Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 2

With cordial thanks, believe me, Yours very sincerely, CHARLES DARWIN.

[In November, 1880, he received an account of a flood in Brazil, from which his friend Fritz Muller had barely escaped with his life. My father immediately wrote to Hermann Muller anxiously enquiring whether his brother had lost books, instruments, etc., by this accident, and begging in that case "for the sake of science, so that science should not suffer," to be allowed to help in making good the loss. Fortunately, however, the injury to Fritz Muller's possessions was not so great as was expected, and the incident remains only as a memento, which I trust cannot be otherwise than pleasing to the survivor, of the friendship of the two naturalists.

In 'Nature' (November 11, 1880) appeared a letter from my father, which is, I believe, the only instance in which he wrote publicly with anything like severity. The late Sir Wyville Thomson wrote, in the Introduction to the 'Voyage of the "Challenger"': "The character of the abyssal fauna refuses to give the least support to the theory which refers the evolution of species to extreme variation guided only by natural selection." My father, after characterising these remarks as a "standard of criticism, not uncommonly reached by theologians and metaphysicians," goes on to take exception to the term "extreme variation," and challenges Sir Wyville to name any one who has "said that the evolution of species depends only on natural selection." The letter closes with an imaginary scene between Sir Wyville and a breeder, in which Sir Wyville criticises artificial selection in a somewhat similar manner. The breeder is silent, but on the departure of his critic he is supposed to make use of "emphatic but irreverent language about naturalists." The letter, as originally written, ended with a quotation from Sedgwick on the invulnerability of those who write on what they do not understand, but this was omitted on the advice of a friend, and curiously enough a friend whose combativeness in the good cause my father had occasionally curbed.]

CHARLES DARWIN TO G.J. ROMANES. Down, April 16, 1881.

My dear Romanes,

My MS. on 'Worms' has been sent to the printers, so I am going to amuse myself by scribbling to you on a few points; but you must not waste your time in answering at any length this scribble.

Firstly, your letter on intelligence was very useful to me and I tor up and re-wrote what I sent to you. I have not attempted to define intelligence; but have quoted your remarks on experience, and have shown how far they apply to worms. It seems to me that they must be said to work with some intelligence, anyhow they are not guided by a blind instinct.

Secondly, I was greatly interested by the abstract in 'Nature' of your work on Echinoderms ("On the locomotor system of Echinoderms," by G.J. Romanes and J. Cossar Ewart. 'Philosophical Transactions,' 1881, page 829.), the complexity with simplicity, and with such curious co-ordination of the nervous system is marvellous; and you showed me before what splendid gymnastic feats they can perform.

Thirdly, Dr. Roux has sent me a book just published by him: 'Der Kampf der Theile,' etc., 1881 (240 pages in length).

He is manifestly a well-read physiologist and pathologist, and from his position a good anatomist. It is full of reasoning, and this in German is very difficult to me, so that I have only skimmed through each page; here and there reading with a little more care. As far as I can imperfectly judge, it is the most important book on Evolution, which has appeared for some time. I believe that G.H. Lewes hinted at the same fundamental idea, viz. that there is a struggle going on within every organism between the organic molecules, the cells and the organs. I think that his basis is, that every cell which best performs its function is, in consequence, at the same time best nourished and best propagates its kind. The book does not touch on mental phenomena, but there is much discussion on rudimentary or atrophied parts, to which subject you formerly attended. Now if you would like to read this book, I would sent it... If you read it, and are struck with it (but I may be WHOLLY mistaken about its value), you would do a public service by analysing and criticising it in 'Nature.'

Dr. Roux makes, I think, a gigantic oversight in never considering plants; these would simplify the problem for him.

Fourthly, I do not know whether you will discuss in your book on the mind of animals any of the more complex and wonderful instincts. It is unsatisfactory work, as there can be no fossilised instincts, and the sole guide is their state in other members of the same order, and mere PROBABILITY.

