Books: Darwin

CHARLES DARWIN—Henshaw Ward—Bobbs-Merrill ($5).

The Man, in his old age, looked exactly like that preposterous old South African, whose picture, displayed in advertisements or in his book, is now in so many homes—Trader Horn. He had the same shiny bald head, the beard that looks as if it had been doused in foamy soapsuds, the same sad mastiff eyes. His nose was shiny and a little bulbous. His speech had a genial and sarcastic tang for the silly staring people who came to see him, his mind retained a vast curiosity and with it inevitably, a courteous and inclusive scepticism, an uncertainty, an almost universal doubt. “He habitually formed so humble an estimate of the value of his works that he was generally surprised at the interest they created.”

This was long after he had written the Origin of Species. Darwin was born in 1809. He went to Shrewsbury School, then Edinburgh, then Cambridge. He was regarded during this period as an ineffectual student, a boy of vague intents, a sporting blood. He first planned on medicine for a career, then thought of entering the ministry. But something happened that changed his life and the history of the world. A Captain (later Admiral) Fitz-Roy was leaving England to tour the world in a boat called The Beagle. Darwin wanted to go. His father forbade the trip provisionally but arguments were found to convince him, and in December of 1831 The Beagle put to sea from Barn-pool, carrying Darwin and 73 men below her narrow decks.

On his departure Charles Darwin was still convinced of the immutability of species. He had read the fabulous evolutionary theories of Lamarck, based on the “longing” of species to change or improve. These he considered, as did most other repu table naturalists of the period, pure pishtosh. But eight years spent among the strange leaves and unbelievable beetles of South America, among the cannibalistic Fuegian savages (with three of whom, notably one Jemmy Button, he becameintimate), among the corals of the Pacific Islands and the animals and fish that swarmed in the dark oceans, made him less certain. He foresaw that “longing” was not the cause of one species merging into another. But he saw the merging, came to be assured that the world’s fauna were not divided into rigorous tribes but were, rather, in a continuous and universal state of flux; he began to look for the real reasons behind this perpetual revolution.

In England, the first thing he did was to marry his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, the granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood. The next was to publish the journal of his voyage. This made him recognised as a brilliant and important naturalist; he and the wife were invited to distinguished dinner parties which annoyed Charles Darwin. He soon stopped going to them and spent the next four years studying species at Downe, the eight years after that perusing the habits and character of barnacles. After this, he was ready. For four years, 1855-59, he wrote The Origin of Species. Until its publication he had had no allies in his opinions. Afterward he found a few (notably Thomas Huxley, Asa Gray, Alfred Russell Wallace, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Lyell), but most of the civilized world thought the book was a fairy tale and the author a misguided fool.

There is the record of a famous discussion which took place at Oxford in 1860. The Bishop of Oxford grew ironic; he turned on the platform when he was lecturing and said: ” ‘I should like to ask Professor Huxley, who is sitting near me, and is about to tear me into pieces when I have sat down, as to his belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side that the ape ancestry comes in?'” Huxley answered the Bishop’s previous chatter, and then said, ” ‘I asserted—and I repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would be a man of restless and versatile intellect who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance. . . .” The audience began to applaud.

The rest of Darwin’s life was necessarily a downward slope. He had rattled his thunderbolt and was now only interested in tracing its reverberations. He heeded the persuasions of his sympathisers to concede more importance in the evolutionary advance to external conditions. This smoothed his reception among his contemporaries but has made modern investigators suspicious. At last, an old invalid with a ruddy healthy face, who mooned in sorrow because he had accidentally killed a crossbeak, in 1881, on a summer day, Charles Darwin died.

The Significance. It has become common to speak of Darwin not as the originator but merely as one of many who supported the evolutionary hypothesis. This is not true. Author Ward shows the man working with a solitary mania of conviction, writing to his friends that they would think him a madman if they knew what his convictions had come to be. It is true that Alfred Russell Wallace, just before the publication of The Origin, wrote a paper in which he suggested a theory much akin to Darwin’s; but this lacked the enormous research of the latter’s findings. Darwin did not receive it until he had practicallycompleted his work. The most specific quality of Darwin’s genius was not reason but receptiveness. He did not desire to know what was likely to happen, but insisted upon finding out personally precisely what did happen in any given natural phenomenon.

In addition to presenting a splendidly prepared, thoroughly welldocumented history of such a genius, Author Ward has been at pains to put in his background. The short characterizations of the scientists who worked with Darwin, the men who opposed him, even of the Fuegian savages, are done, as the whole book is done, with literary clarity, and an understanding born of knowledge.

The Author is descended from Artemus Ward, first commander-in-chief of the U. S. Revolutionary forces. His literary history he calls, “a bitter narrative 25 years long”; it includes The Evolution for John Doe, The Circus of the Intellect. Besides these achievements, Author Ward has walked 800 miles through the Appalachian Mountains, has given up making speeches, has long wanted to write a prose work which would correspond to the Ancient Mariner in poetry. He was born in 1872 in Norfolk, Neb. In 1926, he married. Now he lives in New Haven.