IMa»MMMMMM«^^M iSMi^ TTt L '^ Jb JjL J& Am^'iA 1 1/ « t 1^1^ . Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcli ive.org/details/cliarlesdarwinOOalleiala Edited by ANDREW LANG ^CHARLES DARWIN^ "4- GEANT ALLEN NEW YOEK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 1, 8, ASD 6 BOND STREET. 1885. 1 ??^ PEEFACB In this little volume I have endeavoured to present tho life and work of Charles Darwin viewed as a moment in a great revolution, in due relation both to those who went before and to those who come after him. Recog- nising, as has been well said, that the wave makes the crest, not the crest the wave, I have tried to let my hero fall naturally into his proper place in a vast onward movement of the human intellect, of which he was himself at once a splendid product and a moving cause of the first importance. I have attempted to show him both as receiving the torch from Lamarck and Malthus, and as passing it on with renewed brilliancy to the wide school of evolutionary thinkers whom his work was instrumental in arousing to fresh and vigorous activity along a thousand separate and varied lines of thought and action. As Mr. Francis Darwin was already engaged upon a life of his father, I should have shrunk from putting iv Preface forth my own little book if I had not succeeded in securing beforehand his kind sanction. That sanction, however, was at once so frankly and cordially given, that all my hesitation upon such a score was immediately laid aside ; and as I have necessarily had to deal rather with Darwin's position as a thinker and worker than with the biographical details of his private life, I trust the lesser book may not clash with the greater, but to some extent may supplement and even illustrate it. Treating my subject mainly as a study in the inter- action of organism and environment, it has been neces- sary for me frequently to introduce the names of living men of science side by side with some of those who have more or less recently passed away from among us. For uniformity's sake, as well as for brevity's, I have been compelled, in every instance alike, to omit the customary conventional handles. I trust those who thus find themselves docked of their usual titles of respect will kindly remember that the practice is in fact adopted honoris causa ; they are paying prematurely the usual penalty of intellectual greatness. My obligations to Professor Huxley, to Professor Fiske, to Mr. Herbert Spencer, to Professor Sachs, to Hermann Miiller, to Dr. Krause, to Charles Darwin him- self, and to many other historians and critics of evolu- tionism, will be sufficiently obvious to all instructed Preface v readers, and are for tlie most part fully acknowledged already in tlie text. It would be absurd to overload so small and popularly written a book with references and authorities. I hope, therefore, that any other writers to whom I may inadvertently have neglected to confess my debts will kindly rest satisfied with this general acknow- ledgment. There are, however, three persons in par- ticular from whom I have so largely borrowed facts or ideas that I owe them more special and definite thanks. From Mr. Woodall's admirable paper on Charles Dar- win, contributed to the ' Transactions of the Shropshire Archasological Society,' I have taken much interesting information about my hero's immediate ancestry and early days. From Mr. Samuel Butler, the author of * Evolution Old and New,' I have derived many preg- nant suggestions with regard to the true position and meaning of Bufibn, Erasmus Darwin, and the early essentially teleological evolutionists — suggestions which I am all the more anxious to acknowledge since I differ fundamentally from Mr. Butler in his estimate of the worth of Charles Darwin's distinctive discovery of natural selection. Finally, to Mr. Bates, the ' Naturalist on the Amazons,' I am indebted for several valuable items of information as to the general workings of the pre-Darwinian evolutionary spirit. In a book dealing so largely with a contemporary vi Preface movement, the history of which has never yet been con- secutively written down in full, or subjected as a whole to searching criticism, there must probably be many errors of detail, which can hardly be avoided under such circumstances. I have endeavoured to minimise them as far as possible. For those which may have escaped my own scrutiny I must trust both for correction and for indulgence to the kindness of my readers. CONTENTS CHAPTER FAGB I. THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN . . • II. CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS ... 20 III. EARLY DAYS 31 IV. DARWIN'S WANDER-YEARS 38 V. THE PERIOD OF INCUBATION 88 VI. THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 79 VII. THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION BEGINS . . . us VIII. THE DESCENT OF MAN I33 IX. THE THEORY OF COURTSHIP I44 X. VICTORY AND REST 155 XI. DARWIN'S PLACE IN THE EVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT 177 XII. THE NET RESULT ....... 192 INDEX . ... 203 CHAELES DAE WIN. CHAPTER I. THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN. Charles Darwin was a great man, and he accomplished a great work. The Newton of biology, he found the science of life a chaotic maze; he left it an orderly system, with a definite plan and a recognisable meaning. Great men are not accidents; great works are not accomplished in a single day. Both are the product of adequate causes. The great man springs from an ancestry competent to produce him ; he is the final flower and ultimate outcome of converging hereditary forces, that culminate at last in the full production of his splendid and exceptional personality. The great work which it is his mission to perform in the world is never wholly of his own inception. It also is the last effect of antecedent conditions, the slow result of ten- dencies and ideas long working unseen or but little noticed beneath the surface of opinion, yet all gradually conspiring together towards the definitive revolution at whose head, in the fulness of time, the as yet unborn genius is destined to place himself. This is especially 2 Charles Darwin the case with those extraordinary waves of mental upheaval, one of which gave us the Italian renaissance, and another of which is actually in progress around us at the present day. They have their sources deep down in the past of human thought and human feeling, and they are themselves but the final manifestation of innumerable energies which have long been silently agi- tating the souls of nations in their profoundest depths. Thus, every great man may be regarded as possess- ing two distinct lines of ancestry, physical and spiritual, each of which separately demands elucidation. He owes much in one way to his father and his mother, his grandfathers and his grandmothers, and his remoter progenitors, from some or all of whom he derives, in varying degrees and combinations, the personal qualities whose special interaction constitutes his greatness and his idiosyncrasy ; he owes much in another way to his intellectual and moral ancestors, the thinkers and workers who have preceded him in his own department of thought or action, and have made possible in the course of ages the final development of his special revo- lution or his particular system. Viewed as an indivi- dual, he is what he is, with all his powers and faculties and potentialities, in virtue of the brain, the frame, the temperament, the energy he inherits directly from his actual ancestors, paternal and maternal ; viewed as a factor or element in a great movement, he is what he is because the movement had succeeded in reachinor such and such a point in its progress already without him, and waited only for such and such a grand and commanding personality in order to carry it yet a step further on its course of development. The World into which Darwin was Born 3 No man who ever lived would more cordially have recognised these two alternative aspects of the great worker's predetermining causes than Charles Darwin. He knew well that the individual is the direct cumulative product of his physical predecessors, and that he works and is worked upon in innumerable ways by the particular environment into whose midst he is born. Let us see, then, in his own case what were these two main sets of conditioning circumstances which finally led up to the joint production of Charles Darwin, the man and the philosopher, the thinking brain and the moving energy. In other words, what was the state of the science of life at the time when he first began to observe and to speculate ; and what was the ancestry which made him be born a person capable of helping it forward at a single bound over its great restricting dogmatic barrier of the fixity of species ? Let us begin, in the first place, by clearing the path beforehand of a popular misconception, so extremely general and almost universal that, unless it be got rid of at the very outset of our sketch, much of the real scope and purport of Darwin's life and work must, of necessity, remain entirely misunderstood by the vast mass of English readers. In the public mind Darwin is, perhaps, most commonly regarded as the discoverer and founder of the evolution hypothesis. Two ideas are usually associated with his name and memory. It is believed that he was the first propounder of the theory which supposes aU plant and animal forms to be the result, not of special creation, but of slow modification in pre-existent organisms. It is further and more particularly believed that he was the first 4 Charles Darwin proponnder of the theory which supposes the descent of man to be traceable from a remote and more or less monkey-like ancestor. Now, as a matter of fact, Darwin was not the prime originator of either of these two great cardinal ideas. Though he held both as part of his organised theory of things, he was not by any means the first or the earliest thinker to hold them or to propound them publicly. Though he gained for them both a far wider and more general acceptance than they had ever before popularly received, he laid no sort of claim himself to originality or proprietorship in either theory. The grand idea which he did really originate was not the idea of ' descent with modifica- tion,' but the idea of 'natural selection,' by which agency, as he was the first to prove, definite kinds of plants and animals have been slowly evolved from simpler forms, with definite adaptations to the special circumstances by which they are surrounded. In a word, it was the peculiar glory of Charles Darwin, not to have suggested that all the variety of animal and vegetable life might have been produced by slow modi- fications in one or more original types, but to have shown the nature of the machinery by which such a result could be actually attained in the practical working out of natural causes. He did not invent the develop- ment theory, but he made it believable and comprehen- sible. He was not, as most people falsely imagine, the Moses of evolutionism, the prime mover in the biological revolution; he was the Joshua who led the world of thinkers and workers into full fruition of that promised land which earlier investigators had but dimly descried from the Pisgah-top of conjectural speculation. The World into which Darwin was Born 5 How far Darwin's special idea of natural selection supplemented and rendered credible the earlier idea of descent with modification we shall see more fully when we come to treat of the inception and growth of his great epoch-making work, ' The Origin of Species ; ' for the present, it must suffice to point out that in the world into which he was born, the theory of evolution already existed in a more or less shadowy and un- developed shape. And since it was his task in life to raise this theory from the rank of a mere plausible and happy guess to the rank of a highly elaborate and almost universally accepted biological system, we may pause awhile to consider on the threshold what was the actual state of natural science at the moment when the great directing and organising intelligence of Charles Darwin first appeared. From time immemorial, in modern Christendom at leaKt, it had been the general opinion of learned and simple alike that every species of plant or animal owed its present form and its original existence to a distinct act of special creation. This naif belief, unsupported as it was by any sort of internal evidence, was supposed to rest directly upon the express authority of a few obscure statements in the Book of Genesis. The Creator, it was held, had in the beginning formed each kind after a particular pattern, had endowed it with special organs devised with supreme wisdom for subserving special functions, and had bestowed upon it the mystical power of reproducing its like in its own image to all generations. No variation of importance ever occurred within the types thus constituted; all plants and animals always retained their special forms unaltered in any 2 6 Charles Darwin way from era to era. This is tlie doctrine of the fixity and immutability of species, almost universal in the civilised world up to the end of the last century. Improbable as such a crude idea now seems to any person even moderately acquainted with the extra- ordinary variety and variability of living forms, it nevertheless contained nothing at all likely to con- tradict the ordinary experience of the everyday observer in the last century. The handful of plants and animals with which he was personally acquainted consisted for the most part of a few large, highly advanced, and well-marked forms, not in the least liable to be mistaken for one another even by the most hasty and casual spectator. A horse can immediately be discriminated by the naked eye from a donkey, and a cow from a sheep, without risk of error; nobody is likely to confuse wheat with barley, or to hesitate between classing any given fruit that is laid before him as a pear or an apple, a plum or a nectarine. Variability seldom comes under the notice of the ordinary passing- spectator as it does under that of the prying and curious scientific observer ; and when it comes at all, as in the case of dogs and pigeons, roses and hyacinths, it is no doubt set down carelessly on a superficial view as a mere result of human selection or of deliberate mongrel interbreed- ing. To the eye of the average man, all the living objects ordinarily perceived in external nature fall at once under certain fixed and recognisable kinds, as dogs and horses, elms and ashes, whose limits he is never at all inclined to confound in any way one with the other. Linnaeus, the great father of modem scientific The World into which Darwin was Born 7 biology, had frankly and perhaps unthinkingly accepted this current and almost universal dogma of the fixity and immutability of species. Indeed, by defining a kind as a group of plants or animals so closely resembling one another as to give rise to the belief that they might all be descended from a single ancestor or pair of ancestors, he implicitly gave the new sanction of his weighty authority to the creation hypothesis, and to the pre- valent doctrine of the unchangeability of organic forms. To Linnaeus, the species into which he mapped out all the plants and animals then known, appeared as the descendants each of a solitary progenitor or of a primitive couple, called into existence at the beginning of all things by the direct fiat of a designing Creator. He saw the world of organic life as composed of so many well-demarcated types, each separate, distinct, and immutable, each capable of producing its like ad, infinitum, and each unable to vary from its central standard in any of its individuals, except perhaps within very narrow and unimportant limits. But towards the close of the eighteenth century, side by side with the general awakening of the human intellect and the arrival of a new , era of free social investigation, which culminated in a fresh order of things, there was developed a more critical and sceptical attitude in the world of science, which soon produced a notable change of front among thinking naturalists as to the origin and meaning of specific distinctions. Bufibn was the first great biological innovator who ventured, in very doubtful and tentative language, to suggest the possibility of the rise of species from one 8 Charles Darwin another bj slow modification of ancestral forms. Essen- tially a popular essayist, writing in the volcanic priest- suppressed France of the ancien regime, during the inconsistent days of Louis XV. and Louis XVL, when it was uncertain whether novel and heterodox opinions would bring down upon their author fame and reputa- tion or the Sorbonne and the Bastille, Buffon was careful to put his conjectural conclusions in a studiously guarded and often even ironical form. But time after time, in his great discursive work, the ' Histoire Natu- relle' (published in successive volumes between 1749 and 1788), he recurs anew to the pregnant suggestion that plants and animals may not be bound by fixed and immovable limits of species, but may freely vary in every direction from a common centre, so that one kind may gradually and slowly be evolved by natural causes from the type of another. He points out that, under- lying all external diversities of character and shape, fundamental likenesses of type occur in many animals, which irresistibly suggest the novel notion of common descent from a single ancestor. Thus regarded, he says, not only the ass and the horse (to take a parti- cular passage) but even man himself, the monkeys, the quadrupeds, and all vertebrate animals, might be viewed as merely forming divergent branches of one and the same great family tree. Every such family, he believed, whether animal or vegetable, might have sprung ori ginally from a single stock, which after many gener- ations had here developed into a higher form, and there degenerated into a lower and less perfect t}^e of organisation. Granting this — granting that nature could by slow variation produce one species in the The World into which Darwin was Born g course of direct descent from another unlike it (for example, the ass from the horse), then, Buffon observed, there was no further limit to be set to her powers in this respect, and we might reasonably conclude that from a single primordial being she has gradually been able in the course of time to develop the whole con- tinuous gamut of existing animal and vegetable life. To be sure, Buffon always saves himself from censure by an obvious afterthought — ' But no ; it is certain from revelation that every species was directly created by a separate fiat.' This half-hearted and somewhat subrisive denial, however, must be taken merely as a concession to the Sor bonne and to the fashionable exegesis of his own day ; and, even so, the Sorbonne was too much in the end for the philosophic thinker. He had once in his life at least to make his submission and demand pardon from the oflfended orthodoxy of the Paris faculty. The wave of thought and feeling, thus apologetically and tentatively stirred on the unrufiled pond of eighteenth century opinion by the startling plop of Bufibn's little smooth-cut pebble, soon widened out on every side in concentric circles, and affected with its wash the entire world of biological science in every country. Before the close of the eighteenth century speculation as to the origin of species was rife in all quarters of Europe. In France itself, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, constitutionally cautious and undecided, but wide of view and free from prejudice, came slowly to the conclusion, in 1795, that all species are really derived by modification from one or more primitive types. In Germany, in the very same year, Goethe, lo Charles Darwin with the keen vision of the poet and the calm eye of the philosopher uniquely combined, discerned indepen- dently as by a lightning flash the identical idea of the origin of kinds by modification of pre-existent organisms. *We may assert without hesitation,' says that great nebulous thinker and observer, ' that all the more perfect organic natures, such as fishes, amphibians, birds and mammals, with man at their head, were formed at first on one original type, which still daily changes and modifies its form by propagation.' In England, twelve months earlier, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather (of whom more anon), published his ' Zoonomia,' a treatise on the laws of animal life, in which he not only adopted Bufibn's theory of the origin of species by evolution, but also laid down as the chief cause of such development the actions and needs of the animals themselves. According to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, animals came to vary from one another chiefly because they were always altering their habits and voluntarily accommodating themselves to new actions and positions in life. His work produced com- paratively little effect upon the world at large in his own time, but it had immense influence upon the next great prophet of evolution, Lamarck, and through Lamarck on Lyell, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the modern school of evolutionists generally. We shall consider his views in greater detail when we pass froin the spiritual to the physical antecedents of Charles Darwin. It was in 1801 that Lamarck first gave to the world his epoch-making speculations and suggestions on the origin of species ; and from that date to the day of his The World into which Darwin was Born ii death, in 1831, the unwearied old philosopher continued to devote his whole time and energy, in blindness and poverty, to the elucidation of this interesting and im- portant subject, A bold, acute, and vigorous thinker, trained in the great school of Diderot and D'Alembert, with something of the vivid Celtic poetic imagination, and a fearless habit of forming his own conclusions irrespective of common or preconceived ideas, Lamarck went to the very root of the matter in the most deter- mined fashion, and openly proclaimed in the face of frowning officialism under the Napoleonic reaction his profound conviction that all species, including man, were descended by modification from one or more primordial forms. In Charles Darwin's own words, * He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change, in the organic as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law and not of miraculous interposition. Lamarck seems to have been chiefly led to his conclusion on the gradual change of species by the difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, by the almost perfect gradation of forms in certain groups, and by the analogy of domestic productions. With respect to the means of modifica- tion, he attributed something to the direct action of the physical conditions of life, something to the crossing of already existing forms, and much to use and disuse, that is, to the effects of habit. To this latter agency he seems to attribute all the beautiful adaptations in nature — such as the long neck of the girafle for browsing on the branches of trees.' He believed, in short, that animals had largely developed themselves, by functional efibrt followed by increased powers and abilities. 