But if you do discuss any (and it will perhaps be expected of you), I should think that you could not select a better case than that of the sand wasps, which paralyse their prey, as formerly described by Fabre, in his wonderful paper in the 'Annales des Sciences,' and since amplified in his admirable 'Souvenirs.'

Whilst reading this latter book, I speculated a little on the subject. Astonishing nonsense is often spoken of the sand wasp's knowledge of anatomy. Now will any one say that the Gauchos on the plains of La Plata have such knowledge, yet I have often seen them pith a struggling and lassoed cow on the ground with unerring skill, which no mere anatomist could imitate. The pointed knife was infallibly driven in between the vertebrae by a single slight thrust. I presume that the art was first discovered by chance, and that each young Gaucho sees exactly how the others do it, and then with a very little practice learns the art. Now I suppose that the sand wasps originally merely killed their prey by stinging them in many places (see page 129 of Fabre's 'Souvenirs,' and page 241) on the lower and softest side of the body — and that to sting a certain segment was found by far the most successful method; and was inherited like the tendency of a bulldog to pin the nose of a bull, or of a ferret to bite the cerebellum. It would not be a very great step in advance to prick the ganglion of its prey only slightly, and thus to give its larvae fresh meat instead of old dried meat. Though Fabre insists so strongly on the unvarying character of instinct, yet it is shown that there is some variability, as at pages 176, 177.

I fear that I shall have utterly wearied you with my scribbling and bad handwriting.

My dear Romanes, yours, very sincerely, CH. DARWIN.

POSTSCRIPT OF A LETTER TO PROFESSOR A. AGASSIZ, MAY 5TH, 1881: —

I read with much interest your address before the American Association. However true your remarks on the genealogies of the several groups may be, I hope and believe that you have over-estimated the difficulties to be encountered in the future: — A few days after reading your address, I interpreted to myself your remarks on one point (I hope in some degree correctly) in the following fashion: —

Any character of an ancient, generalised, or intermediate form may, and often does, re-appear in its descendants, after countless generations, and this explains the extraordinarily complicated affinities of existing groups. This idea seems to me to throw a flood of light on the lines, sometimes used to represent affinities, which radiate in all directions, often to very distant sub-groups, — a difficulty which has haunted me for half a century. A strong case could be made out in favour of believing in such reversion after immense intervals of time. I wish the idea had been put into my head in old days, for I shall never again write on difficult subjects, as I have seen too many cases of old men becoming feeble in their minds, without being in the least conscious of it. If I have interpreted your ideas at all correctly, I hope that you will re-urge, on any fitting occasion, your view. I have mentioned it to a few persons capable of judging, and it seemed quite new to them. I beg you to forgive the proverbial garrulity of old age.

C.D.

[The following letter refers to Sir J.D. Hooker's Geographical address at the York Meeting (1881) of the British Association:]

CHARLES DARWIN TO J.D. HOOKER. Down, August 6, 1881.

My dear Hooker,

For Heaven's sake never speak of boring me, as it would be the greatest pleasure to aid you in the slightest degree and your letter has interested me exceedingly. I will go through your points seriatim, but I have never attended much to the history of any subject, and my memory has become atrociously bad. It will therefore be a mere chance whether any of my remarks are of any use.

Your idea, to show what travellers have done, seems to me a brilliant and just one, especially considering your audience.

1. I know nothing about Tournefort's works.

2. I believe that you are fully right in calling Humboldt the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived, I have lately read two or three volumes again. His Geology is funny stuff; but that merely means that he was not in advance of his age. I should say he was wonderful, more for his near approach to omniscience than for originality. Whether or not his position as a scientific man is as eminent as we think, you might truly call him the parent of a grand progeny of scientific travellers, who, taken together, have done much for science.

3. It seems to me quite just to give Lyell (and secondarily E. Forbes) a very prominent place.

4. Dana was, I believe, the first man who maintained the permanence of continents and the great oceans... When I read the 'Challenger's' conclusion that sediment from the land is not deposited at greater distances than 200 or 300 miles from the land, I was much strengthened in my old belief. Wallace seems to me to have argued the case excellently. Nevertheless, I would speak, if I were in your place, rather cautiously; for T. Mellard Reade has argued lately with some force against the view; but I cannot call to mind his arguments. If forced to express a judgment, I should abide by the view of approximate permanence since Cambrian days.

