In October 1838…I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population,” Darwin wrote in the slim autobiography he penned for his family near the end of his life.
He was referring to “An Essay on the Principle of Population” published in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, one of those natural-philosophizing English country parsons Darwin might have turned into had he never met Robert FitzRoy. He began reading it on September 28 and finished on October 3. Hardly amusing, it was a grim little monograph. Malthus had stated that unless checked by some means, human population could double, quadruple, and continue to multiply geometrically until it quickly grew beyond any possibility of feeding itself with a food supply that could only increase arithmetically and never keep up with demand. Continual global famine was the only possible mathematical result.
But Malthus observed that this didn’t happen, that natural “checks”—disease, war, periodic localized famine, sexual abstinence, and early death—kept population numbers roughly at sustainable levels.
This was what Darwin, with all his cogitation, had been waiting to read. Doors opened in his brain.
It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it.
The theory supported his developing ideas about the transmutation of species: that adaptation to a hostile world which kept population numbers steady by attrition would, in time, produce better-adapted, survivalist species. But the implications of such a theory—godless creation, and humans from apes—were so inflammatory that Darwin resisted putting his thoughts in writing until he had the roundest possible argument to support it.
It is almost impossible today to understand the reluctance Darwin felt about publishing his ideas. While scientists, clergymen, and liberal thinkers might debate the literal or metaphorical length of the “days” of creation in the book of Genesis, the public and private acceptance of God’s responsibility for it all, whether it had taken six days or six million years, was absolute. To suggest otherwise, particularly if well-supported by scientific argument, would change the way mankind perceived itself. Whether people wanted to believe it or not, Darwin’s argument threatened to undermine the deepest faith. The idea of expressing it, he wrote to Joseph Hooker, an eminent botanist to whom he sounded his theory, felt “like confessing a murder.”
Instead, he simply made notes. Years went by as he studied and published his findings about barnacles and other natural mysteries, while refining his thoughts about this Malthusian-style natural preservation, or survival, of the fittest individuals of any genus.
Darwin was in no hurry. Although in time his books would become best-sellers and bring him an enviable income, he felt no financial need to publish. He had a good income from his father, and in 1839 he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his favorite uncle Josiah, the Wedgwood pottery tycoon who had proved so influential in his youth, particularly supporting his voyage aboard the Beagle when his father had disapproved. Emma brought with her real wealth, and removed forever any worry Darwin might have felt about money. This enabled him to concentrate solely on his work for its own sake, writing up his conclusions—or not—without regard to any schedule. To pursue this without the demands and distractions of London, the Darwins moved to Downe, a small village in Kent; today just on the southern edge of greater London, but then quite a rural retreat. There, with the modern equivalent of a millionaire’s income and fifteen household servants, Darwin settled down to work.
He almost never went anywhere else again, except to spas for his health. Oddly, after the robustness he showed throughout his five-year voyage around the world, Darwin soon became sickly in the manner of many eminent Victorians: he suffered from chronic nausea, vomiting, headaches, indigestion, dizziness, and insomnia. The reasons remain inconclusive despite much inquiry during and after his lifetime. He may have become infected by some virus or parasite, possibly contracting Chagas’ disease, during his epic travels, particularly in South America, where he ate and drank adventurously in the wild and was bitten by all sorts of insects. It may have been psychosomatic; Darwin was a great worrier about the health of his family, and his own health certainly deteriorated after the death of his ten-year-old daughter Annie in 1851. His own education and experience in medicine made him prone to a vividly imaginative hypochondria. Visits anywhere, and having guests at Downe, only made his health worse, and after his move to the country in 1842, Darwin gradually assumed the life of an invalid. He went for walks in his garden, and occasionally farther afield, but mostly he remained indoors in his cluttered study.
From here he maintained contact with the outside world through an enormous correspondence. His work depended completely on it, and perhaps no one benefited more from the remarkable efficiency of the British postal system when, during the mid-Victorian era, 25,000 postmen handled over 600 million letters a year. Newspapers, books, packages, and money orders moved around the country as fast as steam locomotives could carry them. In London there were up to eleven deliveries a day. The telegraph has been called the Victorian Internet, but its use was restricted to specialized services. It was the postal system, cheap and fantastically efficient, available to everyone, that made by far the bigger impact on people’s lives and their perception of the world.
