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THE BOOKMAN

DARWIN CENTENARY NUMBER

FEBRUARY 1909

WITH PRESENTATION PLATE OF Mr. W.W. OULESS'S PORTRAIT OF CHARLES DARWIN

CONTENTS

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The axiom concerning great men's sons does not hold good in the case of Darwin; four surviving sons of his are men of eminence. Sir George Howard Darwin, K.C.B., LLD., D.Sc., is Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, and has made valuable discoveries in meteorological science. Mr. Francis Darwin, who is a doctor of medicine and a distinguished botanist, has been Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society since 1903; he was his father's assistant at Down, and after the latter's death, wrote a Life of him and edited his letters. Major Leonard Darwin was on the Staff Intelligence Department of the War Office; he served on several scientific expeditions. and after retiring from the Royal Engineers, sat as M.P. for Lichfield. He has written books on "Bimetallism" and on "Municipal Trade." Mr. Horace Darwin is chairman of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, and an ex-Mayor of Cambridge.

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THE READER.

CHARLES DARWIN.

BY EDWARD CLODD

THE glory of the few to whom achievement has come should not eclipse; their forerunners to whom the noble tribute of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews is applicable: "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen, them afar off, and were persuaded of them." Among these are the Ionian philosophers, whose speculations, now two thousand four hundred years old, and "cast into outer darkness during the millennium of theological scholasticism," were brought into the light and had their fruition in certainties arrived at within the last half-century.

Already, at the time of Darwin's birth, the scientific atmosphere was becoming charged with elements of change where by beliefs long unchallenged were to pass away, new conceptions, based upon demonstrated truth, taking their place. The evidence of the spectroscope as to the chemical identity of the solar and other stellar systems; the proofs of an ordered succession of ancient life-forms, and of unbroken continuity between them and recent plants and animals— these, to name no other witnesses, paved the way for conceptions combining all things, living and not living, under the term Universe, i.e. the turning of the many into one; the Greek to pan: the All. Hence, Darwin came into a world in large, degree prepared for the solution of a problem, that of the origin of species, which had attracted the ironic Buffon, the orthodox. Cuvier, the courageous Lamarck, and, among Darwin's contemporaries, Hooker, Huxley, and Spencer; to all of whom the obvious resemblances in structure and function between organisms had suggested doubts as to their independent creation.

Darwin was born at Shrewsbury on February 12, 1809. His father was a doctor of some scientific repute; his mother, who died when he was barely nine, was a daughter of Wedgwood, the famous potter; his grandfather was the poet-biologist Erasmus Darwin, whose "Loves of the Plants" was parodied in the Anti-Jacobin under the title of "Loves of the Triangles," and in whose prose treatise, "Zoonomia," there are forecasts of theories of development and of the doctrine of heredity. Passing from the grammar school of his native town to Edin burgh University, he decided that medicine was not his forte, neither was he inclined to accede to his father's wish that he should enter the Church. It may be remembered, in passing, that a phrenologist, in examining the youthful Herbert Spencer's skull, divined therefrom his fitness for holy orders! Darwin's next move was to Cambridge, where he found redemption from the follies of youth-cardplaying and drinking in the sobrieties of science, the love of which, latent in his blood, needed only the opportunity for its exercise. Fortunate in his tutors and his friendships, he won quick repute as well equipped in

[Portrait]

Charles Darwin. After the painting by the Hon. John Collier.

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geology and natural history, with the result that, in his twenty-third year, he was recommended by Professor Henslow as volunteer naturalist of the Beagle, in which ship he sailed round the world, the voyage occupying from October, 1831, to December, 1836. His narrative of this cruise is in the front rank among travel-records, but its allusions to species show that he was still feeling his way towards belief in their mutability. Two or three more years were to pass before conviction came, because any workable theory was lacking. The suggestion which led to this was supplied by a parson. In 1838, Darwin tells us, he took up "for amusement" the Rev. Thomas Malthus's "Essay on the Principle of Population," wherein is shown that the means of existence do not increase in the same ratio as the number of mouths, and, therefore, that in the inevitably resulting struggle for life, the weakest go to the wall. Consequently, a check is imposed on the increase.

