1. Darwin and Wallace.
We have to deal with Man as a product of Evolution; with Society as a product of Evolution; and with Moral Phenomena as products of Evolution.—Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, § 193.
Charles Robert Darwin (the second name was rarely used by him) was born at Shrewsbury on the 12th of February, 1809. He came of a long line of Lincolnshire yeomen, whose forbears spelt the name variously, as Darwen, Derwent, and Darwynne, perhaps deriving it from the river of kindred name. His father was a kindly, prosperous doctor, of sufficient scientific reputation to secure his election into the Royal Society, although that coveted honour was then more easily obtained than now. Of the more famous grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the reminder suffices that both his prose and poetry were vehicles of suggestive speculations on the development of life-forms. Dealing with bald facts and dates for clearance of what follows, it may be added that Charles Darwin was educated at the Grammar School of his native town; that he passed thence to Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities; was occupied as volunteer naturalist on board the Beagle from December, 1831, till October, 1836; that he published his epoch-making Origin of Species in November, 1859; and that he was buried by the side of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey on the 26th of April, 1882.
As with not a few other men of “light and leading,” neither school nor university did much for him, nor did his boyhood give indication of future greatness. In his answers to the series of questions addressed to various scientific men in 1873 by his distinguished cousin, Francis Galton, he says: “I consider that all I have learnt of any value has been self-taught,” and he adds that his education fostered no methods of observation or reasoning. Of the Shrewsbury Grammar School, where, after the death of his mother (daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated potter), in his ninth year, he was placed as a boarder till his sixteenth year, he tells us, in the modest and candid Autobiography printed in the Life and Letters, “nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind.” All that he was taught were the classics, and a little ancient geography and history; no mathematics, and no modern languages. Happily, he had inherited a taste for natural history and for collecting, his spoils including not only shells and plants, but also coins and seals. When the fact that he helped his brother in chemical experiments became known to Dr. Butler, the head-master, that desiccated pedagogue publicly rebuked him “for wasting time on such useless subjects.” Then his father, angry at finding that he was doing no good at school, reproved him for caring for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and declared that he would be a disgrace to the family! He sent him to Edinburgh University with his brother to study medicine, but Darwin found the dulness of the lectures intolerable, and the sight of blood sickened him, as it did his father. Although the effect of the “incredibly” dry lectures on geology made him—the future Secretary of the Geological Society!—vow never to read a book on the science, or in any way study it, his interest in biological subjects grew, and its first fruits were shown in a paper read before the Plinian Society at Edinburgh in 1826, in which he reported his discovery that the so-called ova of Flustra, or the sea-mat, were larvæ.
But his father had to accept the fact that Darwin disliked the idea of being a doctor, and fearing that he would degenerate into an idle sporting man, proposed that he should become a clergyman! Darwin says upon this:—
I asked for some time to consider, as from what little I had heard or thought on the subject I had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England, though otherwise I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed, and a few other books on divinity; and, as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted. Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox, it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman. Nor was this intention and my father’s wish ever formally given up, but died a natural death when, on leaving Cambridge, I joined the Beagle as naturalist. If the phrenologists are to be trusted, I was well fitted in one respect to be a clergyman. A few years ago the secretaries of a German psychological society asked me earnestly by letter for a photograph of myself; and some time afterwards I received the proceedings of one of the meetings, in which it seemed that the shape of my head had been the subject of a public discussion, and one of the speakers declared that I had the bump of reverence developed enough for ten priests.
The result was that early in 1828 Darwin went to Cambridge, the three years spent at which were “time wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned.” His passion for shooting and hunting led him into a sporting, card-playing, drinking company, but science was his redemption. No pursuit gave him so much pleasure as collecting beetles, of his zeal in which the following is an example: “One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”
Happily for his future career, and therefore for the interests of science, Darwin became intimate with men like Whewell, Henslow, and Sedgwick, while the reading of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, and of Sir John Herschel’s Introduction to Natural Philosophy, stirred up in him “a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.” The vow to eschew geology was quickly broken when he came under the spell of Sedgwick’s influence, but it was the friendship of Henslow that determined his after career, and prevented him from becoming the “Rev. Charles Darwin.” For on his return from a geological tour in Wales with Sedgwick he found a letter from Henslow awaiting him, the purport of which is in the following extract:—
“I have been asked by Peacock (Lowndean Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge) to recommend him a naturalist as companion to Captain Fitz-Roy, employed by Government to survey the southern extremity of America. I have stated that I consider you to be the best-qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation.”