CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS.
From the environment let us turn to the individual; from the world in
which the man moved to the man who moved in it, and was in time destined
to move it.
Who was he, and whence did he derive his exceptional energy and
intellectual panoply?
Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather, the first of the line in whom the
distinctive Darwinian strain of intellect overtly displayed itself, was
the son of one Robert Darwin, a gentleman of Nottinghamshire, 'a person
of curiosity,' with 'a taste for literature and science;' so that for
four generations at least, in the paternal line, the peculiar talents of
the Darwin family had been highly cultivated in either direction. Robert
Darwin was an early member of the Spalding Club, a friend of Stukeley
the antiquary, and an embryo geologist, after the fantastic,
half-superstitious fashion of his own time. Of his four sons, both
Robert, the eldest, and Erasmus, the youngest, were authors and
botanists. Erasmus himself was a Cambridge man, and his natural bent of
mind and energy led him irresistibly on to the study of medicine. Taking
his medical degree at his own university, and afterwards preparing for
practice by attending Hunter's lectures in London, besides going
through the regular medical course at Edinburgh, the young doctor
finally settled down as a physician at Nottingham, whence shortly
afterward he removed to Lichfield, then the centre of a famous literary
coterie. So large a part of Charles Darwin's remarkable idiosyncrasy was
derived by heredity from his paternal grandfather, that it may be worth
while to dwell a little here in passing on the character and career of
this brilliant precursor of the great evolutionist. Both in the physical
and in the spiritual sense, Erasmus Darwin was one among the truest and
most genuine ancestors of his grandson Charles.
A powerful, robust, athletic man, in florid health and of temperate
habits, yet with the full-blooded tendency of the eighteenth century
vividly displayed in his ample face and broad features, Erasmus Darwin
bubbled over with irrepressible vivacity, the outward and visible sign
of that overflowing energy which forms everywhere one of the most marked
determining conditions of high genius. Strong in body and strong in
mind, a teetotaler before teetotalism, an abolitionist before the
anti-slavery movement, he had a great contempt for weaknesses and
prejudices of every sort, and he rose far superior to the age in which
he lived in breadth of view and freedom from preconceptions. The
eighteenth century considered him, in its cautious, cut-and-dried
fashion, a man of singular talent but of remarkably eccentric and unsafe
opinions. Unfortunately for his lasting fame, Dr. Darwin was much given
to writing poetry; and this poetry, though as ingenious as everything
else he did, had a certain false gallop of verse about it which has
doomed it to become since Canning's parody a sort of warning beacon
against the worst faults of the post-Augustan decadence in the
ten-syllabled metre. Nobody now reads the 'Botanic Garden' except either
to laugh at its exquisite extravagances, or to wonder at the queer
tinsel glitter of its occasional clever rhetorical rhapsodies.
But in his alternative character of philosophic biologist, rejected by
the age which swallowed his poetry all applausive, Erasmus Darwin is
well worthy of the highest and deepest respect, as a prime founder and
early prophet of the evolutionary system. His 'Zoonomia,' 'which, though
ingenious, is built upon the most absurd hypothesis'--as men still said
only thirty years ago--contains in the germ the whole theory of organic
development as understood up to the very moment of the publication of
the 'Origin of Species.' In it Dr. Darwin calls attention to 'the great
changes introduced into various animals by artificial or accidental
cultivation,' a subject afterwards fully elucidated by his greater
grandson in his work on 'The Variation of Animals and Plants under
Domestication.' He specially notes 'the immense changes of shape and
colour' produced by man in rabbits and pigeons, the very species on
which Charles Darwin subsequently made some of his most remarkable and
interesting observations. More than any previous writer, Erasmus Darwin,
with 'prophetic sagacity,' insisted strongly on the essential unity of
parent and offspring--a truth which lies at the very base of all modern
philosophical biology. 'Owing to the imperfection of language,' wrote
the Lichfield doctor nearly a hundred years ago, 'the offspring is
termed a new animal, but is in truth a branch or elongation of the
parent, since a part of the embryon-animal is or was a part of the
parent, and therefore may retain some of the habits of the parent
system.' He laid peculiar stress upon the hereditary nature of some
acquired properties, such as the muscles of dancers or jugglers, and the
diseases incidental to special occupations. Nay, he even anticipated his
great descendant in pointing out that varieties are often produced at
first as mere 'sports' or accidental variations, as in the case of
six-fingered men, five-clawed fowls, or extra-toed cats, and are
afterwards handed down by heredity to succeeding generations. Charles
Darwin would have added that if these new stray peculiarities happened
to prove advantageous to the species they would be naturally favoured in
the struggle for existence, while if they proved disadvantageous, or
even neutral, they would die out at once or be bred out in the course of
a few crosses. That last truth of natural selection was the only
cardinal one in the evolutionary system on which Erasmus Darwin did not
actually forestall his more famous and greater namesake. For its full
perception, the discovery of Malthus had to be collated with the
speculations of Buffon.