5. The extreme importance of the Arctic fossil-plants, is self-evident. Take the opportunity of groaning over [our] ignorance of the Lignite Plants of Kerguelen Land, or any Antarctic land. It might do good.

6. I cannot avoid feeling sceptical about the travelling of plants from the North EXCEPT DURING THE TERTIARY PERIOD. It may of course have been so and probably was so from one of the two poles at the earliest period, during Pre-Cambrian ages; but such speculations seem to me hardly scientific seeing how little we know of the old Floras.

I will now jot down without any order a few miscellaneous remarks.

I think you ought to allude to Alph. De Candolle's great book, for though it (like almost everything else) is washed out of my mind, yet I remember most distinctly thinking it a very valuable work. Anyhow, you might allude to his excellent account of the history of all cultivated plants.

How shall you manage to allude to your New Zealand and Tierra del Fuego work? if you do not allude to them you will be scandalously unjust.

The many Angiosperm plants in the Cretacean beds of the United States (and as far as I can judge the age of these beds has been fairly well made out) seems to me a fact of very great importance, so is their relation to the existing flora of the United States under an Evolutionary point of view. Have not some Australian extinct forms been lately found in Australia? or have I dreamed it?

Again, the recent discovery of plants rather low down in our Silurian beds is very important.

Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the APPARENTLY very sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants. I have sometimes speculated whether there did not exist somewhere during long ages an extremely isolated continent, perhaps near the South Pole.

Hence I was greatly interested by a view which Saporta propounded to me, a few years ago, at great length in MS. and which I fancy he has since published, as I urged him to do — viz., that as soon as flower-frequenting insects were developed, during the latter part of the secondary period, an enormous impulse was given to the development of the higher plants by cross-fertilization being thus suddenly formed.

A few years ago I was much struck with Axel Blytt's Essay showing from observation, on the peat beds in Scandinavia, that there had apparently been long periods with more rain and other with less rain (perhaps connected with Croll's recurrent astronomical periods), and that these periods had largely determined the present distribution of the plants of Norway and Sweden. This seemed to me, a very important essay.

I have just read over my remarks and I fear that they will not be of the slightest use to you.

I cannot but think that you have got through the hardest, or at least the most difficult, part of your work in having made so good and striking a sketch of what you intend to say; but I can quite understand how you must groan over the great necessary labour.

I most heartily sympathise with you on the successes of B. and R.: as years advance what happens to oneself becomes of very little consequence, in comparison with the careers of our children.

Keep your spirits up, for I am convinced that you will make an excellent address.

Ever yours, affectionately, CHARLES DARWIN.

[In September he wrote: —

"I have this minute finished reading your splendid but too short address. I cannot doubt that it will have been fully appreciated by the Geographers of York; if not, they are asses and fools."]

CHARLES DARWIN TO JOHN LUBBOCK. Sunday evening [1881].

My dear L.,

Your address (Presidential Address at the York meeting of the British Association.) has made me think over what have been the great steps in Geology during the last fifty years, and there can be no harm in telling you my impression. But it is very odd that I cannot remember what you have said on Geology. I suppose that the classification of the Silurian and Cambrian formations must be considered the greatest or most important step; for I well remember when all these older rocks were called grau-wacke, and nobody dreamed of classing them; and now we have three azoic formations pretty well made out beneath the Cambrian! But the most striking step has been the discovery of the Glacial period: you are too young to remember the prodigious effect this produced about the year 1840 (?) on all our minds. Elie de Beaumont never believed in it to the day of his death! the study of the glacial deposits led to the study of the superficial drift, which was formerly NEVER STUDIED and called Diluvium, as I well remember. The study under the microscope of rock-sections is another not inconsiderable step. So again the making out of cleavage and the foliation of the metamorphic rocks. But I will not run on, having now eased my mind. Pray do not waste even one minute in acknowledging my horrid scrawls.