Here was the key unlocking the problem, a key, by an odd coincidence, also used by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the surviving co-formulator of the theory of Natural Selection, who, during his sojourn at Ternate, in the Malay Archipelago, was led "to think of positive checks" by reading Malthus. The theory was applied to the whole organic kingdom. Everything therein varies; the saying, "as like as two peas," is true only superficially. And whatever plant or animal possesses a favourable variation is to that extent better equipped for success m the struggle for existence, that war in which there is "no discharge." It is on these variations, the causes of which are obscure, that natural selection acts in the production of species, which, it is needful to remark, remain constant so long as the balance between themselves and their surroundings is undisturbed. For the keynote of evolution is adaptation, not ceaseless. change in the organism, whereby it becomes something else. Here, there is no need for other than brief reference to the story how Darwin, having written an outline of his theory, named the matter to two or three select friends, or otherwise of what was more or less speculative, was startled by receiving in June, 1858, a manuscript from Dr. Wallace, which contained his own theory, stated in terms almost identical with those used by himself. There was now nothing to be done but to make the matter public, and at a meeting of the Linnean Society an abstract of Darwin's manuscript, together with Dr. Wallace's paper, was read to an audience less excited than, under the novel circumstances, might have been expected. But there was no lack of excitement when, fifteen months later, "The Origin of Species " was published. Sir Joseph Hooker (still with us, a vigorous nonagenarian) was an early convert, and, to his credit, the late Canan Tristram appeared in enviable contrast

[Photograph] Darwin's Birthplace, Shrewsbury. Photo by C. S. Sargisson, Burnley.

[Photograph] The Old School, Shrewsbury, with the Statue of Darwin before it. Photo by C. S. Sargisson, Burnley.

This is the school which Darwin attended. It is now a Museum and Library.

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[Portrait] An early portrait of Darwin. After J. H. Maguire.

to the clerics of that time as among the first to accept Darwin's theory. Lyell rejected it, because he saw that its application to man was inevitable; Adam Sedgwick pronounced it "false and mischievous,"but charitably hoped "to meet" its author "in heaven"; Whewell would not give the book a place on the shelves of Trinity College Library; Owen inspired Bishop Wilberforce in an onslaught in the Quarterly Review, wherein the theory was denounced as "incompatible with the Word of God" and an appeal made to Lyell "to shatter its flimsy speculations"; the Athenaeum attacked it, and the Daily Telegraph urged the electors of Southwark not to return Professor Fawcett to Parliament, because he had reviewed "The Origin of Species" favourably in Macmillan's Magazine! To recite these things is to remind us how far we have travelled since 1859.

Briefly noting that Darwin married his first cousin in 1839 (the prejudice against such unions has no warrant where there is a clean bill of health on both sides) and that, three years after, he removed from London to Down, a village in Kent, where he lived until

his death in April, 1882, we may pass to follow the fortunes of the theory which bears his name and gives it a foremost place in the annals of the mighty dead.

With some prevision as to the reception with which that theory might meet, he had only hinted in a passage at the end of the book that natural selection would "throw light on the origin of man and his history," and twelve years elapsed before he published the

corollary under the title of "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex." But the inevitable sequel had been plainly set forth by Huxley in his "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," which appeared in 1863. He appears not to have heard of the meeting at the Linnean Society, of which he was not then a member, but the reputation he had won made his verdict on the "Origin" that for which Darwin most anxiously waited. It was emphatic. "I am prepared," he said, "to go to the stake, if requisite, in support of the chapters marshalling the evidence for evolution," and Darwin's delight expressed itself in willingness to sing his Nunc Dimittis.

Huxley, master of clear and vigorous English, presented the facts proving the descent of man and the higher mammals from a common ancestry, and, what was of profound significance, the evidence of an unbroken chain of psychical continuity between the lowest and the most complex life-forms, "even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect germinating" in the former. Nor did he stop there. Working further back, he added:

"I can see no excuse for doubting, in view of the intimate relations between man and the rest of the living world, and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed, from the inorganic to the organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will."

That faith he kept to the end; in the year before his death in 1895 he referred to Darwin's theory as one that "will modify the whole system of our thought and

opinion and our most intimate convictions." In a letter which lies before me, dated November 18, 1892, Huxley says:

"I was looking through 'Man's Place in Nature' the other day. I do not think there is a word I need delete,

[photograph] Darwin's home, 110, Gower Street, formerly 12, Upper Gower Street. Here he lived from the time of his; marriage in 1839 till his removal to Down, Kent, in 1842. Here he wrote his works on Coral Reefs, etc.

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[Photograph] Charles Darwin. Photo by Elliott & Fry.

nor anything I need add, except in confirmation and extension of the doctrine there laid down. That is great good fortune for a book thirty years old, and one that a very shrewd friend of mine implored me not to publish, as it would certainly ruin all my prospects."