Darwin employed this incredible engine of communication to obtain data, opinions, and specimens. It acted as an enormous reference library for him. It became as crucial to his work and eventual conclusions as the great voyage that had prompted them.
Holed up in seclusion, Darwin turned away from the world and made a life of rumination and study. As he refined his ideas about species and the laws of nature, he was ineluctably led to a reappraisal of his religious beliefs.
Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point…. But I had gradually come…to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world…from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian….
By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported,—that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become…I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.
I was very unwilling to give up my belief…but I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.
Darwin had at last become “an unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason.”
His eventual atheism may have helped ease his concerns over committing his ideas about species to paper. In June 1842, “I first allowed myself the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in pencil in 35 pages.” Two years later Darwin enlarged this to 230 pages. But still he made no move to publish it—except to write a letter to Emma giving her very specific instructions for its publication in case of his death. But for the indefinite future he was in no hurry.
Years more went by while Darwin continued to make notes, and busy himself with other publications—volumes on the zoology of the Beagle voyage (as editor), new editions of his Journal of Researches, books and monographs on geology, volcanic islands, coral reefs, and barnacles. He went no further in writing out his ideas on the “species question” than in letters to friends, scientists like Lyell, and Joseph Hooker.
However, the question of how species came into existence was, in the late 1850s, gaining considerable attention. A number of naturalists and scientists were beginning to write about it, from all points of view, and Lyell knew enough about Darwin’s work to advise him to go public and make this issue his own. In 1856, at Lyell’s urging, Darwin finally began to write out a definitive examination of his ideas on the transmutation of species.
His treatment of it was so exhaustive that he might have gone on for a decade but for the slim package that came with the mail one day in June 1858. It was from one of Darwin’s far-flung correspondents, Alfred Russel Wallace, posted from Ternate, a remote dot in the spice islands, or Moluccas, on the far side of the world. It was dated February 1858, and had been making its way to Darwin for four months.
Wallace, a thirty-five-year-old English naturalist, was halfway through eight years of wandering through the Malay Archipelago, the vast scattering of large and small islands astride the equator, across 45 degrees of longitude and three time zones, comprising roughly what is now the Republic of Indonesia. He was a very different sort of traveler than Charles Darwin. He came from impoverished circumstances and there was no one underwriting his travels. He had previously spent four years in Brazil, supporting himself by shipping specimens back to England and selling them to museums and collectors through an agent. In 1852 he lost all his own specimens, notes, and equipment when the ship carrying him back to England from Brazil caught fire and sank (the suggestion for A. S. Byatt’s story, and the eventual film, Angels and Insects). In England Wallace published a book, Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro that impressed nobody, sold poorly, and was soon remaindered. Undaunted, he went to Southeast Asia. With the help of Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographic Society he got a free ride aboard a government ship to Singapore, and then made his way to Borneo. From there he began again sending specimens back to England for money. His best-sellers were orangutan hides, but his most sought-after item was the rare and impossibly gorgeous bird of paradise.
In Wallace’s travels through the jungles of Borneo, the volcanic island of Java, the Celebes and Banda Seas, and the fragrant Moluccas, he came across an unimaginable variety of plant and animal species. He grew keenly aware of the geographic and physical differences between them, and also between the natives of Asia, Malaysia, and Polynesia. He observed and plotted across a map of Southeast Asia a line dividing the Indo- and Austro-Malayan regions, on either side of which all the plants, animals, and even humans, belonged to these two distinct regions. Today this is still called the Wallace Line.
Wallace had also read Malthus, and his observations soon got him thinking along lines that history (always written by the victors) has termed Darwinian. He put some of these thoughts in a paper he sent to England that was published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855. Wallace later summarized the conclusions of that paper.
