Chapter -2

In what he achieved Darwin is so entirely alone that his place in the history of ideas is next to Aristotle, the great Greek biologist and philosopher who preceded him by over two thousand years.

The biographers of Lincoln are at a loss to explain his greatness through heredity. Darwin belonged to an able family, and his ancestors are singularly prophetic of his career. He was near of kin to Francis Galton, who shares with Weismann the leadership in the study of heredity during the nineteenth century. By a happy combination of all the best traits of the best of his ancestors coupled with the no less happy omission of other traits, Darwin was a far greater man than any of his 41forebears. Kindliness, truthfulness and love of nature were part of his birthright. From his grandfather Erasmus, Charles may have inherited especially his vividness of imagination and his strong tendency to generalize. Countless hypotheses flitted through his mind. “Without speculation there is no good and original observation,” he wrote to Wallace. Still more interesting is the fact that the inheritance of his grandfather’s tendency toward speculation took the direction of evolution, for before the close of the eighteenth century Erasmus Darwin gave the world in poetical form his belief in a complete evolutionary system as well as the first clear exposition of what is now known as the Lamarckian hypothesis. But in the grandson hypotheses were constantly held in check by the determination to put each to the severe test of observation. Darwin speaks of his father, Robert, as the most acute observer he ever saw, and attributes to him his intense desire to understand the reasons of things; from him came caution and conservatism. He says in his “Autobiography”:

I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis (however 42much beloved), and I cannot resist forming one on every subject, as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.

If the “poet is born not made,” the man of science is surely both born and made. Rare as was Darwin’s genius, it was not more rare than the wonderful succession of outward events which shaped his life. It is true that Darwin believed with his cousin Francis Galton that education and environment produce only a small effect upon the mind of any one, but Darwin underestimated the force of his educational advantages just as he underestimated his own powers, and this because he thought only of his book and classroom life at school, at Edinburgh and at Cambridge, and not of his broader life. It was true in 1817, as today, that few teachers teach and few educators educate. It is true that those were the dull days of classical and mathematical drill. Yet look at the roster of Cambridge and see the men it produced. From Darwin’s regular college work he may have gained but little, yet he was all the while enjoying an exceptional training. Step by step he was made a strong man by a mental guidance which is without parallel, by the precepts and example 43of his father, for whom he held the greatest reverence, by his reading of the poetry of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Milton, and the scientific prose of Paley, Herschel and Humboldt, by the subtle scholarly influences of old Cambridge, by the scientific inspiration and advice of Henslow, by the masterful inductive influence of the geologist Lyell, and by the great nature panorama of the voyage of the Beagle.

The college mates of Darwin saw more truly than he himself what the old university was doing for him. Professor Poulton of Oxford believes that the kind of life which so favored Darwin’s mind has largely disappeared in English universities, especially under the sharp system of competitive examinations; yet this is still more truly the atmosphere of old Cambridge today than of any of our American colleges. It would be an interesting subject to debate whether we could nurture such a man; whether a Darwin, were he entered at a Columbia, a Harvard, a Princeton, could develop mentally as Charles Darwin did at Cambridge in 1828. I believe that conditions for the favorable nurture of such a mind are not with us. They are repose, 44time for continuous thought, respect for the man of brains and of individuality and of such peculiar tastes as Darwin displayed in his avidity for collecting beetles, freedom from mental convention, general sympathy for nature, and, above all, ardor in the world of ideas. If the genial mind cannot find the kindred mind it cannot develop. Many American school and college men are laughed out of the finest promptings of their natures. In short, I believe our intellectual environment would be distinctly against a young Darwin today.

Thus event after event in Darwin’s life was singularly propitious. None but a Darwin would have reflected these events as he did, but grand and rare they certainly were.

At the age of nineteen he entered Christ’s of Cambridge, the small college which two hundred years before had sheltered John Milton, the great poet of “Paradise Lost,” the epic of the special creation theory which it was Darwin’s destiny to destroy. His passion for sport, shooting, hunting, cross-country riding, his genial enjoyment of friends of his own age, did not prevent delightful excursions with older men. He was known as “the man who walks with Henslow”; and 45close personal intercourse with this learned and genial botanist (Reverend Wm. C. Henslow) affected him more than any other feature of his college life. After graduation this personal association extended through Henslow to the geologist Sedgwick, who prepared him for the next step in his career. It was Henslow who secured for him his place on the exploring ship Beagle and the voyage round the world (1831–1836), by far the most important experience in his life.

No graduate course in any university can compare for a moment with the glorious vision which passed before young Darwin on the Beagle, but here again fortune smiled upon him, for this vision required the very scientific spirit and point of view which came to him through the reading of the “Principles of Geology” of Lyell, the masterly teacher of the uniformitarian doctrine of Hutton. That nature worked slowly in past as in present time and that the interpretation of the past is through observation of the present gave the note of Darwin’s larger and more original interpretation, because the slow evolution which Lyell piously restricted to geology and the surface of the earth Darwin extended to 46biology and all living beings. If during the voyage Lyell’s arguments convinced Darwin of the permanence of species, Lyell’s way of looking at nature also gave him the means of seeing that species are not permanent. In his own words, he “saw through Lyell’s eyes,” and with the admiration of others always so characteristic of him his tribute to Lyell is without reserve. The second edition of “The Journal” is dedicated:

With grateful pleasure as an acknowledgment that the chief part of whatever scientific merit this Journal and the other works of the author may possess has been derived from studying the well-known and admirable “Principles of Geology.”

The five years of the voyage filled the twenty-second to twenty-seventh years of Darwin’s life, the period now ordinarily given to professional studies. In reading the simple but fascinating “Journal,” which stands quite by itself in literature, we see how Darwin through his own genius and through the methods successively impressed upon him by his father, by Henslow, by Sedgwick and by Lyell was unconsciously preparing his mind for the “Origin of Species” and the “Descent of Man,” the two most influential books of 47science which have ever appeared. From the islands of the Atlantic and the Pacific we follow his delightful comments on animals and plants of all kinds on sea and land, through forests, pampas and steppes, up the dry slopes of the Andes, along the salt lakes and deserts of Chili and of Australia. The dense forests of Brazil, pendant with orchids and gay with butterflies, contrast with those of Terra del Fuego and of Tahiti, and with the deforested Cape de Verde Islands. On these islands, the first he visits, he is enormously impressed by the superiority of Lyell’s method. He visits other islands of all kinds, inhabited and uninhabited, the non-volcanic St. Paul’s rocks, half-submerged volcanic cones, coral reefs and islands of the south Pacific. He observes live glaciers, as well as the contrasting action of active and of dead volcanoes. Along the rivers of Patagonia he unearths great extinct or fossil mammals; in Peru he studies the extinct races of man; the aborigines of Terra del Fuego and of Patagonia make the most profound impression upon his mind. In brief, he sees the great drama of nature in all its lesser scenes and in all its grander acts. He begins the voyage a firm believer in the fixity 48of species, but doubts begin to enter his mind when in the sands of the pampas of South America he perceives that the extinct forms are partly ancestral to the living, and when on the isolated Galapagos Islands he finds the life is not that of a special creation but that detached from the continent of South America six hundred miles distant.

Darwin says:

I owe to the voyage the first real training and education of my mind. That my mind had developed is rendered probable by my father’s first exclamation on my return, “why the shape of his head is quite altered.”