Part 20

Op. cit., vol. i. p. 44.

Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory, § 118.

Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin., vol. xxiii. (1862).

Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin., vol. v. p. 512 (Dec. 18, 1865).

Trans. Geol. Soc. Glasgow, vol. iii. (February, 1868), pp. 1, 16.

'The Age of the Earth,' being the Annual Address to the Victoria Institute, June 2, 1897. Phil. Mag., January, 1899, p. 66.

Recent Advances in Physical Science, p. 174.

Presidential Address. Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., 1869.

Trans. Geol. Soc. Glasgow, vol. iii. (March 26, 1868), p. 189. Sir W. Thomson acknowledged my adhesion in his reply to Huxley's criticism. Op. cit., p. 221.

Darwin's Life and Letters, vol. iii. pp. 115, 146.

Rep. Brit. Assoc., 1886, p. 517.

Nature, vol. li. p. 585, April 18, 1895.

Rep. Brit. Assoc., 1886, p. 518.

October 1904. Since this Address was given the subject of radio-activity has assumed high importance in reference to questions connected with the evolution of the cosmos. Thus Prof. George Darwin, in view of the newly discovered properties of radium, has stated that he sees 'no reason for doubting the possibility of augmenting the estimates of solar heat, as derived from the theory of gravitation, by some such factor as ten or twenty' (Nature, 24th Sept., 1903). The same opinion is shared by Prof. Joly, who points out that the establishment of the observed gradient of temperature from the earth's surface inward 'may have been deferred indefinitely during the exhaustion of stores of radium and similar bodies at greater or shallower depths' (Nature, 1st Oct., 1903). More recently Prof. Rutherford, who has taken so leading a part in the discussion of radio-activity, has made the following statement: 'I think we may conclude that the present rate of loss of heat of the earth might have continued unchanged for long periods of time in consequence of the supply of heat from radio-active matter in the earth. It thus seems probable that the earth may have remained for very long intervals of time at a temperature not very different from that observed to-day, and that in consequence the time during which the earth has been at a temperature capable of supporting the presence of animal and vegetable life may be very much longer than the estimate made by Lord Kelvin from other data' (Radio-activity, Cambridge, 1904, p. 346). Thus two of the three physical arguments are impugned on new grounds, and the forecast of Prof. Darwin is shown to have been reasonable when in 1886 he said: 'Although speculations as to the future course of science are usually of little avail, yet it seems as likely that meteorology and geology will pass the word of command to cosmical physics as the converse.'

The Age of the Earth, Presidential Address to the Victoria Institute for 1897, p. 10; also in Phil. Mag., January 1899.

The geological arguments are briefly given in my Presidential Address to the British Association at the Edinburgh Meeting of 1892 (ante p. 182). The biological arguments were well stated, and in some detail, by Professor Poulton in his Address to the Zoological Section of the Association at the Liverpool Meeting of 1896.

See an interesting and suggestive paper by Professor Le Conte on 'Critical Periods in the History of the Earth,' Bull. Dept. Geology, University of California, vol. i. (1895), p. 313; also one by Professor Chamberlin on 'The Ulterior Basis of Time-divisions and the Classification of Geological History,' Journal of Geology, vol. vi. (1898), p. 449.

The first Report of this Committee was submitted to the Southport meeting of the Association in 1903. But the question is one of such importance in view of the rapidity with which some parts of our coast are in course of demolition that it deserves to be taken up as a national investigation. The country at large should contribute to the expense of applying the best means for arresting the waste of its shores. At present the contest has to be carried on by the riparian proprietors, who are often quite unable adequately to cope with it. October, 1904.

Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin., vol. x. (1879-80) p. 518.

Report Brit. Assoc., 1882, p. 95.

The hope here expressed has so far been realised by the appointment of a Committee of the Geological Congress at Paris in 1900 and the renewal and extension of this Committee at the following Meeting held in Vienna in 1903. The subjects of Earthquakes, Movements of elevation or depression in mountain chains and measurements of the value of Gravity were especially proposed for investigation. The recommendations of the Committee were approved by the International Association of Academies in London in the summer of 1904 and steps were then taken in the direction of international co-operation in each of the subjects suggested. Note added, October, 1904.