12 Charles Darwin Lamarck's great work, tke ' Pliilosophle Zoologique,* though opposed by the austere and formal genius of the immortal Cuvier — a reactionary biological conservative and obscurantist, equal to the enormous task of map- ping out piecemeal with infinite skill and power the separate provinces of his chosen science, but incapable of taking in all the bearings of the whole field at a single vivid and comprehensive sweep — Lamarck's great work produced a deep and lasting impression upon the entire subsequent course of evolutionary thought in scientific Europe. True, owing to the retrograde tendencies of the First Empire, it caused but little immediate stir at the precise moment of its first publica- tion ; but the seed it sowed sank deep, and, lying fallow long in men's minds, bore fruit at last in the next gener- ation with the marvellous fecundity of the germs of genius. Indeed, from the very beginning of the present century, a ferment of inquiry on the subject of creation and evolution was everywhere obvious among speculative tliinkers. The pBofound interest which Goethe took in the dispute on this very subject in the French Academie des Sciences between Cuvier and Geofiroy St. Hilaire, amid the thundering guns of a threatened European convulsion, was but a solitary symptom of the general stir which preceded the gestation and birth of the Dar- winian hypothesis. It is impossible to take up any scientific memoirs or treatises of the first half of our own century without seeing at a glance how every mind of high original scientific importance was permeated and disturbed by the fundamental questions aroused, but not fully answered, by Bufibn, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. In Lyell's letters and in Agassiz's lectures, in The World into which Darwin was Born 13 the ' Botanic Journal ' and the * Philosopliical Transac- tions,' in treatises on ^Madeira beetles and the Australian flora, we find everywhere the thoughts of men pro- foundly influenced in a thousand directions by this universal evolutionary solvent and leaven. And while the world of thought was thus seething and moving restlessly before the wave of ideas set in motion by these various independent philosophers, another group of causes in another field was rendering smooth the path beforehand for the future champion of the amended evolutionism. Geology on the one hand and astronomy on the other were making men's minds gradually familiar with the conception of slow natural development, as opposed to immediate and miraculous creation. The rise of geology had been rapid and brilliant. In the last century it had been almost universally believed that fossil organisms were the relics of sub- merged and destroyed worlds, strange remnants of successive terrible mundane catastrophes. Cuvier himself, who had rendered immense services to geo- logical science by his almost unerring reconstructions of extinct animals, remained a partisan of the old theory of constant cataclysms and fresh creations throughout his whole life ; but Lamarck, here as else- where the prophet of the modern uniformitarian con- cept of nature, had already announced his grand idea that the ordinary process of natural laws sufficed to account for all the phenomena of the earth's crust. In England, William Smith, the ingenious land surveyor, riding up and down on his daily task over the face of the country, became convinced by his observations in 14 Charles Darwin the first years of the present century that a fixed order of sequence could everywhere be traced among the various superincumbent geological strata. Modem scientific geology takes its rise from the moment of this luminous and luminiferous discovery. With astonishing rapidity the sequence of strata was everywhere noted, and the succession of characteristic fossils mapped out, with the result of showing, however imperfectly at first, that the history of organic life upon the globe had followed a slow and regular course of constant develop- ment. Immediately whole schools of eager workers employed themselves in investigating in separate detail the phenomena of these successive stages of unfolding life. Murchison, fresh from the Peninsular campaign, began to study the dawn of organic history in the gloom of the Silurian and Cambrian epochs. A group of less articulate but not less active workers like Buckland and Mantell performed similar services for the carboniferous, the wealden, and the tertiary deposits. Sedgwick en- deavoured to co-ordinate the whole range of then known facts into a single wide and comprehensive survey. De La Beche, Phillipps, and Agassiz added their share to the great work of reconstruction. Last of all, among those who were contemporary and all but coeval with Charles Darwin himself, Lyell boldly fought out the battle of ' nniformitarianism,' proving, with all the accumulated weight of his encyclopedic and world- wide knowledge, that every Igiown feature of geological development could be traced to the -agency of causes now in action, and illustrated by means of slow secular changes still actually taking place on earth before our very eyes. The World into which Darwin was Born 15 The influence of these novel conceptions upon the growth and spread of evolutionary ideas was far-reach- ing and twofold. In the first place, the discovery of a definite succession of nearly related organic forms, following one another with evident closeness through the various ages, inevitably suggested to eveiy inquiring observer the possibility of their direct descent one from the other. In the second place, the discovery that geological formations were not really separated each from its predecessor by violent revolutions, but were the result of gradual and ordinary changes, discredited the old idea of frequent fresh creations after each cata- strophe, and familiarised the minds of men of science with the alternative notion of slow and natural evolu- tionary processes. The past was seen to be in effect the parent of tlie present; the present was recognised as the child of the past. Current astronomical theories also pointed inevit- ably in the same direction. Kant, whose supereminent fame as a philosopher has almost overshadowed his just claims as a profound thinker in physical science, had already in the third quarter of the eighteenth century arrived at his sublime nebular hypothesis, in which he suggested the possible development of stars, suns, planets, and satellites by the slow contraction of very diffuse and incandescent haze-clouds. This magnificent cosmical con- ception was seized and adapted by the genius of Laplace in his celestial system, and made familiar through his great work to thinking minds throughout the whole of Europe. In England it was further modified and remodelled by Sir William Herschel, whose period of active investigation coincided in part with Charles 1 6 Charles Darwin Darwin's early boyhood. The bearings of the nebular hypothesis upon the rise of Darwinian evolutionism are by no means remote : the entire modern scientific movement forms, in fact, a single great organic whole, of which the special doctrine of biological development is but a small separate integral part. All the theories and doctrines which go to make it up display the one common trait that they reject the idea of direct creative interposition from without, and attribute the entire existing order of nature to the regular unfolding of one undeviating continuous law. Yet another factor in the intellectual stir and bustle of the time must needs be mentioned even in so short and cursory a sketch as this of the causes which led to the Darwinian crisis. In 1798, Thomas Malthus, a clergyman of the Church of England, published the first edition of his famous and much-debated ' Essay on the Principle of Population.' Malthus was the first person who ever called public attention to the tendency of population to increase up to the utmost limit of sub- sistence, as well as to the necessary influence of starvation in checking its further development beyond that point- Though his essay dealt only with the question of repro- duction in human societies, it was clear that it possessed innumerable analogies in every domain of animal and vegetable life. The book ran through many successive editions with extraordinary rapidity for a work of its class, it was fiercely attacked and bravely defended, it caused an immense amount of discussion and debate, and besides its marvellous direct influence as a germinal power upon the whole subsequent course of politico- economical and sociological thought, it produced also a The World into which Darwin was Born 17 remarkable indirect influence on the side current of biological and speculative opinion. In particular, as we stall more fully see hereafter, it had an immediate effect in suggesting to the mind of the great naturalist who forms our present subject the embryo idea of ' natural selection.' Such then was the intellectual and social world into which, early in the present century, Charles Darwin found himself bom. Everywhere around him in his childhood and youth these great but formless evolu- tionary ideas were brewing and fermenting. The scientific society of his elders and of the contemporaries among whom he grew up was permeated with the leaven of Laplace and of Lamarck, of Hutton and of Herschel. Inquiry was especially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific distinctions among plants and animals. Those who believed in the doctrine of Buffon and of the * Zoonomia ' and those who dis- believed in it, alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by the far-reaching implications of that fundamental problem. On every side evolutionism, in its crude form, was already in the air. Long before Charles Darwin himself published his conclusive ' Origin of Species,' every thinking mind in the world of science, elder and younger, was deeply engaged upon the self-same problem. Lyell and Horner in alternate fits were doubt- ing and debating. Herbert Spencer had already frankly accepted the new idea with the profound conviction of a priori reasoning. Agassiz was hesitating and raising difficulties. Treviranus was ardently proclaiming his un- flinching adhesion. Oken was spinning in metaphy- sical Germany his fanciful parodies of tjie Ijamarckian 3 1 8 Charles Darwin hypothesis. Among the depths of Brazilian forests Bates was reading the story of evolution on the gauze-like wings of tropical butterflies. Under the scanty shade of Malayan palm-trees Wallace was independently spelling out in rude outline the very theory of stirvival of the fittest, which Charles Darwin himself was simultaneously perfecting and polishing among the memoirs and pam- phlets of his English study. WoUaston in Madeira was pointing out the strange adaptations of the curious local snaUs and beetles. Von Buch in the Canaries was coming to the conclusion that varieties may be slowly changed into permanent species. Lecoq and Von Baer were gradually arriving, one by the botanical route, the other by the embryological, at the same opinion. Before Charles Darwin was twenty, Dean Herbert had declared from the profound depth of his horticultural knowledge that kinds were only mere fixed sports ; and Patrick Matthew, in the appendix to a work on * Naval Timber,' had casually developed, without perceiving its import- ance, the actual distinctive Darwinian doctrine of natural selection. Robert Chambers published in 1844 his ' Vestiges of Creation,' in which Lamarck's theory was impressed and popularised under a somewhat spoilt and mistaken form : it was not till 1859 that the first edition of the ' Origin of Species ' burst like a thunder- bolt upon the astonished world of unprepared and unscientific thinkers. This general attitude of interest and inquiry is of deep importance to the proper comprehension of Charles Darwin's life and work, and that for two distinct reasons. In the first place, the universal stir and deep prying into evolutionary questions which everywhere existed The World into which Darwin was Born 19 among scientific men in his early days was naturally communicated to a lad bom of a scientific family, and inheriting directly in blood and bone the biological tastes and tendencies of Erasmus Darwin. In the second place, the existence of such a deep and wide- spread curiosity as to ultimate origins, and the common prevalence of profound uniformitarian and evolutionary views among philosophers and thinkers, made the accept- ance of Charles Darwin's particular theory, when it at last arrived, a comparatively easy and certain matter, because by it the course of organic development was assimilated, on credible grounds, to the course of all other development in general, as then already widely recognised. The first consideration helps us to account in part for the man himself; the second consideration helps us even more to account for the great work which ho was enabled in the end so successfully to accomplish. 20 Charles Darwin CHAPTER II. CHARLES DAEWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS. From the environment let us turn to the individual ; from the world in which the man moved to the man who moved in it, and was in time destined to move it. Who was he, and whence did he derive his excep- tional energy and intellectual panoply ? Erasmus Danvin, the grandfather, the first of the line in whom the distinctive Darwinian strain of intellect overtly displayed itself, was the son of one Robert Darwin, a gentleman of Nottinghamshire, ' a person of curiosity,' with ' a taste for literature and science ; ' so that for four generations at least, in the paternal line, the peculiar talents of the Darwin family had been highly cultivated in either direction. Robert Darwin was an early member of the Spalding Club, a friend of Stukeley the antiquary, and an embryo geologist, after the fantastic, half-superstitious fashion of his own time. Of his four sons, both Robert, the eldest, and Erasmus, the youngest, were authors and botanists. Erasmus himself was a Cambridge man, and his natural bent of mind and energy led him irresistibly on to the study of medicine. Taking his medical degree at his own uni- versity, and afterwards preparing for practice by attend- Charles Darwin and his Antecedents 21 ing Hunter's lectures in London, besides going through the regular medical course at Edinburgh, the young doctor finally settled down as a physician at Nottingham, whence shortly afterward he removed to Lichfield, then the centre of a famous literary coterie. So large a part of Charles Darwin's remarkable idiosyncrasy was derived by heredity from his paternal gi'andfather, that it may be worth while to dwell a little here in passing on the character and career of this brilliant precursor of the great evolutionist. Both in the physical and in the spiiitual sense, Erasmus Darwin was one among the truest and most genuine ancestors of his grandson Charles. A powerful, robust, athletic man, in florid health and of temperate habits, yet with the full-blooded ten- dency of the eighteenth century vividly displayed in his ample face and broad features, Erasmus Darwin bubbled over with irrepressible vivacity, the outward and visible sign of that overflowing energy which forms everywhere one of the most marked determining conditions of high genius. Strong in body and strong in mind, a tee- totaler before teetotalism, an abolitionist before the anti- slavery movement, he had a great contempt for weak- nesses and prejudices of every sort, and he rose far superior to the age in which he lived in breadth of view and freedom from preconceptions. The eighteenth cen- tury considered him, in its cautious, cut-and-dried fashion, a man of singular talent but of remarkably eccentric and unsafe opinions. Unfortunately for his lasting fame. Dr. Darwin was much given to writing poetry ; and this poetry, though as ingenious as every- thing else he did, had a certain false gallop of 22 Charles Darwin verse about it which has doomed it to become since Canning's parody a sort of warning beacon against the worst faults of the post- Augustan decadence in the ten-syllabled metre. Nobody now reads the ' Botanic Garden' except either to laugh at its exquisite ex- travagances, or to wonder at the queer tinsel glitter of its occasional clever rhetorical rhapsodies. But iu his alternative character of philosophic biologist, rejected by the age which swallowed his poetry all applausive, Erasmus Darvvin is well worthy of the highest and deepest respect, as a prime founder and early prophet of the evolutionary system. His * Zoonomia,' ' which, though ingenious, is built upon the most absurd hypothesis ' — as men still said only thirty years ago — contains in the germ the whole theory of organic development as understood up to the very moment of the publication of the * Origin of Species.