested in one,–object to be beloved and played with, better than a dog anyhow.....Imagine living all one's day solitary in smoky dirty London House.–only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps...", while Not Marry headed "Freedom to go where one liked... Not forced to visit relatives..to have the expense and anxiety of children.. fatness & idleness... if many children forced to earn one's bread..". He jotted down further thoughts, then concluded "My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won't do. — Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro' St. Marry–Marry–Marry Q.E.D."
Then he spent his fortnight being "Very idle at Shrewsbury" which meant starting his "D" notebook on the transmutation sequence and his "M" notebook on the evolutionary basis of moral and social behaviour, filling sixty pages with notes and anecdotes from his father about experiences with patients.
Having come down in favour, he went to visit his cousin Emma on 29 July. He did not get around to proposing, but failed to conceal his ideas on transmutation. Emma noted "he is the most open, transparent man I ever saw, and every word expresses his real thoughts." When she asked about ultimate origins he steered clear of the subject, aware that "it will become necessary to show how the first eye is formed" which he could not yet do.
's Positive Philosophy at the Athenaeum Club. It bolstered his pantheist
ideas of natural law
s, making him remark "What a magnificent view one can take of the world" with everything synchronised "by certain laws of harmony", a vision "far grander" than the Almighty individually creating "a long succession of vile Molluscous animals – How beneath the dignity of Him"! Only a "cramped imagination" saw God "warring against those very laws he established in all organic nature." His work on Coral Reefs and a paper theorising that Glen Roy
had been an arm of the sea soldiered on. He visited the zoo to experiment, observing the reactions of the apes and seeing emotions like "revenge and anger", implying that "Our descent, then, [is the root] of our evil passions." He needed an ally, and hinted to Lyell that his work was "bearing on the question of species", amassing "facts, which begin to group themselves clearly under sub-laws."
On 21 September he had a vivid dream "that a person was hung & came to life, & then made many jokes, about not having run away &c having faced death like a hero... [then] showing [the] scar behind [his neck, where his head had been cut off, proving] that he had honourable wounds."
Then in late September he began reading "for amusement" the 6th edition of Malthus's
An Essay on the Principle of Population
which reminded him of Malthus's statistical proof that human populations breed beyond their means and compete to survive, at a time when he was primed to apply these ideas to animal species. Malthus had softened from the bleakness of the earlier editions, now allowing that the population crush could be mitigated by education, celibacy and emigration. Already Radical
crowds were demonstrating against the harsh imposition of Malthusian ideas in the Poor Law
s, and a slump was resulting in mass emigration. Lyell was convinced that animals were also driven to spread their territory by overpopulation, but Darwin went further in applying the Whig
social thinking of struggle for survival with no handouts. His views were secular, but not atheistic. He asked how God's laws had produced "so high a mind" as ours, with purpose
shown by descent geared towards the "production of higher animals", suggesting that "we are [a] step towards some higher end".
Malthus's essay calculates from the birth rate that human population could double every 25 years, but in practice growth is kept in check by death, disease, wars and famine. Darwin was well prepared to see at once that this related to de Candolle's
concept of "nature's war" and also applies to the struggle for existence amongst wildlife, so that when there is more population than resources can maintain, favourable variations that allow the organism to better use the limited resources available tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones destroyed by being unable to get the means for existence, resulting in the formation of new species. On 28 September 1838 he noted this insight, describing it as a kind of wedging, forcing adapted structures into gaps in the economy of nature formed as weaker ones were thrust out. He now had a theory by which to work.
and proposed to Emma.
Again he discussed his ideas, and she subsequently wrote telling him of her "fear that our opinions on the most important subject should differ widely. My reason tells me that honest & conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us. I thank you from my heart for your openness with me & I should dread the feeling that you were concealing your opinions from the fear of giving me pain.... my own dear Charley, we now do belong to each other & I cannot help being open with you... Will you..read our Saviour's farewell discourse to his disciples [from the Gospel of St. John
]. It is so full of love & devotion & every beautiful feeling". As well as "love one another" it also includes
"If a man abide not in me...they are burned". He sent her a warm reply which gave her the comfort that he had entered into her heart's concern "a little more", but this tension would remain.
Emma's father promised a dowry of £5,000 plus £400 a year, while Doctor Darwin added £10,000 for Charles, to be invested. They decided to move to London until Charles had "wearied the geological public" with his itch to write, then they would "decide, whether the pleasures of retirement & country... are preferable to society."
Darwin considered Malthus's argument, that human populations breed beyond their means and compete to survive, in relation to his findings about species relating to localities, earlier enquiries into animal breeding, and ideas of Natural "laws of harmony". Around late November 1838 he compared breeders selecting traits to a Malthusian Nature selecting from random variants, now thrown up by "chance", and in mid December described this comparison as "a beautiful part of my theory, that domesticated races of organics are made by precisely same means as species — but latter far more perfectly & infinitely slower", so that in "species every part of newly acquired structure is fully practical & perfected."
The second edition of Charles Babbage
's The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment published that year included a copy of a letter John Herschel
had sent to Charles Lyell
in 1836, not long before Darwin visited Herschel in Cape Town
. On 2 December, Darwin wrote in his E Notebook "Babbage 2d Edit. p. 226 — Herschel calls the appearance of new species the mystery of mysteries, & has grand passage upon the problem.! Hurrah — 'intermediate causes' ". Herschel's letter advocated seeking natural causes, as opposed to miraculous causes, and gave philosophical justification to Darwin's project.
In the inception of his theory Darwin tried to satisfy the methodology of William Whewell
's metascience
which is now thought to be mistaken in many ways, and in the 1860s this led to him having to debate the merits of the methodology.
having to halt work on Fossil Mammalia, and John Gould
sailing off for Tasmania
leaving Darwin to complete the half finished Birds. "What can a man have to say, who works all morning in describing hawks & owls; & then rushes out , & walks in a bewildered manner up one street & down another, looking out for the word To Let'." Emma had arranged to come with the Hensleigh Wedgwoods to London for a week to help with the search for a house, and wrote telling him "It is very well I am coming to look after you my poor old man", before arriving on 6 December.
On 19 December 1838 as secretary of the Geological Society of London
Darwin witnessed the vicious interrogation by Owen and his allies including Sedgwick and Buckland of Darwin's old tutor Robert Edmund Grant when they ridiculed Grant's Lamarckian heresy in a clear reminder of establishment hatred of evolutionism
.
During her visit, Emma thought Darwin looked unwell and overtired. At the end of December she wrote urging him "to leave town at once & get some rest. You have looked so unwell for some time that I fear you will be laid up... nothing could make me so happy as to feel that I could be of any use or comfort to my own dear Charles when he is not well. So don't be ill any more my dear Charley till I can be with you to nurse you".
. He wrote to Emma that "Gower St is ours, yellow curtains & all", and of his delight at being the "possessor of Macaw Cottage". which he long recalled for its gaudy coloured walls and furniture that "combined all the colours of the macaw in hideous discord", Emma rejoiced at their getting a house she liked, while hoping that they had got rid of "that dead dog out of the garden". Darwin impatiently moved his "museum" in on 31 December, astounding himself, Erasmus and the porters with the weight of his luggage containing geological specimens.
On 24 January 1839 he was honoured by being elected as Fellow of the Royal Society
and presented his paper on the Roads of Glen Roy. The next day he took the train home to Shrewsbury, then on the 28th travelled to Maer Hall
.
On 29 January 1839, Charles married Emma at Maer, Staffordshire
in an Anglican ceremony arranged to also suit the Unitarians, conducted by the vicar, their cousin John Allen Wedgwood
. Emma's bedridden mother slept through the service, sparing Emma "the pain of parting". Immediately afterwards Charles and Emma rushed off to the railway station, raising their relative's eyebrows, and ate their sandwiches and toasted their future from a "bottle of water" on the train. Back at Macaw Cottage, Charles noted in his journal "Married at Maer & returned to London 30 years old", and in his "E" notebook recorded uncle John Wedgwood
's views on turnips.
See the development of Darwin's theory
for the ensuing developments, in the context of his life, work and outside influences at the time.
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...
returned from the survey voyage of the Beagle
Second voyage of HMS Beagle
The second voyage of HMS Beagle, from 27 December 1831 to 2 October 1836, was the second survey expedition of HMS Beagle, under captain Robert FitzRoy who had taken over command of the ship on its first voyage after her previous captain committed suicide...
, with his reputation as a fossil
Fossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...
collector and geologist
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
already established. He was given an allowance from his father to become a gentleman naturalist
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
rather than a clergyman, and his first tasks were to find suitable experts to describe his collections, write out his Journal and Remarks
The 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...
, and present papers on his findings to the Geological Society of London
Geological Society of London
The Geological Society of London is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with the aim of "investigating the mineral structure of the Earth"...
.
At Darwin's geological début, the 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...
