In April 1845 Charles was hard at work writing his Geological Observations on South America, which was published the following year. He was also preparing the second edition of Journal of Researches (The Voyage of the Beagle), which was published in August 1845 (Freeman 1977).
Charles and Emma’s second son was born at Down House on 9 July 1845. He was named George, with Darwin reflecting on pleasant memories of Professor Henslow’s son of the same name. George soon became “Georgy” to family members. One of Georgy’s earliest childhood memories was watching his father turn nearly blue while taking a cold shower as part of the water cure in the garden shed on a snow-covered winter morning (Browne 1995).
In summer 1851, six-year-old Georgy and eight-year-old Etty went with Charles and Emma to the Great Exposition in London and visited the Crystal Palace (Desmond and Moore 1991). This three-story glass house covered over 75,000 square feet (Loy and Loy 2010). The children were restless and Uncle Ras happily entertained them, as he often did throughout their childhood, both at home in Down House and in London.
FIGURE 7.1 Six-year-old George Howard Darwin, in August 1851, in the London studio of Richard Beard. The image of Henrietta (fig. 6.1, left) was also made during the same photo shoot. Darwin Museum, Down House.
Childfree, Charles and Emma explored the exhibitions from India, Africa, Egypt, Greece, and many other nations. They may have seen an amazing display of John Gould’s hummingbirds in the Zoological Society pavilions in Regent’s Park (Voss 2010). A drawing of these hummingbirds, and an engraving of Darwin, share the back of the current £10 note, introduced in 2000 by the Bank of England. On another day the Darwin family visited the Zoological Gardens and saw a hippopotamus that was a famous attraction at the time. While in London, George and Henrietta sat for their photographs (Figure 7.1). The trip to London also allowed Charles to safely deliver the first parts of his barnacle monograph to its publisher, the president of the Ray Society, Edwin Lankester. Charles then called on Weiss and Company to discuss his needs related to dissecting scissors used in his barnacle work (Stott 2003).
Charles was remarkably tolerant of his growing family’s interruptions into his research contemplations as the children burst into his study seeking string, pins, paper, ruler, scissors, and other must-have items. George and his older brother William even played cricket in the house (Browne 1995). George recalled how quietly and slowly his father would walk in the woods, a skill honed in the Brazilian rainforest (visited during Charles’s H.M.S. Beagle voyage), which allowed for the observation of many forms of wildlife.
Charles spent eight years of his life working on barnacles, painstakingly dissecting thousands of specimens in his study from 1846 to 1854 (Stott 2003). To the Darwin children this seemed like a perfectly natural thing for a father to do. One day, while playing with Sir John Lubbock’s offspring at their neighbor’s property, George asked, “Where does Sir John do his barnacles?” (R. Keynes 2001).
Georgy’s informal education began at home. Charles never forced science on his children, but he did everything possible to support whatever interest they showed in any form of natural history. When Georgy wanted to know more about lenses, Charles read a popular optics book to him daily (Browne 1995).
In 1853, England was making preparations for the Crimean War (1854–1856), in which Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia battled Russia. This was the period when Tennyson wrote his poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and Florence Nightingale performed heroic service as a nurse. The martial excitement did not escape the Darwin children. Emma played rousing tunes on the piano and “Sergeant” Georgy marched around the grounds pretending to be a soldier and commanding his younger brother, “Private” Franky, in mock battles with toy rifles and bayonets (Desmond and Moore 1991). Charles’s old shipmate and friend, Lieutenant Bartholomew Sulivan, was now Captain Sulivan. During his visits to Down House, the captain had many heroic tales to tell about various battles. The war, to everyone’s relief, ended in 1856 with the Treaty and Declaration of Paris. The allies’ victory ensured the integrity of Turkey, Black Sea neutrality, and free navigation of the Danube River.
The Reverend George Varenne Reed was employed as the local tutor for George from the time when the boy was about age seven. The relationship was eventually expanded to include the other Darwin boys, Francis, Leonard, and Horace. Apparently George exhibited maturity and good judgment at a young age, because he was allowed to ride his pony alone on a 20-mile trip to visit relatives in Hartfield, Sussex, when he was only 10 years old (F. Darwin 1916).