* In it Dr. Darwin calls attention to ' the great changes introduced into various animals by artificial or acci- dental cultivation,' a subject afterwards fully elucidated by his greater grandson in his work on ' The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,' He specially notes ' the immense changes of shape and colour' produced by man in rabbits and pigeons, the very species on which Charles Darwin subsequently made some of his most remarkable and interesting ob- servations. More than any previous writer, Erasmus Darwin, with ' prophetic sagacity,' insisted strongly on the essential unity of parent and offspring — a truth which lies at the very base of all modern philosophical biology. * Owing to the imperfection of language,' wrote the Lichfield doctor nearly a hundred years ago, Charles Darwin and his Antecedents 23 'the offspring is termed a new animal, but is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent, since a part of the embryon-animal is or was a part of the parent, and therefore may retain some of the habits of the parent system.' He laid peculiar stress upon the hereditary natlire of some acquired properties, such as the muscles of dancers or jugglers, and the diseases incidental to special occupations. Nay, he even anticipated his great descendant in pointing out that varieties are often pro- duced at first as mere ' sports ' or accidental variations, as in the case of six-fingered men, five-clawed fowls, or extra-toed cats, and are afterwards handed do^vn by heredity to succeeding generations. Charles Darwin would have added that if these new stray peculiarities happened to prove advantageous to the species they would be naturally favoured in the struggle for exist- ence, while if they proved disadvantageous, or even neutral, they would die out at once or be bred out in the course of a few crosses. That last truth of natural selection was the only cardinal one in the evolutionary system on which Erasmus Darwin did not actually fore- stall his more famous and greater namesake. For its full perception, the discovery of Malthus had to be collated with the speculations of Buffon. ' When we revolve in our minds,' says the eighteenth century prophet of evolution, 'the great similarity of structure which obtains in all the warm-blooded animals, as well quadrupeds, birds, and amphibious animals, as in mankind ; from the mouse and bat to the elephant and whale ; one is led to conclude that they have alike been produced from a similar living filament. In some this filament in its advance to maturity has acquired 24 Charles Darwin hauds and fingers with a fine sense of touch, as in man- kind. In others it has acquired claws or talons, as in tigers and eagles. In others, toes with an intervening web or membrane, as in seals and geese. In others it has acquired cloven hoofs, as in cows and swine ; and whole hoofs in others, as in the horse : while in the bird kind this original living filament has put forth wings instead of arms or legs, and feathers instead of hair.' This is a very crude form of evolutionism indeed, but it is leading up by gradual stages to the finished and all-sided philosophy of physical life, which at last definitely formulates itself through the mouth of Charles Darwin. We shall see hereafter wherein Erasmus Darwin's conception of development chiefly failed — in attributing evolution for the most part to the exertions and endeavours of the animal itself, rather than to inevitable survival of the fittest among innu- merable spontaneous variations — but we must at least conclude our glimpse of his pregnant and suggestive work by quoting its great fundamental apergu : — ' As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vege- table productions long before the existence of animals, and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life ? * A few lines from the ' Temple of Nature,' one of Erasmus Darwin's poetic rhapsodies, containing his fully matured views on the origin of living creatures, may be worth reproduction in further elucidation of his philosophical position :— Charles Darwin and his Antecedents 2$ ' Organic life beneath tlie shoreless waves Was born, and nursed in ocean's pearly caves ; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass ; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume ; "Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breatliing realms of fin and feet and wing.' Have we not here the very beginnings of Charles Darwin ? Do we not see, in these profound and funda- mental suggestions, not merely hints as to the evolu- tion of evolution, but also as to the evolution of the evolutionist ? On the other hand, though Erasmus Darwin defined a fool to his friend Edgeworth as ' a man who never tried an experiment in his life,' he was wanting himself in the rigorous and patient inductive habit which so strikingly distinguished his grandson Charles. That trait, as we shall presently see, the biological chief of the nineteenth century derived ia all probability from another root of his genealogical tree. Erasmus Darwin gave us brilliant suggestions rather than cumulative proof : he apologised in his * Zoonomia ' for ' many con- jectures not supported by accurate investigation or con- clusive experiments.' Such an apology would have been simply impossible to the painstaking spirit of his grandson Charles. Erasmus Darwin was twice married. His first wife was Mary, daughter of Mr. Charles Howard, of Lichfield, and it was her son, Robert Waring Darwin, who be- came the father of our hero, Charles. It is fashionable to say, in this and sundry other like cases, that the mental energy skips a generation. People have said so 26 Charles Darwin in the case of that intermediate Mendelssohn who was son of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher, and father of Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn, the composer — that mere link in a marvellous chain who was wont to observe of himself in the decline of life, that in his youth he was called the son of the great Men- delssohn, and in his old age the father of the great Mendelssohn. As a matter of fact, one may fairly doubt whether such a case of actual skipping is ever possible in the nature of things. In the particular instance of Robert Waring Darwin at least we may be pretty sure that the distinctive Darwinian strain of genius lay merely latent rather than dormant : that it did not display itself to the world at large, but that it persisted silently as powerful as ever within the remote recesses of the thinking organism. Not every man brings out before men all that is within him. Robert Waring Darwin was a physician at Shrewsbury; and he attained at least sufficient scientific eminence in his own time to^ become a Fellow of the Royal Society, in days when that honour was certainly not readily con- ferred upon country doctors of modest reputation. Charles Darwin says of iim plainly, ' He was incom- parably the most acute observer whom I ever knew.' It may well have been that Robert Darwin lived and died, as his famous son lived for fifty years of his great life, in comparative silence and learned retirement ; for we must never forget that if Charles Darwin had only completed the first half century of his laborious exist- ence, he would have been remembered merely as the author of an entertaining work on the voyage of the 'Beagle,' a plausible theory of coral islands, and a Charles Darwin and his Antecedents 27 learned monograph on the fossil barnacles. During all those years, in fact, he had really done little else than collect material for the work of his lifetime. If we judge men by outward performance only, we may often be greatly mistaken in our estimates : poten- tiality is wider than actuality; what a man does is never a certain or extreme criterion of what he can do. The Darwins, indeed, were all a mighty folk, of varied powers and varied attainments. Erasmus's brother, Robert, was the author of a work on botany, which long enjoyed a respectable repute. Of his sons, one, Sir Francis Darwin, was noted as a keen observer of animals ; a second, Charles, who died at twenty-one, was already the author of a very valuable medical essay ; while the third, Robert, was the Shrewsbury F.R.S., the father of our great evolutionary thinker. And among Charles Darwin's own cousins, one is Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, the philologist ; a second was the late Sir Henry Holland ; and a third is .Mr. Francis Galton, the author of that essentially Darwinian book, ' Hereditary Genius.' Robert Waring Darwin took to himself a wife from another very great and eminent family. He married Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter ; and from these two silent repre- sentatives of powerful stocks, Charles Robert Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary biology, was born at Shrewsbury, on February the 12th, 1809. That Wedg- wood connection, again, is no mere casual or unimportant incident in the previous life-history of the Darwinian originality ; it throws a separate clear light of its own 28 Charles Darwin upon the peculiar and admirably compounded idiosyn- crasy of Charles Darwin. A man, indeed, owes on the average quite as much to his mother's as to his father's family. It is a mere unscientific old-world prejudice which makes us for the most part count ancestry in the direct ascending male line alone, to the complete neglect of the equally important maternal pedigree. From the biological point of view, at least, every individual is a highly com- plex compound of hereditary elements, a resultant of numerous converging forces, a meeting place of two great streams of inheritance, each of which is itself similarly made up by the like confluence of innumerable distinct prior tributaries. Between these two it is almost impossible for us accurately to distribute any given individuality. How much Charles Darwin owed to the Darwins, and how much he owed in turn to the Wedgwoods, no man is yet psychologist enough or phy- siologist enough to say. But that he owed a great deal to either strong and vigorous strain we may even now quite safely take for granted. The Wedgwood family were ' throwers ' by handi- craft, superior artisans long settled at Burslem, in the Staffordshire potteries. Josiah, the youngest of thirteen children, lamed by illness in early life, was turned by this happy accident from his primitive task as a * thrower ' to the more artistic and original work of pro- ducing ornamental coloured earthenware. Skilful and indefatigable, of indomitable energy and with great powers of forcing his way in life against all obstacles, young Wedgwood rose rapidly by his own unaided exertions to be a master potter, and a manufacturer of Charles Darwin and his Antecedents 29 the famous unglazed black porcelain. Those were the darkest days of industrial art and decorative handicraft in modern England. Josiah Wedgwood, by his marked originality and force of character, succeeded in turning the current of national taste, and creating among us a new and distinctly higher type of artistic workman- ship. His activity, however, was not confined to his art alone, but found itself a hundred other different outlets in the most varied directions. When his pot- teries needed enlargement to meet the increased demand, he founded for the hands employed upon his works the model industrial village of Etruria. When Brindley began cutting artificial waterways across the broad face of central England, it was in the great potter that he found his chief ally in promoting the construc- tion of the Grand Trunk Canal. Wedgwood, indeed, was a builder of schools and a maker of roads ; a chemist and an artist ; a friend of Watt and an employer of Flaxman. In short, like Erasmus Darwin, he pos- sessed that prime essential in the character of genius, an immense underlying stock of energy. And with it there went its best concomitant, the ' infinite capacity for taking pains.' Is it not probable that in their joint descendant, the brilliant but discursive and hazardous genius of Erasmus Darwin was balanced and regulated by soberer qualities inherited directly from the profound industry of the painstaking potter ? When later on we find Charles Darwin spending hours in noting the successive movements of the tendrils in a plant, or watching for long years the habits and manners of earthworms in flower-pots, may we not reasonably con- jecture that he derived no little share of his extraordi- 30 Charles Darwin nary patience, carefulness, and minuteness of handicraft from his mother's father, Josiah Wedgwood ? Such, then, were the two main component elements, paternal and maternal, from which the striking person- ality of Charles Darwin was no doubt for the most part ultimately built up. CHAPTER III. EARLY DAYS. As the Chester express steams out of Shrewsbury station, you see on your left, overhanging the steep bank of Severn, a large, square, substantial-looking house, known as the Mount, the birthplace of the author of the ' Origin of Species.' There, in the comfortable home he had built for himself. Dr. Robert Darwin, the father, lived and worked for fifty years of unobtrusive usefulness. He had studied medicine at Edinburgh and Leyden, and had even travelled a little in Germany, before he settled down in the quiet old Salopian town, where for half a century his portly figure and yellow chaise were familiar objects of the country-side for miles around. Among a literary society which included Coleridge's friends, the Tayleurs, and where Hazlitt listened with delight to the great poet's ' music of the spheres,' in High Street Unitarian Chapel, the Mount kept up with becoming dignity the family traditions of the Darwins and the Wedgwoods as a local centre of sweetness and light. On February the 12th, 1809, Chai-les Darwin first saw the light of day in this his father's house at Shrews- bury. Time and place were both propitious. Born in 32 Charles Darwin a cultivated scientific family, surrounded from his birth by elevating influences, and secured beforehand from the cramping necessity of earning his own livelihood by his own exertions, the boy was destined to grow up to full maturity in the twenty-one years of slow development that immediately preceded the passing of the first Reform Act. The thunder of the great European upheaval had grown silent at Waterloo when he was barely six years old, and his boyhood was passed amid country sights and sounds during that long period of reconstruction and assimilation which followed the fierce volcanic outburst of the French Revolution. Happy in the opportunity of his birth, he came upon the world eight years after the first publication of Lamarck's remarkable speculations, and for the first twenty-two years of his life he was actually the far younger contemporary of the great French evolutionary philosopher. Eleven years before his arrival upon the scene Malthus had set forth his ' Principle of Population.' Charles Darwin thus entered upon a stage well prepared for him, and he entered it with an idiosyncrasy exactly adapted for making the best of the situation. The soil had been thoroughly turned and dressed beforehand: Charles Darwin's seed had only to fall upon it in order to spring up and bear fruit a hundredfold, in every field of science or speculation. For it was not biology alone that he was foredoomed to revolutionise, but the whole range of human thought, and perhaps even ultimately of human action. Is it mere national prejudice which makes one add with congratulatory pleasure that Darwin was bom in England, rather than in France, in Germany, or in Early Days 33 America ? Perhaps so ; perhaps not. For the English intellect does indeed seem more capable than most of uniting high speculative ability with high practical skill and experience : and of that union of rare qualities Darwin himself was a most conspicuous example. It is probable that England has produced more of the great organising and systematising intellects than any other modem country. Among those thinkers in his own line who stood more nearly abreast of Darwin in the matter of age, Lyell was some eleven years his senior, and contributed not a little (though quite unconsciously) by his work and conclusions to the formation of Danvin's OT\'n pecu- liar scientific opinions. The veteran Owen, who still survives him, was nearly five years older than Darwin, and also helped to a great extent in giving form and exactness to his great contemporary's anatomical ideas. Humboldt, who preceded our English naturalist in the matter of time by no less than forty years, might yet almost rank as coeval in some respects, owing to his long and active life, his late maturity, and the very recent date of his greatest and most thought-compelling work, the * Cosmos ' (begun when Humboldt was seventy-five, and finished when he lacked but ten years of his century), in itself a sort of preparation for due acceptance of the Darwinian theories. In fact, as many as fifty years of their joint lives coincided entirely one with the other's. Agassiz antedated Darwin by two years. On the other hand, among the men who most helped on the recognition of Darwin's theories, Hooker and Lewes were his juniors by eight years, Herbert Spencer by eleven, Wallace by thirteen, and Huxley 34 Charles Darwin by sixteen. His cousin, Francis Galton, another grand- son of Erasmus Darwin, and joint inheritor of the dis- tinctive family biological ply, was bom at the same date as Alfred Russell Wallace, thirteen years after Charles Darwin. In such a goodly galaxy of workers was the Darwinian light destined to shine through the middle of the century, as one star excelleth another in glory. Charles Darwin was the second son : but nature refuses doggedly to acknowledge the custom of primo- geniture. His elder brother, Erasmus, ia man of mute and inarticulate ability, with a sardonic humour alien to his race, extorted unwonted praise from the critical pen of Thomas Carlyle, who * for intellect rather pre- ferred him to his brother Charles.' But whatever spark of the Darwinian genius was really innate in Erasmus the Less died with him unacknowledged. The boy was educated (so they call it) at Shrews- bury Grammar School, under sturdy Sam Butler, after- wards Bishop of Lichfield ; and there he picked up so much Latin and Greek as was then considered absolutely essential to the due production of an English gentleman. Happily for the world, having no taste for the classics, he escaped the ordeal with little injury to his individuality. His mother had died while he was stiU a child, but his father, that ' acute observer,' no doubt taught him to know and love nature. At sixteen he went to Edin- burgh University, then rendered famous by a little knot of distinguished professors, and there he remained for two years. Already at school he had made himself notable by his love of collecting — the first nascent symptom of the naturalist bent. He collected everything, shells, eggs, Early Days 35 minerals, coins, nay, since postage stamps were then not yet invented, even franks. But at Edinburgh he gave the earliest distinct evidence of his definite scientific tastes by contributing to the local academic society a paper on the floating eggs of the common sea-mat, in which he had even then succeeded in discovering for the first time organs of locomotion. Thence he proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge. The Darwins were luckily a Cambridge family : luckily, let us say, for had it been otherwise — had young Darwin been distorted from his native bent by Plato and Aristotle, and plunged deep into the mysteries of Barbara and Celarent, as would infallibly have happened to him at the sister university — who can tell how long we might have had to wait in vain for the ' Origin of Species ' and the * Descent of Man ' ? But Cambridge, which rejoiced already in the glory of Newton, was now to match it by the glory of Darwin. In its academical course, the mathematical wedge had always kept open a dim passage for physical science ; and at the exact moment when Darwin was an undergraduate at Christ's — from 1827 to 1831 — the university had the advantage of several good scientific teachers, and amongst them one. Professor Henslow, a well-known botanist, who took a special interest in young Darwin's intellectual development. There, too, he met with Sedgwick, Airy, Ramsay, and numerous other men of science, whose intercourse with him must no doubt have contributed largely to mould and form the future cast of his peculiar philosophical idiosyn- crasy. It was to Henslow's influence that Darwin in later years attributed in great part his powerful taste for 36 Charles Darwin natural history. But in truth the ascription of such high praise to his early teacher smacks too much of the Darwinian modesty to be accepted at once without demur by the candid critic. The naturalist, like the poet, is born, not made. How much more, then, must this needs be the case with the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and of Josiah Wedgwood ? As a matter of fact, already at Edinburgh the lad had loved to spend his days among the sea-beasts and wrack of the Inches in the Firth of Forth ; and it was through the instrument- ality of his * brother entomologists ' that he first became acquainted with Henslow himself when he removed to Cambridge. The good professor could not make him into a naturalist : inherited tendencies and native ener- gies had done that for him already from his very cradle. ' Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam ; ' and it was well that Darwin took up at Cambridge with the study of geology as his first love. For geology was then the living and moving science, as astronomy had been in the sixteenth century, and as biology is at the present day — the growing-point, so to speak, of European de- velopment, whence all great things might naturally be expected. Moreover, it was and is the central science of the concrete class, having relations with astronomy on the one hand, and with biology on the other ; con- cerned alike with cosmical chances or changes on this side, and with the minutest facts of organic nature on that ; the meeting-place and border-land of all the sepa- rate branches of study that finally bear upon the com- plex problems of our human life. No other subject of investigation was so well calculated to rouse Darwin's interest in the ultimate questions of evolution or creation, Early Days 37 of sudden cataclysm or gradual growth, of miraculous intervention or slow development. Here, if anywhere, his enigmas were all clearly propounded to him by the inarticulate stony sphinxes ; he had only to riddle them out for himself as he went along in after years with the aid of the successive side-lights thrown upon the world by the unconnected lanterns of Lamarck and of Malthus. Fortunately for us, then, Darwin did not waste his time at Cambridge over the vain and frivolous pursuits of the classical tripos. He preferred to work at his own subjects in his own way, and to leave the short- lived honours of the schools to those who cared for them and for nothing higher. He came out with the ol TToWoiin 1831, and thenceforth proceeded to study life in the wider university for which his natural incli- nations more properly fitted him. The world was all before him where to choose, and he chose that better part which shall not be taken away from him as long as the very memory of science survives. 