's reports on the fossils showed that extinct species were related to current species in the same locality, and the ornithologist John Gould
John Gould
John Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
showed that bird specimens from the Galápagos Islands
Galápagos Islands
The Galápagos Islands are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed around the equator in the Pacific Ocean, west of continental Ecuador, of which they are a part.The Galápagos Islands and its surrounding waters form an Ecuadorian province, a national park, and a...
were of distinct species related to places, not just varieties. These points convinced Darwin that transmutation of species
Transmutation of species
Transmutation of species was a term used by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 for his theory that described the altering of one species into another, and the term is often used to describe 19th century evolutionary ideas that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection...
must be occurring, and in his Red Notebook he jotted down his first evolutionary ideas. He began specific transmutation notebooks with speculations on variation in offspring "to adapt & alter the race to changing world", and sketched an "irregularly branched" genealogical
Genealogy
Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...
branching of a single evolutionary tree
Tree of life (science)
Charles Darwin proposed that phylogeny, the evolutionary relatedness among species through time, was expressible as a metaphor he termed the Tree of Life...
.
Animal observations of an orangutan
Orangutan
Orangutans are the only exclusively Asian genus of extant great ape. The largest living arboreal animals, they have proportionally longer arms than the other, more terrestrial, great apes. They are among the most intelligent primates and use a variety of sophisticated tools, also making sleeping...
at the zoo showed how human its expressions looked, confirming his thoughts from the Beagle voyage that there was little gulf between man and animals. He investigated animal breeding and found parallels to nature removing runts and keeping the fit, with farmers deliberately selecting breeding animals so that through "a thousand intermediate forms" their descendants were significantly changed. His speculations on instincts and mental traits suggested habits, beliefs and facial expressions having evolved, and considered the social implications. While this was his "prime hobby", he was struggling with an immense workload and began suffering from 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...
. Having taken a break from work, his thoughts of marriage turned to his cousin Emma Wedgwood
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...
.
Reading about Malthus
Thomas Malthus
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularized the economic theory of rent....
and natural law led him to apply to his search for the Creator's laws Malthusian logic of social thinking of struggle for survival with no handouts, and he "had at last got a theory by which to work". He proposed to Emma, and was accepted. In his theory he compared breeders selecting traits to natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
from variants thrown up by "chance", and continued to look to the countryside for supporting information. On 24 January 1839 he was elected as Fellow of 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"...
, and on the 29th married Emma. The development of Darwin's theory
Development of Darwin's theory
Following the inception of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection in 1838, the development of Darwin's theory to explain the "mystery of mysteries" of how new species originated was his "prime hobby" in the background to his main occupation of publishing the scientific results of the Beagle...
followed.
Background
After his early life in a UnitarianUnitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
family, Charles Darwin developed his interest
Charles Darwin's education
Charles Darwin's education gave him a foundation in the doctrine of Creation prevalent throughout the West at the time, as well as knowledge of medicine and theology. More significantly, it led to his interest in natural history, which culminated in his taking part in the second voyage of the...
in natural history
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
. At Edinburgh University his work as a student of Robert Edmund Grant involved him in pioneering investigations of the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck , often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist...
and 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...
on homology
Homology (biology)
Homology forms the basis of organization for comparative biology. In 1843, Richard Owen defined homology as "the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function". Organs as different as a bat's wing, a seal's flipper, a cat's paw and a human hand have a common underlying...
showing common descent
Common descent
In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong quantitative support for the theory that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor....
, but he also saw how controversial and troubling such theories were. Robert Jameson
Robert Jameson
thumb|Robert JamesonProfessor Robert Jameson, FRS FRSE was a Scottish naturalist and mineralogist.As Regius Professor at the University of Edinburgh for fifty years, Jameson is notable for his advanced scholarship in natural history, his superb museum collection, and for his tuition of Charles...
's course taught Darwin stratigraphic
Stratigraphy
Stratigraphy, a branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering . It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks....
geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
, and closed with lectures on the "Origin of the Species of Animals". At Christ's College, Cambridge
Christ's College, Cambridge
Christ's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.With a reputation for high academic standards, Christ's College averaged top place in the Tompkins Table from 1980-2000 . In 2011, Christ's was placed sixth.-College history:...
to qualify as an Anglican clergyman, Darwin became passionate about beetle collecting, then shone in 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 :...
's botany course. He was convinced by Paley's Natural Theology which set out the Teleological argument
Teleological argument
A teleological or design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and intelligent design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human...
that complexity of "design" in nature proved God's role as Creator, and by the views of Paley and John Herschel
John Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...
that creation was by laws which science could discover, not by intermittent miracles. The geology course of Adam Sedgwick
Adam Sedgwick
Adam Sedgwick was one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale...
and summer work mapping strata in Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
emphasised that life on earth went back over eons of time.
Then on his voyage on the Beagle
Second voyage of HMS Beagle
The second voyage of HMS Beagle, from 27 December 1831 to 2 October 1836, was the second survey expedition of HMS Beagle, under captain Robert FitzRoy who had taken over command of the ship on its first voyage after her previous captain committed suicide...
Darwin became convinced by 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...
's uniformitarian
Uniformitarianism (science)
In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...
theory of gradual geological process, and puzzled over how various theories of creation
History of creationism
The history of creationism relates to the history of thought based on a premise that the natural universe had a beginning, and came into being supernaturally...
fitted the evidence he saw.
In the third edition of On the Origin of Species Darwin provided a historical sketch of his predecessors in writing of descent with modification or natural selection, including those who he had only learned of after the 1859 publication of The Origin. His account essentially deals with 19th century authors; "Passing over authors from the classical period to that of Buffon
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopedic author.His works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier...
, with whose writings I am not familiar, Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on this subject excited much attention." However, in a footnote he remarks on how his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
and Geoffroy Saint Hilaire
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories...
came to the same conclusion on the origin of species in the years 1794-5, anticipating Lamarck.
There is no direct evidence linking Darwin to Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...
's treatise "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.
Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.
Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. is a short essay written in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin. It was circulated by Franklin in manuscript, but in 1755 published as an addendum to another essay....
." However, Franklin was a friend and colleague of both Erasmus and Robert Darwin, and it has been suggested that this work may have influenced Darwin's study of Malthus' belief on the relationship between population and subsistence.
Return to celebrity and science
When the Beagle returned, Darwin was quick to take the coach home and arrived at the family home of The Mount HouseThe Mount, Shrewsbury
The Mount, is the site of a house in Shrewsbury, officially known as Mount House that belonged to Robert Darwin and was the birthplace of his son Charles Darwin.- Overview :...
in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, late at night on 4 October 1836. He went straight to bed, then greeted his family at breakfast and began catching up with news of his family and of the country: "all England appears changed". The Reform Bill had brought what the Tory Duke of Wellington
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS , was an Irish-born British soldier and statesman, and one of the leading military and political figures of the 19th century...
described as a shift in power from decent Tory
Tory
Toryism is a traditionalist and conservative political philosophy which grew out of the Cavalier faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It is a prominent ideology in the politics of the United Kingdom, but also features in parts of The Commonwealth, particularly in Canada...
Anglicans to Whig
British Whig Party
The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...
manufacturers, shopkeepers and atheists. Everyone was discussing the writings of Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularized the economic theory of rent....
on population outstripping resources as the New Poor Law
Poor Law
The English Poor Laws were a system of poor relief which existed in England and Wales that developed out of late-medieval and Tudor-era laws before being codified in 1587–98...
described by opponents as "a Malthusian bill designed to force the poor to emigrate, to work for lower wages, to live on a coarser sort of food" brought the construction of workhouse
Workhouse
In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a spike, was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment...
s in the southern counties despite riots and arson. The government had not yet dared introduce these measures to London and the industrial north, and recession was bringing threats of mass unemployment.
Darwin wrote to 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 :...
that he was still "giddy with joy & confusion... I want your advice on so many points, indeed I am in the clouds" and on 15 October went on to Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
to get advice from Henslow and Sedgwick
Adam Sedgwick
Adam Sedgwick was one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale...
on the task of organising the description and cataloguing of his collections accumulated from the Beagle expedition. Henslow took on the plants, and Darwin was given introductions to the best London naturalists with a warning that they would already be busy with other work.
Charles went on to stay with his brother Erasmus
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...
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...
, near the scientific institutions which were in the throes of renovation, while the city itself was being torn up to install new sewers and gas lighting. He went round 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...
, the Royal 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...
, the Linnean
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...
, the Zoological Society
Zoological Society of London
The Zoological Society of London is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats...
and Geological Society
Geological Society of London
The Geological Society of London is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with the aim of "investigating the mineral structure of the Earth"...
, trying to get the experts to take on his collections. Henslow had already established his former pupil's reputation during the Beagle expedition by giving selected naturalists access to fossil specimens sent back as well as having Darwin's geological writings privately printed for distribution. Darwin went "in most exciting dissipation amongst the Dons in science", and as Charles Bunbury
Sir Charles James Fox Bunbury, 8th Baronet
Sir Charles James Fox Bunbury, 8th Baronet, FRS was an English naturalist.He was born in Messina, the eldest son of Sir Henry Bunbury, 7th Baronet and Louisa Amelia Fox and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He married Frances Joanna Horner, daughter of Leonard Horner, on 31 May 1844 in...
reported, "[he] seems to be a universal collector" finding new species "to the surprise of all the big wigs". While geologists were quick to take on the rock samples, zoologists already had more specimens arriving than they could deal with. Their institutions were in turmoil as democrats argued for reforms replacing the aristocratic amateurs with professional salaried scientists as in the French
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...
research institutes. At the Zoological Society the reformers were led by Darwin's tutor from Edinburgh days, Robert Edmund Grant. Darwin now had an allowance plus stocks from his father, bringing him around £400 per year, and his sympathies were with the amateur clerical "Dons in science" of Cambridge.