In 1856 George attended nearby Clapham Grammar School to learn math and chemistry from Darwin’s contemporary at Cambridge, the Reverend Charles Pritchard. Pritchard, an astronomer and Fellow of the Royal Society, was the founder and headmaster of Clapham. He operated a small astronomical observatory at the school. Darwin recalled his own dislike of the formal, classical education in Latin and Greek that he received, so all of his sons (except William) went to this school. Only George and Francis were taught personally by Pritchard, who eventually became professor of astronomy at Oxford University (Freeman 1978). The training at Clapham was far superior to most education in what Americans call public schools. Pritchard’s astronomical influence is clearly visible in George’s career.
At Clapham George caught measles, a dangerous disease at that time (Browne 2002). This became one more health issue for Charles and Emma to worry about. In 1861, 16-year-old George had to return home from Clapham in order to have dental surgery (Figure 7.2). Charles took his son to a London dentist, Mr. Woodhouse. Fortunately, chloroform was now in use, and George had to be put under twice in order to treat the extensive decay and remove the offending teeth (Loy and Loy 2010). During home visits, George would join in his father’s latest obsession, billiards. He also played cricket in local games against villagers and collected moths for his father.
George entered Trinity College of Cambridge University in 1864 without a scholarship, but by 1866 he had won one. Although he received a degree in mathematics, his skills were slow to develop. According to one of George’s classmates, “he took his studies lightly so that they did not interfere with his enjoyment of other things” (F. Darwin 1916). Nonetheless, he exceeded his father’s expectations and, at age 23, finished as the second-highest scorer (“second wrangler”) on the Mathematical Tripos (a written examination covering the mathematics course taught at Cambridge University). Later that year he was elected a fellow of Trinity College. He seemed to have an ability to focus intently on things that interested him. Charles had no idea that George was so mathematically capable, and wrote him a letter from Down House on 24 January 1868 (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 16, pt. 1: 33):
FIGURE 7.2 Seventeen-year-old George Howard Darwin, about 1862, photographed by S. J. Wiseman, Southampton. Cambridge University Library. Right: George Howard Darwin, photographed by A. Nicholls, Cambridge. Cambridge University Library.
My Dear Old Fellow,
I am so pleased. I congratulate you with all my heart and soul. I always said from your early days that such energy, perseverance and talent as yours would be sure to succeed; but I never expected such brilliant success as this. Again and again I congratulate you. But you have made my hand tremble so I can hardly write. The telegraph came here at eleven. We have written to W. and the boys.
God bless you, my dear old fellow—may your life so continue.
Your affectionate Father,
Ch. Darwin.
George officially received his B.A. on 25 January 1868. Arthur James Balfour, who became prime minister from 1902 to 1905, was among George’s Cambridge friends and tennis mates. George went to Paris in spring 1869 to work on his French skills. Upon his return he was offered a science position at Eton (a prestigious British boarding school) but instead decided to study for the bar, which he did from 1869 to 1872 in London. George was admitted to the bar in 1874 but never practiced law. Ill health, in the form of the usual Darwinian digestive problems, intervened. Like his father, he tried the treatments at Malvern, but to no avail. He was also attended to by Dr. Andrew Clark, who treated Charles and Thomas Henry Huxley (Loy and Loy 2010). George chose a life in mathematics and returned to Trinity College in 1873, remaining there for his entire career.
George functioned as his father’s ambassador when he took his sister Elizabeth on a visit to Paris in 1869. Charles asked him to call upon various scientific colleagues and present his respects. Charles also sent George and Francis to the United States to liaise with colonial Darwinians. George was tutored in engraving by George Brettingham Sowerby II, who drew all of the illustrations for Darwin’s book on barnacles (Browne 2002). Both George and Francis provided illustrations for Insectivorous Plants, published on 2 July 1875. George helped beautifully illustrate Climbing Plants, which appeared in book form in September 1875, and The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) (Figure 7.3).
William, George, and Francis collected earthworms for their father, both locally and when they went on holiday in various places. George also reviewed Darwin’s calculations of how much soil earthworms could bring to the surface in a year, which turned out to be, on average, a staggering 10 tons of dry earth per acre (C. Darwin 1881). They concluded that a Roman villa found in a field in Surrey was being submerged by earthworm activity at the rate of one inch every 12 years.