'When we revolve in our minds,' says the eighteenth century prophet of
evolution, 'the great similarity of structure which obtains in all the
warm-blooded animals, as well quadrupeds, birds, and amphibious animals,
as in mankind; from the mouse and bat to the elephant and whale; one is
led to conclude that they have alike been produced from a similar living
filament. In some this filament in its advance to maturity has acquired
hands and fingers with a fine sense of touch, as in mankind. In others
it has acquired claws or talons, as in tigers and eagles. In others,
toes with an intervening web or membrane, as in seals and geese. In
others it has acquired cloven hoofs, as in cows and swine; and whole
hoofs in others, as in the horse: while in the bird kind this original
living filament has put forth wings instead of arms or legs, and
feathers instead of hair.' This is a very crude form of evolutionism
indeed, but it is leading up by gradual stages to the finished and
all-sided philosophy of physical life, which at last definitely
formulates itself through the mouth of Charles Darwin. We shall see
hereafter wherein Erasmus Darwin's conception of development chiefly
failed--in attributing evolution for the most part to the exertions and
endeavours of the animal itself, rather than to inevitable survival of
the fittest among innumerable spontaneous variations--but we must at
least conclude our glimpse of his pregnant and suggestive work by
quoting its great fundamental _aperçu_:--'As the earth and ocean were
probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of
animals, and many families of these animals long before other families
of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living
filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?'
A few lines from the 'Temple of Nature,' one of Erasmus Darwin's poetic
rhapsodies, containing his fully matured views on the origin of living
creatures, may be worth reproduction in further elucidation of his
philosophical position:--
'Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born, and nursed in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass.
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.'
Have we not here the very beginnings of Charles Darwin? Do we not see,
in these profound and fundamental suggestions, not merely hints as to
the evolution of evolution, but also as to the evolution of the
evolutionist?
On the other hand, though Erasmus Darwin defined a fool to his friend
Edgeworth as 'a man who never tried an experiment in his life,' he was
wanting himself in the rigorous and patient inductive habit which so
strikingly distinguished his grandson Charles. That trait, as we shall
presently see, the biological chief of the nineteenth century derived in
all probability from another root of his genealogical tree. Erasmus
Darwin gave us brilliant suggestions rather than cumulative proof: he
apologised in his 'Zoonomia' for 'many conjectures not supported by
accurate investigation or conclusive experiments,' Such an apology would
have been simply impossible to the painstaking spirit of his grandson
Charles.
Erasmus Darwin was twice married. His first wife was Mary, daughter of
Mr. Charles Howard, of Lichfield, and it was her son, Robert Waring
Darwin, who became the father of our hero, Charles. It is fashionable to
say, in this and sundry other like cases, that the mental energy skips a
generation. People have said so in the case of that intermediate
Mendelssohn who was son of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher, and
father of Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn, the composer--that mere link in a
marvellous chain who was wont to observe of himself in the decline of
life, that in his youth he was called the son of the great Mendelssohn,
and in his old age the father of the great Mendelssohn. As a matter of
fact, one may fairly doubt whether such a case of actual skipping is
ever possible in the nature of things. In the particular instance of
Robert Waring Darwin at least we may be pretty sure that the distinctive
Darwinian strain of genius lay merely latent rather than dormant: that
it did not display itself to the world at large, but that it persisted
silently as powerful as ever within the remote recesses of the thinking
organism. Not every man brings out before men all that is within him.
Robert Waring Darwin was a physician at Shrewsbury; and he attained at
least sufficient scientific eminence in his own time to become a Fellow
of the Royal Society, in days when that honour was certainly not readily
conferred upon country doctors of modest reputation. Charles Darwin says
of him plainly, 'He was incomparably the most acute observer whom I ever
knew.' It may well have been that Robert Darwin lived and died, as his
famous son lived for fifty years of his great life, in comparative
silence and learned retirement; for we must never forget that if Charles
Darwin had only completed the first half century of his laborious
existence, he would have been remembered merely as the author of an
entertaining work on the voyage of the 'Beagle,' a plausible theory of
coral islands, and a learned monograph on the fossil barnacles. During
all those years, in fact, he had really done little else than collect
material for the work of his lifetime. If we judge men by outward
performance only, we may often be greatly mistaken in our estimates:
potentiality is wider than actuality; what a man does is never a certain
or extreme criterion of what he can do.