Owen and fossils
The geologist Charles LyellCharles 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...
invited Darwin to dinner on 29 October 1836. Over dinner Lyell listened eagerly to Darwin's stories (which supported Lyell's uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism (science)
In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...
) and introduced him to 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...
and William Broderip
William Broderip
William John Broderip was an English lawyer and naturalist.-Life:Broderip, the eldest son of William Broderip, surgeon from Bristol, was born at Bristol on 21 November 1789, and, after being educated at Bristol Grammar School under the Rev. Samuel Seyer, matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, and...
, Tories
Tory
Toryism is a traditionalist and conservative political philosophy which grew out of the Cavalier faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It is a prominent ideology in the politics of the United Kingdom, but also features in parts of The Commonwealth, particularly in Canada...
who had just been involved in voting Grant out of a position at the Zoological Society. Owen was rapidly ousting Grant as the country's leading anatomist. Darwin went to visit him at his Royal 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...
, and Owen agreed to work on some animal specimens in spirits and the fossil bones. Owen shared Darwin's enthusiasm. He was a proponent of German ideas of "organising energy" and vehemently opposed to Grant's evolution. At around this time Grant was one the few to volunteer his help with cataloguing the collection. Darwin turned down the offer, not wanting to be associated with a disreputable radical
Radicalism (historical)
The term Radical was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. It later became a general pejorative term for those favoring or seeking political reforms which include dramatic changes to the social order...
who denounced his Cambridge friends.
On 12 November Darwin visited his Wedgwood relatives at Maer Hall
Maer Hall
The large 17th century stone built country house and estate of Maer Hall dominates the village of Maer, Staffordshire. Its location in the district of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, is attractively rural, but fairly close to the pottery manufacturing area around Stoke-on-Trent which...
and they encouraged him to publish a book of his travels based on his diary, an idea his sisters picked up when he visited his home.
On 2 December he returned to London and began finding takers for his specimens, with Thomas Bell
Thomas Bell (zoologist)
Thomas Bell FRS was an English zoologist, surgeon and writer, born in Poole, Dorset, UK.Bell, like his mother Susan, took a keen interest in natural history which his mother also encouraged in his younger cousin Philip Henry Gosse. Bell left Poole in 1813 for his training as a dental surgeon in...
and the Revd. William Buckland
William Buckland
The Very Rev. Dr William Buckland DD FRS was an English geologist, palaeontologist and Dean of Westminster, who wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus...
interested in the reptiles. Darwin's reputation was being made by the giant mammal fossils. Owen's first surprising revelation was that a hippopotamus
Hippopotamus
The hippopotamus , or hippo, from the ancient Greek for "river horse" , is a large, mostly herbivorous mammal in sub-Saharan Africa, and one of only two extant species in the family Hippopotamidae After the elephant and rhinoceros, the hippopotamus is the third largest land mammal and the heaviest...
sized fossil skull 2 feet 4 inches (710 mm) long which Darwin had bought for about two shillings near Mercedes
Mercedes, Uruguay
Mercedes is the capital and largest city of the department of Soriano in Uruguay. It is located on the junction of Route 2 with Route 14, and is situated on the south bank of the Río Negro. Also Route 21 from Colonia del Sacramento of Colonia Department terminates in this city.Mercedes is an...
while on a "galloping" trip 120 miles (190 km) from Montevideo
Montevideo
Montevideo is the largest city, the capital, and the chief port of Uruguay. The settlement was established in 1726 by Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, as a strategic move amidst a Spanish-Portuguese dispute over the platine region, and as a counter to the Portuguese colony at Colonia del Sacramento...
was of an extinct rodent
Rodent
Rodentia is an order of mammals also known as rodents, characterised by two continuously growing incisors in the upper and lower jaws which must be kept short by gnawing....
-like creature resembling a giant capybara
Capybara
The capybara , also known as capivara in Portuguese, and capibara, chigüire in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador ronsoco in Peru, chigüiro, and carpincho in Spanish, is the largest living rodent in the world. Its closest relatives are agouti, chinchillas, coyphillas, and guinea pigs...
, which Owen named Toxodon
Toxodon
Toxodon is an extinct mammal of the late Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs about 2.6 million to 16,500 years ago. It was indigenous to South America, and was probably the most common large-hoofed mammal in South America at the time of its existence....
. Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline that "[the fossils] are turning out great treasures" and of the Toxodon, "There is another head, as large as a Rhinoceros which as far as they can guess, must have been a gnawing animal. Conceive a Rat or a Hare of such a size— What famous Cats they ought to have had in those days!" The College of Surgeons distributed casts of the fossils to the major scientific institutions.
Darwin paid a visit to his brother Eras's lady friend the literary Whig
British Whig Party
The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...
Miss Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist....
who had strong views on egalitarianism and whose writings had popularised the ideas of Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularized the economic theory of rent....
. "She was very agreeable" and they discussed the "process of world making" that she had seen on her visit to the Niagara Falls
Niagara Falls
The Niagara Falls, located on the Niagara River draining Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, is the collective name for the Horseshoe Falls and the adjacent American Falls along with the comparatively small Bridal Veil Falls, which combined form the highest flow rate of any waterfalls in the world and has...
. While he later remarked on "how ugly" she was, she described Charles as "simple, childlike, painstaking, effective".
Geological début, species related to places
Unhappy with life in a “dirty odious London” he returned to Cambridge on 13 December then wrote his first paper, showing that the ChileChile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
an coast and the South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
n land-mass was rising slowly, and discussed his ideas with Lyell. To Lyell's delight, Darwin went further in balancing the rising continent with sinking mountains forming the basis of coral atoll
Atoll
An atoll is a coral island that encircles a lagoon partially or completely.- Usage :The word atoll comes from the Dhivehi word atholhu OED...
s. Darwin briefly returned to London to read his paper to the Geological Society
Geological Society of London
The Geological Society of London is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with the aim of "investigating the mineral structure of the Earth"...
on 4 January 1837. Despite Darwin's nerves about his début, the talk was so well received that he felt “like a peacock admiring his tail”.
On the same day Darwin presented 80 mammal and 450 bird specimens to the Zoological Society
Zoological Society of London
The Zoological Society of London is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats...
. The Mammalia were ably taken on by George R. Waterhouse
George Robert Waterhouse
George Robert Waterhouse was an English naturalist.In 1833, Waterhouse was elected as the Royal Entomological Society of London's librarian and curator of insects and records....
.
While the birds seemed almost an afterthought the ornithologist John Gould
John Gould
John Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
took them on and was quick to notice the significance of specimens from the Galápagos Islands
Galápagos Islands
The Galápagos Islands are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed around the equator in the Pacific Ocean, west of continental Ecuador, of which they are a part.The Galápagos Islands and its surrounding waters form an Ecuadorian province, a national park, and a...
. He startlingly revealed at the next meeting on 10 January that what Darwin had taken to be wrens, blackbirds and slightly differing finches were "a series of ground finches which are so peculiar" as to form "an entirely new group" of 11 species. The story of what we now call "Darwin's finches
Darwin's finches
Darwin's finches are a group of 14 or 15 species of passerine birds. It is still not clear which bird family they belong to, but they are not related to the true finches. They were first collected by Charles Darwin on the Galápagos Islands during the second voyage of the Beagle...
" was covered by the daily newspapers, though Darwin was in Cambridge and did not get details at this stage. In the minutes of the meeting the number was extended to 12 species.
Owen was finding unexpected relationships from the fossils: the batch included the horse sized Scelidotherium
Scelidotherium
Scelidotherium is an extinct genus of actively mobile ground sloth of the family Mylodontidae, endemic to South America during the middle Pleistocene epoch. It lived from 780,000—11,000 years ago, existing for approximately ....
which appeared to be closely allied to the anteater
Anteater
Anteaters, also known as antbear, are the four mammal species of the suborder Vermilingua commonly known for eating ants and termites. Together with the sloths, they compose the order Pilosa...
, a gigantic ground sloth
Ground sloth
Ground sloths are a diverse group of extinct sloths, in the mammalian superorder Xenarthra. Their most recent survivors lived in the Antilles, where it has been proposed they may have survived until 1550 CE; however, the youngest AMS radiocarbon date reported is 4190 BP, calibrated to c. 4700 BP...
, and an ox-sized armoured armadillo
Armadillo
Armadillos are New World placental mammals, known for having a leathery armor shell. Dasypodidae is the only surviving family in the order Cingulata, part of the superorder Xenarthra along with the anteaters and sloths. The word armadillo is Spanish for "little armored one"...
which he called Glyptodon
Glyptodon
Glyptodon was a large, armored mammal of the family Glyptodontidae, a relative of armadillos that lived during the Pleistocene Epoch. It was roughly the same size and weight as a Volkswagen Beetle, though flatter in shape...