FIGURE 7.3 Top left: Drosera rotundifolia, drawn by George Darwin for his father’s book Insectivorous Plants, published in July 1875. Top right: Flower-stalk of the vine, drawn by George Darwin for his father’s book Climbing Plants, published in September 1875. Bottom: Desmodium gyrans during the day and “asleep” at night, drawn by George Darwin for his father’s book The Power of Movement in Plants, published in November 1880.
Hensleigh Wedgwood, Emma’s brother (Charles’s first cousin and brother-in-law) was involved in spiritualism and enjoyed participating in seances. After much struggle he finally got Darwin and Huxley, both notorious skeptics, to attend a seance. George arranged for this performance by medium Charles Williams to take place at Erasmus’s house in London on 16 January 1874. It was to be a big social occasion. In attendance were George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Cross, aka Mary Ann Evans) and her common-law husband George Henry Lewes, Thomas H. Huxley, the Litchfields, Charles and Emma, Francis Galton, Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood, Erasmus Alvey Darwin, and several others. Charles, Lewes, and Evans left before the fun started. The others had a good time and even arranged a second performance at Hensleigh’s house a few weeks later. Huxley considered Williams to be a con man, and even learned some of the tricks of the trade to better understand what was done. George John Romanes eventually exposed Williams as a charlatan (Browne 2002). Darwin pronounced it all “rubbish.”
Francis Galton, Darwin’s half first cousin (Berra et al. 2010a, 2010b), was the author of Hereditary Genius (1869) and the founder of eugenics (Pearson 1914–1930). He met with Charles on 2 April 1872 and sent Darwin a survey request on education and background, to which Charles responded on 28 May 1873. His answers to Galton’s questions can be seen in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (F. Darwin 1887, 3: 177–179). In his Autobiography Charles wrote, “I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of anyone, and that most of our qualities are innate.”
Like most of the Darwin household, George was frequently ill as a child and a young man. He spent a lot of time either in bed or undergoing treatments at various spas. This scuttled his legal studies. When back at Cambridge, George began writing essays in order to establish himself. In an article in the Contemporary Review (1873), George endorsed Galton’s plan for a family register. He also advocated legal divorce in cases of insanity, criminality, and other defects that were considered to be hereditary. Charles supported George’s essay. His plant-breeding experiments (C. Darwin, 1862, 1876, 1877a) reinforced Charles’s concern about the possible hereditary effects of his own consanguineous marriage to Emma, his first cousin, and its potential link to the ill health of their children (R. Keynes 2001; Berra et al. 2010a, 2010b). He expressed this fear in several letters to his cousin William Darwin Fox and to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1852–1853 (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 5: 84, 100, 147, 194). An example of what Darwin was worried about can be seen in his work with yellow toadflax (Linaria vulgaris). The five best seedpods were collected from plants that Darwin grew under gauze netting, to prevent cross-pollination by insects. These pods yielded a total of 118 seeds. A single seedpod of a cross-pollinated (uncovered) plant contained 166 seeds. When germinated, the seedlings from the cross-pollinated plants were taller and more robust than the self-pollinated group (Ayres 2008). This made Darwin think about the general ill health of his own offspring who, if they were plants, would fall into the self-pollinated group (Darwin 1876).
Anti-Darwinist St. George Jackson Mivart saw George Darwin’s essay calling for a liberalization of divorce law as an attempt to weaken marriage. Mivart bitterly and unfairly attacked George as a way to get to Charles. Mivart, who was already an enemy of Darwin—demonstrated by his scathing reviews of The Descent of Man (Mivart 1871a, 1871b)—used this excuse to continue his attacks on Charles Darwin and The Descent of Man in an anonymous article in the Quarterly Review (Mivart 1874a; Loy and Loy 2010). Mivart tried to destroy George’s reputation as a gentleman by portraying him as licentious. This outraged Charles, who forced Mivart’s publisher, John Murray (who also happened to be Darwin’s publisher) to publish George’s reply (G. Darwin 1874). Printed below George’s letter was Mivart’s (1874b) anonymous “non-apology.” The Darwins contemplated a lawsuit. Thomas Henry Huxley, ever “Darwin’s Bulldog,” rose to George’s defense (Desmond 1997). Some of Mivart’s writings were placed on the Vatican’s Index of forbidden readings, and he was eventually excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church in 1900 by Cardinal Vaughan, mainly due to Mivart’s views on hell. He also became persona non grata among the scientific establishment. No love was lost between Darwin’s circle of supporters and Mivart. Many years later, Huxley and Hooker continued to block Mivart’s application to join the Athenaeum Club, and Charles never spoke to him again (Desmond and Moore 1991).