Relying mainly on the well-known facts of geographical distribution and geological succession, I deduced from them the law, or generalisation, that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in Space and Time with a Pre-existing closely allied Species”; and I showed how many peculiarities in the affinities, the succession, and the distribution of the forms of life, were explained by this hypothesis, and that no important facts contradicted it.
Wallace’s paper aroused various reactions. A number of naturalists felt this was pointless theorizing. Darwin read it and wrote a letter to Wallace telling him, “I can plainly see that we have thought much alike and to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions.” Darwin also mentioned that Lyell too had enjoyed his paper. Wallace, whose naturalizing wanderlust had been directly inspired by both Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Darwin’s Journal of Researches, was pleased and encouraged. This was praise from the top. He continued his correspondence with Darwin and sent him a Javanese chicken and other skins.
In February 1858, Wallace was struck by malaria. Shivering and sweating with fever, he lay in his bed in a palm-thatched house in Ternate. Around him sat boxes of pinned butterflies, the skins and bones of birds and animals, his books, his glasses, a gun, and his sweat-stained clothing. The Malthusian question, “Why do some live and some die?” spun around and around in his fevered mind. How do some escape the natural checks on populations—and why? Hungry, lightheaded, but with a growing lucidity, the threads of all his thinking came together in an elegant conclusion. He rose from his soaked bed, staggered to his table and began writing.
The answer was clearly that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior remain—that is, the fittest would survive.
Wallace worked on his thesis for three days, making it as clear and simple as he could. Finally he had a 4000-word essay that excited him. “The more I thought it over,” he wrote much later, “the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species.”
He signed and dated it and sent it to Darwin, together with a letter asking if he would read it and, if he thought it worthwhile, forward it to Lyell, and perhaps help him arrange for its publication.
Four months later, the pages Wallace wrote in his hut trembled in Darwin’s hands. Darwin was staggered. He could hardly believe what he read. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” he wrote in dismay to a friend. “If Wallace had my ms. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract. Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.”
Darwin was devastated. The work that had preoccupied him for twenty years, the theory he had thought his own, which he had delayed making public for so long, had now been neatly summed up by a nobody on the other side of the world. He didn’t know what to do. He felt paralyzed, irresolute. So he sent Wallace’s essay, as requested, to Lyell.
Lyell immediately wrote back insisting that Darwin get something of his own, a very short summary, into print immediately. Darwin balked. “I shd be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so,” he wrote back. “But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably.” He was also suddenly distracted by the illness of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Henrietta, and his and Emma’s tenth child, Charles, nineteen months old, both of whom suddenly came down with raging fevers. Darwin left his dilemma in Lyell’s hands.
There were none better. After thirty years in the scientific limelight, defending his own revolutionary views and commanding respect, Lyell knew everything there was to know about intellectual turf and reputation. He consulted Joseph Hooker, who was also familiar with Darwin’s work, and the two of them, eager to protect their friend’s interests, came up with a seemingly fair solution. They would have extracts from Darwin’s notes, and dated letters describing his ideas, read out together with Wallace’s essay at the next meeting of the Linnean Society. This was the pre-eminent naturalist’s society—Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker were members—the sort of august old boys club where Wallace ordinarily couldn’t hope to have his work taken notice of. By this tactic, Darwin’s years of study on the subject could be established, while Wallace would be offered the sort of respect and exposure he had never experienced.
The readings took place on July 1, 1858. Darwin’s baby boy had just died and he did not attend. Nor, of course, did Wallace, then in New Guinea and entirely unaware of the whole business. The items were read. Darwin’s claim to his ideas was established, along with Wallace’s, and the world went about its business.
Darwin now threw aside his usual parsonly deliberation and began swiftly to do what he realized he should have done many years earlier. He began writing for publication.
The world did not suddenly shift on its axis as Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were read at the Linnean Society. No outrage or damnation was voiced. Very little attention was paid to them. History has, in retrospect, paid rapt attention to these documents and the moment of their portentous appearance, but on that July day they were simply scientific papers routinely read into the record in droning voices to a sleepy audience. Darwin was not yet Darwin, so to speak—merely a respected, reclusive naturalist noted for his works on travel, zoology, and barnacles; and Wallace was an obscure collector. What was to come of it all was still to come.
