Charles Darwin was about halfway through his eight-year odyssey into barnacles as Leonard, his fourth son and eighth child, was born on 15 January 1850. The doctor was late in arriving at Down House, so Charles had to administer chloroform to Emma on a saturated cloth. This new anesthetic had only been in use for two years. She became unconscious immediately and remembered nothing about the birth. Charles apparently used too much chloroform, and Emma was out for about 90 minutes. Charles thought this was grand (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 4: 302–303). Criticism of the drug’s use was silenced when Queen Victoria gave birth to Leopold, her eighth child, under its influence in April 1853 (Healey 2001).
The name Leonard was chosen in honor of Leonard Jenyns, a naturalist and friend from Cambridge days whom Charles enlisted to write the fish section of The Zoology of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle. Jenyns was John Henslow’s brother-in-law, and Henslow also had a son named Leonard (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 4: 303–304). The new arrival quickly became known as “Pouter,” then “Lenny,” and later as “Leo.”
Francis Darwin told the story, quoted by Browne (1995), about Lenny jumping on the sofa, which was not allowed in Down House. Their father caught him doing this and said, “Oh Lenny Lenny it is against all rules.” To which Lenny replied, “Then I think you’d better go out of the room.” Lenny became known for his jokes and wisecracks. He was a typical Darwin child in his zeal for beetle collecting (Figure 10.1). He was also a budding philatelist and took great delight in the stamps that Asa Gray sent to him from America (Loy and Loy 2010).
FIGURE 10.1 Emma Darwin (at about 45 years old) and three-year-old Leonard Darwin, demonstrating his nickname “Pouter.” A pouter was also a breed of long-legged domestic pigeons, characterized by their habit of puffing out the distensible crop. Photograph by Maull and Fox, circa 1853. Darwin Museum, Down House.
Both Lenny and Franky developed a fever in 1855, and there were other illnesses to come for Lenny. By the time he was 11 years old, his father felt that Lenny was a bit backwards in learning his lessons because of his illnesses. He was tutored by the local vicar, George Varenne Reed, before being enrolled in Clapham School at the age of 12. This grammar school was close enough to allow the boys to return to Down House on weekends. On 12 June 1862, Lenny was sent home from school because he had scarlet fever (Browne 2002). Several weeks of grave concern for his life permeated Down House. He relapsed in mid-August and Emma also developed scarlet fever. The end result of all this was a very ill Charles Darwin, who worried himself sick about the health of his family.
Leonard’s niece, Margaret Elizabeth (George’s daughter), wrote a lovely memoir about her uncle for the Economic Journal. In that piece she also recounted a very interesting scenario, pregnant with implications for the history of biology, which I will use for a related digression (M. Keynes 1943). The story is that Gregor Mendel, the Austrian friar who, by experimenting with pea plants, had formulated the first two laws of heredity (segregation, and independent assortment), was in Downe in 1862 and could have visited Charles Darwin. Because of Lenny’s near-death experience from scarlet fever, however, this meeting did not take place. The mind boggles at what could have resulted had the two ever met!
Mendel published his results in 1866 in an obscure German journal, but this paper was not widely known until Hugo de Vries (Dutch), Carl Correns (German), and Erich von Tschermak (Austrian) more or less simultaneously rediscovered it in 1900. Mawer (2006) unraveled the behind-the-scenes maneuvering this rediscovery produced in the scientific literature. William Bateson (English) had Mendel’s paper translated into English and published. Bateson became a staunch supporter of Mendel, coined the word genetics for the study of inheritance, and eventually demonstrated that the same Mendelian hereditary patterns in plants also occur in animals.
Here is what Leonard wrote 80 years later, when contacted by a German who told him he believed Mendel had been to Down in 1862 (M. Keynes 1943):
I have told him that I am fairly certain that the interview never took place. I am the only person who can now fully realize what an event the appearance of a German Catholic priest at Down would then have been. There is also another reason in regard to which I oddly enough play the chief role. At as nearly as possible when Mendel was in England, I was recovering from a long and very dangerous illness, and my mother was suffering from scarlet fever caught from me. If I prevented my father from meeting Mendel, do you not think that I even now ought to be hung, drawn and quartered? Moreover I think people now forget the prejudices of those days: the Catholic clergy are much more under the thumb of their superiors than are the protestants, and I only remember 3 clergy coming to Down House, 2 local parsons, and [Charles] Kingsley. I do not believe Mendel would have thought it wise to get the reputation of having seen my father.