Charles urged caution, however, in George’s concomitant desire to ridicule prayer, divine influence on morality, and heaven and hell. These religious beliefs were not important to Charles, but he had always endeavored to avoid unnecessarily stirring the pot of public outrage, as that would reflect unfavorably on the family.
Charles began revisions for the second edition of The Descent of Man in November 1873. Emma persuaded him to ask George for assistance in this sizeable task. Charles was thinking of paying Alfred Russel Wallace to help with the changes, but he agreed to let George do it (Browne 2002). The second edition of the book was published in autumn 1874.
George did a statistical analysis of cousin marriages via questionnaires (G. Darwin 1875) and concluded that they were very common and not especially harmful (Berra et al. 2010b). Charles took some comfort in this result. George’s analysis was one of the first data-based sociological studies (Kuper 2009). George demonstrated “that the percentage of offspring of first-cousin marriages [in mental asylums] is so nearly that of such marriages in the general population, that one can only draw the negative conclusion that, as far as insanity and idiocy go, no evil has been shown to accrue from consanguineous marriages.” He also introduced the idea of using the frequency of occurrence of the same surname in married couples (isonymy) to study the level of inbreeding in a population. This concept is still used today in human population biology.
As a child George was interested in heraldry (coats of arms, castles, knights, armor, horses, etc.). He pursued genealogy into adulthood, becoming an expert on the family’s history and preparing pedigrees for Francis Galton. He hired an American genealogist living in London, Colonel Joseph Lemuel Chester, to produce a pedigree that traced the Darwins back 200 years (Berra et al. 2010b). This document was never printed, but some of Chester’s notes are in the Francis Galton archive in the library of University College, London (Freeman 1984).
Charles Darwin knew that for evolution to produce the great diversity of life that surrounds us today, the earth needed to be immensely old. A professor at the University of Glasgow, William Thompson (Lord Kelvin), whose name is synonymous with thermodynamics, was one of the most distinguished astronomical physicists of the day. His calculations for the age of the earth (estimated at various times to be from 20 to 400 million years, but centering on 100 million years [Dalrymple 1991, table 2.10]) did not provide enough time for evolution to work. Thompson based this estimate on the cooling of the earth (Burchfield 1975; Dalrymple 1991; Kushner 1993). Charles enlisted George, asking him to use his freshly earned math degree to critique Thompson’s estimates. As the science of geology and knowledge of radioactivity progressed, Thompson’s assumptions were eventually shown to be incorrect.
George’s first major scientific paper was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1877. It dealt with the effects of geological changes on the earth’s axis of rotation and how this affected glacial periods. He treated the obliquity of the ecliptic as constant, but suggested that the poles may wander a bit. George was the first scientist to treat the earth as a viscous body instead of either an elastic one (as Thompson had done) or a rigid body (as mathematicians and astronomers had proposed). This made the study of tides much more accessible (Kushner 2004). Lord Kelvin (William Thompson) was the reviewer. Greatly impressed by this paper, he invited George to Glasgow. This resulted in a firm friendship, despite the disagreement between Lord Kelvin and George’s father over the age of the earth. Still, George was in a bit of an awkward position as the son of Britain’s greatest biologist and the protégé of Britain’s greatest physicist (Kushner 1993). By 1897, however, based on George’s work with the tidal retardation of the earth’s rotation, Lord Kelvin was able to accept earth’s age as 1,000 million (1 billion) years old (Dalrymple 1991, table 2.10). Today we recognize that the earth is about 4,600 million (4.6 billion) years old.
Thompson and his wife eventually became godparents to George’s first son, Charles Galton Darwin. George considered that his entire scientific career was the outcome of his conversations with Lord Kelvin in 1877, when George was 32 years old (E. Brown 1916). Dalrymple (1991) provided a technical and historical review of Lord Kelvin’s and George Darwin’s contributions to age-of-earth studies.
