On 13–16 April 1856, Charles Lyell visited Darwin at Down House. Lyell and Darwin discussed a paper written by a young British naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, that had appeared in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History the previous year. It seemed to present ideas that were similar to Darwin’s on how races of animals may develop into species. The essence of Wallace’s thesis was succinctly stated at the end: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.” How this could happen, however, had not yet occurred to Wallace. Lyell cautioned Darwin to hurry up and publish his own ideas before someone beat him to it. Darwin appeared unmoved by this warning. He had read the paper and did not consider Wallace to be a threat. Darwin proceeded to explain his thoughts about natural selection to Lyell in depth, and Lyell continued to urge their publication (Browne 1995).
In spring 1856, Emma was stunned when she discovered that she was pregnant once again, although she thought she may have had a couple of miscarriages in the intervening years (Healey 2001). She would turn 48 years old on 2 May, and she had already given birth nine times. Her previous child, Horace, was born five years earlier. Emma was as wretchedly uncomfortable as ever (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 6: 87, 151–152, 191). In 1852 Charles had written to his cousin and Cambridge University classmate, William Darwin Fox, to congratulate him on the birth of Fox’s tenth child. Charles then added, “but please to observe when I have a 10th, send only condolences to me” (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 5: 83).
FIGURE 12.1 Emma Darwin holding Charles Waring Darwin, photographed by William Darwin, in 1857. English Heritage Photographic Library, London.
The Darwin’s tenth and last child was born on 6 December 1856. Emma’s sister Elizabeth was present to help, as she had been many times before. Charles administered chloroform, but not nearly as much as he had in the past, and only when Emma cried out for it (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 6: 438). The baby was christened Charles Waring on 21 May 1857, at the parish church in Downe. It was apparent that the baby was not normal. The probability of a Down syndrome baby rises with increasing maternal age (Huether et al. 1998). The risk is about 1 in 14 for a 48-year-old mother (Beers and Berkow 1999)—Emma’s age then—compared to 1 in 1,667 for a 20-year-old mother. R. Keynes (2001) suggested a Down syndrome diagnosis for this last Darwin child. A photograph of Emma holding baby Charles Waring, taken by William, displays typical Down syndrome features (Figure 12.1). The skull shows frontal bossing; the eyes are wide set, with a hint of slanting; the nasal bridge is depressed; and the lips are thin. The hands appear to have short, wide digits, and there is a suggestion of clinodactyly in the fifth finger. The baby appears hypotonic (Berra et al. 2010a).
In today’s parlance, Charles Waring was “developmentally delayed.” He showed no sign of walking or talking, but was “‘remarkably sweet’ and affectionate, with a ‘wicked little smile,’ he was totally passive, and ‘made strange grimaces & shivered, when excited.’ He had a ‘passion for Parslow’ and a special claim on his mother” (Desmond and Moore 1991).
In early March 1858, while recovering from an attack of malaria on Ternate Island in the Moluccas (= Spice Islands, between Sulawesi and New Guinea, now a province of Indonesia), Wallace decided to write a letter to Darwin that more fully outlined his views on species. Wallace chose to do this because, in previous correspondence (1 May 1858), Darwin had written to Wallace: “By your letter [not found] & even still more by your paper in Annals [Wallace 1855] … I can plainly see that we have thought much alike & to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions…. I agree to the truth of almost every word of your paper” (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 6: 387–388).
This pleased Wallace greatly, and he wrote to his fellow Amazon explorer, Henry Walter Bates, on 4 January 1858: “I have been much gratified by a letter from Darwin, in which he says that he agrees with ‘almost every word’ of my paper. He is now preparing his great work on ‘Species and Varieties’ for which he has been collecting material for twenty years. He may save me the trouble of writing more on my hypothesis, by proving that there is no difference in nature between the origin of species and varieties; or he may give me trouble by arriving at another conclusion; but at all events, his facts will be given for me to work upon” (Wallace 1905, 1: 358). The Darwin-Wallace relationship, as reflected in their correspondence, has been reviewed by Berra (2013).
On 18 June 1858, Charles finally received the Ternate letter from Wallace, which contained a manuscript entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” Like Darwin had done 20 years previously, Wallace had read Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. This led Wallace to the idea of natural selection, just as it had done for Darwin. Darwin had 20 years of data to support this concept; Wallace intuitively came to the same conclusion, but without the data to back it up. Wallace asked that Darwin read the manuscript and pass it along to Charles Lyell if Darwin considered it significant (Wallace 1905, 1: 362–363).