VII

The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin

By the universal consent of mankind, the name of Charles Darwin was placed, even during his lifetime, among those of the few great leaders who stand forth for all time as the creative spirits that have founded and legislated for the realm of Science. It is too soon to estimate with precision the full value and effect of his work. The din of controversy that rose around him has hardly yet died down, and the influence of the doctrines he propounded is extending into so many remote departments of human inquiry, that a generation or two may require to pass away before his true place in the history of thought can be definitely fixed. But the judgment of his contemporaries as to his proud pre-eminence is not likely ever to be called in question. He is enrolled among the Dii Majorum Gentium, and there he will remain to the end of the ages. When he was laid beside the illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey, there arose far and wide a lamentation as of personal bereavement. Thousands of mourners who knew only his writings, and judged of the gentleness and courtesy of his nature from these and from such hearsay reports as passed outwards from the privacy of his country home, grieved as for the loss of a dear friend. It is remarkable that probably no scientific man of his day was personally less familiar to the mass of his fellow-countrymen. He seemed to shun all the usual modes of contact with them. His weak health, domestic habits, and absorbing work kept him in the seclusion of his own quiet household. In later years his face was seldom to be seen at the meetings of scientific societies, or at those gatherings where the discoveries of science are expounded to more popular audiences. He shrank from public controversy, although no man was ever more vigorously attacked and more completely misrepresented. Nevertheless, when he died, the affectionate regret that followed him to the grave came not alone from his own personal friends, but from thousands of sympathetic mourners in all parts of the world, who had never known or seen him. Men had ample material for judging of his work, and in the end had given their judgment with general acclaim. Of the man himself, however, they could know but little, yet enough of his character shone forth in his work to indicate its tenderness and goodness. Men instinctively felt him to be in every way one of the great ones of the earth, whose removal from the living world leaves mankind poorer in moral worth as well as in intellect. So widespread has been this conviction, that the story of his life has been eagerly longed for. It might contain no eventful incidents, but it would reveal the man as he was, and show the method of his working and the secret of his greatness.

At last, five years and a half after his death, the long expected Memoir has made its appearance. The task of preparing it was undertaken by his son, Mr. Francis Darwin, who, having for the last eight years of his father's life acted as his assistant, was specially qualified to put the world in possession of a true picture of the inner life of the great naturalist. Most biographies are too long, but, in the present case, the three goodly volumes will be found to contain not a page too much. The narrative is absorbingly interesting from first to last. The editor, with excellent judgment, allows Darwin himself, as far as possible, to tell his own story in a series of delightful letters, which bring us into the very presence of the earnest student and enthusiastic explorer of Nature.

Charles Darwin came of a family which from the beginning of the sixteenth century had been settled on the northern borders of Lincolnshire. Several of his ancestors had been men of literary taste and scientific culture, the most noted of them being his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the poet and philosopher. His father was a medical man in large practice at Shrewsbury, and his mother, a daughter of Josiah Wedgewood of Etruria. Some interesting reminiscences are given of the father, who must have been a man of uncommon strength of character. He left a large fortune, and thus provided for the career which his son was destined to fulfil. Of his own early life and later years, Darwin has left a slight but most interesting sketch in an autobiographical fragment, written late in life for his children, and without any idea of its ever being published. From this outline we learn that he was born at Shrewsbury on the 12th of February, 1809. Shortly before his mother's death, in 1817, he was sent, when eight years old, to a day-school in his native town. But even in the period of childhood he had chosen the favourite occupation of his life; 'my taste for natural history,' he says, 'and more especially for collecting, was well developed. I tried to make out the names of plants, and collected all sorts of things--shells, seals, franks, coins and minerals. The passion for collecting which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brother ever had this taste.' According to his own account, he was 'in many ways a naughty boy.' But there must have been so much fun and kind-heartedness in his transgressions, that neither parents nor teachers could have been very seriously offended by his pranks. What, for instance, could be said to a boy who would gravely pretend to a schoolfellow that he could produce variously tinted flowers by watering them with coloured fluids, or who gathered a quantity of fruit from his father's trees, hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran off to announce his discovery of a robbery; or who, after beating a puppy, felt such remorse that the memory of the act lay heavy on his conscience and remained with him to old age? In 1818 he was placed under Dr. Butler in Shrewsbury School, where he continued to stay for seven years until 1825, when he was sixteen years old. He confesses that the classical training at that seminary was useless to him, and that the school as a means of education was, so far as he was concerned, simply a blank. Verse-making, and learning by heart so many lines of Latin or Greek, seem to have been the occupations of school that specially dwelt in his memory, the sole pleasure he could recall being the reading of some of Horace's Odes. He describes, however, the intense satisfaction with which he followed the clear geometrical proofs of Euclid, and the pleasure he took in sitting for hours in an old window of the school reading Shakespeare. He made acquaintance, too, with the poems of Thomson, Byron and Scott, but confesses that in later life, to his great regret, he lost all pleasure from poetry of any kind, even from Shakespeare.