In fact, creationism, the other side of the species coin, had never been so widely and popularly discussed. In response to the challenges raised by cold science—mainly by the Lyellian view of geology and the worldwide proliferation of fossil finds, which suggested with increasing weight the enormous age of the earth and a creation that was ongoing—a slew of books appeared in the 1850s offering explanations and proofs of divine creation. Most notable and most radical among these was Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse, published in 1857.
Gosse was a naturalist of growing renown. He had already published countless articles and more than twenty books (recently at the rate of four per year) on natural history, most of them about the seashore and coastal sea creatures. His self-illustrated book, A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853) was a smash best-seller.
Gosse’s Rambles was responsible for sending tens of thousands of Victorians to the seaside and started a craze for collecting shells and small sea creatures. As the pursuit and study of natural history developed into a nationwide obsession, Gosse’s influence grew so great that it was reported that England had been “Gosse-ified.” He was the David Attenborough of his time. His son Edmund Gosse, in his biography of his father, wrote of an incident on the rocky coast near Torbay, Devon, when Gosse, out fossicking, came upon a group of ladies who believed they had found a rare species of sea creature. Curious, but without identifying himself, Gosse asked if he might see their prize. When they showed it to him, he politely disagreed and told them it was something else, much more common. The ladies were indignant and informed him he was mistaken. “Gosse is our authority,” they told him witheringly.
Gosse was the inventor of the aquarium. As a boy he had tried keeping sea anemones in a jug of seawater, but it had become cloudy and malodorous and the anemones died. He had since spent years gazing into coastal rock pools, sometimes by night with a candle or lantern. He learned that “animals absorb oxygen, and exhale or throw off carbonic acid gas; plants, on the contrary, absorb carbonic acid, and throw off oxygen.” He made experiments to see how long he could keep captive sea creatures and plants together in artificial, glass-walled tanks. In 1854, he published The Aquarium (a term Gosse coined). It contained beautiful, expensively reproduced illustrations and plans for making “a marine aquarium for the Parlour or Conservatory.” It was also about Gosse’s further rambles along the seashore. It was rapturously reviewed.
Those who have had the gratification of spirit-companionship with Mr Gosse in his former rambles, will rejoice to find themselves again by his side…. He has the art of throwing the “purple light” of life over the marble form of science…this volume ought to be upon the table of every intelligent sea-side visitor. (Globe, June 22, 1854)
He had become Jacques Cousteau as well. The book was another best-seller, and very financially rewarding for Gosse. No author could ask for more.
Reviewers did not remark on the religious passages in The Aquarium. Gosse framed many of his natural observations as proof of the existence of God, of his “wondrous contrivance in planning” and the “stable order of the universe.” Such sentiments were shared by the vast majority of Gosse’s readers and reviewers and were a natural complement of the fulsome prose style of the Victorian era.
Darwin and Gosse were well aware of each other. They keenly admired each other’s work and corresponded frequently. Both were members of the Royal Society. They finally met at the Linnean Society in March 1855, where Gosse was reading a paper on sea anemones. Darwin was so enamored of Gosse’s experiments with aquariums that he toyed with the idea of making one for himself.
Gosse knew little or nothing of Darwin’s preoccupation with species, but he too had read Wallace’s deduction in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in Space and Time with a Pre-existing closely allied Species.” He had read Lyell, of course, as had most naturalists, amateur and professional, but the breadth and depth of Gosse’s reading in geology was uncommon. He had explored the subject with a highly personal interest, and he had become disturbed by its inferential trend toward a belief in the natural, if not yet precisely described and identified, evolution of species.