Mendel was influenced by Darwin’s research and, in fact, even owned a copy of On the Origin of Species, but there is no evidence that Darwin was aware of Mendel’s experiments (Mawer 2006). Such knowledge would have enabled Darwin to abandon his mistaken notion of pangenesis and gemmules, which he postulated in Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication in 1868. Darwin’s system of inheritance involved the shedding of gemmules by cells and tissues throughout the body. The particles reached the gonads via the bloodstream and became part of the sex cells, which were passed on to offspring. One can only wonder what Darwin would have said and done if he had been exposed to Mendelian genetics.
The spurious story, recounting that Darwin had been sent one of the 40 reprints (offprints) Mendel ordered of his paper in the 1866 Proceedings of the Brünn Society of Natural History but had not read it, nonetheless contains a wisp of truth, as explained by Mawer (2006). Mendel’s paper, “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” (“Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden”), was cited in an important book by W. O. Focke, published in 1881, entitled Die Pflanzen-Mischlinge (Plant Hybridization). Darwin owned a copy of this book, which is still in his library, but the pages dealing with Mendel’s work are uncut (the bound, folded pages are unopened), meaning they could not have been read.
Of the 40 reprints of Mendel’s pea-plant paper, only 7 have been located (Mawer 2006). One of these is in the Indiana University library, and was acquired by Dr. Charles Davenport about 1898. Davenport was a zoologist and one of the first US scientists to utilize Mendelian genetics (Berra et al. 2010b). He established the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) of the Department of Genetics at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. The ERO was located in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island in New York State. Davenport hired Harry H. Laughlin to be superintendent of the ERO in 1910. This became the foremost center for eugenics in the United States. One of its missions was to collect the pedigrees of prominent families. Laughlin eventually produced a large pedigree of the Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood families (front endpapers) and was well acquainted with Leonard Darwin, who had been president of the Eugenics Society.
Browne (2002) related a story about Leo’s 1862 return home from Clapham, during his first term there. The Origin had been the topic of conversation among his schoolmates, and Leo wanted to read it: “I remember my father entering the drawing room at Down, apparently seeking for someone, when I, then a schoolboy, was sitting on the sofa with the Origin of Species in my hands. He looked over my shoulder and said: ‘I bet you half a crown that you do not get to the end of that book.’” Charles “won his bet but never got his money.”
Down House was open to the public as a national memorial and museum on 7 June 1929, initially under the care of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and, later, the Royal College of Surgeons (Reeve 2009). This occasion caused Leonard, the only surviving child of Charles and Emma, to reminisce about his childhood at Down (L. Darwin 1929). His memories are a gold mine of information about his father and life at Down House. Leonard described how he climbed a large holly tree one winter in his Sunday clothes. He received such a scolding from his father as “to wipe out for the rest of my life every desire to climb trees in my Sunday best.”
Leonard thought that Charles overstated his lack of aesthetic emotions in his Autobiography, because he recalled his father declaring “that if he had to live his life over again he would make it a rule to let no day pass without reading a few lines of poetry.” Leonard further added, “It seemed to all of us onlookers that his appreciation of natural scenery remained quite undimmed to the end of his life.” Leonard explained that his “father’s life cannot be understood without reference to what he suffered.” When his father was asked by one of the children if he could not go away from home and rest, Charles “replied that the truth was that he was never quite comfortable except when utterly absorbed in his writing. He evidently dreaded idleness as robbing him of his one anodyne, work” (L. Darwin 1929).