. The Patagonia
Patagonia
Patagonia is a region located in Argentina and Chile, integrating the southernmost section of the Andes mountains to the southwest towards the Pacific ocean and from the east of the cordillera to the valleys it follows south through Colorado River towards Carmen de Patagones in the Atlantic Ocean...
n spine and leg bones from Port St Julian
Puerto San Julián
Puerto San Julián, also known historically as Port St Julian, is a natural harbour in Patagonia in the Santa Cruz Province of Argentina located at . In the days of sailing ships it formed a stopping point, south of Puerto Deseado...
which Darwin had thought might be from a Mastodon
Mastodon
Mastodons were large tusked mammal species of the extinct genus Mammut which inhabited Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and Central America from the Oligocene through Pleistocene, 33.9 mya to 11,000 years ago. The American mastodon is the most recent and best known species of the group...
were apparently from a gigantic guanaco or Llama
Llama
The llama is a South American camelid, widely used as a meat and pack animal by Andean cultures since pre-Hispanic times....
, or perhaps camel
Camel
A camel is an even-toed ungulate within the genus Camelus, bearing distinctive fatty deposits known as humps on its back. There are two species of camels: the dromedary or Arabian camel has a single hump, and the bactrian has two humps. Dromedaries are native to the dry desert areas of West Asia,...
, which Owen named Macrauchenia
Macrauchenia
Macrauchenia was a long-necked and long-limbed, three-toed South American ungulate mammal, typifying the order Litopterna. The oldest fossils date back to around 7 million years ago, and M...
. Lyell saw a "law of succession" with mammals being replaced by their own kind on each continent, and on 17 February used his presidential address at the Geographical Society to present Owen's findings to date on Darwin's fossils, pointing out this inference that extinct species were related to current species in the same locality. He invited Darwin to come along, and the speech drew Darwin's attention to the question of why past and present species in one place should be so closely related. At the same meeting Darwin was elected to the Council of the Society. For Lyell this was "a glorious addition to my society of geologists", gentlemen (and amateurs of independent means) with duty only to scientific integrity, social stability and responsible religion, for Darwin it meant joining the respectable élite of eminent geologists developing a science dealing with the age of the earth and the Days of Creation.
Darwin had already been invited by FitzRoy to contribute his Journal, based on his field notes, as the natural history section of the captain's account of the Beagle's voyage, and this ended up keeping him fully occupied from March 13th to the end of September. He also plunged into writing a book on South American Geology, putting his and Lyell's ideas forward against the cataclysmic explanation of mountain formation Alcide d'Orbigny
Alcide d'Orbigny
Alcide Charles Victor Marie Dessalines d'Orbigny was a French naturalist who made major contributions in many areas, including zoology , palaeontology, geology, archaeology and anthropology....
was promoting in a multi-volume account of the continent begun two years previously.
On Monday 27 February Darwin presented a talk to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on glassy tubes he had found amongst Maldonado
Maldonado, Uruguay
Maldonado is the capital of Maldonado Department of Uruguay. It is located on Route 39 and shares borders with Punta del Este to the south, Pinares - Las Delicias to the south and to the east and suburb La Sonrisa to the north. Together they all for a unified metropolitan area. East of the city...
sand dunes, explained by lightning having fused the sand.
To supervise his collections Darwin had to return to London, and on Lyell's advice he planned to arrive on Friday 3 March 1837, in time for one of Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...
's Saturday parties, talking shops about the latest developments "brilliantly attended by fashionable ladies, as well as literary and scientific gents" and "a good mixture of pretty women", bankers and politicians, where Babbage promoted such projects as his mechanical computer. At first Darwin stayed with Eras, in his journal written up later he put his date of moving as 6 March 1837. On the 13th he moved to nearby lodgings, joining Eras's circle of friends including Martineau and Hensleigh
Hensleigh Wedgwood
Hensleigh Wedgwood was a British etymologist, philologist and barrister, author of A Dictionary of English Etymology. Wedgwood was the fourth son of Josiah Wedgwood II and Elizabeth Allen...
and enjoying his intimate dinner parties with guests such as Lyell, Babbage and Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...
.
In their first meeting to discuss his detailed findings, Gould told Darwin that the Galápagos mockingbird
Mockingbird
Mockingbirds are a group of New World passerine birds from the Mimidae family. They are best known for the habit of some species mimicking the songs of other birds and the sounds of insects and amphibians, often loudly and in rapid succession. There are about 17 species in three genera...
s from different islands were separate species, not just varieties, and the finch group included the “wren
Wren
The wrens are passerine birds in the mainly New World family Troglodytidae. There are approximately 80 species of true wrens in approximately 20 genera....
s”. The two rheas
Rhea (bird)
The rheas are ratites in the genus Rhea, native to South America. There are two existing species: the Greater or American Rhea and the Lesser or Darwin's Rhea. The genus name was given in 1752 by Paul Möhring and adopted as the English common name. Möhring's reason for choosing this name, from the...
were also distinct species, and on 14 March Gould's announcement of this finding to the Zoological Society of London
Zoological Society of London
The Zoological Society of London is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats...
was accompanied by Darwin, who presented a paper on how distribution of the two species of rheas changed going southwards.
Transmutation
Scientific circles were buzzing with ideas of natural theologyNatural theology
Natural theology is a branch of theology based on reason and ordinary experience. Thus it is distinguished from revealed theology which is based on scripture and religious experiences of various kinds; and also from transcendental theology, theology from a priori reasoning.Marcus Terentius Varro ...
. In a letter to Lyell, John Herschel
John Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...
had written of “that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others”. This was circulated and widely discussed, with scientists sharing Herschel's approach of looking for an answer through laws of nature
Physical law
A physical law or scientific law is "a theoretical principle deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined group or class of phenomena, and expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions be present." Physical laws are typically conclusions...
and rejecting ad hoc
Ad hoc
Ad hoc is a Latin phrase meaning "for this". It generally signifies a solution designed for a specific problem or task, non-generalizable, and not intended to be able to be adapted to other purposes. Compare A priori....
miracles as an explanation. Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...
described God as a programmer of such laws. Darwin's freethinking
Freethought
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...
brother Erasmus
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...
was part of this Whig
British Whig Party
The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...
circle and a close friend of the writer Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist....
who promoted the Malthusianism
Malthusianism
Malthusianism refers primarily to ideas derived from the political/economic thought of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, as laid out initially in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population, which describes how unchecked population growth is exponential while the growth of the food...
underlying the controversial Whig Poor Law reforms
Poor Law Amendment Act 1834
The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, sometimes abbreviated to PLAA, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed by the Whig government of Lord Melbourne that reformed the country's poverty relief system . It was an Amendment Act that completely replaced earlier legislation based on the...
to stop welfare from causing overpopulation and more poverty, which were then being implemented piecemeal in the face of opposition to the new poorhouse
Poorhouse
A poorhouse or workhouse was a government-run facility in the past for the support and housing of dependent or needy persons, typically run by a local government entity such as a county or municipality....
s. As a Unitarian
Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
she welcomed the radical
Radicalism (historical)
The term Radical was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. It later became a general pejorative term for those favoring or seeking political reforms which include dramatic changes to the social order...
implications of transmutation of species
Transmutation of species
Transmutation of species was a term used by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 for his theory that described the altering of one species into another, and the term is often used to describe 19th century evolutionary ideas that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection...
, which was promoted by Grant
Robert Edmond Grant
Robert Edmond Grant MD FRCPEd FRS was born in Edinburgh and educated at Edinburgh University as a physician. He became one of the foremost biologists of the early 19th century at Edinburgh and subsequently the first Professor of Comparative Anatomy at University College London...
and some medical men but anathema to Darwin's Anglican friends who saw it as a threat to the social order. Transmutation threatened the essential distinction between man and beast, and implied progressive improvement with the implication that the lower orders could aspire to the privileges of their aristocratic overlords.
The medical establishment controlling the London teaching hospitals, including the Royal 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...
, was restricted to Anglicans
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...
and dominated by the aristocracy who saw perfect animal design as proof a natural theology
Natural theology
Natural theology is a branch of theology based on reason and ordinary experience. Thus it is distinguished from revealed theology which is based on scripture and religious experiences of various kinds; and also from transcendental theology, theology from a priori reasoning.Marcus Terentius Varro ...
supporting their ideas of God-given rank and privilege. Since the 1820s large numbers of private medical schools joined by the new had introduced the "philosophical anatomy" of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories...
based on unity of plan
Homology (biology)
Homology forms the basis of organization for comparative biology. In 1843, Richard Owen defined homology as "the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function". Organs as different as a bat's wing, a seal's flipper, a cat's paw and a human hand have a common underlying...
compatible with the transmutation of species, implying ideas of progressive improvement and hence radical support for democracy. This anatomy had already spread from Paris to the medical schools of Edinburgh, and the new London schools attracted Scots including Grant. Numerous journals new promoted these radical ideas, including Thomas Wakley
Thomas Wakley
Thomas Wakley , was an English surgeon. He became a demagogue and social reformer who campaigned against incompetence, privilege and nepotism. He was the founding editor of The Lancet, and a radical Member of Parliament .- Life :Thomas Wakley was born in Membury, Devon to a prosperous farmer and...