Gosse and FitzRoy would have known each other as well, and met a number of times, for the same reasons: they were fellows of the same societies, frequenters of the same small scientific circles that included Lyell and Darwin—and in these, because of his reclusiveness, it was Darwin who was the odd man out. Until Gosse moved permanently to Devon in 1857, both he and FitzRoy lived in London and were highly active in intellectual affairs, regularly attending meetings, readings, gatherings at their societies and clubs, mixing and exchanging ideas with their peers. Both read widely and exhaustively on scientific matters, particularly in geology and the marine sciences. FitzRoy would have been well aware of Gosse’s rising star, but his own had suffered a twenty-year-long downward trajectory, and when they met there was no reason for anyone to remark or remember such occasions.
The two men shared something else. Gosse was a fanatic, fundamentalist Christian. To him, God and nature were inseparable: “I cannot look at the Bible with one eye, and at Nature with the other. I must take them together,” he wrote. He was a lay preacher to fellow fundamentalists who called themselves the Plymouth Brethren. He lived his life in the everyday expectation of the imminent second coming of Christ.
As marriage to Mary O’Brien had deepened FitzRoy’s faith, Gosse was equally affected by the more fervent beliefs of his wife. Emily Gosse was a widely read writer of religious tracts. They had first met at an assembly of the Brethren, and their son, Edmund Gosse, wrote about the rigour of their religious faith in his book Father and Son.
She [Emily] had formed a definite conception of the absolute, unmodified and historical veracity, in its direct and obvious sense, of every statement contained within the covers of the Bible. For her, and for my Father, nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in any part of the Scripture…. When they read [in the Book of Revelation] of seals broken and vials poured forth, of the star which was called Wormwood that fell from Heaven, and of men whose hair was as the hair of women and their teeth as the teeth of lions, they did not admit for a moment that these vivid mental pictures were of a poetic character, but they regarded them as positive statements, in guarded language, describing events which were to happen.
Gosse and his wife shared an intensely tender, loving, and physically intimate relationship. When Edmund was an infant and Gosse was off rambling at the seaside for his work while Emily stayed at home with the baby, they exchanged daily letters that were full of their longing for each other. “O my sweet beloved one, my helper, my comforter, my joy, my love,” Gosse wrote Emily, “I wish I could just now throw my arms round your neck and kiss your dear mouth.” And he signed his letters, “Ever your own faithful, affectionate, devoted, longing lover and husband, P.H. Gosse.”
And Emily wrote back:
My love, How lonely you must feel tonight…I am always thinking of you…I long for tomorrow when I shall have a letter from you. Do not forget me for a moment and let me hear your assurance that you love me as I love you. I do not like to go to bed. I shall be so lonely. I miss having you to pray with me and to kiss me.
Perhaps because they married late (for the times)—Philip at age thirty-eight, and Emily, who was three and a half years older than he was, at forty-two—they were amazed and profoundly grateful for what they had found in each other. This only deepened when Emily gave birth at forty-three to their son. They couldn’t believe what they had been given so late in life. “How very happy we are!” Emily wrote and said often. “Surely this cannot last!”
And it did not. In 1856, when they had been married eight years, Emily found a hard lump in her breast. After ten months of excruciating treatment, she was dead.
Philip’s grief was fathomless. But he was not inconsolable: he knew for certain where Emily had gone. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” He knew too that one day he would join Emily again, and as if to obliterate any doubt about this, he turned toward God as never before.
He wrote a slim book, A Memorial of the Last Days on Earth of Emily Gosse. Emily’s religious writing had reached a wide audience, so there was more than catharsis to this endeavor.
Then he began writing something else. Faith was under assault by the findings of geology, and, with a sense of divine mission, Gosse set out to use his knowledge of natural history, his deep erudition, and his reputation to crush such heresy for good. The resulting book was titled Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. (Omphalos is the Greek word for navel.)
It could have been written by FitzRoy. Gosse’s arguments and “proofs” were strikingly like those juggling geology and Holy Writ in the last two chapters of FitzRoy’s Beagle narrative. Both used an identical technique: Scientific facts, displaying an impressive depth of knowledge, were marshaled and explained with the same appealing common-or-garden logic that had the Flood compared to a coat of varnish.
Gosse posed the eternal riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The embryo or the cow? Neither, he answered. All of organic nature consists of an endless circular process: Chicken to egg to chicken, seed to tree to seed, rain to ocean to cloud to rain, baby to man to baby.