Much has been written about Charles Darwin’s ailments (Colp 2008; Berra et al. 2010b; and references cited therein). Here is what Leonard had to say on the subject (L. Darwin 1929):
No doctor seemed to know from what he was suffering, and in his own opinion it was not the result of sea-sickness on his long voyage, severe though that trouble had been. Though it is very rash for a layman to speak on such subjects, yet I cannot refrain from recording my belief that it was pyorrhea [peridontitis], or some other form of auto-poisoning, and that any excitement made the poison flow more freely. It is in any case a fact that for many years an hour’s interesting conversation in the afternoon with a visitor would bring on several hours’ vomiting during the succeeding night, whilst he was hardly ever without some symptoms of indigestion.
Leonard goes on to marvel at the mass of work his father accomplished in spite of his ill health: “It was only done by declining to undertake extraneous duties—and here his bad health was a real help—and by never wasting a single minute of his short day’s work.” Nevertheless, Leonard wrote, “my father spoke of his life as a happy one, and this was certainly true, though it was greatly marred by very long periods of discomfort and suffering, which mercifully got decidedly less frequent towards the end of his life.”
The penultimate in a long litany of diagnoses-at-a-distance for what ailed Charles Darwin (Crohn’s disease, systemic lactose intolerance, Chagas disease, arsenic poisoning, allergies, psychosomatic disorders, etc.) is chronic vomiting syndrome (Hayman 2009a, 2009b). The author, a Melbourne University pathologist, recently informed me that his preferred diagnosis, based on circumstantial evidence, is now an A to G point mutation at nucleotide 3243 in a mitochondrial ring chromosome, and that this explains all of Darwin’s symptoms (John Hayman, personal communication, 22 August 2012; Hayman 2013).
In spite of his slow start, Lenny, now 18 years old, did well at Clapham and placed second on the entrance exam to attend the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, where he pursued an engineering education. Charles was very proud of his son’s late-blooming accomplishments. Leonard’s special interest was photography, which was very useful in survey operations. He was commissioned in the Royal Engineers in 1870. In his usual self-effacing way, Leonard claimed that he joined the army because he thought himself the dimmest of the Darwin sons (M. Keynes 1943), but he told his niece Gwen that it was “because he was afraid of being afraid” (Raverat 1952). Leonard had a 20-year army career.
The Franco-Prussian War began on 19 July 1870, encouraged by the ruler of France (Napoleon III) and the prime minister of Prussia (Otto von Bismarck). The war was ostensibly over succession to the Spanish throne. Casualties were very high. The French were overwhelmed by the German war machine, Napoleon III surrendered, and Paris capitulated on 28 January 1871. Bismarck used the victory to complete the unification of Germany. England remained neutral. Leonard (as well as Charles and Emma), however, favored the Prussians, but most of Leonard’s fellow soldiers wanted the French to win, so there could be an excuse for a war with France, Britain’s traditional enemy (H. Litchfield 1915, 2: 198–199).
After the war but prior to the publication of The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles turned over the proof correction to Leonard and Henrietta. They made extensive changes to this pioneering work that used photographs to illustrate the text, and all were gratified to see it published on 26 November 1872. This work includes 32 photographs and 21 woodcuts. Because photographs taken during that period required long exposure times, animal expressions are represented in the woodcuts, and those of humans in the photographs (Voss 2010). Darwin was attempting to illustrate that human expressions are a physiological response to stimuli, and thus are vestiges of the same response seen in other animals.
In 1874 Leonard and a contingent of Royal Engineers were posted to New Zealand, where Leonard was to observe and photograph a transit of Venus on 9 December. Unfortunately the sky was cloudy and the event could not be seen. He returned home by steamer via San Francisco and then took a train to Washington, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. In Boston he visited Asa Gray, his stamp supplier from childhood. The Atlantic crossing was on the S.S. Abyssinia of the Cunard Line. Leonard then served a two-year posting in Malta. While on leave in March 1876, Leonard and George toured around Italy (Loy and Loy 2010). Leonard taught chemistry and photography at the school of military engineering at Chatham from 1877 to 1882.