Ever yours, CH. DARWIN.

[The following extracts referring to the late Francis Maitland Balfour (Professor of Animal Morphology at Cambridge. He was born in 1851, and was killed, with his guide, on the Aiguille Blanche, near Courmayeur, in July, 1882.), show my father's estimate of his work and intellectual qualities, but they give merely an indication of his strong appreciation of Balfour's most lovable personal character: —

From a letter to Fritz Muller, January 5, 1882: —

"Your appreciation of Balfour's book ['Comparative Embryology'] has pleased me excessively, for though I could not properly judge of it, yet it seemed to me one of the most remarkable books which have been published for some considerable time. He is quite a young man, and if he keeps his health, will do splendid work... He has a fair fortune of his own, so that he can give up his whole time to Biology. He is very modest, and very pleasant, and often visits here and we like him very much."

From a letter to Dr. Dohrn, February 13, 1882: —

"I have got one very bad piece of news to tell you, that F. Balfour is very ill at Cambridge with typhoid fever... I hope that he is not in a very dangerous state; but the fever is severe. Good Heavens, what a loss he would be to Science, and to his many loving friends!"]

CHARLES DARWIN TO T.H. HUXLEY. Down, January 12, 1882.

My dear Huxley,

Very many thanks for 'Science and Culture,' and I am sure that I shall read most of the essays with much interest. With respect to Automatism ("On the hypothesis that animals are automata and its history," an Address given at the Belfast meeting of the British Association, 1874, and published in the 'Fortnightly Review,' 1874, and in 'Science and Culture.'), I wish that you could review yourself in the old, and of course forgotten, trenchant style, and then you would here answer yourself with equal incisiveness; and thus, by Jove, you might go on ad infinitum, to the joy and instruction of the world.

Ever yours very sincerely, CHARLES DARWIN.

[The following letter refers to Dr. Ogle's translation of Aristotle, 'On the Parts of Animals' (1882):]

CHARLES DARWIN TO W. OGLE. Down, February 22, 1882.

My dear Dr. Ogle,

You must let me thank you for the pleasure which the introduction to the Aristotle book has given me. I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper.

From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. How very curious, also, his ignorance on some points, as on muscles as the means of movement. I am glad that you have explained in so probable a manner some of the grossest mistakes attributed to him. I never realized, before reading your book, to what an enormous summation of labour we owe even our common knowledge. I wish old Aristotle could know what a grand Defender of the Faith he had found in you. Believe me, my dear Dr. Ogle,

Yours very sincerely, CH. DARWIN.

[In February, he received a letter and a specimen from a Mr. W.D. Crick, which illustrated a curious mode of dispersal of bivalve shells, namely, by closure of their valves so as to hold on to the leg of a water-beetle. This class of fact had a special charm for him, and he wrote to 'Nature,' describing the case. ('Nature,' April 6, 1882.)

In April he received a letter from Dr. W. Van Dyck, Lecturer in Zoology at the Protestant College of Beyrout. The letter showed that the street dogs of Beyrout had been rapidly mongrelised by introduced European dogs, and the facts have an interesting bearing on my father's theory of Sexual Selection.]

CHARLES DARWIN TO W.T. VAN DYCK. Down, April 3, 1882.

Dear Sir,

After much deliberation, I have thought it best to send your very interesting paper to the Zoological Society, in hopes that it will be published in their Journal. This journal goes to every scientific institution in the world, and the contents are abstracted in all year-books on Zoology. Therefore I have preferred it to 'Nature,' though the latter has a wider circulation, but is ephemeral.

I have prefaced your essay by a few general remarks, to which I hope that you will not object.

Of course I do not know that the Zoological Society, which is much addicted to mere systematic work, will publish your essay. If it does, I will send you copies of your essay, but these will not be ready for some months. If not published by the Zoological Society, I will endeavour to get 'Nature' to publish it. I am very anxious that it should be published and preserved.

Dear Sir, Yours faithfully, CH. DARWIN.