38 Charles Darwin CHAPTER IV. Darwin's wander-years. Scarcely had Darwin taken his pass degree at Cam- bridge when the great event of his life occurred which, more than anything else perhaps, gave the final direction to his categorical genius in the line it was thenceforth so successfully to follow. In the autumn of 1831, when Darwin was just twenty-two, it was decided by Govern- ment to send a ten-gun brig, the ' Beagle,' under command of Captain Fitzroy, to complete the unfinished survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, to map out the shores of Chili and Peru, to visit several of the Pacific archipelagoes, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the whole world. This was an essentially scien- tific expedition, and Captain Fitzroy, afterwards so famous as the meteorological admiral, was a scientific oflicer of the highest type. He was anxious to be accompanied on his cruise by a competent naturalist who would undertake the collection and preservation of the animals and plants discovered on the voyage, for which purpose he generously offered to give up a share of his own cabin accommodation. Professor Henslow seized upon the opportunity to recommend for the post his promising pupil, young Darwin, ' grandson of the poet.' Darwin gladly volunteered his services without Dar wins' Wander-Years 39 salary, and partly paid his own expenses on condition of being permitted to retain in his own possession the animals and plants he collected on the journey. The * Beagle ' set sail from Devonport on December the 27th, 1831; she returned to Falmouth on October the 2nd, 1836, That long five years' cruise around the world, the journal of which Darwin has left us in the * Voyage of the " Beagle," ' proved a marvellous epoch in the great naturalist's quiet career. It left its abiding mark deeply imprinted on all his subsequent life and thinking. Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin were cabinet biologists, - who had never beheld with their own eyes the great round world and all that therein is ; Charles Darwin had the inestimable privilege of seeing for himself, at first hand, a large part of the entire globe and of the creatures that inhabit it. Even to have caught one passing glimpse of the teeming life of the tropics is in itself an education ; to the naturalist it is more, it is a revelation. Our starved little northern fauna and flora, the mere leavings of the vast ice sheets that spread across our zone in the glacial epoch, show us a world depopulated of all its largest, strangest, and fiercest creatures ; a world dwarfed in all its component elements, and immensely differing in ten thousand ways from that rich, luxuriant, over-stocked hot-house in which the first great problems of evolution were practically worked out by survival of the fittest. But the tropics preserve for us still in all their jungles something of the tangled, thickly-peopled aspect which our planet must have presented for countless ages in all latitudes before the advent of primaeval man. We now know that 40 Charles Darwin throughout the greater part of geological time, essentially tropical conditions existed unbroken over the whole surface of the entire earth, from the Antarctic continent to the shores of Greenland ; so that some immediate acquaintance at least with the equatorial world is of immense value to the philosophical naturalist for the sake of the analogies it inevitably suggests ; and it is a significant fact that almost all those great and fruitful thinkers who in our own time have done good work in the wider combination of biological facts have themselves passed a considerable number of years in investigating the conditions of tropical nature. Europe and England are at the ends of the earth ; the tropics are biological head-quarters. The equatorial zone is therefore the true school for the historian of life in its more universal and lasting aspects. Nor was that all. The particular countries visited by the ' Beagle ' during the course of her long and varied cruise happened to be exactly such as were naturally best adapted for bringing out the latent po- tentialities of Darwin's mind, and suggesting to his active and receptive brain those deep problems of life and its environment which he afterwards wrought out with such subtle skill and such consummate patience in the ' Origin of Species ' and the ' Descent of ]\Ian.' The Cape de Verdes, and the other Atlantic islands, with their scanty population of plants and animals, composed for the most part of waifs and strays drifted to their barren rocks by ocean currents, or blown out helplessly to sea by heavy winds ; Brazil, with its marvellous contrasting wealth of tropical luxuriance and self-strangling fertility, a new province of inter- Darwin's Wander-Years 41 minable delights to the soul of the enthusiastic young collector; the South American pampas, with their colossal remains of extinct animals, huge geological precursors of the stunted modem sloths and armadillos that still inhabit the self-same plains ; Tierra del Fuego, with its almost Arctic climate, and its glimpses into the secrets of the most degraded savage types; the vast range of the Andes and the Cordilleras, with their volcanic energy and their closely crowded horizontal belts of climatic life ; the South Sea Islands, those paradises of the Pacific, Hesperian fables true, alike for the lover of the picturesque and the biological student ; Australia, that surviving fragment of an ex- tinct world, with an antiquated fauna -whose archaic character still closely recalls the European life of ten million years back in the secondary epoch : all these and many others equally novel and equally instructive passed in long alternating panorama before Darwin's eyes, and left their images deeply photographed for ever after on the lasting tablets of his retentive memory. That was the real great university in which he studied nature and read for his degree. Our evolutionist was now being educated. Throughout the whole of the journal of this long cruise, which Darwin afterwards published in an en- larged form, it is impossible not to be struck at every turn with the way in which his inquisitive mind again and again recurs to the prime elements of those great problems towards whose solution he after- wards so successfully pointed out the path. The Dar- winian ideas are all already there in the germ ; the embryo form of the ' Origin of Species ' plays in and 5 ( 42 Charles Darwin out on every page with tlie quaintest elusiveness. We are always just on the very point of catching it ; and every now and again we do actually all but catch it in essence and spirit, though ever still its bodily shape persistently evades us. Questions of geographical dis- tribution, of geological continuity, of the influence of climate, of the modifiability of instinct, of the effects of surrounding conditions, absorb the young observer's vivid interest at every step, wherever he lands. He is all unconsciously collecting notes and materials in pro- fuse abundance for his great work; he is thinking in rough outline the new thoughts which are hereafter to revolutionise the thought of humanity. Five years are a great shoe out of a man's life : those five years of ceaseless wandering by sea and land were spent by Charles Darwin in accumulating endless observations and hints for the settlement of the profound fundamental problems in which he was even then so deeply interested. The ' Beagle ' sailed from England to the Cape de Verdes, and already, even before she had touched her first land, the young naturalist had observed ' with interest that the impalpably fine dust which fell on deck contained no less than sixty-seven distinct organic forms, two of them belonging to species peculiar to South America. In some of the dust he found particles of stone so very big that they measured 'above the thousandth of an inch square ; ' and after this fact, says the keen student, ' one need not be surprised at the diffusion of the far lighter and smaller sporules of crypto- gamic plants.' Would Erasmus Darwin have noticed these minute points and their implications one wonders ? Probably not. May we not see in the observation Darwin's Wander-Years 43 " partly tlie hereditary tendencies of Josiah Wedgwood towards minute investigation and accuracy of detail, partly the influence of the scientific time-wave, and the cai-eful training under Professor Henslow? Erasmus Darwin comes before us rather as the brilliant and ingenious amateur, his grandson Charles as the in- structed and fully equipped final product of the scientific schools. At St. Paul's Rocks, once more, a mass of new volcanic peaks rising abruptly from the midst of the Atlantic, the naturalist of the ' Beagle ' notes with interest that feather and dirt-feeding and parasitic insects or spiders are the first inhabitants to take up their quarters on recently formed oceanic islands. This problem of the peopling of new lands, indeed, so closely connected with the evolution of new species, necessarily obtruded itself upon his attention again and again during his five years' cruise ; and in some cases, espe- cially that of the Galapagos Islands, the curious insular faunas and floras which he observed upon this trip, composed as they were of mere casual strayhngs from adjacent shores, produced upon his mind a very deep and lasting impression, whose traces one may without difficulty discern on every second page of the ' Origin of Species.' On the last day of February, 1832, the 'Beagle' came to anchor in the harbour of Bahia, and young Darwin caught sight for the first time of the mutually strangling luxuriance of tropical vegetation. Nowhere on earth are the finest conditions of tropical life more fully realised than in the tangled depths of the great uncleared Brazilian forests, which everywhere gird round 44 Charles Darwin like a natural palisade with tlieir impenetrable belt the narrow and laborious clearings of over-mastered man. The rich alluvial silt of mighty river systems, the im- memorial manuring of the virgin soil, the fierce energy of an almost equatorial sun, and the universal presence of abundant water, combine to make life in that mar- vellous region unusually wealthy, varied, and crowded, so that the struggle for existence is there perhaps more directly visible to the seeing eye than in any other known portion of God's universe. * Delight itself,' says Darwin in his journal, with that naive simplicity which everywhere forms the chief charm of his direct and un- afiected literary style — ' delight itself is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who for the first time has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the para- sitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration.' In truth, among those huge buttressed trunks, overhung by the unbroken canopy of foliage on the vast spreading and interlacing branches, festooned with lianas and drooping lichens, or beautified by the pendent alien growth of perfumed orchids, Darwin's mind must indeed have found congenial food for apt reflection, and infinite opportunities for inference and induction. From the mere picturesque point of view, indeed, the naturalist enjoys such sights as this a thousand times more truly and profoundly than the mere casual unskilled observer : for it is a shallow, self-flattering mistake of vulgar and narrow minds to suppose that fuller knowledge and clearer insight can destroy or impair the beauty of Darwin^ s Wander-Years 45 beautiful objects — as wlio should imagine that a great painter appreciates the sunset less than a silly boy or a sentimental schoolgirl. As a matter of fact, the naturalist knows and admires a thousand exquisite points of detail in every flower and every insect which only he himself and the true artist can equally delight in. And a keen intellectual and aesthetic joy in the glorious fecundity and loveliness of nature was every- where present to Darwin's mind. But, beyond and above even that, there was also the architectonic delight of the great organiser in the presence of a noble organised product : the peculiar pleasure felt only by the man in whose broader soul all minor details fall at once into their proper place, as component elements in one great consistent and harmonious whole — a sympathetic plea- sure akin to that with which an architect views the interior of Ely and of Lincoln, or a musician listens to the linked harmonies of the ' Messiah ' and the ' Crea- tion.' The scheme of nature was now unfolding itself visibly and clearly before Charles Darwin's very eyes. , After eighteen memorable days spent with unceasing delight at Bahia, the ' Beagle ' sailed again for Rio, where Darwin stopped for three months, to improve his ac- quaintance with the extraordinary wealth of the South American fauna and flora. Collecting insects was here his chief occupation, and it is interesting to note even at this early period how his attention was attracted by some of those strange alluring devices on the part of the males for charming their partners which afterwards formed the principal basis for his admirable theory of sexual selection, so fuUy developed in the ' Descent of Man.' ' Several times,' he says, ' when a pair [of 46, Charles Darwin butterflies], probably male and female, were chasing each other in an irregular course, they passed within a few yards of me ; and I distinctly heard a clicking noise, similar to that produced by a toothed wheel pass- ing under a spring catch.' In like manner he observed here the instincts of tropical ants, the habits of phos- phorescent insects, and the horrid practice of that wasp- like creature, the sphex, which stuffs the clay cells of its larvae full of half-dead spiders and writhing cater- pillars, so stung with devilish avoidance of vital parts as to be left quite paralysed yet still alive, as future food for the developing grubs. Cases like these helped naturally to shake the young biologist's primitive faith in the cheap and crude current theories of universal beneficence, and to introduce that wholesome sceptical reaction against received dogma which is the necessary ground-work and due preparation for all great progres- sive philosophical thinking. In July they set sail again for Monte Video, where the important question of climate and vegetation began to interest young Darwin's mind. Uruguay is almost entirely treeless; and this curious phenomenon, in a comparatively moist sub-tropical plain-land, struck him as a remarkable anomaly, and set him speculating on its probable cause. Australia, he remembered, was far more arid, and yet its interior was everywhere covered by whole forests of quaint indigenous gum-trees. Could it be that there were no trees adapted to the climate ? As yet, the true causes of geographical distribution had not clearly dawned upon Darwin's mind ; but that a young man of twenty-three should seriously busy him- self about such problems of ultimate causation at all is Darwin's Wander-Years 47 in itself a sufficiently pointed and remarkable phe- nomenon. It was here, too, that he first saw that curious animal, the Tucutuco, a true rodent with the habits of a mole, which is almost always found in a blind condition. With reference to this singular creature, there occurs in his journal one of those inter- esting anticipatory passages which show the rough workings of the distinctive evolutionary Darwinian concept in its earlier stages. * Considering the strictly subterranean habits of the Tucutuco,' he writes, 'the blindness, though so common, cannot be a very serious evil; yet it appears strange that any animal should possess an organ frequently subject to be injured. Lamarck would have been delighted with this fact, had he known it, when speculating (probably with more truth than usual with him) on the gradually acquired blindness of the Aspalax, a gnawer living under the ground, and of the Proteus, a reptile living in dark caverns fiUed with water ; in both of which animals the eye is in an almost rudimentary state, and is covered by a tendinous membrane and skin. In the common mole the eye is extraordinarily small but perfect, though many anatomists doubt whether it is connected with the true optic nerve ; its vision must certainly be im- perfect, though probably useful to the animal when it leaves its burrow. In the Tucutuco, which I believe never comes to the surface of the ground, the eye is rather larger, but often rendered blind and useless, though without apparently causing any inconvenience to the animal : no doubt Lamarck would have said that the Tucutuco is now passing into the state of the Aspalax and Proteus.' The passage is instructive both as show- 48 Charles Darwin ing that Danvin was already familiar with Lamarck's writings, and as pointing out the natural course of his own future development. For the two years from her arrival at Monte Video, the ' Beagle ' was employed in sun^eying the eastern coast of South America ; and Darwin enjoyed unusual opportunities for studying the geology, the zoology, and the botany of the surrounding districts during all that period. It was a suggestive field indeed for the young naturalist. The curious relationship of the gigantic fossil armour-plated animals to the existing armadillo, of the huge megatherium to the modem sloths, and of the colossal ant-eaters to their degenerate descendants at the present day, formed one of the direct inciting causes to the special study which produced at last the ' Origin of Species.' In the Introduction to that immortal work Darwin wrote, some twenty-seven years later, ' When on board H.M.S. " Beagle " as natu- ralist, I was much struck with certain. facts in the dis- tribution of the organic beings inhabiting South Ame- rica, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin of species — that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.' And in the body of the work itself he refers over and over again to numberless observations made by himself during this period of rapid psycho- logical development — observations on the absence of recent geological formations along the lately upheaved South American coast ; on the strange extinction of the horse in La Plata ; on the aflSnities of the extinct and Darwin's Wander-Years 49 recent species; on the effect of minute individual peculiarities in preserving life under special circum- stances ; and on the influence of insects and blood-suck- ing bats in determining the existence of the larger naturalised mammals in parts of Brazil and the Argentine Republic. It was the epoch of wide collec- tion of facts, to be afterwards employed in brilliant generalisations : the materials for the ' Origin of Species ' were being slowly accumulated in the numberless pigeon-holes of the Darwinian memory. Among the facts thus industriously gathered by Darwin in the two years spent on the South American coast were several curious instincts of the cuckoo-like molothrus, of the owl of the Pampas, and of the American ostrich. A few sentences scattered here and there through this part of the ' Naturalist's Journal ' may well be extracted in the present place as showing, better than any mere secondhand description could do, the slow germinating process of the ' Origin of Species.' In speaking of the toxodon, that strange extinct South American mammal, the young author remarks acutely that, though in size it equalled the elephant and the megatherium, the structure of its teeth shows it to be closely allied to the ruminants, while several other details link it to the pachyderms, and its aquatic peculiarities of ear and nostril approximate it rather to the manatee and the dugong. 'How wonder- fully,' he says, ' are the different orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in different points of the structure of the toxodon.' We now know that unspecialised ancestral forms always display this close union of peculiarities afterwards separately 50 Charles Darwin developed in distinct species of their later descend- ants. Still more pregnant with evolutionism in the bud is the prophetic remark about a certain singular group of South American birds, ' This small family is one of those which, from its varied relations to other families, although at present offering only difficulties to the systematic naturalist, ultimately may assist in revealing the grand scheme, common to the present and past ages, on which organised beings have been created.' Of the agouti, once more, that true friend of the desert, Darwin notes that it does not now range as far south as Port St. Julian, though Wood in 1670 found it abundant there ; and he asks suggestively, ' What cause can have altered, in a wide, uninhabited, and rarely visited country, the range of an animal like this ? ' Again, when speaking of the analogies between the extinct camel-like macrauchenia and the modern guanaco, as well as of those between the fossil and living species of South American rodents, he says, with even more pro- phetic insight, ' This wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts.' He was him- self destined in another thirty years to prove the truth of his own vaticination. A yet more remarkable passage in the ' Journal of the " Beagle," ' though entered under the account of events observed in the year 1834, must almost certainly have been written somewhat later, and subsequently to Darwin's first reading of Malthus's momentous work, Darwin's Wander-Years 51 'The Principle of Population,' whicli (as we know from his own pen) formed a cardinal point in the great biologist's mental development. It runs as follows in the published journal : ' — ' We do not steadily bear in mind how profoundly ignorant we are of the condi- tions of existence of every animal ; nor do we always remember that some check is constantly preventing tho too rapid increase of every organised being left in a state of nature. The supply of food, on an average, remains constant ; yet the tendency in every animal to increase by propagation is geometrical, and its sur- prising effects have nowhere been more astonishingly shown than in the case of the European animals run wild during the last few centuries in America. Every animal in a state of nature regularly breeds ; yet in a species long established any great increase in numbers is obviously impossible, and must be checked by some means.' Aut Malthus aut Diabolus. And surely here, if anywhere at all, we tremble on the very verge of natural selection. It would be impossible to follow young Darwin in detail through his journey to Buenos Ayres, and up the Parana to Santa Fe, which occupied the autumn of 1833. In the succeeding year he visited Patagonia and the Falkland Islands, having previously made his first ac- quaintance with savage life among the naked Fue- gians of the extreme southern point of the continent. Some of these interesting natives, taken to England by • The full narrative was first given to the world in 1839, some three years after Darwin's return to England, so that much of it evidently represents the results of his maturer thinking and reading on the facts collected during his journey round the world. 