Darwin wrote to Lyell the same day, enclosing Wallace’s manuscript (as Wallace had requested), saying: “Your words have come true with a vengeance—that I should be forestalled.” Charles further stated that “if Wallace had my MS. Sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract” (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 7: 107).
Charles Lyell had been trying to get Darwin to publish his ideas on evolution for several years, before someone else arrived at the same conclusion, but Darwin was reluctant to rush into print. He had many excuses for procrastinating. Charles knew he would be attacked by religious authorities and believers for proposing a godless origin for the earth’s various species. He didn’t want to upset devout Emma. He wanted to make sure he could answer every possible objection by completing his “big book,” Natural Selection. He had seen the upset caused by Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously by Robert Chambers in 1844 (Secord 2000). Chambers posited a view of evolution as being driven by innate forces that caused species to strive for change. The book was wildly popular—but full of scientific errors. Because it was published anonymously, there was much speculation about its authorship. Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s Cambridge geology professor, initially thought that because it was so awful, it must have been written by a woman (imagine saying that today in a book review), but Sedgwick later changed his opinion (Sedgwick 1845). Public acknowledgment of Chambers’s authorship was not made until 1884, after Darwin’s death, but Charles suspected that Chambers was the author (Freeman 1978).
Henrietta was sick with fever (diphtheria), three children in the village of Downe had died recently from scarlet fever, and baby Charles was very ill with fever. On 28 June 1858, Charles Waring succumbed. He was buried on 30 June, next to infant Mary in the parish churchyard, with Charles and Emma present. As fears of a local epidemic spread, the next day Darwin evacuated most of his family to Sarah Elizabeth Wedgwood’s (Emma’s sister) house in Sussex. Charles and Emma remained at Down to take care of the ailing Henrietta (Healey 2001). Years later, in her role as editor of her mother’s letters, Henrietta wrote: “The poor little baby was born without its full share of intelligence. Both my father and mother were infinitely tender towards him, but, when he died in the summer of 1858, after their first sorrow, they could only feel thankful. He had never learnt to walk or talk” (H. Litchfield 1915, 2: 162).
Darwin agonized over the morality of publishing his 20 years’ worth of data, now that he had received Wallace’s essay also positing the principle of natural selection. Charles did not want to be accused of acting unethically and claiming priority over an amateur naturalist. Shermer (2002) has explored this mine-field in great historical and philosophical detail and judged that Darwin acted as the perfect gentleman that he was. This conclusion is clearly justified by the letter Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell one week after receiving Wallace’s letter. In this piece of correspondence, dated 25 June 1852, Darwin expressed to Lyell that he felt constrained by Wallace’s letter:
My Dear Lyell
I am very sorry to trouble you, busy as you are, in so merely personal an affair. But if you will give me your deliberate opinion, you will do me as great a service, as ever man did, for I have entire confidence in your judgment & honour….
There is nothing in Wallace’s sketch which is not written out much fuller in my sketch copied in 1844, & read by Hooker some dozen years ago. About a year ago I sent a short sketch of which I have copy of my views (owing to correspondence on several points) to Asa Gray, so that I could most truly say & prove that I take nothing from Wallace. I shd be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so. But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably. Wallace says nothing about publication, & I enclose his letter.—But as I had not intended to publish any sketch, can I do so honourably because Wallace has sent me an outline of his doctrine?—I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man shd think I had behaved in such a paltry spirit. Do you not think that his having sent me this sketch ties my hands?… By the way would you object to send this & your answer to Hooker to be forwarded to me, for then I shall have the opinion of my two best & kindest friends.—This letter is miserably written and I write it now, that I may for time banish whole subject. And I am worn out with musing.