Since George was at Cambridge, he was the person who first notified his father that Charles was to be awarded an honorary degree. When Charles was awarded an L.L.D. (Doctor of Laws) by his alma mater, Cambridge University, on 17 November 1877, his sons George, Francis, and Horace, as well as Emma and daughter Bessy, were in attendance. The Cambridge Chronicle of 24 November 1877 reported that when Darwin appeared in his red academic gown, he received a huge ovation; a stuffed monkey, also dressed in academic regalia, was released on cords stretched across the gallery.
Two years earlier, Charles had been elected a foreign associate of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Rome. This tickled anti-papist Emma, who was pleased that this was accomplished under Pope Pius IX’s nose (Loy and Loy 2010).
In papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1879 to 1881, and especially in 1880, George proposed his theory of the tidal evolution of the earth-moon system, which eventually led to his fission hypothesis for the origin of the moon. A rotating, self-gravitating mass like the earth would assume a pear shape. As its rotation rate increased, an unstable bifurcation could occur. George reasoned that this could split apart (fission) into the earth-moon system. He suggested that the gravitational attraction of the sun produced tidal oscillations in the crust and upper mantle early in the earth’s formation, which pulled out a chunk of the rapidly spinning and elongating body. George’s work on this topic also affected many areas of mathematics. For example, his research into the equilibrium of rotating fluid masses clarified the pear-shaped figure of equilibrium advocated by Henri Poincaré (Kushner 1993).
Osmond Fisher, a geologist, then suggested that the Pacific Ocean basin was created when the moon was ripped from the earth (O. Fisher 1881). Although this Darwin-Fisher (or extraction) model persisted for the next half century, information gleaned from seismology, plate-tectonics theory, the analyses of lunar rocks brought back by astronauts, and other data do not support this idea. The current view of lunar formation, referred to as the giant impact theory, was proposed by Hartman and Davis (1975), who suggested that 4.5 billion years ago, during the early formation of the earth, a small planetary body collided with it. Some of the resulting debris coalesced in orbit around the earth and became our moon.
George’s papers explained that the tides on the earth’s surface were caused by the moon and the sun, and that these tides, in turn, affected the moon (Kushner 2004). He demonstrated that lunar tidal friction was the cause of the lengthening of the day (Larmor 1912). On 29 October 1878, Charles wrote to George, “Hurrah for the bowels of the earth and their viscosity and for the moon and for the Heavenly bodies and for my son George (F.R.S. very soon)” (F. Darwin 1916).
George’s early papers (1877–1880s) launched his career into the upper tier of scientists of the day. He considered Lord Kelvin to be his master and colleague. He was, as his father had proudly predicted, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1879, an honor bestowed on his father 40 years previously. George became the government’s expert on tidal observations throughout the empire, and the world’s foremost authority on tides.
FIGURE 7.4 Left: The title page of the second edition of The Tides. The first edition was published in 1889. Right: The title page of volume 5 of George Darwin’s Scientific Papers, which features a biographical sketch by his brother Francis Darwin and George’s former student E. W. Brown.
He authored the article on “tide” for various editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, including the eleventh edition (1911), called the scholar’s edition. Like all of George’s scientific work, the encyclopedia article is very complicated, densely mathematical, and difficult for the nonspecialist to follow. The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System (G. Darwin 1898), destined for a more general audience, was based on lectures George gave in Boston at the Lowell Institute in 1878. This book was a bestseller and widely translated (Figure 7.4). George served on the Meteorological Council and exerted a powerful influence on all areas of official meteorology (F. Darwin 1916). His tidal predictions were made available worldwide, via reports to the British Association from 1883 onward (Larmor 1912). George’s focus was to apply the techniques and methods of mathematical physics to the concerns of geology.
George’s flurry of scholarship came to an abrupt, temporary halt as his father approached death. George traveled to Down House on 10 April 1882 to help Frank support their dying father. George returned to Cambridge on 18 April, and Charles passed away the next day. George hurried home again to help with the funeral and organize pallbearers. William and George made most of the funeral arrangements (Desmond and Moore 1991).