's The Lancet
The Lancet
The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is one of the world's best known, oldest, and most respected general medical journals...
started in 1823 with support from William Cobbett
William Cobbett
William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly...
and William Lawrence
Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet
Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet FRCS FRS was an English surgeon who became President of the Royal College of Surgeons of London and Serjeant Surgeon to the Queen....
, whose 1819 publication of evolutionary ideas had been prosecuted for blasphemy
Blasphemy
Blasphemy is irreverence towards religious or holy persons or things. Some countries have laws to punish blasphemy, while others have laws to give recourse to those who are offended by blasphemy...
. In response, the medical establishment gave support to the idealist biology of Joseph Henry Green
Joseph Henry Green
Joseph Henry Green was an English surgeon who became the literary executor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.-Life:Green was the only son of Joseph Green, a prosperous merchant, and was born on 1 November 1791, at the house over his father's office in London Wall. His mother was Frances Cline, sister of...
and his younger protégé 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...
, based on the vitalism
Vitalism
Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is#a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions...
of German Naturphilosophie
Naturphilosophie
Naturphilosophie is a term used in English-language philosophy to identify a current in the philosophical tradition of German idealism, as applied to the study of Nature in the earlier 19th century...
and Platonic idealism
Platonic idealism
Platonic idealism usually refers to Plato's theory of forms or doctrine of ideas,Some commentators hold Plato argued that truth is an abstraction...
which held that anatomical forms were "archetype
Archetype
An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...
s" in the Divine mind, imposed through "descensive" powers of delegation of divine authority in accordance with traditional hierarchies.
Red notebook
By mid-March, Darwin was speculating in his Red Notebook on the possibility that "one species does change into another" to explain the geographical distribution of living species such as the rheas, and extinct ones such as MacraucheniaMacrauchenia
Macrauchenia was a long-necked and long-limbed, three-toed South American ungulate mammal, typifying the order Litopterna. The oldest fossils date back to around 7 million years ago, and M...
which resembled a giant version of the modern guanacos that Darwin had hunted in the same area of Patagonia
Patagonia
Patagonia is a region located in Argentina and Chile, integrating the southernmost section of the Andes mountains to the southwest towards the Pacific ocean and from the east of the cordillera to the valleys it follows south through Colorado River towards Carmen de Patagones in the Atlantic Ocean...
. Darwin speculated as to why the territories of the rheas overlapped without intermediate species, wondering if mutations (known then as "monsters" or "freaks") "present an analogy to production of species". His Cambridge tutor Adam Sedgwick
Adam Sedgwick
Adam Sedgwick was one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale...
had described those promoting similar ideas as "infidel naturalists..[adopting] false theories". Even for Lyell, this was a heresy which implied ape ancestry, destroying mankind's "high estate".
Darwin was more open to new speculation. He had seen the bestial life of the natives of Tierra del Fuego
Tierra del Fuego
Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of a main island Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego divided between Chile and Argentina with an area of , and a group of smaller islands including Cape...
, apparently happy in their harsh environment, and Jemmy Button
Jemmy Button
Orundellico, known as "Jeremy Button" or "Jemmy Button", was a native Fuegian of the Yaghan people from islands around Tierra del Fuego, in modern Chile and Argentina...
's reversion to savagery. To him the need was to explain how both Fuegians and civilised Europeans could be "essentially the same creatures" from the hand of the same Creator. At the Geographical Society meeting on 2 May 1837, when Darwin read his next paper on the Pampas, the first discoveries of ancient fossil monkeys were announced. Lyell uncomfortably joked that from "Lamarck's view" this gave a long time "for their tails to wear off", but Darwin was beginning to look at these "wonderful" fossils in an evolutionary light.
At their frequent meetings, Owen argued that intrinsic "organising energy" in the "embryonic germ" set the lifespan of the species and precluded transmutation. The botanist 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...
showed Darwin a different concept, of "swarming atoms" inside the germ, allowing nature's self development. Embarrassed by his lack of labels for his finch specimens, he examined FitzRoy's in 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...
and contacted seamen including Syms Covington
Syms Covington
Syms Covington was a fiddler and cabin boy on HMS Beagle who became an assistant to Charles Darwin and was appointed as his personal servant in 1833, continuing in Darwin's service after the voyage until 1839. Originally named Simon Covington, he was born in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England, the...
for their collections. From this he was able to relate the finches to separate islands, with distinct species on each island. As well as pressing on with his Journal, he started an ambitious project to get the expert reports on his collection published as a multi-volume Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. A search for sponsorship was answered when Henslow used his contacts with the Chancellor of the Exchequer
Chancellor of the Exchequer
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the title held by the British Cabinet minister who is responsible for all economic and financial matters. Often simply called the Chancellor, the office-holder controls HM Treasury and plays a role akin to the posts of Minister of Finance or Secretary of the...
Thomas Spring Rice to arrange a Treasury grant of £1,000, a sum equivalent to about £ in present day terms.
During the Beagle voyage Darwin had noted the distribution of the two species of Galápagos iguanas and suspected that "this genus, the species of which are so well adapted to their respective localities, is peculiar to this group of Isds." He had identified the sea iguanas from a book on board as having been named Amblyrhyncus Cristatus by Bell from a specimen which had arrived in Mexico, probably found on the Pacific shore. In June he gave this information to William Buckland
William Buckland
The Very Rev. Dr William Buckland DD FRS was an English geologist, palaeontologist and Dean of Westminster, who wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus...
. As the Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
began, Darwin pressed on with writing his Journal, and in August 1837 began correcting printer's proofs
Galley proof
In printing and publishing, proofs are the preliminary versions of publications meant for review by authors, editors, and proofreaders, often with extra wide margins. Galley proofs may be uncut and unbound, or in some cases electronic...
.
Transmutation notebooks
Zoönomia
Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life is a two-volume medical work by Erasmus Darwin dealing with pathology, anatomy, psychology, and the functioning of the body...
, referring to his grandfather's evolutionary ideas.
He scribbled down a framework for his speculations, jotting down thoughts on the lifespan of individuals and of species, including 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...
's idea that complexity of a species was inversely related to its life span. Darwin thought about reproduction, with asexual reproduction
Asexual reproduction
Asexual reproduction is a mode of reproduction by which offspring arise from a single parent, and inherit the genes of that parent only, it is reproduction which does not involve meiosis, ploidy reduction, or fertilization. A more stringent definition is agamogenesis which is reproduction without...
resulting in copies of the original, but sexual reproduction
Sexual reproduction
Sexual reproduction is the creation of a new organism by combining the genetic material of two organisms. There are two main processes during sexual reproduction; they are: meiosis, involving the halving of the number of chromosomes; and fertilization, involving the fusion of two gametes and the...
producing variation in the offspring which made it possible "to adapt & alter the race to changing world". This could explain the divergence from a common ancestor of Galápagos tortoise
Galápagos tortoise
The Galápagos tortoise or Galápagos giant tortoise is the largest living species of tortoise, reaching weights of over and lengths of over . With life spans in the wild of over 100 years, it is one of the longest-lived vertebrates...
s and mockingbirds, and of the rheas which remained distinct species with their overlapping territories. He sketched branching descent, then a genealogical
Genealogy
Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...
branching of a single evolutionary tree
Tree of life (science)
Charles Darwin proposed that phylogeny, the evolutionary relatedness among species through time, was expressible as a metaphor he termed the Tree of Life...
, in which "It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another". He was thinking of life as arising only once and discarding the independent lineages
Lineage (evolution)
An evolutionary lineage is a sequence of species, that form a line of descent, each new species the direct result of speciation from an immediate ancestral species. Lineages are subsets of the evolutionary tree of life. Lineages are often determined by the techniques of molecular systematics.-...
progressing to higher forms as proposed by Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck , often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist...
and Grant
Robert Edmond Grant
Robert Edmond Grant MD FRCPEd FRS was born in Edinburgh and educated at Edinburgh University as a physician. He became one of the foremost biologists of the early 19th century at Edinburgh and subsequently the first Professor of Comparative Anatomy at University College London...
as well as rejecting Lamarck's gradual progression in favour of what Darwin called "inosculation
Inosculation
Inosculation is a natural phenomenon in which trunks or branches of two trees grow together. When occurring in plants, it is biologically very similar to grafting....
", a clear distinction between even the most closely related species. Still influenced by Paley, he assumed that variants emerged perfect, and developed the hypothesis that, for example, where every island in the Galápagos Archipelago had its own kind of tortoise, these had originated from a single tortoise species and had adapted to life on the different islands in different ways. Thinking of how ancestors could have spread to islands, he noted possible experiments.