52 Charles Darwin Captain Fitzroy on a former visit, had accompanied the ' Beagle ' through all her wanderings, and from them Darwin obtained that close insight into the workings of savage human nature which he afterwards utilised with such conspicuous ability in the ' Descent of Man.' Through Magellan's Straits the party made their way up the coasts of Chili, and Darwin had there an oppor- tunity of investigating the geology and biology of the Cordillera. The year 1835 was chiefly spent in that temperate country and in tropical Peru ; and as the autumn went on, the ' Beagle ' made her way across a belt of the Pacific to the Galapagos archipelago. Small and unimportant as are those little equatorial islands from the geographical and commercial point of view, they will yet remain for ever classic ground to the biologists of the future from their close connection with the master-problems of the ' Origin of Species.' Here more, perhaps, than anywhere else the naturalist of the ' Beagle ' found himself face to face in real earnest with the ultimate questions of creation or evolution. A group of tiny volcanic islets, never joined to any land, nor even united to one another, yet each possessing its own special zoological features — the Galapagos roused to anf extraordinary degree the irresistible questionings of Darwin's mind. They contain no frogs, and no mammal save a mouse, brought to them, no doubt, by some passing ship. The only insects are beetles, which possess peculiar facilities for being transported in the 6gg or grub across salt water upon floating logs. There are two kinds of snake, one tortoise, and four lizards j but, in striking contrast to this extreme poverty of terrestrial forms, there are at least fifty-five distinct Darwin's Wander-Years 53 species of native birds. A few snails complete the list. Now most of these animals, though closely resembling the fauna of Ecuador, the nearest mainland, are specifically distinct ; they have varied (as we now know) from their continental types owing to natural selection under the new circumstances in which they have been placed. But Darwin had not yet evolved that potent key to the great riddle of organic existence. He saw the problem, but not its solution. * Most of the organic productions,' he says plainly, ' are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else ; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands : yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. . . . Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period geologically recent the nnbroken sea was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time we seem to be brought somewhat nearer to that great fact — that mystery of mysteries — the first appearance of new beings on this earth,' Among the most singular of these zoological facts may be mentioned the existence in the Galapagos archipelago of a genus of gigantic and ngly lizard, the amblyrhyncus, unknown elsewhere, but here assuming the forms of two species, the one marine and the other terrestrial. In minuter points, the dif- ferences of fauna and flora between the various islands are simply astounding, so as to compel the idea that 6 54 Charles Darwin each form must necessarily have been developed not merely for the group, but for the special island which it actually inhabits. No wonder that Darwin should say in conclusion, ' One is astonished at the amount of creative force, if such an expression may be used, dis- played on these small, barren, and rocky islands ; and still more so at its diverse, yet analogous, action on points so near each other.' Here again, in real earnest, the young observer trembles visibly on the very verge of natural selection. In the 'Origin of Species' he makes full use, more than once, of the remarkable facts he observed with so much interest in these tiny isolated oceanic specks of the American galaxy. From the Galapagos the ' Beagle ' steered a straight course for Tahiti, and Darwin then beheld with his own eyes the exquisite beauty of the Polynesian Islands. Thence they sailed for New Zealand, the most truly insular large mass of land in the whole world, supplied accordingly with a fauna and flora of most surprising meagreness and poverty of species. In the woods, our observer noted very few birds, and he remarks with astonishment that so big an island — as large as Great Britain — should not possess a single living indigenous mammal, save a solitary rat of doubtful origin. Australia and Tasmania, with their antiquated and stranded mar- supial inhabitants, almost completed the round trip. Keeling Island next afibrded a basis for the future famous observations upon coral reefs; and thence by Mauritius, St. Helena, Ascension, Bahia, Pernambuco, and the beautiful Azores, the ' Beagle ' made her way home by slow stages to England, which she reached in safety on October the 2nd, 1836. What an ideal education Darwin's Wander-Years 55 for the future reconstructor of biological science ! He had now all his problems cut and dried, ready to his hand, and he had nothing important left to do — except to sit down quietly in his study, and proceed to solve them. Observation and collection had given him one half the subject-matter of the ' Origin of Species ; ' reflection and ]\falthus were to give him the other half. Never had great mind a nobler chance ; never, again, had noble chance a great mind better adapted by nature and heredity to make the most of it. The man was not wanting to the opportunity, nor was the opportunity wanting to the man. Organism and environment fell together into perfect harmony ; and so, by a lucky com- bination of circumstances, the secret of the ages was finally wrung from not unwilling nature by the far- seeing and industrious volunteer naturalist of the * Beagle ' expedition. It would be giving a very false idea of the interests which stirred Charles Darwin's mind during his long five years' voyage, however, if we were to dwell ex- clusively upon the biological side of his numerous observations on that memorable cruise. Ethnology, geology, oceanic phenomena, the height of the snow- line, the climate of the Antarctic islands, the formation of icebergs, the transport of boulders, the habits and manners engendered by slavery, all almost equally aroused in their own way the young naturalist's vivid interest. Nowhere do we get the faintest trace of narrow specialism ; nowhere are we cramped within the restricted horizon of the mere vulgar beetle-hunter and butterfly-catcher. The biologist of the ' Beagle ' had taken the whole world of science for his special 56 Charles Darwin province. Darwin's mind with all its vastness was not, indeed, profoundly analytical. The task of working out the psychological and metaphysical aspects of evolution fell rather to the great organising and sys- tematising intellect of Herbert Spencer. But within the realm of material fact, and of the widest possible inferences based upon such fact, Darwin's keen and comprehensive spirit ranged freely over the whole illimitable field of nature. * No one,' says Buckle with unwonted felicity, ' can have a firm grasp of any science if, by confining himself to it, he shuts out the light of analogy. He may, no doubt, wprk at the details of his subject ; he may be useful in adding to its facts ; he will never be able to enlarge its philosophy. For the philosophy of every department depends on its connection with other departments, and must therefore be sought at their points of contact. It must be looked for in the place where they touch and coalesce : it lies, not in the centre of each science, but on the confines and margin.' This profound truth Darwin fully and instinctively realised. It was the all-embracing catho- licity of his manifold interests that raised him into the greatest pure biologist of all time, and that enabled him to co-ordinate with such splendid results the raw data of so many distinct and separate sciences. And even as early as the days of the cruise in the ' Beagle,' that innate catholicity had already asserted itself in full vigour. Now it is a party of Gauchos throwing the bola that engages for the moment his eager atten- tion ; and now again it is a group of shivering Fuegians, standing naked with their long hair streaming in the wind on a snowy promontory of their barren coast. Darwin's Wander-Years 57 Here lie examines the tubular lightning-holes melted in the solid rock of Maldonado by the electric energy; and there he observes the moving boulder-streams that course like torrents down the rugfofed corries of the Falkland Islands. At one time he works upon the unstudied geology of the South American Pampas ; at another, he inspects the now classical lagoon and nar- row fringing reef of the Keeling archipelago. Every- where he sees whatever of most noteworthy in animate or inanimate nature is there to be seen ; and every- where he draws from it innumerable lessons, to be applied hereafter to the special field of study upon which his' intense and active energies were finally concentrated. It is not too much to say, indeed, that it was the voyage of the ' Beagle ' which gave us in the last resort the ' Origin of Species ' and its great fellow the ' Descent of Man.' 5 8 Charles Darwin CHAPTER V. THE PERIOD OF INCUBATION. When Charles Darwin landed in England on his return from the voyage of the ' Beagle ' he was nearly twenty- eight. When he published the first edition of the < Origin of Species ' he was over fifty. The intermediate years, though much occupied by many minor works of deep specialist scientific importance, were still mainly devoted to collecting material for the one crowning effort of his life, the chief monument of his great co- ordinating and commanding intellect — the settlement of the question of organic evolution. * There is one thing,' says Professor Fiske, * which a man of original scientific or philosophical genius in a rightly ordered world should never be called upon to do. He should never be called upon to earn a living ; for that is a wretched waste of energy, in which the highest intellectual power is sure to suffer serious detriment, and runs the risk of being frittered away into hopeless ruin.' From this unhappy necessity Charles Darwin, like his predecessor Lyell, was luckily free. He settled down early in a home of his own, and worked away at his own occupations, with no sordid need for earning the day's bread, but with The Period of Incubation 59 perfect leisure to carry out the great destiny for which the chances of the universe had singled him out. His subsequent history is the history of his wonderful and unique contributions to natural science. The first thing to be done, of course, was the ar- rangement and classification of the natural history spoils gathered during the cruise, and the preparation of his own journal of the voyage for publication. The strict scientific results of the trip were described in the ' Zoology of the Voyage of the " Beagle," ' the different parts of which were undertaken by rising men of science of the highest distinction, under Charles Darwin's own editorship. Sir Richard Owen took in hand the fossil mammals ; Waterhouse arranged their living allies ; Gould discussed the birds, Jenyns the fish, and Bell the amphibians and reptiles. In this vast co-operative publication Darwin thus obtained the assistance of many among the most competent specialists in the England of his day, and learned to understand his own collections by the light thrown upon them from the focussed lamps of the most minute technical learning. As for the journal, it was origi- nally published with the general account of the cruise by Captain Fitzroy in 1839, but was afterwards set forth in a separate form under the title of ' A Natural- ist's Voyage Round the World.' But while Darwin was thus enfyaofed in arrangrinsr and classifying the animals and plants he had brought home with him, the germs of those inquiring ideas about the origin of species which we have already observed in his account of the voyage were quickening into fresh life within him. As he ruminated at his leisure over 6o Charles Darwin the results of his accumulations, he was beginning to work upon the great problem with the definite and conscious resolution of solving it. ' On my return home, it occurred to me,' he says, ' in 1837, that some- thing might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work, I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes ; these I en- larged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions that then seemed to me probable ; from that period to the present day [1859] I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that T may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision,' So Darwin wrote at fifty. The words are weighty and well worthy of consideration. They give us in a nutshell the true secret of Darwin's success in compel- ling the attention and assent of his contemporaries to his completed theory. For speculations and hypotheses like those of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, however brilliant and luminous they may be, the hard, dry, scientific mind cares as a rule less than nothing. Men of genius and insight like Goethe and Oken may, indeed, seize greedily upon the pregnant suggestion; their intellects are already attuned by nature to its due reception and assimilation; but the mere butterfly- catchers and plant-hunters of the world, with whom after all rests ultimately the practical acceptance or rejection of such a theory, can only be convinced by long and patient accumulations of facts, by infinite instances and endless examples, by exhaustive surveys The Period of Incubation 6i of tlie whole field of nature in a thousand petty details piecemeal. Thej have to be driven by repeated beating into the right path. Everywhere they fancy they see the loophole of an objection, which must be carefully closed beforehand against them with anticipatory argument, as we close hedges by the wayside against the obtrusive donkey with a cautious bunch of thorny brambles. Even if Charles Darwin had hit upon the fundamental idea of natural selection, and had published it, as Wallace did, in the form of a mere splendid apergu, he would never have revolutionised the world of biology. When the great discovery was actually promulgated, it was easy enough to win the assent of philosophical thinkers like Herbert Spencer ; easy enough, even, to gain the ready adhesion of non- biological but kindred minds, like Leslie Stephen's and John Morley's; those might all, perhaps, have been readily convinced by far less heavy and crushing artillery than that so triumphantly marshalled together in the * Origin of Species.' But in order to command the slow and grudging adhesion of the rank and file of scientific workers, the * hodmen of science,' as Professor Huxley calls them, it was needful to bring together an imposing array of closely serried facts, to secure every post in the rear before taking a single step onward, and to bring to bear upon every antagonist the exact form of argument with which he was already thoroughly famihar. It was by carefully pursuing these safe and cautious phi- losophical tactics that Charles Darwin gained his great victory. Where others were pregnant, he was cogent. He met the Dryasdusts of science on their own ground, and he put them fairly to flight with their own weapons. 62 Charles Darwin More than tliat, lie brought them all over in the long run as deserters into his own camp, and converted them from doubtful and suspicious foes into warm adherents of the evolutionary banner. Moreover, fortunately for the world, Darwin's own mind was essentially one of the inductive type. If a great deductive thinker and speculator like Herbert Spencer had hit upon the self-same idea of survival of the fittest, he might have communicated it to a small following of receptive disciples, who would have under- stood it and accepted it, on a priori grounds alone, and gradually passed it on to the grades beneath them ; but he would never have touched the slow and cautious elephantine intellect of the masses. The common run of mankind are not deductive; they require to have everything made quite clear to them by example and instance. The English intelligence in particular shows itself as a rule congenitally incapable of appreciating the superior logical certitude of the deductive method. Englishmen will not even believe that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the containing sides until they have measured and weighed as well as they are able by rude experimental devices a few selected pieces of rudely shaped rectangular paper. It was a great gain, therefore, that the task of reconstructing the course of organic evolution should fall to the lot of a highly trained and masterly intelligence of the in- ductive order. Darwin had first to convince himself, and then he could proceed to convince the world. He set about the task with characteristic patience and thoroughness. No man that ever Hved possessed in a more remarkable degree than he did the innate capacity The Period of Incubation 63 for taking trouble. For five years, as a mere pre- liminary, he accumulated facts in immense variety, and then for the first time and in the vaguest possible way he ' allowed himself to speculate/ That brings us down to the year 1842, when the first notes of the ' Origin of Species' must have been tentatively committed to paper. 'It was in 1859 that the first edition of the complete work was given to the world. Compare this with the case of Newton, who similarly kept his grand idea of gravitation for many years in embryo, until more exact measurements of the moon's mass and dis- tance should enable him to verify it to his own satis- faction. One other item of immense importance in the genesis of the full Darwinian doctrine deserves mention here — I mean, the exact moment of time occupied by Charles Darwin in the continuous history of scientific thought. A generation or two earlier, in Erasmus Darwin's days, biology had not yet arrived at the true classification of animals and plants upon an essentially hereditary basis. The Linntean arrangement, then universally accepted, was wholly artificial in its main features ; it distributed species without regard to their fundamental likenesses of structure and organisation. But the natural system of Jussieu and De Candolle, by arranging plants into truly related groups, made possible the proofs of an order of affiliation in the vegetable kingdom; while Cuvier's similar reconstruction of the animal world gave a like foothold to the evolutionary philosopher in the other great department of organic nature. The recognition of kinship between the various members of the same family necessarily preceded the establish- 64 Charles Darwin inent of a regular genealogical theory of life in its entirety. Though we are here concerned mainly with Charles Darwin the thinker and writer — not with Charles Darwin the husband and father — a few words of explanation as to his private life must necessarily be added at the present point, before we pass on to consider the long, slow, and cautious brewing of that wonderful work, the * Origin of Species.' Darwin returned home from the voyage of the ' Beagle ' at the end of the year 1836. Soon after, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, no doubt through the influence of his friend Lyell, who was quite enthusiastic over his splendid geological investigations on the rato of elevation in the Pampas and the Cordillera. Acting on Lyell's advice, too, he determined to seek no x)flBcial appointment, but to devote himself entirely for the rest of his life to the pursuit of science. In 1838, at the age of twenty-nine, he read before the Geological Society his paper on the * Connection of Volcanic Phenomena with the Elevation of Mountain Chains,' when, says Lyell admiringly in a private letter, ' he opened upon De la Beche, Phillips, and others ' — the veterans of the science — * his whole battery of the earthquakes and volcanoes of the Andes.' Shortly after, the audacious young man was appointed secretary to the Geological Society, a post which he filled when the voyage of the ' Beagle ' was first pub- lished in 1839. In the early part of that same year, the rising naturalist took to himself a wife from one of the houses to which he himself owed no small part of his conspicuous greatness. His choice fell upon his cousin. The Period of Incubation 65 Miss Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah "Wedg\vood, of Maer Hall ; and, after three years of married life in London, he settled at last at Down House, near Orping- ton, in Kent, where