This, then, is the order of all organic nature. When once we are in any portion of the course, we find oursleves running in a circular groove, as endless as the course of a blind horse in a mill. It is evident that there is no one point in the history of any single creature, which is a legitimate beginning of existence….
Creation, however, solves the dilemma…. Creation, the sovereign fiat of Almighty Power, gives us the commencing point, which we in vain seek in nature. But what is creation? It is the sudden bursting into a circle…. The life history of every organism commenced at some point or other of its circular course.
But once in the circle of life, a nanosecond after creation, the very nature of the first egg showed an apparent history of its cyclical self stretching into the past.
Its whole structure displays a series of developments…former conditions…. But what former conditions?…[Its] history was a perfect blank till the moment of creation. The past conditions or stages of existence can…be…inferred by legitimate deduction from the present…; they are identically the same in every respect, except in this one, that they were unreal.
Those past “unreal” stages of the development of an organism that could be seen immediately after the instant of its creation, Gosse called prochronic. They appeared real, they could be readily inferred from an examination of the present nature of the organism. See this cow? Obviously it must once have been a calf. We “irresistibly” look backward in our belief of the existence of these prochronic stages, but they are illusory. They didn’t exist before the moment of creation, the “sovereign act of power, an irruption into the circle.”
Man, too, the very first one, came equipped with seemingly irresistible proof of existence stretching backward into uncountable time.
What means this curious depression in the centre of the abdomen, and the corrugated knob which occupies the cavity? This is the NAVEL. The corrugation is the cicatrice left where once was attached the umbilical cord…. And thus the life of the individual Man before us passes, by a necessary retrogression, back to the life of another individual, from whose substance his own substance was formed.
Both Gosse and FitzRoy believed that man was created fully grown: “That man could have been first created in an infant, appears to my apprehension impossible,” FitzRoy had written, “because—if an infant—who nursed, who fed, who protected him till able to subsist alone?”
Gosse agreed with this. When God created an organism, it hit the ground running, with an apparent history of its development, in the middle of an endless, ongoing cycle following the laws of nature and its own structure. Gosse’s Adam was a man of “between 25 and 35 years” of age.
So it was with the fish and the fowl, and all the flora and fauna of the earth—the first towering redwood tree was created with its rings that gave an appearance of 500 years of history—so it was with the earth itself, the geological examination of which had revealed, like the rings inside a tree, the fossils embedded in its crust. In the world according to Gosse, all of nature was created with such “retrospective phenomena.”
There was a freaky logic that came with all this. By the principles of Gosse’s retrospective widget, the law of prochronism, the world might have popped into existence as a going concern at any recent moment, without anyone even suspecting it.
Let us suppose that this present year 1857 had been the particular epoch in the projected life-history of the world, which the Creator selected as the era of its actual beginning. At his fiat it appears; but in what condition? Its actual condition at this moment: whatever is now existent would appear, precisely as it does appear. There would be cities filled with swarms of men; there would be houses half-built; castles fallen into ruins; pictures on artists’ easels just sketched in; wardrobes filled with half-worn garments; ships sailing over the sea; marks of birds’ footsteps in the mud; skeletons whitening the desert sands; human bodies in every stage of decay in the burial grounds…. These phenomena…are inseparable from the condition of the world at the selected moment of irruption into its history; because they constitute its condition; they make it what it is.
Creation might have happened five minutes ago, and all memory would be prochronic phenomena. Creation might really be a palimpsest upon a fake creation.
Gosse’s theory appeared, for those who bought it, to reconcile the great paradox of the age: geology and the mosaic account of creation. But it made geology moot. If it was an illusion, what was the point? Gosse offered hope.
The acceptance of the principles [of prochronism]…would not, in the least degree, affect the study of scientific geology. The character and order of the strata; their disruptions and displacements and injections; the successive floras and faunas; and all the other phenomena, would be facts still. They would still be, as now, legitimate subjects of examination and inquiry. I do not know that a single conclusion, now accepted, would need to be given up, except that of actual chronology. And even in respect of this, it would be rather a modification than a relinquishment of what is at present held; we might still speak of the inconceivably long duration of the processes in question, provided we understand ideal instead of actual time; that the duration was projected in the mind of God, and not really existent.