The first book that excited in him a wish to travel was a copy of the Wonders of the World in the possession of a schoolfellow, which he read with some critical discrimination, for he used to dispute with other boys about the veracity of its statements. Nothing in the school-life could daunt his ardour in the pursuit of natural history. He continued to be a collector, and began to show himself an attentive observer of insects and birds. White's Selborne, which has started so many naturalists on their career, stimulated his zeal, and he became so fond of birds as to wonder in his mind why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist. Nor were his interests confined to the biological departments of Nature. With his brother, who had made a laboratory in the garden tool-house, he worked hard at chemistry, and learned for the first time the meaning of experimental research. These extra-scholastic pursuits, which he declares to have been the best part of his education at school, came somehow to be talked of by his companions, who consequently nicknamed him 'Gas'; and Dr. Butler, when he heard of them, rebuked the young philosopher, for 'wasting time on such useless subjects,' and called him a 'poco curante.' It was evident to his father that further attendance at Shrewsbury School would not advance young Darwin's education, and he was accordingly sent in 1825, when he was a little over sixteen years old, to join his elder brother, who was attending the medical classes of the University of Edinburgh. It was intended that he should begin the study of medicine, and qualify himself for that profession; but he had already discovered that a sufficient competence would eventually come to him to enable him to live in some comfort and independence. So he went to the lectures with no very strong determination to get from them as much good as if he knew that his living was to depend on his success. He found them 'intolerably dull,' and records in maturer years his deliberate conviction that 'there are no advantages, and many disadvantages, in lectures compared with reading.' That he did not conquer his repugnance to the study of anatomy in particular is remarkable, when we consider how strong already was his love of biology, and how wholly it dominated his later life. Tenderness of nature seems to have had much to do with his repugnance. He could not bear the sight of suffering; the cases in the clinical wards in the Infirmary distressed him, and after bringing himself to attend for the first time the operating theatre, he rushed away before the operations were completed and never went back. But he afterwards came to regard as one of the greatest evils of his life that he had not been urged to conquer his disgust and make himself practically familiar with the details of human anatomy. It is curious, too, to learn with what aversion he regarded the instructions of the Professor of Natural History in the University. Jameson could certainly kindle, or at least stimulate, enthusiasm in some young souls, as the brilliant band of naturalists trained under him in Edward Forbes' time sufficiently proved. But to others he undoubtedly was, what Darwin describes him, 'incredibly dull.' If the professorial teaching was defective, however, the loss seems to have been in good measure made up by the companionship of fellow-students of kindred tastes, with whom the future naturalist explored the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. Collecting animals from the tidal pools of the estuary of the Forth, and accompanying the Newhaven fishermen in their dredging voyages for oysters, he found plenty of material for study, and employed himself in dissecting as well as he could. In the course of these observations he made his first recorded discovery, which was 'that the so-called ova of Flustra had the power of independent movement by means of cilia, and were, in fact, larvae.' As a part of his love of Nature and out-of-door employments, he became an ardent sportsman, rose even long before day, in order to reach the ground betimes, and went to bed with his shooting boots placed open close beside him, that not a moment might be lost in getting into them.

When two sessions had been passed at Edinburgh and no great zeal appeared for the medical profession, Darwin's father proposed to him that he should become a clergyman, for it was out of the question that the young student should be allowed to turn into an idle sporting man, as he bade fair to do. After some time given to reflection on this momentous change in his career, Darwin, who 'did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible,' agreed to the proposal. Many years afterwards, when he had risen to fame, and his photograph was the subject of public discussion at a German psychological society, he was declared by one of the speakers to have 'the bump of reverence developed enough for ten priests.' So that in one respect, as he says of himself, he was well fitted to be a clergyman. In another and more serious qualification, however, he found himself lamentably and almost incredibly deficient. If his two years at Edinburgh had not added much to his stock of professional knowledge, they seem to have driven out of his head what slender share of classical learning he had imbibed at Shrewsbury. He had actually forgotten some of the Greek letters, and had to begin again, therefore, at the very beginning. But after a few months of preliminary training he found himself able to proceed to Cambridge in the early part of the year 1828, when he was now nearly nineteen years of age. So far as concerned academical studies, the three years at the University were, in his own opinion, as much wasted time as his residence at Edinburgh or his life at school had been. He attempted mathematics, which he found repugnant. In classics he did as little as he could; but in the end he took his B.A. degree, and got the tenth place on the list of those who did not go in for honours. The disgust for geology with which the Wernerian doctrines at Edinburgh had inspired him, prevented him from becoming a pupil of Sedgwick. It is curious to speculate on what might have been his ultimate bent had he then come under the spell of that eloquent, enthusiastic, and most lovable man. Not improbably he would have become an ardent geologist, dedicating more exclusively to that science the genius and industry which he devoted to biology and to natural history as a whole.