Darwin thought that the possibility of common ancestry could not be denied when such strange forms as the platypus
Platypus
The platypus is a semi-aquatic mammal endemic to eastern Australia, including Tasmania. Together with the four species of echidna, it is one of the five extant species of monotremes, the only mammals that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young...
existed. He believed at that time that the Creator used laws to create, and felt this was shown by the unique plants and animals on the Galápagos islands sharing features with mainland American species, while wandering birds such as sandpipers
Scolopacidae
The sandpipers are a large family, Scolopacidae, of waders or shorebirds. They include many species called sandpipers, as well as those called by names such as curlew and snipe. The majority of these species eat small invertebrates picked out of the mud or soil...
were unchanged. A similar relationship in time was shown by the extinct armoured giant Glyptodon
Glyptodon
Glyptodon was a large, armored mammal of the family Glyptodontidae, a relative of armadillos that lived during the Pleistocene Epoch. It was roughly the same size and weight as a Volkswagen Beetle, though flatter in shape...
resembling the modern South American armadillo
Armadillo
Armadillos are New World placental mammals, known for having a leathery armor shell. Dasypodidae is the only surviving family in the order Cingulata, part of the superorder Xenarthra along with the anteaters and sloths. The word armadillo is Spanish for "little armored one"...
. He considered that the way that astronomers once thought that God ordered the movement of individual planets was comparable to individual creation of species in particular countries, but divine powers were "much more simple & sublime" in creating the first animals so that species then arose by "the fixed laws of generation". A hypothesis of "fresh creations" was "mere assumption, it explains nothing further".
Under pressure with organising Zoology and correcting proofs of his Journal which had to have the introduction revised when FitzRoy complained that he was "astonished at the total omission of any notice of the officers" for their help, Darwin's health suffered. On 20 September 1837 he suffered "an uncomfortable palpitation of the heart". His doctors advised him "strongly to knock off all work" and leave for the country. Two days later he went to Maer Hall
Maer Hall
The large 17th century stone built country house and estate of Maer Hall dominates the village of Maer, Staffordshire. Its location in the district of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, is attractively rural, but fairly close to the pottery manufacturing area around Stoke-on-Trent which...
, the Wedgwood's home, for a month of recuperation. His relations wore him out with questions about gaucho
Gaucho
Gaucho is a term commonly used to describe residents of the South American pampas, chacos, or Patagonian grasslands, found principally in parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Chile, and Southern Brazil...
life. His invalid aunt was being cared for by the as yet unmarried Emma
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...
, and his uncle Jos
Josiah Wedgwood II
Josiah Wedgwood II , the son of the English potter Josiah Wedgwood, continued his father's firm and was Member of Parliament for Stoke-upon-Trent from 1832 to 1835...
pointed out an area of ground where cinders had disappeared under loam which Jos though might have been the work of earthworm
Earthworm
Earthworm is the common name for the largest members of Oligochaeta in the phylum Annelida. In classical systems they were placed in the order Opisthopora, on the basis of the male pores opening posterior to the female pores, even though the internal male segments are anterior to the female...
s. Darwin returned to London on 21 October and on 1 November gave a talk on the role of earthworms in soil formation
Pedogenesis
Pedogenesis is the science and study of the processes that lead to the formation of soil ' and first explored by the Russian geologist Vasily Dokuchaev , the so called grandfather of soil science, who determined that soil formed over time as a consequence of...
to the Geological Society, a mundane subject which to them may have seemed eccentric. William Buckland
William Buckland
The Very Rev. Dr William Buckland DD FRS was an English geologist, palaeontologist and Dean of Westminster, who wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus...
subsequently recommended Darwin's paper for publication, praising it as "a new & important theory to explain Phenomena of universal occurrence on the surface of the Earth—in fact a new Geological Power", while rightly rejecting Darwin's suggestion that chalkland could have been formed in a similar way.
Darwin's notebooks developed an essentially materialist
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
and deterministic
Determinism
Determinism is the general philosophical thesis that states that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen. There are many versions of this thesis. Each of them rests upon various alleged connections, and interdependencies of things and...
view of human beings, with the conclusions that freewill was an illusion and the brain was mechanistic. He had avoided taking on official posts which would take valuable time, turning down William Whewell
William Whewell
William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.-Life and career:Whewell was born in Lancaster...
's request that he become Secretary of the Geological Society with excuses including "anything which flurries me completely knocks me up afterwards and brings on a bad palpitation of the heart", but by March 1838 he accepted the post. On 7 March he read to the Society his longest paper yet, which explained the earthquake he had witnessed at Concepción, Chile
Concepción, Chile
Concepción is a city in Chile, capital of Concepción Province and of the Biobío Region or Region VIII. Greater Concepción is the second-largest conurbation in the country, with 889,725 inhabitants...
, in terms of gradual crustal movements, to the delight of Lyell. Despite hours of practice "I was so nervous at first, I somehow could see nothing all around me, & felt as if my body was gone, & only my head left." At the same time Darwin was privately scorning Whewell's faith in a human-centred universe being perfectly adapted to man and writing of "my theory" which he thought "would give zest to recent & Fossil Comparative Anatomy", transforming the "whole metaphysics".
Darwin's ideas fitted with the radical
Radicalism (historical)
The term Radical was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. It later became a general pejorative term for those favoring or seeking political reforms which include dramatic changes to the social order...
Unitarianism of his brother Erasmus
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...
's circle including Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist....
, but were heretical to his Anglican friends in the scientific establishment. Despite stomach upsets Darwin explored in his notebooks the metaphysical implications of a consistent positivist creed, arguing that a person can be “congratulated for doing good” but the act is actually purely conditioned and “deserves no credit”. Indeed, “wickedness is no more a man’s fault than bodily disease!”. His Anglican friends would have found this deterministic materialism more shocking than his ideas of evolution. Such materialist ideas had been seized on by socialist agitators, red Lamarckians
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck , often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist...
who stirred the mob to overthrow the social order and Chartists who even demanded the vote for working men! The establishment and the Tory
Tory
Toryism is a traditionalist and conservative political philosophy which grew out of the Cavalier faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It is a prominent ideology in the politics of the United Kingdom, but also features in parts of The Commonwealth, particularly in Canada...
press were quick to crush such ideas, using the full force of the law at a time when blasphemy was a criminal offence. Many were denounced and overthrown for such scandalous ideas, including the surgeon William Lawrence who was forced to resign his post and lost copyright on his book Lectures on Man. This book was promptly pirated by the notorious agitator and pornography publisher William Benbow
William Benbow
William Benbow was a non-conformist preacher and a leader of the Great Reform Movement in Manchester, England.Benbow worked with William Cobbett on the radical newspaper The Political Register. Faced with being imprisoned for sedition he fled to the United States where he continued to work on the...
, and then published in cheap editions such as the copy that Darwin now read. He was cautious about giving away his half-formed ideas, but openly mentioned his interest in the species question to friends and colleagues.
Dissenters such as John Wesley
John Wesley
John Wesley was a Church of England cleric and Christian theologian. Wesley is largely credited, along with his brother Charles Wesley, as founding the Methodist movement which began when he took to open-air preaching in a similar manner to George Whitefield...
abhorred slavery and privilege, and had a bleaker view of nature than Paley. Darwin reflected these ideas in his notes, writing "Animals – whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. – Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind? Animals with affections, imitation, fear, pain, sorrow for the dead." and "if we choose to let conjecture run wild then animals our fellow brethren in pain, disease death & suffering & famine; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amusements, they may partake, from our origin in one common ancestor we may all be netted together."
Animal observations
By February 1838 Darwin was on to a new pocketbook, the maroon C notebook, and was investigating the breeding of domestic animals. He found the newspaper wholesaler William YarrellWilliam Yarrell
William Yarrell was an English bookseller and naturalist.Yarrell is best known as the author of The History of British Fishes and The History of British Birds . The latter went into several editions and was the standard reference work for a generation of British ornithologists...
at the Zoological museum a fund of knowledge, and questioned if breeders weren't going against nature in "picking varieties". He was now writing of "Descent" rather than transmutation, and hinting at ideas of "adaptation" to climate.
At the zoo on 28 March he had his first sight of an ape, and was impressed at the orang-utan's antics "just like a naughty child" when the keeper held back an apple. In his notes he wrote "Let man visit Ourang-outang in domestication, hear expressive whine, see its intelligence.... let him look at savage...naked, artless, not improving yet improvable & let him dare to boast of his proud preeminence." Here Darwin was drawing on his experience of the natives of Tierra del Fuego
Tierra del Fuego
Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of a main island Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego divided between Chile and Argentina with an area of , and a group of smaller islands including Cape...
and daring to think that there was little gulf between man and animals despite the theological doctrine that only humanity possessed a soul.
He sent his parents the gossip that Miss Martineau had been "as frisky lately as the Rhinoceros. – Erasmus has been with her noon, morning & night: – if her character is not as secure, as a mountain in the polar regions she would certainly lose it". He began thinking about marriage himself, listing the pros and cons on the back of an old letter and noting that rather than being "a man tied down in London" going over information, "I have so much more pleasure in direct observation... In country, experiment & observation on lower animals, – more space."