Lyell devised an ingenious solution to prevent his friend from losing priority over the topic he had researched for the past 20 years: Darwin and Wallace would announce their ideas together. Darwin had the concept fully formed by 1844. Joseph Dalton Hooker had looked at Darwin’s 1844 essay, and Asa Gray from Harvard had received extracts from it. This demonstrated that Darwin borrowed nothing from Wallace. Darwin sent his Asa Gray letter to Hooker and left the matter in the hands of his friends Lyell and Hooker. He was too distraught over his baby’s recent death to deal with Wallace’s letter himself. Darwin wrote to Hooker on 29 June (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 7: 121–122):
My dear Hooker
I have just read your letter, & see you want papers at once. I am quite prostrated & can do nothing but I send Wallace & my abstract of abstract of letter to Asa Gray, which gives most imperfectly only the means of change & does not touch on reasons for believing species do change. I daresay all is too late. I hardly care about it—
But you are too generous to sacrifice so much time & kindness.—It is most generous, most kind. I send sketch of 1844 solely that you may see by your own handwriting that you did read it.—
I really cannot bear to look at it.—Do not waste much time. It is miserable in me to care at all about priority.—
The table of contents will show what it is. I would make a similar, but shorter & more accurate sketch for Linnean Journal.—I will do anything
God bless you my dear kind friend. I can write no more. I send this by servant to Kew.
Yours
C. Darwin
The Darwin and Wallace papers were combined alphabetically and inserted into a hastily organized meeting of the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858. Extracts of Darwin’s 1844 manuscript, portions of his 1857 letter to Gray, and Wallace’s manuscript were read by the society’s secretary, John Joseph Bennett (Desmond and Moore 1991; Browne 2002). This material was not presented as one paper, with Darwin and Wallace as coauthors. Rather, the items were treated as two separate contributions, each with its own author, and were presented as a unit. About 30 people were present at this meeting, but no great excitement was generated by the papers (Moody 1971). The audience didn’t “get it.” It would take a book to explain this momentous concept. Grief-stricken and ill himself, Darwin did not attend the meeting, but instead remained at Down to deal with his baby son’s funeral.
When word of the Linnean Society meeting and the reading of the joint papers finally reached Wallace, who was in the Malay jungle, by letters to him from Darwin and Hooker, he was very pleased. In the second edition of his autobiography (Wallace 1908, 193), Wallace wrote that “I not only approved, but felt that they had given me more honour and credit than I deserved, by putting my sudden intuition… on the same level with the prolonged labours of Darwin, who had reached the same point twenty years before me.” The joint papers were published in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Zoology) in August 1858 (C. Darwin and Wallace 1858).
Van Wyhe and Rookmaaker (2012) presented a convincing explanation for the timing of Darwin’s receipt of Wallace’s letter—on 18 June 1858—by reviewing shipping and mail schedules, although Davis (2012) disputed their calculations. Porter (2012) further explored why Wallace contacted Darwin in the first place. Berra (2013) examined the Darwin-Wallace correspondence and, using Wallace’s own words, demonstrated Wallace’s unequivocal acceptance of Darwin’s priority with grace and a complete lack of acrimony.
On 2 July 1858, Charles Darwin wrote a touching memorial to his infant son, who had lived less than 19 months (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 7: 521):
“Our poor Baby was born Decr 6th 1856 & died on June 28th 1858, & was therefore above 18 months old. He was small for his age & backward in walking & talking, but intelligent & observant. When crawling naked on the floor he looked very elegant. He had never been ill, & cried less than any of our babies. He was of a remarkably sweet, placid & joyful disposition; but had not high spirits, & did not laugh much. He often made strange grimaces & shivered, when excited; but did so also, for a joke & his little eyes used to glisten, after pouting out or stretching widely his little lips. He used sometimes to move his mouth as if talking loudly, but making no noise, & this he did when very happy. He was particularly fond of standing on one of my hands, & being tossed in [the] air: & then he always smiled, & made a little pleased noise. I had just taught him to kiss me with open mouth, when I told him. He would lie for a long time placidly on my lap looking with a steady & pleased expression at my face; sometimes trying to poke his poor little fingers into my mouth, or making nice little bubbling noises as I moved his chin. I had taught him not to scratch, but when I said “Giddlums never scratches now” he could not always resist a little grab, & then he would look at me with a wicked little smile. He would play for any length of time on the sofa, letting himself fall suddenly, & looking over his shoulder to see that I was ready. He was very affectionate, & had a passion for Parslow; & it was very pretty to see his extreme eagerness, with outstretched arms, to get to him. Our poor little darling’s short life has been placid innocent & joyful. I think & trust he did not suffer so much at last, as he appeared to do; but the last 36 hours were miserable beyond expression. In the sleep of Death he resumed his placid looks.”
In July Charles took Emma and Henrietta to join the family, who were “in exile” at Emma’s sister’s house in Hartfield. The serenity and sea air revived all concerned. They returned to Down House on 13 August, and Charles began to work on his theory (Healey 2001). The close call with Wallace was enough to stimulate Darwin to abandon his “big book” and complete what he called “an abstract” of his idea about species. The rest of the world calls it On the Origin of Species. It was published on 24 November 1859. Modern biology had begun.
