[217]

Whiteman

 

Worcester

60 Foregate Street June 7 /82

Sir

I am told you are desirous that letters by your late revered father be sent you and having one of importance I have pleasure in sending it you, and when convenient to you, I shall be glad to have it returned. I prize it very highly.

It is in reply to one I wrote Mr Darwin that a contemptible quack Lecturer Thos Cooper a converted infidel had been lecturing here* and making game of the reference to the Bear in the first edition & the omission in subsequent editions

Yours truly

RG Whiteman

* and all over the kingdom

Mr Darwin

Beckenham Kent.

A copy of Darwin's 5 May 1881 letter to Whiteman is in CUL-DAR148.354.

In Origin, p. 184, Darwin wrote, "In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water." Darwin removed most of the passage about the black bear eating insects from the water like a whale after the first edition of Origin (see the Variorum). At least five of the reviews of Origin criticised or mocked Darwin over the passage. The Dublin Review remarked: "This is a rare instance with Mr. Darwin, of a wish to accept a fact because it suits his theory." (p. 64) However, the source Darwin cited is very explicit and detailed:

"This was in the month of June, long before any fruit was ripe, for the want of which they then fed entirely on water insects, which in some of the lakes we crossed that day were in astonishing multitudes*.
The method by which the Bears catch those insects is by swimming with their mouths open, in the same manner as the whales do, when feeding on the sea-spider. There was not one of the Bears killed that day, which had not its stomach as full of those insects (only) as ever a hog's was with grains, and when cut open, the stench from them was intolerable.  
* The insects here spoken of are of two kinds; the one is nearly black, its skin hard like a beetle, and not very unlike a grasshopper, and darts through the water with great ease, and with some degree of velocity. The other sort is brown, has wings, and is as soft as the common cleg-fly. The latter are the most numerous; and in some of the lakes such quantities of them are forced into the bays in gales of wind, and there pressed together in such multitudes, that they are killed, and remain there a great nuisance; for I have several times, in my inland voyages from York Fort, found it scarcely possible to land in some of those bays for the intolerable stench of those insects, which  in some places were lying in putrid masses to the depth of two or three feet.  It is more than probable, that the Bears occasionally feed on these dead insects."

Hearne, Samuel. 1795. A journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean, undertaken by order of the Hudson's Bay Company, for the discovery of copper mines, a north west passage, &c. in the years 1769, 1770, 1771, & 1772. London, p. 370.

The editors of the Correspondence noted: "Thomas Cooper had been a Chartist, but renounced free thought around 1856 and travelled throughout Britain as a religious lecturer (ODNB). In the published version of his lecture, 'Mr. Darwin's fine fancies', he suggested that CD had intimated that a whale might be formed from a polar bear by swimming with its mouth open; Cooper concluded, 'Our sage philosopher—"the greatest since Aristotle"—left all that out in his second edition, and it has never appeared since!' (see T. Cooper 1880, p. 32)."

Cooper, Thomas. 1880. Evolution, the stone book, and the Mosaic record of creation. London: Hodder and Stoughton.