In connection with this the following memorandum from Darwin’s pocket-book of 1831 is of interest:—“Returned to Shrewsbury at end of August. Refused offer of voyage.”
This refusal was given at the instance of his father, who objected to the scheme as “wild and unsettling, and as disreputable to his character as a clergyman”; but he soon yielded on the advice of his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, and on Darwin’s plea that he “should be deuced clever to spend more than his allowance whilst on board the Beagle.” On this his father answered with a smile, “But they tell me you are very clever.” It is amusing to find that Darwin narrowly escaped being rejected by Fitz-Roy, who, as a disciple of Lavater, doubted whether a man with such a nose as Darwin’s “could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.”
The details of that voyage, the first of the two memorable events in Darwin’s otherwise unadventurous life, are set down in delightful narrative in his Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World, and it will suffice to quote a passage from the autobiography bearing on the significance of the materials collected during his five years’ absence.
During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southwards over the continent; and thirdly, by the South American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos Archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which they differ slightly on each island of the group, none of the islands appearing to be very ancient in a geological sense. It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually became modified; and the subject haunted me. But it was equally evident that “none of the evolutionary theories then current in the scientific world” could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life.... I had always been much struck by such adaptations, and until these could be explained, it seemed to me almost useless to endeavour to prove by indirect evidence that species have been modified.... In October, 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observations of the habits of plants and animals, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.
Shortly after his return he settled in London, prepared his journal and manuscripts of observations for publication, and opened, he says, under date of July, 1837, “my first note-book for facts in relation to the origin of species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for the next twenty years.” He acted for two years as one of the honorary secretaries of the Geological Society, which brought him into close relations with Lyell, and, as his health then allowed him to go into society, he saw a good deal of prominent literary and scientific contemporaries.
In the autumn of 1842, two years and eight months after his marriage with his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who died in October last (1896), Darwin removed from London, the air and social demands of which were alike unsuited to his health, and finally fixed upon a house in the secluded village of Down, near Beckenham, where he spent the rest of his days. Henceforth the life of Darwin is merged in the books in which, from time to time, he gave the result of his long years of patient observation and inquiry, from the epoch-making Origin to the monograph on earthworms. With bad health, apparently due to gouty tendencies aggravated by chronic sea-sickness during his voyage; with nights that never gave unbroken sleep; and days that were never passed without prostrating pain; he might well have felt justified in doing nothing whatever. But he was saved from the accursed monotony of a wealthy invalid’s life by his insatiate delight in searching for that solution of the problem of the mutability of species which time would not fail to bring. In this, he tells us, he forgot his “daily discomfort,” and thus was delivered from morbid introspection.
Darwin worked at his rough notes on the variation of animals and plants under domestication, adding facts collected by “printed enquiries, by conversations with skilful breeders and gardeners, and by extensive reading,” gleams of light coming till he says that he is “almost convinced that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” But he was still groping in the dark as to the application of selection to wild plants and animals, until, as remarked above, the chance reading of Malthus suggested a working theory. A brief sketch of this theory, written out in pencil in 1842, was elaborated in 1844 into an essay of two hundred and thirty pages. The importance attached to this was shown in a letter which Darwin then addressed to his wife, charging her, in the event of his death, to apply £400 to the expense of publication. He also named certain competent men from whom an editor might be chosen, preference being given to Sir Charles (then Mr. Lyell, at whose advice Darwin began to write out his views on a scale three or four times as extensive as that in which they appeared in the Origin of Species.) Their publication in an abstract form was hastened by the receipt, in June, 1858, of a paper, containing “exactly the same theory,” from Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace at Ternate in the Moluccas. This reference to that distinguished explorer, will, before the story of the coincident discovery is further told, fitly introduce a sketch of his career.
Alfred Russel Wallace was born at Usk, in Monmouthshire, on the 8th of January, 1823. He was educated at Hereford Grammar School, and in his fourteenth year began the study of land-surveying and architecture under an elder brother. Quick-witted and observing, he studied a great deal more on his own account in his journeyings over England and Wales, the results of which abide in the wide range of subjects—scientific, political, and social—engaging his active pen from early manhood to the present day.
About 1844 he exchanged the theodolite for the ferule, and became English master in the Collegiate School at Leicester, in which town he found a congenial friend in the person of his future fellow-traveller, Henry Walter Bates. Bates was then employed in his father’s hosiery warehouse, from which he escaped, as often as the long working hours then prevailing allowed, into the fields with his collecting-box. Both schoolmaster and shopman were ardent naturalists, Mr. Wallace, as he tells us, being at that time “chiefly interested in botany,” but he afterward took up his friend’s favourite pursuit of entomology. The writer, when preparing his memoir of Bates (which prefaces a reprint of the first edition of the delightful Naturalist on the Amazons), learned from Mr. Wallace that in early life he did not keep letters from Bates and other correspondents. But, fortunately, among Bates’s papers, there was a bundle of interesting letters from Wallace written between June, 1845, and October, 1847, from Neath, in South Wales, to which town he had removed. In one of these, dated the 9th of November, 1845, Wallace asks Bates if he had read the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and a subsequent letter indicates that Bates had not formed a favourable opinion of the book. A later letter is interesting as conveying an estimate of Darwin. “I first,” Wallace says, “read Darwin’s Journal three or four years back, and have lately re-read it. As the journal of a scientific traveller, it is second only to Humboldt’s Personal Narrative; as a work of general interest, perhaps supporter to it. He is an ardent admirer and most able supporter of Mr. Lyell’s views. His style of writing I very much admire, so free from all labour, affectation, or egotism, yet so full of interest and original thought.”
But, of still greater moment, is a letter in which Wallace tells Bates that he begins “to feel dissatisfied with a mere local collection. I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species.” The two friends had often discussed schemes for going abroad to explore some virgin region, nor could their scanty means prevent the fulfilment of a scheme which has enriched both science and the literature of travel. The choice of country to explore was settled by Wallace’s perusal of a little book entitled A Voyage up the River Amazons, including a Residence in Pará, by W. H. Edwards, an American tourist, published in Murray’s Family Library, in 1847. In the autumn of that year Wallace proposed a joint expedition to the river Amazons for the purpose of exploring the Natural History of its banks; the plan being to make a collection of objects, dispose of the duplicates in London to pay expenses, and gather facts, as Mr. Wallace expressed it in one of his letters, “towards solving the problem of the origin of species.”