The Darwins, indeed, were all a mighty folk, of varied powers and varied
attainments. Erasmus's brother, Robert, was the author of a work on
botany, which long enjoyed a respectable repute. Of his sons, one, Sir
Francis Darwin, was noted as a keen observer of animals; a second,
Charles, who died at twenty-one, was already the author of a very
valuable medical essay; while the third, Robert, was the Shrewsbury
F.R.S., the father of our great evolutionary thinker. And among Charles
Darwin's own cousins, one is Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, the philologist; a
second was the late Sir Henry Holland; and a third is Mr. Francis
Galton, the author of that essentially Darwinian book, 'Hereditary
Genius.'
Robert Waring Darwin took to himself a wife from another very great and
eminent family. He married Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah
Wedgwood, the famous potter; and from these two silent representatives
of powerful stocks, Charles Robert Darwin, the father of modern
evolutionary biology, was born at Shrewsbury, on February the 12th,
1809. That Wedgwood connection, again, is no mere casual or unimportant
incident in the previous life-history of the Darwinian originality; it
throws a separate clear light of its own upon the peculiar and
admirably compounded idiosyncrasy of Charles Darwin.
A man, indeed, owes on the average quite as much to his mother's as to
his father's family. It is a mere unscientific old-world prejudice which
makes us for the most part count ancestry in the direct ascending male
line alone, to the complete neglect of the equally important maternal
pedigree. Prom the biological point of view, at least, every individual
is a highly complex compound of hereditary elements, a resultant of
numerous converging forces, a meeting place of two great streams of
inheritance, each of which is itself similarly made up by the like
confluence of innumerable distinct prior tributaries. Between these two
it is almost impossible for us accurately to distribute any given
individuality. How much Charles Darwin owed to the Darwins, and how much
he owed in turn to the Wedgwoods, no man is yet psychologist enough or
physiologist enough to say. But that he owed a great deal to either
strong and vigorous strain we may even now quite safely take for
granted.
The Wedgwood family were 'throwers' by handicraft, superior artisans
long settled at Burslem, in the Staffordshire potteries. Josiah, the
youngest of thirteen children, lamed by illness in early life, was
turned by this happy accident from his primitive task as a 'thrower' to
the more artistic and original work of producing ornamental coloured
earthenware. Skilful and indefatigable, of indomitable energy and with
great powers of forcing his way in life against all obstacles, young
Wedgwood rose rapidly by his own unaided exertions to be a master
potter, and a manufacturer of the famous unglazed black porcelain.
Those were the darkest days of industrial art and decorative handicraft
in modern England. Josiah Wedgwood, by his marked originality and force
of character, succeeded in turning the current of national taste, and
creating among us a new and distinctly higher type of artistic
workmanship. His activity, however, was not confined to his art alone,
but found itself a hundred other different outlets in the most varied
directions. When his potteries needed enlargement to meet the increased
demand, he founded for the hands employed upon his works the model
industrial village of Etruria. When Brindley began cutting artificial
waterways across the broad face of central England, it was in the great
potter that he found his chief ally in promoting the construction of the
Grand Trunk Canal. Wedgwood, indeed, was a builder of schools and a
maker of roads; a chemist and an artist; a friend of Watt and an
employer of Flaxman. In short, like Erasmus Darwin, he possessed that
prime essential in the character of genius, an immense underlying stock
of energy. And with it there went its best concomitant, the 'infinite
capacity for taking pains.' Is it not probable that in their joint
descendant, the brilliant but discursive and hazardous genius of Erasmus
Darwin was balanced and regulated by soberer qualities inherited
directly from the profound industry of the painstaking potter? When
later on we find Charles Darwin spending hours in noting the successive
movements of the tendrils in a plant, or watching for long years the
habits and manners of earthworms in flower-pots, may we not reasonably
conjecture that he derived no little share of his extraordinary
patience, carefulness, and minuteness of handicraft from his mother's
father, Josiah Wedgwood?
Such, then, were the two main component elements, paternal and maternal,
from which the striking personality of Charles Darwin was no doubt for
the most part ultimately built up.