Charles had encouraged photography as a hobby for both William and Leonard in their childhoods. The chemicals were expensive, however, and the outcomes were often unreliable. Leonard eventually produced some well-known photographs of his father (Figure 10.2). The most famous is the photograph of Charles in a wicker chair on the veranda of Down House circa 1878 (Berra et al. 2010b). The veranda was constructed in 1872 and faced the garden. It was the family’s favorite place to sit. Photography was in its infancy in the nineteenth century and exposure times were long. This may explain why very few smiles were recorded from that period, as it was too long to hold one’s facial muscles in a smile. Posing for a photograph was not all that different from sitting for a painting. In 1878 Leonard introduced the Darwin household to the telephone, probably a military field version, but it was less than a rousing success (Browne 2002).
FIGURE 10.2 Charles Darwin (circa 69 years old), in a wicker chair on the veranda of Down House. Photographed by Leonard Darwin, about 1878. Darwin Museum, Down House.
Leo and his fiancée, Elizabeth (“Bee”) Frances Fraser, visited Charles at Down House on 23 March 1882, only a month before Charles’s death. She was the sister of one of Leonard’s fellow officers. When Leo’s father died in April, he hurried home to join his other brothers. Newly promoted Captain Leonard Darwin and Bee were married on 11 July 1882. He was then ordered to Jimbour (near Brisbane in Queensland, Australia) to observe another transit of Venus that was supposed to occur on 10 December 1882. His new wife accompanied him, and they had their honeymoon during the trip to Australia. While sailing there, Leonard learned that he had earned a first in his Staff College examination (Loy and Loy 2010). Alas, it was again too cloudy to carry out his mission. Leonard wrote, “There are few people who have been twice round the world to see a thing without seeing it” (M. Keynes 1943).
On the way home, Leonard and Bee stopped in Singapore. Leonard used telegraphic signals to calculate the longitudinal difference between the Singapore telegraph station and Port Darwin, the northern Australian town named for his father (Loy and Loy 2010). The couple returned to England at the end of April 1883, and he resumed teaching chemistry at the Staff College.
Leonard worked in the Intelligence Service of the War Office in London from 1885 to 1890 and was promoted to major in 1889. He was assigned to the African desk, where he worked in the topographical and colonial sections, which dealt with West African colonies. He was sent to Paris to delimit various colonial borders. In 1886 he was seconded to the Royal Society and sent on another astronomical expedition, this time to Grenada in the West Indies (Loy and Loy 2010). His wife went with him, and they arrived on 12 August. His assignment was to photograph a total eclipse of the sun, and the weather finally cooperated. His observations on photographing the corona and solar prominences with a prismatic camera were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (L. Darwin et al. 1889).
Leonard resigned his military commission in 1890. Doctors had recommended a long sea voyage for the health of his wife, so Leonard and Bee sailed for New York City, crossed to California, and then went on to Japan, China, and Egypt on a six-month circumnavigation of the globe (Loy and Loy 2010). Leonard was the most widely traveled of all the Darwin children. Treasures acquired on this trip furnished and filled his and Bee’s home.
On his return to England, Leonard joined the Royal Geographical Society and was elected to its council in 1890. He became its president in 1908 and served until 1911. He wrote a few pieces for the Dictionary of National Biography, including a sketch of Thomas Wedgwood (L. Darwin 1900), but he found this too dull and without financial reward (Loy and Loy 2010).
Since I am privileged to be a university professorial fellow at Charles Darwin University and research associate at the Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory, both located in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, I would be remiss if I did not include the following story from Margaret (M. Keynes 1943). When questioned about the origin of the name Port Darwin, Leonard wrote in 1941:
If you look at the chart in your edition of the Voyage of the Beagle, you will see that she [the H.M.S. Beagle] never could have been within a thousand miles of Port Darwin when my father was on board, so the name could not have been given then. My memory & not too clear—is that my father never heard how the name was given; but that he knew that an officer from the Beagle, I presume [John] Stokes, had subsequently surveyed the northern coast of Australia, and he felt sure that he had then given it that name in memory of their voyage together. I do not think it strange that he [Charles] never heard of this event at the time. When I was president of the R. G. S. two mountains were called after me. … [One] was [named] by Scott (?) in the Antarctic. He probably said: “Call it after the President of the R. G. S.” and he did so and thought no more of the matter, having to name places every day. I don’t know if that Mount Darwin still appears or not. As to Port Darwin, when named it was a dreary desolate bay, with behind it the country since called the Never-Never land, an inhospitable region. Stokes might have felt that giving it the name of Darwin was no great compliment.