In autumn 1882, 37-year-old George proposed to Nellie du Puy, who was 18 years old at the time. She refused George’s proposal, but he was soon to get a second shot at a du Puy female. Twenty-two-year-old Martha Haskins (“Maude”) du Puy of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, visited Cambridge in the spring of 1883 to see the same family and friends who introduced her sister to George. The du Puy family was descended from French Huguenot stock that migrated to New York in 1713. Gwen Raverat (1952) (Maud’s daughter) delightfully described the social scene and courtship. Gwen also provided her mother’s description of her father upon seeing him for the first time, the day after her arrival in Cambridge: “Jane came to tell me that Aunt C. [Cara] wished me to come downstairs to met Mr. Darwin. I ran down and opened the door quickly before I could lose courage, and G. D. quickly stepped forward blushing rosy-red and shook hands. The first thing that struck me was his size. He is little [he was actually 5 feet 10 inches tall]. He is intensely nervous, cannot sit still a minute. He is full of fun, and talks differently from an American man. They are so different in everything.” Maud liked English gentlemen, but thought that they were strange and cold. She preferred them to American men, however, because Englishmen “read more and think more, and know more.”
Several suitors pursued Maud during her time in Cambridge and one proposed. George was consulted on the suitability of this match. He approved, but Maud had other ideas. George and Maud spent more time together during family activities, and a friendship ensued as Maud began to develop feelings for George. Maud, in the company of another aunt, traveled to continental Europe to see the sights. George followed her, and they became engaged in Florence in March 1884. They were married on 22 July 1884 in Erie, Pennsylvania. George was the last of the bachelor Darwin boys (Loy and Loy 2010).
The newlyweds settled into a house that George purchased in 1885, Newnham Grange (now called Darwin College) in Cambridge. They remained in that yellow brick house near the river for the rest of George’s life. The estate had granaries on it, and a mill was nearby. Details of the day-to-day life of the George Darwin household are lovingly told by his daughter, Gwen Raverat (1952). George and Maud had five children, one of whom died in childhood. Gwen, who married Jacques Raverat, was an artist and writer; Charles Galton Darwin became a mathematician and professor like his father; Margaret Elizabeth married Sir Geoffrey Keynes and wrote a biographical sketch of Leonard Darwin; and William Robert was in the army.
George and Maud and their children often visited Emma at Down House, along with Henrietta. They would amble along the Sandwalk and explore childhood places that held fond memories. Most of Emma’s married life was spent at Down House. In autumn 1883, a year and a half after Charles’s death, Emma took a house (named the Grove) on Huntington Road in Cambridge to be near George, Francis, and Horace (Healey 2001). The plan was for Emma and Bessy to spend winters in the Grove and summers in Down House. Emma continued to enjoy her children and grandchildren. She was still able to play the piano for them in the last year of her life, even though she was losing her hearing (Loy and Loy 2010). Back in Cambridge, George visited his mother nearly every day. Emma died quietly in Cambridge on 2 October 1896, at the age of 88. As a result of 43 years of marriage to Charles and exposure to his family and scientific friends, Emma had become more secular and humanistic and less rigidly religious (Loy and Loy 2010). She was buried in the churchyard at Downe. George had been Emma’s favorite son since childhood and was very attached to Down House. Emma’s will specified that George would inherit Down when she died (Healey 2001).
George was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge in 1883, and his teaching duties involved lecturing on advanced mathematics. His students loved him and considered him a lifelong friend. They felt free to visit him in his home. Former pupil E. Brown (1916) wrote, “To have spent an hour or two with him, whether in discussion on ‘shop’ or in general conversation, was always a lasting inspiration.” Eventually his students came to dominate the leading astronomical positions and professorships (Kushner 1993).
George was instrumental in the 1899 formation of the Cambridge University Association, which promoted the university’s financial affairs among its graduates throughout the world (Larmor 1912). This is what Americans would recognize as an alumni association that works to boost the university’s endowment fund.
In 1883 George was awarded the Telford Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and in 1884 the Royal Society bestowed the Royal Medal on him, which he called a wedding gift, since it was presented in the same year as his marriage (Kushner 2004). As Kushner (1993) put it, “by the early 1880s [George] Darwin had himself become a member of those upper echelons of the scientific establishment—aided at first by familial ties, abetted by the powerful patronage of Thompson, but ultimately propelled there by the significance of his contributions.”