The Origin was an immediate success. All 1,250 copies of the first edition were spoken for before the publication date, and 3,000 copies of the second edition were rushed into print and quickly sold (Freeman 1977).
On 30 June 1860, The Origin was the topic of discussion at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Oxford, with John Henslow in the chair as president. The bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, derided the book and addressed Thomas Henry Huxley—who was representing his absent friend Charles Darwin—and asked if it was through Huxley’s grandfather or his grandmother that he descended from an ape. Huxley replied with words to the effect that he would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a bishop who ridiculed science. The meeting dissolved into chaos and this temporarily silenced the bishop. It also earned Huxley the nickname of “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Game on—the battle between evolution and religion had begun! Huxley’s subsequent success in public forums can be traced back to this moment (Meacham 1970, 216–217).
The above description is a truncated caricature of the Oxford meeting. The exact words of the debate were not recorded at the time. In her biography of Darwin, Browne (2002) gave a full account, rich in details. Joseph Dalton Hooker wrote a description of the Oxford meeting just two days later (on 2 July), for Darwin’s benefit (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 8: 270–271). He described the proceedings and how both Huxley and himself had defended their friend’s theory. Browne (1978) examined Hooker’s account in an analysis of the prolific and historic Darwin-Hooker correspondence. There are also several eyewitness accounts that differ in the wording of the exchange between Wilberforce and Huxley. Lucas (1979) attempted to rehabilitate Wilberforce, and Gould (1986) downplayed Huxley’s triumph.
Two months after the debate, Huxley wrote a letter to his Welsh surgeon-naturalist friend, Frederic Daniel Dyster, in which Huxley recounted his words at that extraordinary meeting: “If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitantly affirm my preference for the ape” (Burkhardt et al. 1985–, 8: 271–272).
Years later, the meeting was described in Darwin’s Life and Letters (F. Darwin 1887, 2: 320–323) and in Huxley’s Life and Letters (L. Huxley 1900, 1: 179–189). Wilberforce reportedly said, “If any one were to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?” (L. Huxley 1900, 183). Huxley allegedly turned to Sir Benjamin Brodie, the president of the Royal Society who was seated next to Huxley, and whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands” (L. Huxley 1900, 184). Huxley then stated: “I asserted—and I repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digression and skilled appeals to religious prejudice” (L. Huxley 1900, 185).
More recently, Desmond (1997, 276–281) and Jensen (1988) recounted various versions of this epic confrontation. By comparing all the sources cited above, which more or less tell the same story, one can capture the essence and excitement of the moment, even though the precise wording is elusive. The Oxford debate scenario has become such a cultural icon of the conflict between science and religion that it is even included in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (Bartlett 1968, 725b; Anderson 2002).
As usual, the acerbic Huxley had the last word. When, in 1873, the bishop fell off his horse and died, Huxley wrote to a friend: “Poor dear Sammy! His end has been all too tragic for his life. For once, reality & his brains come into contact & the result was fatal” (Desmond 1997). The Origin went through six editions. and “On” was dropped from the title after the first edition (Costa 2009).
In February 1863, Darwin’s close friend and confidant, geologist Sir Charles Lyell, who had so helpfully brokered the compromise arrangement with Wallace’s paper, published The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. The publisher was Darwin’s very own: John Murray of London. Although Lyell accepted evolution, he hedged about human origins and allowed theistic input. In fact, he required “a direct interposition of the Deity.” This was a great disappointment to Darwin. After all, it was Lyell’s geology that had started Darwin thinking about evolution during the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle. In addition, Lyell’s geology demonstrated the immense age of the earth, which provided enough time for evolution to occur. But Lyell just couldn’t bring himself to go all the way with a naturalistic origin of humans.
Huxley, as expected, was not so bashful. His book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, was published shortly after Lyell’s Antiquity of Man. As a morphologist, Huxley compared the anatomy of humans and other apes (gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees), monkeys, and lemurs. He concluded that there was no reason to doubt that man could have originated, by means of natural selection, from an apelike ancestor. This, of course, was in the days before the extensive fossil record of human ancestors was known to confirm Huxley’s view. Charles was heartened by Huxley’s little “monkey book,” as Darwin called it.