On 27 April 1882 the Times [London] printed an account of Charles Darwin’s funeral. Next to this article was a letter to the editor by Admiral John Lort Stokes, reminiscing about his and Charles’s shipboard experiences in 1831–1836. He commented on Darwin’s seasickness and quoted Charles: “Old fellow I must take the horizontal for it.” Stokes elaborated, “It was distressing to witness this early sacrifice of Mr. Darwin’s health, who ever afterwards seriously felt the ill-effects of the Beagle’s voyage.” Stokes was a 19-year-old mate and assistant surveyor on the second voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, with Charles aboard, when she sailed in 1831. He was also Charles’s roommate in the tiny poop cabin, along with midshipman Philip Gidley King, for the nearly five-year voyage. It was on the third voyage of the Beagle in 1839 that naval surveyor Stokes named Darwin Harbour for his friend. Stokes joined the navy at the age of 13, and spent 18 years on all three voyages of the H.M.S. Beagle (Powell 2009). He was in command of the Beagle by the end of the third voyage (Freeman 1978).
Leonard had three careers: (1) military, (2) politics and economics, and (3) eugenics. After leaving the army he served on the London County Council as a Moderate. He ran for election to Parliament as the Liberal-Unionist member for the Lichfield division of Staffordshire. With campaign support from his wife, he won the general election in July 1892, although only by four votes. His mother enthusiastically supported his candidacy and threw a party to celebrate his election (Healey 2001). He served as a member of Parliament from 1892 to 1895, but was defeated for reelection in 1895. Leonard was not cut out for the realities of politics. As Sir Arthur Keith remarked, Leonard considered politics “as the art of applying science to the problems of government,” and Leonard had a penchant for seeing both sides of every question (M. Keynes 1943).
Leonard also gave of himself to public service in other ways. In 1892 he became a member of the council of Bedford College for Women. His Uncle Erasmus (Charles’s brother) played a leading role in its founding in 1849. Leonard worked for the college for 33 years. From 1913 to 1920 he was chairman of Bedford College of London University. During World War I he served as chairman of the Professional Classes Relief Council from 1914 to 1918, which reflected his view that eugenically desirable qualities were segregated in social classes. This commission helped a socially selected group through economic difficulties. It was an early experiment in social welfare, related to social biology, that was designed to “encourage parenthood and to give help to those carrying good stock through the tribulations of the war period” (Eugenics Review 1943).
Leonard’s experiences in government led to his involvement in economics. He wrote the very influential textbook Bimetallism (1897) (Figure 10.3), which was highly praised by economist J. Keynes (1943). John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was one of the world’s most influential economists, and his theories remain in use. Keynesian economic policy, which calls for government spending during a recession, is still part of today’s economic debates. As the title, Bimetallism, implies, Leonard’s subject matter dealt with the price of gold and silver. It argued that the government ought to define the value of its monetary unit in terms of both metals, thus establishing a fixed rate of exchange between them. Leonard was a moderate adherent to the policy of allowing the market to determine the ratio between gold and silver prices, instead of favoring a high gold-price for silver, which could raise actual gold prices and increase inflation. He wanted to stabilize the exchange rates between countries that pegged their currency to either gold or silver. As Miss Prism says in The Importance of Being Earnest, “When one has thoroughly mastered the principles of Bimetallism one has the right to lead an introspective life. Hardly before. I must beg you to return to your Political Economy.”
The array of eclectic topics Leonard tackled is really quite astonishing. For example, he testified before a parliamentary committee about Indian currency (L. Darwin 1899). In 1903 he published an extensive study entitled Municipal Trade: The Advantages and Disadvantages Resulting from the Substitution of Representative Bodies for Private Proprietors in the Management of Industrial Undertakings. In it, he concluded that private management was more efficient than public management. This led to a series of lectures at Harvard University that became another book, Municipal Ownership (L. Darwin 1907).