In other words, all of scientific investigation was pointless, but still fun.
When it appeared in the fall of 1857, Omphalos, a new book from a best-selling author, was widely noticed and reviewed. The word most consistently applied to it was “ingenious”: “The argument is startling. But it is so ingeniously framed…. This very ingenious analogy…. We cannot deny the merit of ingenuity.” “His reasonings are very ingenious.” “Mr. Gosse’s argument appears to us both ingenious and important.”
FitzRoy must have been one of its most receptive readers. Here was an esteemed author grounded, as he had been, in scientific learning, using that knowledge to reconcile, as he had tried to do, science with scripture.
Gosse wrote for FitzRoy.
But the overwhelming response to his ingenuity was scathing. Reviewers found the logic in the book “unanswerable,” untestable, the theory “too monstrous for belief.” The Natural History Review pronounced it full of “idle speculations, fit only to please a philosopher in his hours of relaxation, but hardly worthy of the serious attention of any earnest man, whether scientific or not.”
Even believers were unhappy with Gosse’s argument. In the Review’s April issue, a man with the Dickensian name of J. Beete Jukes, denounced his flippant handling of the “awe-inspiring mystery” of creation.
To a man of a really serious and religious turn of mind this treatment is far more repulsive than that even of…the Lamarckian School. Both classes of reasons appeal to our ignorance rather than our knowledge, and take upon themselves to make positive assertions upon things about which no man knows, perhaps no man ever shall or can know, anything whatever; but the soi-disant religious school to which Mr Gosse belongs has the additional bad taste to speak as if they, forsooth, were on the most intimate terms with the Creator.
Mr. Jukes was deploring the same presumption FitzRoy brought to his own scientifically buttressed logic and arguments about the Flood; the presumption of a man to explain God and his designs.
Gosse was dismayed.
In the course of that dismal winter [wrote his son Edmund], as the post began to bring in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and scornful, my Father looked in vain for the approval of the churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific societies, and in vain for the gratitude of those “thousands of thinking persons,” which he had rashly assured himself of receiving. As his reconciliation of Scripture statements and geological deductions was welcomed nowhere…a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups…. He had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant favourite of the press, and now…he could not recover from the amazement at having offended everybody by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of universal reconciliation.
He was most stung by the reaction of his old friend, the Reverend Charles Kingsley, author of Westward Ho! and The Water Babies, who had befriended and championed Gosse and his work before his books were well-known. Omphalos had “staggered and puzzled me,” he wrote him. Kingsley also believed absolutely in divine creation, but Gosse’s book was the first to make him actually doubt it.
Your book tends to prove this—that if we accept the fact of absolute Creation, God becomes a Deus quidam deceptor…. I cannot believe this of a God of truth, of Him who is Light and no darkness at all, of Him who formed the intellectual man after His own image, that he might understand and glory in His Father’s works…. I cannot give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years’ study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind….
I would not for a thousand pounds put your book into my children’s hands.
The trouble for Kingsley, and many others, was that Gosse had almost managed to convince him that only by adopting his law of prochronics could the biblical story of creation and geology be reconciled. And he found Gosse’s theory so preposterous and silly that it threatened to remove for him the last barrier to disbelief. It left him gaping into an abyss.
Hardly anyone bought Omphalos. Most copies of the book were sold for waste paper.
For those whose faith in the literal word was buckling under the weight of scientific argument, or preposterous rationale, the last barrier came down on November 24, 1859, when Darwin finally published his book on the transmutation of species. It was not the immensely long work he had envisioned and begun a few years earlier at Lyell’s urging, but, inspired by the clarity of Wallace’s brief essay, a shorter, simpler volume (though still 502 pages long). It was titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
The first edition of 1,250 copies, priced at fourteen shillings, sold out on the day of publication.