Volume I Part 7 (1/2)
(Chapter II./1. Since the publication of the ”Life and Letters,” Mr.
Huxley's obituary notice of Charles Darwin has appeared. (Chapter II./2.
”Proc. R. Soc.” volume 44, 1888, and ”Collected Essays (Darwiniana),”
page 253, 1899.) This masterly paper is, in our opinion, the finest of the great series of Darwinian essays which we owe to Mr. Huxley.
We would venture to recommend it to our readers as the best possible introduction to these pages. There is, however, one small point in which we differ from Mr. Huxley. In discussing the growth of Mr. Darwin's evolutionary views, Mr. Huxley quotes from the autobiography (Chapter II./3. ”Life and Letters,” I., page 82. Some account of the origin of his evolutionary views is given in a letter to Jenyns (Blomefield), ”Life and Letters,” II. page 34.) a pa.s.sage in which the writer describes the deep impression made on his mind by certain groups of facts observed in South America. Mr. Huxley goes on: ”The facts to which reference is here made were, without doubt, eminently fitted to attract the attention of a philosophical thinker; but, until the relations of the existing with the extinct species, and of the species of the different geographical areas with one another, were determined with some exactness, they afforded but an unsafe foundation for speculation.
It was not possible that this determination should have been effected before the return of the ”Beagle” to England; and thus the date (Chapter II./4. The date in question is July 1837, when he ”opened first note-book on Trans.m.u.tation of Species.') which Darwin (writing in 1837) a.s.signs to the dawn of the new light which was rising in his mind, becomes intelligible.” This seems to us inconsistent with Darwin's own statement that it was especially the character of the ”species on Galapagos Archipelago” which had impressed him. (Chapter II./5. See ”Life and Letters,” I., page 276.) This must refer to the zoological specimens: no doubt he was thinking of the birds, but these he had himself collected in 1835 (Chapter II./6. He wrote in his ”Journal,”
page 394, ”My attention was first thoroughly aroused, by comparing together the numerous specimens shot by myself and several other parties on board,” etc.), and no accurate determination of the forms was necessary to impress on him the remarkable characteristic species of the different islands. We agree with Mr. Huxley that 1837 is the date of the ”new light which was rising in his mind.” That the dawn did not come sooner seems to us to be accounted for by the need of time to produce so great a revolution in his conceptions. We do not see that Mr. Huxley's supposition as to the effect of the determination of species, etc., has much weight. Mr. Huxley quotes a letter from Darwin to Zacharias, ”But I did not become convinced that species were mutable until, I think, two or three years [after 1837] had elapsed” (see Letter 278). This pa.s.sage, which it must be remembered was written in 1877, is all but irreconcilable with the direct evidence of the 1837 note-book. A series of pa.s.sages are quoted from it in the ”Life and Letters,” Volume II., pages 5 et seq., and these it is impossible to read without feeling that he was convinced of immutability. He had not yet attained to a clear idea of Natural Selection, and therefore his views may not have had, even to himself, the irresistible convincing power they afterwards gained; but that he was, in the ordinary sense of the word, convinced of the truth of the doctrine of evolution we cannot doubt. He thought it ”almost useless” to try to prove the truth of evolution until the cause of change was discovered. And it is natural that in later life he should have felt that conviction was wanting till that cause was made out.
(Chapter II./7. See ”Charles Darwin, his Life told, etc.” 1892, page 165.) For the purposes of the present chapter the point is not very material. We know that in 1842 he wrote the first sketch of his theory, and that it was greatly amplified in 1844. So that, at the date of the first letters of this chapter, we know that he had a working hypothesis of evolution which did not differ in essentials from that given in the ”Origin of Species.”
To realise the amount of work that was in progress during the period covered by Chapter II., it should be remembered that during part of the time--namely, from 1846 to 1854--he was largely occupied by his work on the Cirripedes. (Chapter II./8. ”Life and Letters,” I. page 346.) This research would have fully occupied a less methodical workman, and even to those who saw him at work it seemed his whole occupation. Thus (to quote a story of Lord Avebury's) one of Mr. Darwin's children is said to have asked, in regard to a neighbour, ”Then where does he do his barnacles?” as though not merely his father, but all other men, must be occupied on that group.