[The paper was read at a meeting of the Zoological Society on April 18th — the day before my father's death.

The preliminary remarks with which Dr. Van Dyck's paper is prefaced are thus the latest of my father's writings.]

We must now return to an early period of his life, and give a connected account of his botanical work, which has hitherto been omitted.

CHAPTER 2.X. — FERTILISATION OF FLOWERS

[In the letters already given we have had occasion to notice the general bearing of a number of botanical problems on the wider question of Evolution. The detailed work in botany which my father accomplished by the guidance of the light cast on the study of natural history by his own work on Evolution remains to be noticed. In a letter to Mr. Murray, September 24th, 1861, speaking of his book on the 'Fertilisation of Orchids,' he says: "It will perhaps serve to illustrate how Natural History may be worked under the belief of the modification of species." This remark gives a suggestion as to the value and interest of his botanical work, and it might be expressed in far more emphatic language without danger of exaggeration.

In the same letter to Mr. Murray, he says: "I think this little volume will do good to the 'Origin,' as it will show that I have worked hard at details." It is true that his botanical work added a mass of corroborative detail to the case for Evolution, but the chief support to his doctrines given by these researches was of another kind. They supplied an argument against those critics who have so freely dogmatised as to the uselessness of particular structures, and as to the consequent impossibility of their having been developed by means of natural selection. His observations on Orchids enabled him to say: "I can show the meaning of some of the apparently meaningless ridges, horns, who will now venture to say that this or that structure is useless?" A kindred point is expressed in a letter to Sir J.D. Hooker (May 14th, 1862:) —

"When many parts of structure, as in the woodpecker, show distinct adaptation to external bodies, it is preposterous to attribute them to the effects of climate, etc., but when a single point alone, as a hooked seed, it is conceivable it may thus have arisen. I have found the study of Orchids eminently useful in showing me how nearly all parts of the flower are co-adapted for fertilization by insects, and therefore the results of natural selection — even the most trifling details of structure."

One of the greatest services rendered by my father to the study of Natural History is the revival of Teleology. The evolutionist studies the purpose or meaning of organs with the zeal of the older Teleology, but with far wider and more coherent purpose. He has the invigorating knowledge that he is gaining not isolated conceptions of the economy of the present, but a coherent view of both past and present. And even where he fails to discover the use of any part, he may, by a knowledge of its structure, unravel the history of the past vicissitudes in the life of the species. In this way a vigour and unity is given to the study of the forms of organised beings, which before it lacked. This point has already been discussed in Mr. Huxley's chapter on the 'Reception of the "Origin of Species",' and need not be here considered. It does, however, concern us to recognize that this "great service to natural science," as Dr. Gray describes it, was effected almost as much by his special botanical work as by the 'Origin of Species.'

For a statement of the scope and influence of my father's botanical work, I may refer to Mr. Thiselton Dyer's article in 'Charles Darwin,' one of the "Nature Series". Mr. Dyer's wide knowledge, his friendship with my father, and especially his power of sympathising with the work of others, combine to give this essay a permanent value. The following passage (page 43) gives a true picture: —

"Notwithstanding the extent and variety of his botanical work, Mr. Darwin always disclaimed any right to be regarded as a professed botanist. He turned his attention to plants, doubtless because they were convenient objects for studying organic phenomena in their least complicated forms; and this point of view, which, if one may use the expression without disrespect, had something of the amateur about it, was in itself of the greatest importance. For, from not being, till he took up any point, familiar with the literature bearing on it, his mind was absolutely free from any prepossession. He was never afraid of his facts, or of framing any hypothesis, however startling, which seemed to explain them... In any one else such an attitude would have produced much work that was crude and rash. But Mr. Darwin — if one may venture on language which will strike no one who had conversed with him as over-strained — seemed by gentle persuasion to have penetrated that reserve of nature which baffles smaller men. In other words, his long experience had given him a kind of instinctive insight into the method of attack of any biological problem, however unfamiliar to him, while he rigidly controlled the fertility of his mind in hypothetical explanations by the no less fertility of ingeniously devised experiment."