for the rest of his days he passed his time among his conservatories and his pigeons, his garden and his fowls, with his children growing up quietly beside him, and the great thinking world of London within easy reach of a few minutes' journey. His private means enabled him to live the pleasant life of an English country gentleman, and devote himself unremittingly to the pursuit of science. Ill health, indeed, interfered sadly with his powers of work ; but system and patience did wonders during his working days, which were regularly parcelled out between study and recreation, and utilised and economised in the very highest possible degree. Early to bed and early to rise, wandering unseen among the lanes and paths, or riding slowly on his favourite black cob, the great naturalist passed forty years happily and usefully at Down, where all the village knew and loved him. A man of singular simplicity and largeness of heart, Charles Darwin never really learnt to know his own greatness. And that charming innocence and ignorance of his real value made the value itself all the greater. His moral qualities, indeed, were no less admirable and unique in their way than his intellectual faculties. To that charming candour and delightful unostentatious- ness which everybody must have noticed in his published writings, he united in private life a kindliness of dis- position, a width of sympathy, and a ready generosity which made him as much beloved by his friends as he was admired aji4 respected by all Europe. The very 7 66 Charles Darwin servants who came beneath his roof stopped there for the most part during their whole lifetime. In his earlier years at Down, the quiet Kentish home was constantly enlivened by the visits of men like Lyell, Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and WoUaston. During his later days, it was the Mecca of a world-wide scientific and philosophic pilgrimage, where all the greatest men our age has produced sought at times the rare honour of sitting before the face pf the immortal master. But to the very last Darwin himself never seemed to dis- cover that he was anything more than just an average man of science among his natural peers. Shortly after Darwin went to Down he began one long and memorable experiment, which in itself casts a flood of light upon his patient and painstaking method of inquiry. Two years before, he had read at the Geo- logical Society a paper on the ' Formation of Mould,' which more than thirty years later he expanded into his famous treatise on the 'Action of Earthworms.' His uncle and father-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, sug- gested to him that the apparent sinking of stones on the surface might really be due to earthworm castings. So, as soon as he had some land of his own to experi- ment upon, he began, in 1842, to spread broken chalk over a field at Down, in which, twenty-nine years later, in 1871, a trench was dug to test the results. What other naturalist ever waited so long and so patiently to discover the upshot of a single experiment ? Is it wonder- ful that a man who worked like that should succeed, not by faith but by logical power, in removing mountains ? Unfortunately, we do not know the exact date when Darwin first read Malthus. But that the perusal of The Period of Incubation 67 that remarkable book formed a crisis and taming-point in his mental development we know from his own distinct statement in a letter to Haeckel, prefixed to the brilliant German evolutionist's ' History of Creation.* ' It seemed to me probable,' says Darwin, speaking of his own early development, ' that allied species were descended from a common ancestor. But during several years I could not conceive how each form could have been modified so as to become admirably adapted to its place in nature. I began therefore to study domesti- cated animals and cultivated plants, and after a time perceived that man's power of selecting and breeding from certain individuals was the most powerful of all means in the production of new races. Having attended to the habits of animals and their relations to the sur- rounding conditions, I was able to realise the severe struggle for existence to which all organisms are sub- jected ; and my geological observations had allowed me to appreciate to a certain extent the duration of past geological periods. With my mind thus prepared I fortunately happened to read Malthus's " Essay on Popu- lation ; " and the idea of natural selection through the struggle for existence at once occurred to me. Of all the subordinate points in the theory, the last which I under- stood was the cause of the tendency in the descendants from a common progenitor to diverge in character.' It is impossible, indeed, to overrate the importance of Malthus, viewed as a schoolmaster to bring men to Darwin, and to bring Darwin himself to the truth. Without the ' Essay on the Principle of Population ' it is quite conceivable that we should never have had the * Origin of Species ' or the ' Descent of Man.' 68 Charles Darwin At the same time, Darwin had not been idle in other departments of scientific work. Side by side with his collections for his final efibrt he had been busy on his valuable treatise upon Coral Reefs, in which he proved, mainly from his own observations on the Keeling archipelago, that atolls owe their origin to a subsidence of the supporting ocean-floor, the rate of upward growth of the reefs keeping pace on the whole with the gradual depression of the sea-bottom. ' No more admirable example of scientific method,' says Professor Geikie forty years later, ' was ever given to the world ; and even if he had written nothing else, this treatise alone would have placed Darwin in the very front of investi- gators of nature.' But, from our present psychological and historical point of view, as a moment in the de- velopment of Darwin's influence, and therefore of the evolutionary impulse in general, it possesses a still greater and more profound importance, because the work in which the theory is unfolded forms a perfect masterpiece of thorough and comprehensive inductive method, and gained for its author a well-deserved repu- tation as a sound and sober scientific inquirer. The ac- quisition of such a reputation, afterwards increased by the publication of the monograph on the Family Cirripedia (in 1851), proved of immense use to Charles Darwin in the fierce battle which was to rage around the uncon- scious body of the ' Origin of Species.' To be ' sound ' is everywhere of incalculable value ; to have approved one- self to the slow and cautious intelligence of the Philistine classes is a mighty spear and shield for a strong man ; but in England, and above all in scientific England, it is absolutely indispensable to the thinker who would The Period of Incubation 6g accomplish any great revolution. Soundness is to the world of science what respectability is to the world of business — the sine qua non for successfully gaining even a hearing from established personages. To read the book on Coral Reefs is indeed to take a lesson of the deepest value in applied inductive canons. Every fact is duly marshalled: every conclusion is drawn by the truest and most legitimate process from careful observation or crucial experiment. Bit by bit, Darwin shows most admirably that, through gradual submergence, fringing reefs are developed into barrier- reefs, and these again into atolls or lagoon islands ; and incidentally he throws a vivid light on the slow secular movements upward or downward for ever taking place in the world's crust. But the value of the work as a geological record, great as it is, is as nothing compared with its value as a training exercise in inductive logic. Darwin was now learning by experience how to use his own immense powers. Meanwhile, the environment too had been gradually moving. In 1832, the year after young Darwin set out upon his cruise, Lyell published the first edition of his 'Principles of Geology,' establishing once for all the uniformitarian concept of that branch of science. In 1836, the year when he returned, Rafinesque, in his * New Flora of North America,' had accepted within certain cramping limits the idea that ' all species might once have been varieties, and that many varieties are gradually becoming species by assuming constant and peculiar characters.' Haldeman in Boston, and Grant at University College, London, were teaching from their professorial chairs the self-same novel and revolutionary 70 Charles Darwin doctrine. At last, in 1844, Eobert Chambers published anonymously his famous and much-debated 'Vestiges of Creation,' which brought down the question of evolu- tion versus creation from the senate of savants to the arena of the mere general public, and set up at once a universal fever of inquiry into the mysterious question of the origin of species. Chambers himself was a man rather of general knowledge and some native philo- sophical insight than of any marked scientific accuracy or depth. His work in its original form displayed comparatively little acquaintance with the vast ground- work of the question at issue — zoological, botanical, geological, and so forth — and in Charles Darwin's ovsm opinion s)iowed * a great want of scientific caution.* But its graphic style, its vivid picturesqueness, and to the world at large the startling novelty of its brilliant and piquant suggestions, made it burst at once into an unwonted popularity for a work of so distinctly philo- sophical a character. In nine years it leaped rapidly through no less than ten successive editions, and re- mained until the publication of the ' Origin of Species ' the chief authoritative exponent in England of the still struggling evolutionary principle. The ' Vestiges of Creation ' may be succinctly de- scribed as Lamarck and water, the watery element being due in part to the unnecessary obtrusion (more Scotico) of a metaphysical and theological principle into the physical universe. Chambers himself, in his latest edition (before the book was finally killed by the advent of Darwinism), thus briefly describes his main concepts : ' The several series of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are, under The Period of Incubation 71 the providence of God, the results, jirst^ of an impulse which has been imparted to the forms of life, advancing them, in definite times, by generation, through grades of organisation, terminating in the highest dicotyledons and vertebrata, these grades being few in number, and generally marked by intervals of organic character, which we find to be a practical difficulty in ascertaining affinities; second^ of another impulse connected with the vital forces, tending, in the course of generations, to modify organic structures in accordance with external circumstances, as food, the nature of the habitat, and the meteoric agencies.' Now it is clear at once that these two supposed ' impulses ' are really quite miracu- lous in their essence. They do not help us at all to a distinct physical and realisable conception of any natural agency whereby species became differentiated one from the other. They lay the whole burden of species- making upon a single primordial supernatural impetus, imparted to the first living germ by the will of the Creator, and acting ever since continuously it is true, but none the less miraculously for all that. For many creations Chambers substitutes one single long creative nisus : where Darwin saw natural selection, his Scotch predecessor saw a deus ex macJdna, helping on the course of organic development by a constant but unseen interference from above. He supposed evolution to be predetermined by some intrinsic and externally im- planted proclivity. In short, Chambers's theory is Lamarck's theologised, and spoilt in the process. The book had nevei'theless a most prodigious and perfectly unprecedented success. The secret of its authorship was keenly debated and jealously kept. The 72 Charles Darwin most ridiculous surmises as to its anonymous origin were everywhere afloat. Some attributed it to Thackeray, and some to Prince Albert, some to Lyell, some to Sir John Herschel, and some to Charles Darwin himself. Obscurantists thought it a wicked book ; ' intellectual ' people thought it an advanced book. As a matter of fact it was neither the one nor the other. It was just a pale and colourless transcript of the old familiar teleological Lamarckism. Yet it did good in its generation. The public at large were induced by its ephemeral vogue to interest themselves in a question to which they had never previously given even a passing thought, though more practised biologists of evolutionary tendencies were grieved at heart that evolution should first have been popularly presented to the English world under so unscientific, garbled, and mutilated a form. From the philosophic side, Herbert Spencer found ' this ascription of organic evolution to some aptitude naturally possessed by organisms or miracu- lously imposed upon them ' to be ' one of those explana- tions which explain nothing — a shaping of ignorance into the semblance of knowledge. The cause assigned,' he says, ' is not a true cause — not a cause assimilable to known causes — not a cause that can be anywhere shown to produce analogous efiects. It is a cause un- representable in thought: one of those illegitimate symbolic conceptions which cannot by any mental pro- cess be elaborated into a real conception.' From the scientific side, on the other hand, Darwin felt sadly the inaccuracy and want of profound technical knowledge everywhere displayed by the anonymous author. These things might naturally cause the enemy to blaspheme. The Period of Incubation 73 No worse calamity, indeed, can happen to a great truth than for its defence to be intrusted to inefficient hands. Nevertheless, long after, in the ' Origin of Species,* the great naturalist wrote with generous appreciation of the ' Vestiges of Creation,' ' In my own opinion it has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus pre- paring the ground for the reception of analogous views/ Still Darwin gave no sign. A flaccid, cartilaginous, unphilosophic evolutionism had full possession of the field for the moment, and claimed, as it were, to be the genuine representative of the young and vigorous biological creed, while he himself was in truth the real heir to all the honours of the situation. He was in possession of the master-key which alone could unlock the bars that opposed the progress of evolution, and still he waited. He could afford to wait. He was diligently collecting, amassing, investigating; eagerly reading every new systematic work, every book of travels, every scientific journal, every record of sport, or exploration, or discovery, to extract from the dead mass of undigested fact whatever item of implicit value might swell the definite co-ordinated series of notes in his own common- place books for the now distinctly contemplated ' Origin of Species.' His way was to make all sure behind him, to summon up all his facts in irresistible array, and never to set out upon a public progress until he was secure against all possible attacks of the ever- watchful and alert enemy in the rear. Few men would have had strength of mind enough to resist the temptation offered by the publication of the ' Vestiges of Creation,' and the extraordinary success attained by so flabby a 74 Charles Darwin presentation of the evolutionary case : Darwin resisted itj and he did wisely. We may, however, take it for granted, I doubt not, that it was the appearance and success of Chambers's invertebrate book which induced Darwin, in 1844 (the year of its publication), to enlarge his short notes ' into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed to him probable.' This sketch he showed to Dr. (now Sir Joseph) Hooker, no doubt as a precaution to ensure his own claim of priority against any future possible com- petitor. And having thus eased his mind for the moment, he continued to observe, to read, to devour ' Transactions,' to collate instances, with indefatigable persistence for fifteen years longer. If any man mentally measures out fifteen years of his own life, and bethinks him of how long a space it seems when thus deliberately pictured, he will be able to realise a little more definitely — but only a little — how profound was the patience, the self-denial, the single-mindedness of Darwin's intense search after the ultimate truths of natural science. What was the sketch that he thus committed to paper in 1844, and submitted to the judgment of his friend Hooker? It was the germ of the theory of natural selection. According to that theory, organic development is due to the survival of the fittest among innumerable variations, good, bad, and indifferent, from one or more parent stocks. Darwin's reading of Mal- thus had suggested to him (apparently as early as the date of publication of the * Naturalist's Journal ') the idea that every species of plant and animal must always be producing a far greater number of seeds, eggs, germs, or young oflfspring than could possibly be needed for The Period of Incubation 75 the maintenance of the average number of the species. Of these young, by far the greater number must always perish from generation to generation, for want of space, of food, of air, of raw material. The survivors in each brood must be those naturally best adapted for survival. The many would be eaten, starved, overrun, or crowded out ; the few that survive would be those that possessed any special means of defence against aggressors, any special advantage for escaping starvation, any special protection against overrunning or overcrowding foes. Animals and plants, Darwin found on inquiry and in- vestigation, tended to vary under diverse circumstances from the parent or parents that originally produced them. These variations were usually infinitesimal in amount, but sometimes more considerable or even striking. If any particular variation tended in any way to preserve the life of the creatures that exhibited it, beyond the average of their like competitors, that variation would in the long run survive, and the indi- viduals that possessed it, being thus favoured in the struggle for existence, would replace the less adapted form from which they sprang. Darwinism is Malthusian- ism on the large scale : it is the application of the calculus of population to the wide facts of -universal life. In one sense, indeed, it may be said that, given Malthus on the one hand and the Lamarckian evolu- tionism on the other, some great man somewhere must sooner or later, almost of necessity, have combined the two, and hit out the doctrine of natural selection as we actually know it. Quite so ; but then the point is just this : Darwin was the great man in question ; he did the work which in the very essence of things some 76 Charles Darwin sucli great man was naturally and inevitably predestined to do. You can always easily manage to get on without any particular great man, provided, of course, you have ready to hand another equally able great man by whom to replace him in the scheme of existence. But how many ordinary naturalists possess the width of mind and universality of interest which would prompt them to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest a politico- economical treatise of the calibre of Malthus? How many, having done so, have the keenness of vision to perceive the ensuing biological implications? How many, having seen them, have the skill and the patience to work up the infinite chaos of botanical and zoological detail into the far-reaching generalisations of the ' Origin of Species ' ? Merely to have caught at the grand idea is in itself no small achievement ; others did so and deserve all honour for their insight ; but to flesh it out with all the minute care and conclusive force of Darwin's masterpiece is a thousand times a greater and nobler monument of human endeavour. During the fifteen years from 1844 to 1859, how- ever, Darwin's pen was by no means idle. In the first- named year he published his ' Geological Observations on Volcanic Islands ' — part of the ' Beagle ' exploration series; in 1846 he followed this up by his 'Geological Observations on South America;' in 1851 he gave to the world his monograph on * Recent Barnacles ; ' and in 1853, his treatise on the fossil species of the same family. But all these works of restricted interest remained always subsidiary to the one great central task of his entire lifetime, the preparation of his pro- jected volume on the Origin of Species. The Period of Incubation yy All through the middle decades of the century Darwin continued to labour at his vast accumulation of illustrative facts ; and side by side with his continuous toil, outside opinion kept paving the way for the final acceptance of his lucid ideas. The public was buying and reading all the time its ten editions of the ' Vestiges of Creation.' It was slowly digesting Lyell's ' Principles of Geology,' in which the old cataclysmic theories were featly demolished, and the uniformitarian conception of a past gradually and insensibly merging into the present was conclusively established. It was getting accustomed to statements like those of the younger St. Hilaire, in 1850, that specific characters may be modified by changes in the environing conditions, and that the modifications thus produced may often be of generic value — may make a difference so great that we must regard the product not merely as belonging to a distinct species, but even to a distinct genus or higher kind. In 1852 Herbert Spencer published in the ' Leader ' his remarkable essay, contrasting the theories of creation and evolution, as applied to organic beings, with all the biting force of his profound intelligence ; and in 1855, the same encyclopaedic philosopher put forth the first rough sketch of his 'Principles of Psychology,' in which he took the lead in treating the phenomena of mind from the point of view of gradual development. In that extraordinary work, the philo- sopher of evolution traced the origin of all mental powers and faculties by slow gradations from the very simplest subjective elements. The ' Principles of Psychology ' preceded the ' Origin of Species ' by nearly five years ; the first collected volume of Mr. Spencer's 78 Charles Darwin essays preceded Darwin's work by some twelve months. Baden-Powell's essay on the ' Philosophy of Creation ' (much debated and condemned in ecclesiastical circles), and Professor Owen's somewhat contradictory utterances on the nature of types and archetypal ideas, also helped to keep alive interest in the problem of origins up to the very moment of the final appearance of Darwin's great and splendid solution. It is interesting during these intermediate years to watch from time to time the occasional side-hints of Darwin's activity and of the interest it aroused among his scientific contemporaries. In 1854, foi; example, Sir Charles Lyell notes, after an evening at Darwin's, how Sir Joseph Hooker astonished him with an account of that strange orchid, Catasetum, which bears three totally distinct kinds of flowers on the same plant ; ' It "will figure,' he says, ' in C. Darwin's book on species, with many other " ugly facts," as Hooker, clinging like me to the orthodox faith, calls these and other abnormal vagaries.' On a similar occasion, a little later, Lyell asks, after meeting ' Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston at Darwin's,' 'After all, did we not come from an ourang ?' Last of all, in 1857, Darwin himself writes an anti- cipatory letter to his American friend, Asa Gray, in which he mentions ' six points ' — the cardinal concep- tions of the ' Origin of Species.' His book is now fairly under weigh ; he speaks of it himself to acquaint- ance and correspondents as an acknowledged project. Events were growing ripe for the birth. A lucky accident precipitated its parturition in the coursfc of the year 1858. CHAI^ER VI. *TnE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.