Sir Joseph Hooker, to whom the first letter in this chapter is addressed, was good enough to supply a note on the origin of his intimacy with Mr. Darwin, and this is published in the ”Life and Letters.” (Chapter II./9. Ibid., II., page 19. See also ”Nature,” 1899, June 22nd, page 187, where some reminiscences are published, which formed part of Sir Joseph's speech at the unveiling of Darwin's statue in the Oxford Museum.) The close intercourse that sprang up between them was largely carried on by correspondence, and Mr. Darwin's letters to Sir Joseph have supplied most valuable biographical material. But it should not be forgotten that, quite apart from this, science owes much to this memorable friends.h.i.+p, since without Hooker's aid Darwin's great work would hardly have been carried out on the botanical side. And Sir Joseph did far more than supply knowledge and guidance in technical matters: Darwin owed to him a sympathetic and inspiriting comrades.h.i.+p which cheered and refreshed him to the end of his life.
A sentence from a letter to Hooker written in 1845 shows, quite as well as more serious utterances, how quickly the acquaintance grew into friends.h.i.+p.
”Farewell! What a good thing is community of tastes! I feel as if I had known you for fifty years. Adios.” And in ill.u.s.tration of the permanence of the sympathetic bond between them, we quote a letter of 1881 written forty-two years after the first meeting with Sir Joseph in Trafalgar Square (see ”Life and Letters,” II., page 19). Mr. Darwin wrote: ”Your letter has cheered me, and the world does not look a quarter so black this morning as it did when I wrote before. Your friendly words are worth their weight in gold.”)
LETTER 13. TO J.D. HOOKER. Down, Thursday [January 11th, 1844].
My dear Sir
I must write to thank you for your last letter, and to tell you how much all your views and facts interest me. I must be allowed to put my own interpretation on what you say of ”not being a good arranger of extended views”--which is, that you do not indulge in the loose speculations so easily started by every smatterer and wandering collector. I look at a strong tendency to generalise as an entire evil.
What you say of Mr. Brown is humiliating; I had suspected it, but would not allow myself to believe in such heresy. Fitz-Roy gave him a rap in his preface (13/1. In the preface to the ”Surveying Voyages of the 'Adventure' and the 'Beagle,' 1826-30, forming Volume I of the work, which includes the later voyage of the ”Beagle,” Captain Fitz-Roy wrote (March, 1839): ”Captain King took great pains in forming and preserving a botanical collection, aided by a person embarked solely for that purpose. He placed this collection in the British Museum, and was led to expect that a first-rate botanist would have examined and described it; but he has been disappointed.” A reference to Robert Brown's dilatoriness over King's collection occurs in the ”Life and Letters,”
I., page 274, note.), and made him very indignant, but it seems a much harder one would not have been wasted. My cryptogamic collection was sent to Berkeley; it was not large. I do not believe he has yet published an account, but he wrote to me some year ago that he had described [the specimens] and mislaid all his descriptions. Would it not be well for you to put yourself in communication with him, as otherwise something will perhaps be twice laboured over? My best (though poor) collection of the cryptogams was from the Chonos Islands.
Would you kindly observe one little fact for me, whether any species of plant, peculiar to any island, as Galapagos, St. Helena, or New Zealand, where there are no large quadrupeds, have hooked seeds--such hooks as, if observed here, would be thought with justness to be adapted to catch into wool of animals.
Would you further oblige me some time by informing me (though I forget this will certainly appear in your ”Antarctic Flora”) whether in islands like St. Helena, Galapagos, and New Zealand, the number of families and genera are large compared with the number of species, as happens in coral islands, and as, I believe, in the extreme Arctic land. Certainly this is the case with marine sh.e.l.ls in extreme Arctic seas. Do you suppose the fewness of species in proportion to number of large groups in coral islets is owing to the chance of seeds from all orders getting drifted to such new spots, as I have supposed. Did you collect sea-sh.e.l.ls in Kerguelen-land? I should like to know their character.