FIGURE 10.3 Left: The title page of the first edition of Bimetallism, published in 1897. Right: The title page of the first edition of The Need for Eugenic Reform, published in 1926.
Leonard and Bee had no children. She died in 1898, after a long illness. He married Charlotte Mildred Massingberd, his second cousin, in 1900. She was 18 years his junior. The marriage prospered for 40 years, but again there were no children. She was known as Mildred within the family.
Leonard’s studies led him to consider the relationship between economics and heredity, thus ushering in his third career in eugenics. Leonard was 61 years old when he turned to eugenics, which was to become his major interest in life. The eugenics movement was founded by Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half first cousin and thereby Leonard’s half first cousin once removed. Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, and he founded the Eugenics Education Society in 1908 to encourage the study of human heredity. The word “education” was later dropped from the Eugenics Society’s name. Many in the society (including Leonard) felt that its objective should be limited “to the creation of a public opinion favorable to the promotion of fertility among those who could enrich the biological endowment of posterity [positive eugenics] and to its restriction, by sterilization or other means, among those whose contribution to posterity could be spared [negative eugenics]” (Eugenics Review 1943). After Galton’s death in 1911, Leonard, against his strong resistance, was persuaded to become president of the society, a post he held until 1928. This enabled him to combine his interest in human affairs with science (M. Keynes 1943). In 1912, Cambridge University bestowed an honorary degree of Doctor of Science on Leonard.
As he did in politics and economics, Leonard steered a middle course and maintained the equality of environment and heredity. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times (21 December 1912, p. 12), Leonard, as president of the Eugenics Society, spelled out his view of the purposes of eugenics: “We desire therefore greatly to increase the sense of responsibility in connection with all matters pertaining to human parenthood, to spread abroad knowledge of the laws of heredity as far as now known, and to encourage further research in that domain of science…. [W]e do not advocate any interference whatever with the free selection of normal mates in marriage. … There will no doubt always remain a class quite outside the pale of all moral influence, and of these there will be a small proportion who, if they become parents, are certain to pass on some grievous mental or bodily defect to a considerable proportion of their progeny. Here and here only must the law step in. As to whether surgical sterilization should ever be enforced on such persons we have still an open mind, but certainly not till further information on this subject in available.” He further stated that “sufficient control must be maintained over them [those described above] to prevent them from breeding.” He ended his letter by writing that the poor laws should be administered “so as not to encourage reproduction on the part of degenerate paupers.”
Leonard was president during the First International Eugenics Congress in London in 1912. In 1921 he spoke at the Second International Eugenics Congress in New York City. He published The Need for Eugenic Reform in 1926 (Figure 10.3), which was followed by What is Eugenics? It was in 1932, at the Third International Eugenic Congress in New York City, where a large Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood pedigree was exhibited (Berra et al. 2010b). The negative eugenics advocated by Leonard is shocking to today’s sensibilities, but it was a product of the times.
Raverat (1952) described fierce arguments that she had with her uncle about eugenics. She was shocked when Uncle Lenny considered a money standard for deciding who should be encouraged to breed. He reportedly said, “A man who can earn and keep money shows that he has the qualities essential to survival.” Gwen replied that money means little to artists, philosophers, and other creative people, and she did not want to see those qualities bred out of humans. Uncle Lenny and Aunt Mildred had little use for this argument. On the other hand, as Raverat pointed out, Leonard intervened when the local government wanted to lock up an old man who lived wild in the woods. Leonard knew that would kill the man and argued that he should be allowed to roam the forest freely.