* The accident came in this wise. Alfred Russel Wallace, a young "Welsh biologist, went out at twenty-four, in 1848, to the Amazons River, in company with Bates (the author of ' The Naturalist on the Amazons ' ), to collect birds and butterflies, and to study tropical life in the richest region of equatorial America. Like all other higher zoologists of their time, the two young explorers were deeply interested in the profound questions of origin and metamorphosis, and of geographical distribution, and in the letters that passed between them before they started they avowed to one another that the object of their quest was a solution of the pressing biological enigma of creation or evolu- tion. Starting with fresh hopes and a few pounds in pocket, on an old, worn-out, and unseaworthy slave- trader, they often discussed these deep problems of life and nature together upon the Sargasso sea, or among the palms and lianas of the Brazilian woodlands. The air was thick with whiffs and foretastes of evolutionism, and the two budding naturalists of the Amazous expe- dition had inhaled them eagerly with every breath. They saw among the mimicking organisms of that 8o Charles Darwin equatorial zone strange puzzles to engage tlieir deepest attention ; they recognised in the veins and spots that diversified the filmy membranes of insects' wings the hieroglyphs of nature, writing as on a tablet for them to decipher the story of the slow modification of species. In 1852 — the year when Herbert Spencer in England published his essay on the ' Development Hypothesis,' and when Naudin in France put forth his bold and able paper on the * Origin of Species ' — Wallace once more returned to Europe, and gave to the world his interest- ing ' Travels on the Amazons and the Rio Negro.' Two years later the indefatigable traveller set out a second time on a voyage of tropical exploration, among the islands of the Malay archipelago, and for eight years he wandered about in Malay huts and remote islets, gathering in solitude and isolation the enormous store of minute facts which he afterwards lavished with so prodigal a hand upon ' Tropical Nature,' and the ' Geo- graphical Distribution of Animals.' While Wallace was still at Amboyna, he sent home in 1858 a striking memoir, addressed to Darwin, with a request that he would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, for presentation to the Linnean Society. Darwin opened and read his brother naturalist's paper, and found to his surprise that it contained his own theory of natural selection, not worked out in detail, as he himself was working it out, but still complete in spirit and essence, with no important portion of the central idea lacking to its full rotundity of conception. A jealous man would have thrown obstacles in the way of publication ; but both Darwin and Wallace were bom superior to the meannesses of jealousy. The elder naturalist commended ' The Origin of Species* 8i his young rival's paper at once to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it on immediately to tlie Linnean Society. But Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, both of whom knew of Darwin's work, thought it advisable that he should publish, in the ' Journal ' of the Society, a few extracts from his o^vn manuscripts, side by side with Wallace's paper. Darwin, therefore, selected some essential passages for the purpose from his own long- gathered and voluminous notes, and the two contributions were read together before the Society on July the 1st, 1858. That double communication marks the date of birth of modem evolutionism. It is to the eternal credit of both thinkers that each accepted his own true position with regard to the great discovery in perfect sincerity. The elder naturalist never strove for a moment to press his own claim to priority against the younger : the younger, with singular generosity and courtesy, waived his own claim to divide the honours of discovery in favour of the elder. Not one word save words of fraternal admiration and cordial appreciation ever passed the lips of either with regard to the other. The distinctive notion of natural selection, indeed, like all true and fruitful ideas, had more than once flashed for a moment across the penetrating mind of more than one independent investigator. As early as 1813, Dr. Wells, the famous author of the theory of dew, applied that particular conception to the single case of the production of special races among mankind. ' Of the accidental varieties of man, which would occur among the first few and scattered inhabitants of the middle regions of Africa,' he wrote, ' some one would be better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of 82 Charles Darwin the country. This race would consequently multiply, while the others would decrease ; not only from their inability to sustain the attacks of disease, but from their incapacity of contending with their more vigorous neighbours, . . . The same disposition to form varieties still existing, a darker and a darker race would in the course of time occur ; and as the darkest would be the best fitted for the climate, this would at last become the most prevalent, if not the only race in the country.' Here we have not merely the radical concept of natural selection, but also the subordinate idea of its exertion upon what Darwin calls ' spontaneous variations.' What is wanting in the paper is the application of the faintly descried law to the facts and circumstances of general biology : Wells saw only a particular instance, where Darwin and Wallace more vividly perceived a uni- versal principle. Again, in 1831, Mr. Patrick Matthew in that singular appendix to his book on naval timber actually enunciates the same idea, applied this time to the whole of nature, in words sometimes almost iden- tical with Darwin's own. ' As nature in all her modifi- cations of life,' says this unconscious discoverer, ' has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time's decay, those indivi- duals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without repro- ducing— either a prey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generally induced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the more perfect of their OAvn kind, who are pressing on the means of existence. . . . The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life may, in part, be traced to • The Origin of Species ' 8^ the extreme fecundity of nature, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and preoccupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better-suited-to-cir- cumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any other kind ; the weaker and less circumstance-suited being prematurely destroyed. This principle is in constant action; it regulates the colour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts ; those individuals in each species whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from enemies, or defence from inclemencies and vicissitudes of climate, whose figure is best accommodated to health, strength, defence, and support; whose capacities and instincts can best regulate the physical energies to self- advantage according to circumstances — in such im- mense waste of primary and youthful life those only come forward to maturity from the strict ordeal by which nature tests their adaptation to her standard of perfection and fitness to continue their kind by repro- duction.' Of the ideas expressed in these paragraphs, and others which preceded them, Darwin himself rightly observes, ' He gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself. He clearly saw the full force of the prin- ciple of natural selection.' In 1852, once more, so eminent and confirmed an evolutionist as Mr. Herbert Spencer himself had hit 84 Charles Darwin" upon a glimpse of the same great truth, strange to say without perceiving the width and scope of its implica- tions. ' All mankind,' he wrote in that year in an essay on population in the ' Westminster Review,' ' in turn subject themselves more or less to the discipline de- scribed ; they either may or may not advance under it; but, in the nature of things, only those who do advance under it eventually survive. For, necessarily, families and faces whom this increasing diflSculty of getting a living which excess of fertility entails does not stimulate to improvements in production .... are on the high road to extinction ; and must ultimately be supplanted by those whom the pressure does so stimu- late. . . . And here, indeed, without further illustra- tion, it will be seen that premature death, under all its forms, and from all its causes, cannot fail to work in the same direction. For as those prematurely carried oflf must, in the average of cases, be those in whom the power of self-preservation is the least, it unavoidably follows that those left behind to continue the race must be those in whom the power of self-preservation is the greatest, must be the select of their generation.' In this striking pre-Darwinian passage we have a partial perception of what Mr. Spencer afterwards described as the survival of the fittest ; but, as our great philosopher himself remarks, it 'shows how near one may be to a great generalisation without seeing it.' For not only does Mr. Spencer, like Wells before him, limit the application of the principle to the case of humanity ; but, unlike Wells, he overlooks the all-important factor of spontaneous variation, and the power of natural selection, acting upon such, to produce specific and 'The Origin of Species' 85 generic divergences of structure. In short, in his own words, the paragraph ' contains merely a passing recog- nition of the selective process, and indicates no suspicion of the enormous range of its effects, or of the conditions under which a large part of its effects are produced.' On the other hand, it must be noted that both Spencer and Matthew, like Darwin himself, based their ideas largely upon the Malthusian principle, and thus held the two true keys of the situation fairly within their unconscious hands. Frankly to recognise these various foreshadowings of the distinctive Darwinian theory of natural selection is not in any way to undermine the foundations of Charles Darwin's o^vn real and exceptional greatness. On the contrary, the mere fact that his views were so far anticipated by Wells, Matthew, Spencer, and others, and were simultaneously arrived at across half the globe by the independent intellect of Alfred Russel Wallace, is in itself the very best proof and finest criterion of Charles Darwin's genuine apostleship. No truly grand and fruitful idea was ever yet the sole property of a single originator. Great discoveries, says an acute critic, must always be concerned with some problem of the time which many of the world's foremost minds are just then cudgelling their active brains about. It was so with the discovery of the differential calculus, and of the planet Neptune ; with the interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and of the cuneiform in- scriptions ; with the undulatory theory of light, with the mechanical equivalent of heat, with the doctrine of the correlation and conservation of energies, with the invention of the steam engine, the locomotive, the S6 Charles Darwin telegraph and the telephone; with the nebular hypo- thesis, and with spectrum analysis. It was so, too, with the evolutionary movement. The fertile upturning of virgin sod in the biological field which produced Darwin's forerunners, as regards the idea of descent with modification, in the persons of Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, necessarily produced a little later, under the fresh impetus of the Malthusian conception, his forerunners or coadjutors, as regards the idea of natural selection, in the persons of Wells, Matthew, and Wallace. It was Darwin's task to recognise the uni- versal, where Wells and Spencer had seen only the particular ; to build up a vast and irresistible inductive system, where ISIatthew and Wallace had but thrown out a pregnant hint of wonderful a 'priori interest and suggestiveness. It is one thing to draw out the idea of a campaign, another thing to carry it to a successful conclusion ; one thing rudely to sketch a ground-plan, another thing finally to pile aloft to the sky the front of an august and imposing fabric. As soon as the papers at the Linnean had been read and printed, Darwin set to Avork in real earnest to bring out the first instalment of his great work. That instal- ment was the ' Origin of Species.' The first edition was ready for the public on November the 24th, 1859. In his own mind Darwin regarded that immortal work merely in the light of an abstract of his projected volumes. So immense were his collections and so voluminous his notes that the ' Origin of Species ' itself seemed to him like a mere small portion of the contem- plated publication. And indeed he did ultimately work out several other portions of his original plan in his * The Origin of Species* By detailed treatises on the Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, on the Effects of Cross and Self- Fertilisation, and on the Descent of Man and Sexual Selection. But the immense and unexpected vogue of his first volume, the almost immediate revolution which it caused in biological and general opinion, and the all but universal adhesion to his views of all the greatest and most rising naturalists, to a great extent saved him the trouble of carrying out in full the task he had originally contemplated as necessary. Younger and less occupied labourers tbok part of the work off their leader's hands ; the great chief was left to prosecute his special researches in some special lines, and was relieved from the necessity of further proving in minuter detail what he had already proved with sufficient cogency to convince all but the wilfully blind or the hopelessly stupid. The extraordinary and unprecedented success of the * Origin of Species ' is the truest test of the advance it made upon all previous evolutionary theorising. Those who had never been convinced before were now con- vinced by sheer force of reasoning ; those who believed and those who wavered had their faith confirmed into something like the reposeful calm of absolute certitude. Let us consider, therefore, what exactly were the additions which Charles Darwin ofiered in his epoch- making work to the pre-existing conceptions of evolu- tionists. In 1852, seven years before the publication of Darwin's masterpiece, Mr, Herbert Spencer wrote as follows in an essay in the ' Leader ' on creation and evolution. The expressions of so profound and philo- 88 Charles Darwin sopLical a biologist may be regarded as tlie high-water mark of evolutionary thinking np to the date of the appearance of Wallace and Darwin's theory : — 'Even could the supporters of the development hypothesis merely show that the production of species by the process of modification is conceivable, they would be in a better position than their opponents. But they can do much more than this ; they can show that the process of modification has effected and is effecting great changes in all organisms, subject to modifying influences they can show that any existing species — animal or vegetable — when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, imme- diately begins to undergo certain changes of structure fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue until ultimately the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants and domesti- cated animals, and in the several races of men, these changes have uniformly taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference, so produced, are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded. They can show that it is a matter of dispute whether some of these modified forms are varieties or modified species. They can show too that the changes daily taking place in ourselves ; the facility that attends long practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins when practice ceases ; the development of every faculty, bodily, moral or in- tellectual, according to the use made of it, are all ex- plicable on this same principle. And thus they can show that throughout all organic nature there is at '^The Origin of Species'' 89 work a modifying inflaence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific differences, an influence which, though slow in its action, does in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes ; an influence which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of condition which geological records imply, any amount of change.' This admirable passage, written seven years before the publication of the ' Origin of Species,' contains explicitly almost every idea that ordinary people, not specially biological in their interests, now associate with the name of Darwin. That is to say, it contains, in a very philosophical and abstract form, the theory of ' descent with modification' without the distinctive Darwinian adjunct of * natural selection' or ' survival of the fittest.' Yet it was just that particular lever, dexterously applied, and carefully weighted with the whole weight of his endlessly accumulated inductive instances, that finally enabled our modern Archimedes in so short a time to move the world. The pubUc, that was deaf to the high philosophy of Herbert Spencer, listened at once to the practical wisdom of Charles Darwin. They did not care at all for the a priori proof, but they believed forthwith as soon as a cautious and careful investigator laid bare before their eyes in minute detail the modus operandi of nature herself. The main argument of Darwin's chief work runs somewhat after the following fashion • : — " The reraainder of the present chapter, which consists almost entirely of an exposition of the doctrine of natural selection, may Bafely be skipped by the reader already well acquainted with the 9 90 Charles Darwin Variation, to a greater or less degree, is a common and well-known fact in nature. More especially, animals and plants under domestication tend to vary from one another far more than do the individuals of any one species in the wild state. Rabbits in a warren are all alike in shape, size, colour, and features : rabbits in a hutch vary indefinitely in the hue of their fur, the length of their ears, the character of their coat, and half a dozen other minor particulars, well known to the observant souls of boys and fanciers. This great varia- bility, though partly perhaps referable to excess of food, is probably due on the whole to their having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent species is commonly exposed in a state of nature. In other words, variability is one result of altered and more varied surrounding circumstances. Again, this variability is usually indefinite. You can- not say what direction it will take, or to what particular