Your interesting letters tempt me to be very unreasonable in asking you questions; but you must not give yourself any trouble about them, for I know how fully and worthily you are employed. (13/2. The rest of the letter has been previously published in ”Life and Letters,” II., page 23.)
Besides a general interest about the southern lands, I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work, and I know no one individual who would not say a very foolish one. I was so struck with the distribution of the Galapagos organisms, etc., and with the character of the American fossil mammifers, etc., that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact which could bear any way on what are species. I have read heaps of agricultural and horticultural books, and have never ceased collecting facts. At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.
Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ”tendency to progression,”
”adaptations from the slow willing of animals,” etc.! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. You will now groan, and think to yourself, ”on what a man have I been wasting my time and writing to.” I should, five years ago, have thought so...(13/3. On the questions here dealt with see the interesting letter to Jenyns in the ”Life and Letters,” II., page 34.)
LETTER 14. TO J.D. HOOKER. [November] 1844.
...What a curious, wonderful case is that of the Lycopodium! (14/1. Sir J.D. Hooker wrote, November 8, 1844: ”I am firmly convinced (but not enough to print it) that L. Selago varies in Van Diemen's Land into L.
varium. Two more different SPECIES (as they have hitherto been thought), per se cannot be conceived, but nowhere else do they vary into one another, nor does Selago vary at all in England.”)...I suppose you would hardly have expected them to be more varying than a phanerogamic plant.
I trust you will work the case out, and, even if unsupported, publish it, for you can surely do this with due caution. I have heard of some a.n.a.logous facts, though on the smallest scale, in certain insects being more variable in one district than in another, and I think the same holds with some land-sh.e.l.ls. By a strange chance I had noted to ask you in this letter an a.n.a.logous question, with respect to genera, in lieu of individual species,--that is, whether you know of any case of a genus with most of its species being variable (say Rubus) in one continent, having another set of species in another continent non-variable, or not in so marked a manner. Mr. Herbert (14/2. No doubt Dean Herbert, the horticulturist. See ”Life and Letters,” I., page 343.) incidentally mentioned in a letter to me that the heaths at the Cape of Good Hope were very variable, whilst in Europe they are (?) not so; but then the species here are few in comparison, so that the case, even if true, is not a good one. In some genera of insects the variability appears to be common in distant parts of the world. In sh.e.l.ls, I hope hereafter to get much light on this question through fossils. If you can help me, I should be very much obliged: indeed, all your letters are most useful to me.
MONDAY:--Now for your first long letter, and to me quite as interesting as long. Several things are quite new to me in it--viz., for one, your belief that there are more extra-tropical than intra-tropical species. I see that my argument from the Arctic regions is false, and I should not have tried to argue against you, had I not fancied that you thought that equability of climate was the direct cause of the creation of a greater or lesser number of species. I see you call our climate equable; I should have thought it was the contrary. Anyhow, the term is vague, and in England will depend upon whether a person compares it with the United States or Tierra del Fuego. In my Journal (page 342) I see I state that in South Chiloe, at a height of about 1,000 feet, the forests had a Fuegian aspect: I distinctly recollect that at the sea-level in the middle of Chiloe the forest had almost a tropical aspect. I should like much to hear, if you make out, whether the N. or S. boundaries of a plant are the most restricted; I should have expected that the S. would be, in the temperate regions, from the number of antagonist species being greater. N.B. Humboldt, when in London, told me of some river (14/3. The Obi (see ”Flora Antarctica,” page 211, note). Hooker writes: ”Some of the most conspicuous trees attain either of its banks, but do not cross them.”) in N.E. Europe, on the opposite banks of which the flora was, on the same soil and under same climate, widely different!
I forget (14/4. The last paragraph is published in ”Life and Letters,”