Perhaps Leonard’s greatest contribution to science was his encouragement and support for a young scientist, Ronald A. Fisher, a population geneticist and statistician. They carried on a 20-year correspondence from 1915 to 1935, often writing every few days. Many of those letters are included in Bennett’s (1983) review of their relationship. It was Leonard who suggested the topic of Fisher’s important paper, “The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance” (R. Fisher 1918). Leonard seemed to be fulfilling the role of father figure and major professor to the brilliant, much younger Fisher (Bennett 1983). Leonard personally defrayed some of Fisher’s publication costs (Edwards 2004). The two became fast friends, despite the 40-year age difference, and Leonard was a major influence on Fisher’s life and research into biometry, heredity, and selection (Bennett 1983). For Fisher, Leonard Darwin was a living link to Charles Darwin and Francis Galton.
With his characteristic self-effacement, Leonard referred to himself as “muddleheaded” and “stupid about mathematical things.” He wrote that he liked receiving Fisher’s letters because they always made him think. Bennett (1983) wrote: “He once summed up his feelings on receiving a letter from Fisher as ‘somewhat like that of a pig genuinely admiring a necklace of pearls, but not knowing quite how to put it on and feeling sure that he had not deserved such a present.’” Between 1915 and 1935, Fisher published about 200 papers in the Eugenics Review, a quarterly journal of the Eugenics Society of which Leonard was president.
Fisher became part of the neo-Darwinian modern evolutionary synthesis that united natural selection with genetics. His classic work, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (R. Fisher 1930), is dedicated “to Major Leonard Darwin in gratitude for the encouragement, given to the author, during the last fifteen years, by discussing many of the problems dealt with in this book.” Leonard had pushed Fisher “to write a great work on the mathematics of evolution,” and he certainly got it. This book is required reading in most population genetics and evolutionary biology classes. One of the references Fisher cited was Leonard’s book, The Need for Eugenic Reform (L. Darwin 1926). About this book Fisher wrote: “It is one of the difficulties of the subject that eugenics exercises a potent attraction for cranks of various kinds. All the more valuable is the sober judgment, detached reasoning and well-weighed earnestness of this really great book” (Eugenics Review 1943).
In 1921 Leonard and Mildred retired to their country home, Cripps Corner, located on the outskirts of Ashdown Forest (Figure 10.4). They lived in this house in relative isolation, as it was a two-hour train ride from London. Gwen Raverat (1952), Leonard’s niece and Margaret Keynes’s sister, described Aunt Mildred as a fanatical teetotaler, but she allowed Leonard to have his shot of whiskey every night as “medicine,” provided he drank it in one gulp. She would not allow electric lights or a telephone, but she did grant Leonard the privilege of owning a motorcar. She was an ardent feminist, but thought women should treat men kindly and not expect too much from them, “because they are such helpless things, Poor Lambs.” Apparently the entire Darwin extended family took great delight in Mildred’s idiosyncrasies.
FIGURE 10.4 Leonard and Mildred Darwin, photographed in 1923, Uppsala, Sweden. Cropped from a photo in Berra et al. 2010b.
World War II came to Cripps Corner in 1940, when part of the Battle of Britain was fought over their heads (M. Keynes 1943). Mildred died in December 1940 of an unspecified illness. Leonard remained alert but became increasingly more feeble. After being sick for three days, he died peacefully from bronchial pneumonia on 26 March 1943, at the age of 93. His obituary appeared the next day, on 27 March (Times [London] 1943). He holds the record for longevity among the Darwin children. He is buried in Forest Row cemetery.
In 1943 the Eugenics Society printed a group of comments from its members upon Leonard’s death. Most pointed out that he was utterly devoid of personal ambition and was very modest, intellectually honest, and unfailingly courteous to all.
In a letter to Margaret Keynes, dated 11 January 1944, Ronald Fisher wrote that Leonard “was surely the kindest and wisest man I ever knew.” Arthur Keith (1943) remarked in Leonard’s obituary in Nature that in physical appearance and in his attitude toward life, Leonard “bore a closer resemblance to his father than did any of his brothers.” As reported by Raverat (1952), Leonard’s nephew Bernard Darwin (Frank’s son) wrote this poem about his Uncle Lenny:
Serenely kind and humbly wise,
Whom each may tell the thing that’s hidden
And always ready to advise
And ne’er to give advice unbidden.