results it is likely in any special instance to lead. Marked difierences sometimes occur even between the young of the same litter, or between the seedlings sown from the same capsule. As a rule, the variations exhibit themselves in connection with sexual reproduc- tion ; but sometimes, as in the case of ' sporting plants,' a new bud suddenly produces leaves or flowers of a difierent character from the rest of those on the self- same stem, thus showing that the tendency to vary is inherent, as it were, in the organism itself. Upon this Origin of Species. The abstract is taken for the most part from the latest and fullest enlarged edition, but attention is usually called in passing to the points which di^ not appear in the first issue of 1859. • The Origin of Species' 91 fundamental fact of the existence in nature of numerous and indefinite vai'iations, the whole theory of natural selection is ultimately built up. In illustrating by ex- ample the immense variability of domesticated creatures, Darwin lays great stress upon the case of pigeons, with which he was familiar from his long experience as a breeder and fancier in his own home at Down. Naturalists are almost universally of opinion that all the breeds of domestic pigeons, from the carrier to the tumbler, from the runt to the fantail, are alike descended from the wild rock pigeon of the European coasts. The immense amount of variation which this original species has undergone in domestication may be seen by com- paring the numberless breeds of pigeon now exhibited at all our poultry shows with one another. But variation gives us only half the elements of the ultimate problem, even in the case of domestic kinds. For the other half, we must have recourse to human selection, which, by picking out for seed or breed- ing purposes certain specially favoured varieties, has pro- duced at last all the purposive or intentional diversity between the different existing stocks or breeds. In these artificially produced domestic races we see every- where special adaptations to man's particular use or fancy. The dray-horse has been fashioned for purposes of strength and sure-footedness in draught, the race- horse for purposes of fleetness in running. In the fox- hound, man has encouraged the special properties that tend to produce a good day's hunting ; in the sheep- dog, those that make for the better maintenance and safety of a herd. The cauliflower is a cabbage, with specialised and somewhat abortive flower-heads; the 92 Charles Darwin fuller's teasel is a sport of the wild form, with curved hooks specially adapted by a freak of nature for the teasing of wool. So in every case man, by deliberately picking out for breeding or seeding purposes the acci- dental variations which happened best to suit his own needs, has succeeded at last in producing races admirably fitted in the minutest particulars for the special func- tions to which they are applied. There appears indeed to be hardly any limit to the almost infinite plasticity and modifiability of domestic animals. ' It would seem,' said a great sheep-breeder, speaking of sheep, ' as if farmers had chalked out upon a wall a form perfect in itself, and then prpceeded to give it existence.' Now, what is thus true within narrow limits, and in a short space of time about the deliberate action of man, Darwin showed to be also true within wider limits and spread over longer geological epochs about the un- conscious action of nature. And herein consisted his great advance upon the earlier evolutionism of Lamarck, Goethe, and Erasmus Darwin. For while these instinc- tive pioneers of the evolutionary spirit saw clearly that animals and plants betrayed signs of common descent from one or a tew original ancestors, they did not see what was the mechanism by which such organisms had been differentiated into so many distinct genera and species. They caught, indeed, at the analogy of varia- tion under domestication and in the wild state, but they missed the subtler and deeper analogy between human and natural selection. Now, variation alone would give us a world consisting not of definite kinds fairly well demarcated one from the other, but of innumerable un- classified and unorganisable individuals, all shading off * The Origin of Species ' 93 indefinitely one into the other, and incapable of being reduced by human ingenuity to any orderly hierarchical system. Furthermore, it would give tis creatures with- out special adaptation of any kind to the peculiar cir- cumstances of their own environment. To account for adaptation, for the almost perfect fitness of every plant and every animal to its position in life, for the existence (in other words) of definitely correlated parts and organs, we must call in the aid of survival of the fittest. Without that potent selective agent, our con- ception of the becoming of life is a mere chaos ; order and organisation are utterly inexplicable save by the brilliant illuminating ray of the Darwinian principle. That is why Darwin destroyed at one blow the specious arguments of the early teleologists ; he showed that where Chambers and even Erasmus Darwin had seen the working of a final cause, we ought rather to recog- nise the working of an efficient cause, whose outcome necessarily but fallaciously simulates the supposed fea- tures of an a 'priori finality. From art, then, Darwin harks back once more to nature. He proceeds to show that variability occurs among all wild plants and animals, though not so fre- quently under ordinary circumstances as in the case of domesticated species. Individual differences everywhere occur between plant and plant, between animal and animal. Sometimes these differences are so very numerous that it is impossible to divide the individuals at all into well-marked kinds ; for example, among British wild-roses, brambles, hawkweeds and epilobes, with a few other very variable families, Babington makes as many as 251 distinct species, where Bentham 94 Charles Darwin gives only 112 — a margin of 139 doubtful forms of shadowy indefiniteness. Varieties, in fact, are always arising, and dominant species in particular always tend to vary most in every direction. The reason why varia- tion is not so marked in the wild state as under domes- tication is of course because the conditions are there less diverse ; but where the conditions of wild things are most diverse, as in the case of dominant kinds, which range over a wide space of country or of ocean, abundant individual variations habitually occur. Local varieties thus produced are regarded by Darwin as incipient species : they are the raw material on which natural selection gradually exerts itself in the struggle for existence. Granting individual variability, then, how do species arise in nature ? And how are all the exquisite adapta- tions of part to whole, and of whole to environment, gradually initiated, improved, and perfected ? Here Malthus and the struggle for life come in to help us. For the world is perpetually over-populated. It is not, as many good people fearfully imagine, on a half- comprehension of the Malthusian principle, shortly going to be over-populated; it is now, it has always been, and it will always be, pressed close up to the utmost possible limit of population. Reproduction is everywhere and in all species for ever outrunning means of subsistence; and starvation or competition is for ever keeping down the number of the offspring to the level of the average or nonnal supply of raw material. A single red campion produces in a year three thousand seeds ; but there are not this year three thousand times ^The Origin of Species* 95 as many red campions as there were last summer, nor will there be three thousand times as many more in the succeeding season. The roe of a cod contains sometimes nearly ten million eggs ; but supposing each of these produced a young fish which arrived at maturity, the whole sea would immediately become a solid mass of closely packed codfish. Linnaeus reckoned that if an annual plant had two seeds, each of which produced two seedlings in the succeeding season, and so on continually, in twenty years their progeny would amount to a million plants. A struggle for existence necessarily results from this universal tendency of animals and plants to increase faster than the means of subsistence, whether those means be food, as in the first case, or carbonic acid, water, and sunshine as in the second. Animals are all perpetually battling with one another for the food- supply of the moment ; plants are perpetually bat- tling with one another for their share of the soil, the rainfall, and the sunshine. The case of the plant is a very important one to understand in this connection, because it is probable that most people greatly misunderstand the biological meaning of the phrase ' struggle for existence.' They imagine that the struggle is chiefly conducted between different species, whereas in reality it is chiefly conducted between members of the same species. It is not so much the battle between the tiger and the antelope, between the wolf and the bison, between the snake and the bird, that ultimately results in natural selection or survival of the fittest, as the struggle between tiger and tiger, between bison and bison, between snake and snake, between antelope and antelope. A human g6 Charles Darwin analogy may help to make this difficalt principle a little clearer. The baker does not fear the competition of the butcher in the straggle for life : it is the competi- tion of the other bakers that sometimes inexorably crushes liim out of existence. The lawyer does not press hard upon the doctor, nor the architect upon the journeyman painter. A war in the Soudan or in South Africa is far less fatal to the workman in our great towns than the ceaseless competition of his fellow-workmen. It is not the soldier that kills the artisan, but the num- ber of other artisans who undersell him and crowd to fill up every vacant position. In this way the great enemies of the individual herbivore are not the carnivores, but the other herbivores. The lion eats the antelope, to be sure ; but the real struggle lies between lion and lion for a fair share of meat, or between antelope and antelope for a fair share of pasturage. Homo homini lupus, says the old proverb, and so, we may add, in a wider sense, lupus lupo lupus, also. Of course, the carnivore plays a great part in the selective process ; but he is the selector only ; the real competition is be- tween the selected. Now, let us take the case of the plant. A thousand seedlings occupy the space where few alone can ultimately grow ; and between these seedlings the struggle is fierce, the strongest and best adapted ultimately surviving. To take Darwin's own example, the mistletoe, which is a parasite, cannot truly be said to struggle with the apple tree on which it fastens ; for if too many parasites cover a tree, it perishes, and so they kill themselves as well as their host, all alike dying together. But several seedling mistletoes growing together on the same branch may ' The Origin op Species ' 97 fairly be said to struggle with one another for light and air ; and since mistletoe seeds are disseminated by birds and dropped by them in the angles of branches, the mistletoe may also be said to compete with other berry- bearing bushes, like cornel and hawthorn, for the minis- trations of the fruit-eating birds. The struggle is fierce between allied kinds, and fiercest of all between individual members of the same species. Owing to this constant struggle, variations, however slight, and from whatever cause arising, if in any degree profitable to the individual which presents them, will tend to the preservation of the particular organism, and, being on the average inherited by its ofispring, will similarly tend to increase and multiply in the world at large. This is the principle of natural selection or sur- vival of the fittest — the great principle which Darwin and Wallace added to the evolutionism of Lamarck and his successors. Let us take a single concrete example. In the desert, with its monotonous sandy colouring, a black insect or a white insect, still more a red insect or a blue insect, would be immediately detected and promptly de- voured by its natural enemies, the birds and lizards. But any greyish or yellowith insects would be less likely to attract attention at first sight, and would be over- looked as long as there were any more conspicuous in- dividuals of their own kind about for the birds and lizards to feed on at their leisure. Hence, in a very short time, the desert would be depopulated of all but the greyest and yellowest insects ; and among these the birds woiild pick out those which difiered most markedly in hue or shade from the sand around them. But those 98 Charles Darwin •which happened to vary most in the direction of a sandy or spotty colour would be most likely to survive, and to become the parents of future generations. Thus, in the course of long ages, all the insects which inhabit deserts have become sand-coloured ; because the least sandy were perpetually picked out for destruction by their ever-watchful foes, while the most sandy escaped and multiplied and replenished the earth with their own likes. Conversely, the birds and the lizards again would probably begin by being black, and white, and blue, and green, like most other birds and lizards in the world generally. But the insect would have ample warning of the near approach of such conspicuous self-advertising enemies, and would avoid them accordingly whenever they appeared within range of his limited vision, either by lying close, or by shamming death, or by retreating precipitately to holes and crannies. Therefore, whatever individual birds or lizards happened to vary most in the direction of grey or sand- colour, and so to creep unob- served upon the unguarded insects, would succeed best on the average in catching beetles or desert grasshoppers. Hence, by the slow dying out of the more highly coloured and distinctive insect-eaters, before the severe competition of the greyest and sandiest, all the birds and lizards of the desert have become at last as absolutely sand-coloured as the insects themselves. Only the greyest insect could escape the bird ; only the greyest bird, en revanche, could surprise and devour the unwary insect. Sir Charles Lyell and the elder De Candolle had already seen the great importance of the struggle for existence in the organic world, but neither of them had observed the magnificent corollary of natural selection, * The Origin of Species ' 99 wliicli flows from it almost as a mathematical necessity when once suggested ; for, given indefinite variability, and a geometrical rate of increase, it must needs follow that some varieties will be better suited to the circumstances than others, and therefore that they will survive on the average in increased proportions. A passage from one of Lyell's early letters will show how near he too went to this great luminous generalisation, and yet how utterly he missed the true implications of his own vague and chaotic idea. He writes thus to Sir John Herschel in 1836, while Darwin was still but homeward bound on the voyage of the ' Beagle ' : — ' In regard to the origination of new species, I am very glad to find that you think it probable that it may be carried on through the intervention of intermediate causes. . . . An insect may be made in one of its transformations to resemble a dead stick, or a leaf, or a lichen, or a stone, so as to be somewhat less easily found by its enemies; or if this would make it too strong, an occasional variety of the species may have this advantage conferred on it ; or if this would be still too much, one sex of a certain variety. Probably there is scarcely a dash of colour on the wing or body of which the choice would be quite arbitrary, or which might not afiect its duration for thousands of years.' Now, this comes in some ways perilously near to Darwin indeed ; but in the most impoi tant point of all it is wide apart from him as the pole is from the equator. For Lyell thought of all this as a matter of external teleological arrangement ; he imagined a de- liberate power from outside settling it all by design beforehand, and granting to varieties or species these 100 Charles Darwin special peculiarities in a manner that was at bottom essentially supernatural, or in other words miraculous ; whereas Danvin thinks of it as the necessary result of the circumstances themselves, an inevitable outcome of indefinite variability ']^lus the geometrical rate of in- crease. Where Lyell sees a final cause, Darwin sees an efficient cause ; and this distinction is fundamental. It marks Darwin's position as that of a great philosophi- cal thinker, who can dash aside at once all metaphysical cobwebs, and penetrate to the inmost recesses of things, unswerved by the vain but specious allurements of obvious and misleading teleological fallacies. Darwin also laid great stress on the immense com- plexity of the relations which animals and plants bear to one another, in the struggle for existence. For example, on the heathy uplands near Famham in Surrey, large spaces were at one time enclosed, on which, within ten years, self-grown fir-trees from the wind-borne seeds of distant clumps sprang up so thickly as actually to choke one another with their tiny branches. All over the heaths outside, when Darwin looked for them, he could not find a single fir, except the old clumps on the hilltops, from which the seedlings themselves had originally sprung. But, on looking closer among the stems of the heath, he descried a number of very tiny firs, which had been perpetually browsed down by the cattle on the commons ; and one of them, with twenty-six riugs of growth, had during many years endeavoured unsuccessfully to raise its head above the surrounding heather. Hence, as soon as the land was enclosed, and the cattle excluded, it became covered at once with a thick growth of vigorous ^The Origin of Species* ioi young fir-trees. Yet who would ever have supposed beforehand that the mere presence or absence of cattle would absohitely have determined the very existence of the Scotch fir throughout a wide range of well-adapted sandy English upland ? To take another curious instance mentioned by Darwin. In Paraguay, unlike the greater part of neighbouring South America, neither horses nor cattle have ever run wild. This is due to the presence of a parasitic fly, which lays its eggs in their bodies when first born, the maggots killing ofi" the tender young in their first stages. But if any cause were to alter the number of the dangerous flies, then cattle and wild horses would abound ; and this would alter the vegetation, as Darwin himself observed in other parts of America ; and the change in the vegetation would aSect the insects ; and that again the insectivorous birds ; and so on in ever widening circles of incalculable complexity. Once more, to quote the most famous instance of all, the visits of humble-bees are absolutely necessary in order to place the pollen in the right position for setting the seeds of purple clover. Heads from which Darwin excluded the bees produced no seeds at all. Hence, if humble-bees became extinct in England, the red clover, too, would die ofi": and indeed, in New Zealand, where there are no humble-bees, and where the eSbrts to introduce them for tliis very purpose have been uni- formly unsuccessful, the clover never sets its seed at all, and fresh stocks have to be imported at great ex- pense every year from Europe. But the number of humble-bees in any district largely depends upon the number of field-mice, which destroy the combs and 10 102 Charles Darwin nests in immense quantities. The number of mice, again, is greatly affected by the proportion of cats in the neighbourhood ; so that Colonel Newman, who paid much attention to this subject, found humble-bees most numerous in the neighbourhood of villages and small towns, an effect which he attributed to the abundance of cats, and the consequent scarcity of the destructive field-mice. Yet here once more, who could suppose beforehand that the degi-ee to which the purple clover set its seeds was in part determined by the number of cats kept in houses in the surrounding district ? One of Darwin's own favourite examples of the action of natural selection, which he afterwards ex- panded largely in his work on Orchids and in several other volumes, is that which relates to the origin of conspicuous flowers. Many plants have a sweet excre- tion, which is eliminated sometimes even by the leaves, as in the case of the common laurel. This juice, though small in quantity, is eagerly sought and eaten by insects. Now let us suppose that, in some variety of an incon- spicuous flower, similar nectar was produced in the neighbourhood of the petals and stamens. Insects, in seeking the nectar, would dust their bodies over with the pollen, and would carry it away with them to the next flower visited. This would result in an act of crossing ; and that act, as Darwin afterwards abundantly proved in a separate and very laborious treatise, gives rise to excepiionally vigorous seedlings, which would therefore have the best chance of flourishing and sur- viving in the struggle for existence. The flowers which produced most honey would oftenest be visited, and oftenest crossed ; so that they would finally form a new ^The Origin of Species* 103 species. The more brightly coloured