The shrewd friend was Sir William Lawrence, in whose "Physiology, Zoology, and Natural History of Man" theologians had detected heretical ideas, and it was on the ground that the book "contradicted the Scriptures" that Lord Eldon actually refused an injunction to protect the rights of the author against a pirated edition. To narrate how Huxley's book was received by polemic and obscurant is to repeat the story of the reception of "The Origin of Species." "Lyell's object is to make man old, Huxley's is to degrade him," said the Athenaeum; while sermons, squibs, and satires were one in their aim, if varying in method. Mr. Courthope, confusing, like many others, the theories of Lamarck and Darwin, amused with his Aristophanic lines in "The Paradise of Birds":

"Eggs were laid as before, but each time more and more varieties struggled and bred,

Till one end of the scale dropped its ancestor's tail, and the other got rid of his head.

From the bill, in brief words, were developed the Birds, unless our tame pigeons and ducks lie,

From the tail and hind legs, in the second-laid eggs, the Apes—and Professor Huxley."

But no opposition, serious or frivolous, could arrest the cumulative force of facts demonstrating that if the process known as evolution operates anywhere, it operates everywhere, and that man can be no element of discord in a universal order which is alike his stimulus and safeguard. In forcing, as it were, Darwin's hand, Huxley rendered him enormous service. He prepared the way for the publication of "The Descent of Man," whereby the significant issues of the theory of natural selection were brought home to men's "business and bosoms.' Significant, because affecting man intellectually and spiritually, as well as physically. Comparative anatomy has revealed fundamental identity between his mental apparatus and that of his nearest allies; comparative and experimental psychology have made evident identity of behavior between him and them, and shown, in the words of Professor Baldwin, that "the development of mind in its early stages and in certain directions of progress is revealed most adequately in the animal." Continuity is thus proven in the psychical as in the physical; every faculty explicit in man is implicit in lower organisms. There are differences between them that can never be bridged, but they are differences of degree, not of kind. Articulate speech, that is, the association of certain word-sounds with certain ideas, is one of them. But animals communicate with each other, and the evolution of that part of the cortex of the brain wherein lies the speech zone in man is shown in the fact that it does not appear till shortly before birth, and is not fully developed until the end of the first year of infancy.

After marshalling the facts supporting the common descent of living things, and explaining the similitude between simian and human brains the differences between

those of man and ape being less than those between apes and monkeys Darwin indicated the bearing of this upon the profound matters of man's

[Photograph] Charles Darwin From a portrait in the possession of Mr. John Murray, and reproduced by his kind permission.

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duty and destiny, round which thought revolves, centripetally tethered, as planet to the sun. He was not what is termed a moral philosopher, but what he has to say on the evolution of conscience or the ethical sense is a model of clearness with compactness. Every text-book on this subject is mainly an expansion of his lucid chapters wherein he expounds unbroken development from the throbs of the amoeba to the emotions of man, and traces the origin of codes of conduct in the herd instinct. Society is possible only by the subdual of each individual to what the community determines is best for the whole. Thus the doctrine is shown to be applicable to the most momentous human interests, and the bringing of these into its pale was indirectly due, chiefest of all, to Darwin. For evolution, applied to cosmic processes, to cooling nebula and consolidating sun or planet, would have remained a fascinating study, but would never have become a guiding philosophy of life. It is in the extension of its processes as explanation of our social, political, ethical, and religious institutions that its abiding value consists, because it touches the heart of man. Hence, in the roll of that select company, who "having served their generation fell on sleep," and whose ashes repose in Westminster Abbey, the name of Charles Darwin will abide, undimmed in lustre.

[Photograph] Statue of Darwin in front of the Old Shrewsbury School. Photo by C. S. Sargisson.

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[Photograph] Charles Darwin A late portrait Photo by Elliott & Fry.

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FOUR SURVIVING SONS OF CHARLES DARWIN.

[Photograph] Sir George Howard Darwin, K.C.B. Photo by Russell & Sons.

[Photograph] Mr. Francis Darwin. Photo by Palmer Clarke, Cambridge.

[Photograph] Major Leonard Darwin. Photo by Thomson, 141, New Bond Street, W.

[Photograph] Mr. Horace Darwin. Photo by R. H. Lord, Cambridge.

[Darwin's oldest son William Erasmus Darwin (1839-1914) was still alive.]

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[Photograph] Darwin's home at Down, Kent. Here he lived from 1842 till his death in 1882.

[Photograph] Darwin's home at Down, Kent. View from the road. Darwin's study was in the building on the right.

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[Photograph] Statue of Darwin in the British Museum, by Sir J. E. Boehm, unveiled in June, 1885.

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