Darwin found a pamphlet by Yarrell's friend Sir John Sebright
Sir John Sebright, 7th Baronet
Sir John Saunders Sebright, 7th Baronet DL , of Besford, Worcestershire, and Beechwood Park, Hertfordshire, was an English politician and agricultural innovator.-Life:...
with a passage reading:
A severe winter, or a scarcity of food, by destroying the weak and the unhealthy, has all the good effects of the most skilful selection. In cold or barren countries no animals can live to the age of maturity, but those who have strong constitutions; the weak and the unhealthy do not live to propagate their infirmities.After reading the pamphlet, Darwin commented "excellent observations of sickly offspring being cut off". Sebright talked of females falling to "the most vigorous males" and of how "the strongest individuals of both sexes, by driving away the weakest, will enjoy the best food, and the most favourable positions, for themselves and their offspring." To Darwin, while nature removed runts and thrust the fit forward, "the whole art of making [domestic] varieties" by selecting mates to breed an ornamental duck produced "a mere monstrosity propagated by art". Quizzing his cousin William Darwin Fox
William Darwin Fox
The Reverend William Darwin Fox was an English clergyman, naturalist, and a 2nd cousin of Charles Robert Darwin.- Early life :...
about crossing domestic breeds, he admitted for the first time that "It is my prime hobby & I really think some day, I shall be able to do something on that most intricate subject species & varieties." Pondering likely opposition to his ideas, he noted that there must have been "a thousand intermediate forms" between the otter and its land ancestor. "Opponents will say, show me them. I will answer yes, if you will show me every step between bull Dog & Greyhound."
Speculations
Darwin's speculations in his notebooks deepened as he wondered how instincts and mental traits were passed on to offspring, finding it "difficult to imagine [thought as] anything but structure of the brain". He wrote of habits, beliefs and even the "love of deity" having evolved, adding to himself "oh you Materialist!Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
". In private discussions with his cousin, "Hensleigh
Hensleigh Wedgwood
Hensleigh Wedgwood was a British etymologist, philologist and barrister, author of A Dictionary of English Etymology. Wedgwood was the fourth son of Josiah Wedgwood II and Elizabeth Allen...
says the love of the deity & thought of him or eternity, only difference the mind of man & animals" which conflicted with Darwin's own experience with the "savages" of Tierra del Fuego. He struggled on with the Beagle geology, overworked, worried and suffering stomach upsets and headaches which laid him up for days on end. Privately he thought of the social implications of evolution, writing "Educate all classes, improve the women. (double influence) & mankind must improve." This was similar to the position of the radical
Radicalism (historical)
The term Radical was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. It later became a general pejorative term for those favoring or seeking political reforms which include dramatic changes to the social order...
Lamarckians
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck , often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist...
, but female education was already supported by the whole Wedgwood-Darwin family, and strongly advocated by Martineau.
Darwin wrote "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals." He thought grinning was "no doubt a habit gained by formerly being a baboon with giant canine teeth... Laughing modified barking, smiling modified laughing. Barking to tell [troop] good news. discovery of prey. – arising no doubt from want of assistance. – crying is a puzzler."
In June as he worried at these ideas and the Beagle Geology his illness intensified, with stomach upsets, headaches and heart troubles, so that he became overworked and laid up for days on end. "I hope I may be able to work on right hard the next three years... but I find the noddle & the stomach are antagonistic powers, and that it is a great deal more easy to think too much in a day, than to think too little – What thought has to do with digesting roast beef, – I cannot say."
At the same time Darwin was gaining public position, and on 21 June 1838 was elected to the establishment Athenaeum
Athenaeum Club, London
The Athenaeum Club, usually just referred to as the Athenaeum, is a notable London club with its Clubhouse located at 107 Pall Mall, London, England, at the corner of Waterloo Place....
Club, along with Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
. He would dine there daily, feeling " like a gentleman, or rather like a Lord... I enjoy it the more, because I fully expected to detest it... one meets so many people there that one likes to see."
Thoughts of marriage
The Hensleigh WedgwoodHensleigh Wedgwood
Hensleigh Wedgwood was a British etymologist, philologist and barrister, author of A Dictionary of English Etymology. Wedgwood was the fourth son of Josiah Wedgwood II and Elizabeth Allen...
s were now living next door to Erasmus and were visited for a week by Catherine Darwin and Emma Wedgwood
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...
. Charles visited and found them "a very pleasant merry company", particularly noticing Emma's remarkably pleasant manners.
Illness prompted Darwin to take a break from the pressure of work and on 23 June 1838 he took the steamboat
Steamboat
A steamboat or steamship, sometimes called a steamer, is a ship in which the primary method of propulsion is steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels...
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...
to go "geologising" in Scotland. After revisiting Edinburgh on 28 June (the day that Queen Victoria
Victoria of the United Kingdom
Victoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India....
had her coronation in London) he went on to Fort William
Fort William, Scotland
Fort William is the second largest settlement in the highlands of Scotland and the largest town: only the city of Inverness is larger.Fort William is a major tourist centre with Glen Coe just to the south, Aonach Mòr to the north and Glenfinnan to the west, on the Road to the Isles...
. At Glen Roy
Glen Roy
Glen Roy in the Lochaber area of the Highlands of Scotland is a National Nature Reserve and is noted for the geological puzzle of the three roads ....
in glorious weather he was convinced that he had solved the riddle of the "parallel roads" around the glen, which he identified as raised beaches, though later geologists would support the ideas of Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
that these had been formed by glaciation.
Fully recuperated and optimistic, he returned home to The Mount, Shrewsbury
The Mount, Shrewsbury
The Mount, is the site of a house in Shrewsbury, officially known as Mount House that belonged to Robert Darwin and was the birthplace of his son Charles Darwin.- Overview :...
. He discussed his ideas with his father and asked for advice about Emma. Speaking from experience, Doctor Robert Waring Darwin told his son to conceal religious doubts which could cause "extreme misery... Things went on pretty well until the husband or wife became out of health, and then some women suffered miserably by doubting about the salvation of their husbands, thus making them likewise to suffer." Charles drew up a list with two columns on a scrap of paper. Under Marry he listed benefits, "Children–if it please God–Constant companion & friend in old age will feel interested in one,–object to be beloved and played with, better than a dog anyhow.....Imagine living all one's day solitary in smoky dirty London House.–only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps...", while Not Marry headed "Freedom to go where one liked... Not forced to visit relatives..to have the expense and anxiety of children.. fatness & idleness... if many children forced to earn one's bread..". He jotted down further thoughts, then concluded "My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won't do. — Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro' St. Marry–Marry–Marry Q.E.D."
Then he spent his fortnight being "Very idle at Shrewsbury" which meant starting his "D" notebook on the transmutation sequence and his "M" notebook on the evolutionary basis of moral and social behaviour, filling sixty pages with notes and anecdotes from his father about experiences with patients.
Having come down in favour, he went to visit his cousin Emma on 29 July. He did not get around to proposing, but failed to conceal his ideas on transmutation. Emma noted "he is the most open, transparent man I ever saw, and every word expresses his real thoughts." When she asked about ultimate origins he steered clear of the subject, aware that "it will become necessary to show how the first eye is formed" which he could not yet do.
Malthus and natural law
After returning to London on 1 August 1838 Darwin read a review of Auguste ComteAuguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
's Positive Philosophy at the Athenaeum Club. It bolstered his pantheist
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
ideas of natural law
Physical law
A physical law or scientific law is "a theoretical principle deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined group or class of phenomena, and expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions be present." Physical laws are typically conclusions...
s, making him remark "What a magnificent view one can take of the world" with everything synchronised "by certain laws of harmony", a vision "far grander" than the Almighty individually creating "a long succession of vile Molluscous animals – How beneath the dignity of Him"! Only a "cramped imagination" saw God "warring against those very laws he established in all organic nature." His work on Coral Reefs and a paper theorising that Glen Roy
Glen Roy
Glen Roy in the Lochaber area of the Highlands of Scotland is a National Nature Reserve and is noted for the geological puzzle of the three roads ....
had been an arm of the sea soldiered on. He visited the zoo to experiment, observing the reactions of the apes and seeing emotions like "revenge and anger", implying that "Our descent, then, [is the root] of our evil passions." He needed an ally, and hinted to Lyell that his work was "bearing on the question of species", amassing "facts, which begin to group themselves clearly under sub-laws."
On 21 September he had a vivid dream "that a person was hung & came to life, & then made many jokes, about not having run away &c having faced death like a hero... [then] showing [the] scar behind [his neck, where his head had been cut off, proving] that he had honourable wounds."
Then in late September he began reading "for amusement" the 6th edition of Malthus's
Thomas Malthus
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularized the economic theory of rent....