Several series of highly technical, major papers arose out of George’s theory of tidal evolution, which led to him being considered Britian’s leading geodesist. His work resulted in an explosive growth of the geophysical sciences, and George Darwin’s reputation is known by multiple generations of geo-physicists (Kushner 2004). He was president of the Royal Astronomical Society (1899–1900), twice president of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1890–1892 and 1911–1912), and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He became a knight commander of the Order of the Bath in 1905. This honor was especially important, as it was announced to him by his college friend, Prime Minister Balfour. The knighthood and Cambridge University Press’s publication of his collected Scientific Papers in five volumes (1907–1916) were among the most treasured events in George’s life.
The five volumes of Scientific Papers included over 80 separate titles (Figure 7.4). The titles of the five volumes give a brief overview of the depth and breadth of his research: volume 1 (1907), Oceanic Tides and Lunar Disturbance of Gravity; volume 2 (1908), Tidal Friction and Cosmogony; volume 3 (1910), Figures of Equilibrium of Rotating Liquid and Geophysical Investigations; volume 4 (1911), Periodic Orbits and Miscellaneous Papers; and volume 5 (1916), Supplementary Volume. They reflect George’s career as an applied mathematician who tested theories of cosmogony and had a preference for quantitative rather than qualitative results. E. Brown (1916) provided an analysis of George’s scientific work in all its excruciating detail. Kushner’s (1993) account is much more understandable. He wrote, “Finally, it must be admitted that [George] Darwin’s method is plainly intimidating to the mathematically illiterate, and its pages of formulas forbidding even to the mathematically sophisticated: even highly qualified referees such as Thompson and Lord Rayleigh often read through Darwin’s dense mathematical prose in a cursory manner.”
In 1911 George received Britain’s highest scientific distinction, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. His father had received this award in 1864. Francis Galton, George’s half first cousin once removed, received the Copley medal in 1910, with strong support from George, who was unaware that his own name was on the list for recognition (Larmor 1912). George received doctorates from 9 universities, held foreign memberships in 18 academies, and was a correspondent in 10 foreign academies. He clearly occupied a central position in the scientific aristocracy. Larmor (1912) referred to George as the “doyen of the mathematical school at Cambridge.” Kushner (1993) was willing to call him the “head of the British school of geophysics.” Sir Harold Jeffreys dedicated his book, The Earth (1924), to the memory of Sir George Howard Darwin, “father of modern geophysics and cosmogony.”
Two of the very best books about Charles Darwin and the family were written by George’s descendants: his daughter Gwen Raverat (Period Piece) and great-grandson Randal Keynes (Annie’s Box). Gwen reminisced about her father and her relatives. George was of average height and slightly built, at about 137 pounds. Besides science, he loved history, language, travel, and words. He was a world traveler, visiting many European countries, America, South Africa, and other exotic places. He had to give up tennis after being hit in the eye by a ball in 1895. He wanted to know the proper terminology for everything he did, such as archery, which he took up in 1910. For example, what was the proper term for the notch in the arrow’s posterior? Answer, a nock. George was proficient enough to win several local archery medals and trophies. He had a romantic streak, which spurred his lifelong interest in heraldry, and he was delighted at having been made a knight of the Bath. He read widely, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, and works on prehistory (Figure 7.5). Gwen described her father as the most worldly, active, and alert of the Darwin brothers, her uncles. George was genuinely fond and considerate of people and completely unselfish. He seemed to be surprised by his own success.
FIGURE 7.5 Sir George Howard Darwin, from a watercolor drawing by his daughter, Gwen Raverat. This reproduction is from the frontispiece of volume 5 of Scientific Papers, reprint edition, 1980.
Examples of George’s thoughtfulness and generosity include raising money for a railway guard who was robbed of his savings, and intervening with authorities to make sure a one-legged man was sent to London to be fitted with an artificial limb (F. Darwin 1916).
George died of pancreatic cancer on 7 December 1912 at Newnham Grange in Cambridge, at the age of 67. He was buried at Trumpington. George was recognized as the world’s leading authority on tides and one of the most eminent scientists of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Kushner 1993).
Maud, 16 years younger than George, lived until 1947. The only remaining male lineage of Charles Darwin’s family (and hence the Darwin name) passes through George Darwin.
