“With health and vigour, I would not have shewn a white feather, [and] with aid of half-a-dozen really good Naturalists, I believe something might have been done against the miserable and degrading passion of mere species naming.”
Anyone whose researches have been among the species of any much-worked and much-collected zoological group will quite agree that synonymy is, as Darwin found it, heart-breaking work; and although there may be good reasons why the system of appending the describer’s name must be retained, such a protest as that raised in these letters cannot fail to do good in drawing attention to an abuse which is only too common, and which introduces unnecessary difficulty and gratuitous confusion into the study of Nature.
DEATH OF HIS FATHER.
His father, Dr. Darwin, died November 13th, 1848, at the age of eighty-three, when he was so much out of health that he was unable to attend the funeral. In 1851 he lost his little daughter Annie, who died at Malvern, April 23rd. A few days after her death he wrote a most affecting account of her—a composition of great beauty and pathos.
CHAPTER VI.
THE GROWTH OF THE “ORIGIN OF SPECIES” (1837–58).
In dealing with this subject in his “Autobiography,” Darwin tells us of his reflections whilst on the voyage of the Beagle, and here mentions another observation which deeply impressed him in addition to those which he again repeats, on the relation between the living and the dead in the same area and on the productions of the Galapagos Archipelago—viz. “the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southwards over the continent” (of South America). On the theory of separate creation the existence of such representative species received no explanation, although it became perfectly intelligible on the theory that a single species may be modified into distinct, although nearly related, species in the course of its range over a wide geographical area. Here, too, the evidence is in favour of evolution simply, and does not point to any cause of evolution.
He also implies that even at this time he regarded the beautiful adaptations or contrivances of nature by which organisms are fitted to their habits of life—“for instance, a woodpecker or a tree-frog to climb trees, or a seed for dispersal by hooks or plumes”—as the most striking and important phenomena of the organic world, and the one great difficulty in the path of any naturalist who should attempt to supply a motive force for evolution. And he regarded the previous attempts at an explanation—the direct action of surroundings and the will of the organism—as inadequate because they could not account for such adaptations.
Therefore being convinced of evolution, but as yet unprovided with a motive cause which in any way satisfied him, he began in July, 1837, shortly after his return home from the Beagle, to collect all facts which bore upon the modifications which man has induced in the animals and plants which he has subjugated, following, as he tells us, the example of Lyell in geology. He goes on to say in his “Autobiography”:—
“I soon perceived that selection was the key-stone of man’s success in making useful races of animals and plants. But how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some time a mystery to me.”