An Essay on the Principle of Population
An Essay on the Principle of Population
The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798 through J. Johnson . The author was soon identified as The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. While it was not the first book on population, it has been acknowledged as the most influential work of its era...
which reminded him of Malthus's statistical proof that human populations breed beyond their means and compete to survive, at a time when he was primed to apply these ideas to animal species. Malthus had softened from the bleakness of the earlier editions, now allowing that the population crush could be mitigated by education, celibacy and emigration. Already Radical
Radicalism (historical)
The term Radical was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. It later became a general pejorative term for those favoring or seeking political reforms which include dramatic changes to the social order...
crowds were demonstrating against the harsh imposition of Malthusian ideas in the Poor Law
Poor Law
The English Poor Laws were a system of poor relief which existed in England and Wales that developed out of late-medieval and Tudor-era laws before being codified in 1587–98...
s, and a slump was resulting in mass emigration. Lyell was convinced that animals were also driven to spread their territory by overpopulation, but Darwin went further in applying the Whig
British Whig Party
The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...
social thinking of struggle for survival with no handouts. His views were secular, but not atheistic. He asked how God's laws had produced "so high a mind" as ours, with purpose
Teleology
A teleology is any philosophical account which holds that final causes exist in nature, meaning that design and purpose analogous to that found in human actions are inherent also in the rest of nature. The word comes from the Greek τέλος, telos; root: τελε-, "end, purpose...
shown by descent geared towards the "production of higher animals", suggesting that "we are [a] step towards some higher end".
Malthus's essay calculates from the birth rate that human population could double every 25 years, but in practice growth is kept in check by death, disease, wars and famine. Darwin was well prepared to see at once that this related to de Candolle's
A. P. de Candolle
Augustin Pyramus de Candolle also spelled Augustin Pyrame de Candolle was a Swiss botanist. René Louiche Desfontaines launched Candolle's botanical career by recommending him at an herbarium...
concept of "nature's war" and also applies to the struggle for existence amongst wildlife, so that when there is more population than resources can maintain, favourable variations that allow the organism to better use the limited resources available tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones destroyed by being unable to get the means for existence, resulting in the formation of new species. On 28 September 1838 he noted this insight, describing it as a kind of wedging, forcing adapted structures into gaps in the economy of nature formed as weaker ones were thrust out. He now had a theory by which to work.
Proposal
Darwin's thoughts and work continued and he suffered repeated bouts of illness. On 11 November he returned to Maer HallMaer Hall
The large 17th century stone built country house and estate of Maer Hall dominates the village of Maer, Staffordshire. Its location in the district of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, is attractively rural, but fairly close to the pottery manufacturing area around Stoke-on-Trent which...
and proposed to Emma.
Again he discussed his ideas, and she subsequently wrote telling him of her "fear that our opinions on the most important subject should differ widely. My reason tells me that honest & conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us. I thank you from my heart for your openness with me & I should dread the feeling that you were concealing your opinions from the fear of giving me pain.... my own dear Charley, we now do belong to each other & I cannot help being open with you... Will you..read our Saviour's farewell discourse to his disciples [from the Gospel of St. John
Gospel of John
The Gospel According to John , commonly referred to as the Gospel of John or simply John, and often referred to in New Testament scholarship as the Fourth Gospel, is an account of the public ministry of Jesus...
]. It is so full of love & devotion & every beautiful feeling". As well as "love one another" it also includes
John 15
John 15 is the fifteenth chapter in the Gospel of John in the New Testament section of the Christian Bible. It is part of what New Testament scholars have called the 'farewell discourses' of Jesus...
"If a man abide not in me...they are burned". He sent her a warm reply which gave her the comfort that he had entered into her heart's concern "a little more", but this tension would remain.
Emma's father promised a dowry of £5,000 plus £400 a year, while Doctor Darwin added £10,000 for Charles, to be invested. They decided to move to London until Charles had "wearied the geological public" with his itch to write, then they would "decide, whether the pleasures of retirement & country... are preferable to society."
Theory
Charles went house-hunting by day. At night he thought about "innumerable variations" (which he still thought were acquired in some way) with competitive nature selecting the best leading to step by step change, while vestigial organs like the human coccyx (tail) were not, as commonly thought, God "rounding out his original thought [to its] exhaustion", but ancestral remnants pointing to "the parent of man".Darwin considered Malthus's argument, that human populations breed beyond their means and compete to survive, in relation to his findings about species relating to localities, earlier enquiries into animal breeding, and ideas of Natural "laws of harmony". Around late November 1838 he compared breeders selecting traits to a Malthusian Nature selecting from random variants, now thrown up by "chance", and in mid December described this comparison as "a beautiful part of my theory, that domesticated races of organics are made by precisely same means as species — but latter far more perfectly & infinitely slower", so that in "species every part of newly acquired structure is fully practical & perfected."
The second edition of Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...
's The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment published that year included a copy of a letter John Herschel
John Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...
had sent to 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...
in 1836, not long before Darwin visited Herschel in Cape Town
Cape Town
Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...
. On 2 December, Darwin wrote in his E Notebook "Babbage 2d Edit. p. 226 — Herschel calls the appearance of new species the mystery of mysteries, & has grand passage upon the problem.! Hurrah — 'intermediate causes' ". Herschel's letter advocated seeking natural causes, as opposed to miraculous causes, and gave philosophical justification to Darwin's project.
In the inception of his theory Darwin tried to satisfy the methodology of William Whewell
William Whewell
William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.-Life and career:Whewell was born in Lancaster...
's metascience
Consilience
Consilience, or the unity of knowledge , has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes...
which is now thought to be mistaken in many ways, and in the 1860s this led to him having to debate the merits of the methodology.
Stress
The Zoology ran into difficulties, with Richard OwenRichard 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...
having to halt work on Fossil Mammalia, and John Gould
John Gould
John Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
sailing off for Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
leaving Darwin to complete the half finished Birds. "What can a man have to say, who works all morning in describing hawks & owls; & then rushes out , & walks in a bewildered manner up one street & down another, looking out for the word To Let'." Emma had arranged to come with the Hensleigh Wedgwoods to London for a week to help with the search for a house, and wrote telling him "It is very well I am coming to look after you my poor old man", before arriving on 6 December.
On 19 December 1838 as secretary of the Geological Society of London
Geological Society of London
The Geological Society of London is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with the aim of "investigating the mineral structure of the Earth"...
Darwin witnessed the vicious interrogation by Owen and his allies including Sedgwick and Buckland of Darwin's old tutor Robert Edmund Grant when they ridiculed Grant's Lamarckian heresy in a clear reminder of establishment hatred of evolutionism
Evolutionism
Evolutionism refers to the biological concept of evolution, specifically to a widely held 19th century belief that organisms are intrinsically bound to increase in complexity. The belief was extended to include cultural evolution and social evolution...
.
During her visit, Emma thought Darwin looked unwell and overtired. At the end of December she wrote urging him "to leave town at once & get some rest. You have looked so unwell for some time that I fear you will be laid up... nothing could make me so happy as to feel that I could be of any use or comfort to my own dear Charles when he is not well. So don't be ill any more my dear Charley till I can be with you to nurse you".
Marriage
On 29 December 1838, Darwin took the let of a furnished property at 12 Upper Gower StreetGower Street
Gower Street may refer to:*Gower Street *Gower Street...
. He wrote to Emma that "Gower St is ours, yellow curtains & all", and of his delight at being the "possessor of Macaw Cottage". which he long recalled for its gaudy coloured walls and furniture that "combined all the colours of the macaw in hideous discord", Emma rejoiced at their getting a house she liked, while hoping that they had got rid of "that dead dog out of the garden". Darwin impatiently moved his "museum" in on 31 December, astounding himself, Erasmus and the porters with the weight of his luggage containing geological specimens.
On 24 January 1839 he was honoured by being elected as Fellow of 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"...
and presented his paper on the Roads of Glen Roy. The next day he took the train home to Shrewsbury, then on the 28th travelled to Maer Hall
Maer Hall
The large 17th century stone built country house and estate of Maer Hall dominates the village of Maer, Staffordshire. Its location in the district of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, is attractively rural, but fairly close to the pottery manufacturing area around Stoke-on-Trent which...
.
On 29 January 1839, Charles married Emma at Maer, Staffordshire
Maer, Staffordshire
Maer is a rural village and civil parish in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, to the west of the pottery manufacturing town of Stoke-on-Trent....
in an Anglican ceremony arranged to also suit the Unitarians, conducted by the vicar, their cousin John Allen Wedgwood
John Allen Wedgwood
The Reverend John Allen Wedgwood , normally known as Allen Wedgwood was rector of Maer Staffordshire.Wedgwood was the fifth of six children and the fourth and youngest son of John Wedgwood , and his wife Louisa Jane Allen...
. Emma's bedridden mother slept through the service, sparing Emma "the pain of parting". Immediately afterwards Charles and Emma rushed off to the railway station, raising their relative's eyebrows, and ate their sandwiches and toasted their future from a "bottle of water" on the train. Back at Macaw Cottage, Charles noted in his journal "Married at Maer & returned to London 30 years old", and in his "E" notebook recorded uncle John Wedgwood
John Allen Wedgwood
The Reverend John Allen Wedgwood , normally known as Allen Wedgwood was rector of Maer Staffordshire.Wedgwood was the fifth of six children and the fourth and youngest son of John Wedgwood , and his wife Louisa Jane Allen...
's views on turnips.
See the development of Darwin's theory
Development of Darwin's theory
Following the inception of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection in 1838, the development of Darwin's theory to explain the "mystery of mysteries" of how new species originated was his "prime hobby" in the background to his main occupation of publishing the scientific results of the Beagle...
for the ensuing developments, in the context of his life, work and outside influences at the time.
External links
- 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