The Signature of All Things (72 page)

He asked, “What limit can be put to this power?”

He wrote, “We behold the face of nature, bright with gladness . . .”

He concluded, “There is grandeur in this view of life.”

She finished the book and allowed herself to weep.

There was nothing else she could do, in the face of an achievement so splendid and so devastating, but weep.

E
veryone read
On the Origin of Species
in 1860, and everyone argued about it, but nobody read it more carefully than Alma Whittaker. She kept her mouth closed during all the drawing room debates on natural selection—even when her own Dutch family took up the subject—but she followed every word. She attended every lecture on the topic and read every review, every attack, every critique. What’s more, she revisited the book repeatedly, in a spirit as probing as it was admiring. She was a scientist, and she wanted to put Darwin’s theory under a microscope. She wanted to test her theory against his.

Of course, her paramount question was how Darwin had managed to solve the Prudence Problem.

The answer quickly emerged: he hadn’t.

Darwin had not solved it because—quite cannily—he avoided the subject of human beings altogether in his book.
On the Origin of Species
was about nature, but it was not overtly about Man. Darwin had played his hand carefully in this regard. He wrote about the evolution of finches, of pigeons, of Italian greyhounds, of racehorses, and of barnacles—but never did he mention human beings. He wrote, “The vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply,” but never did he add, “We, too, are part of this
system.” Scientific-minded readers would arrive at that conclusion for themselves—and Darwin well knew it. Religious-minded readers would arrive at that conclusion, too, and find it an infuriating sacrilege—but Darwin
had not actually said it
. Thus, he had protected himself. He could sit in his quiet country house in Kent, innocent in the face of public outrage:
What harm can exist in a simple discussion of finches and barnacles?

As far as Alma was concerned, this strategy constituted Darwin’s single greatest stroke of brilliance: he had not taken up the
entire
question. Perhaps he would take it up later, but he had not done so now, not here, in his careful, initial discourse on evolution. This realization dazzled Alma, and she nearly slapped her own forehead in dumbfounded marvel; it never would have occurred to her that a good scientist need not tackle the
entire
question right away—on any topic whatsoever! In essence, Darwin had done what Uncle Dees had tried for years to persuade Alma to do: he had published a beautiful theory of evolution, but only within the realms of botany and zoology, thereby leaving the humans to debate their own origins.

She longed to speak to Darwin. She wished she could dash across the Channel to England, take a train down to Kent, knock on Darwin’s door, and ask him, “How do you explain my sister Prudence, and the notion of self-sacrifice, in the context of the overwhelming evidence for constant biological struggle?” But everyone wanted to talk to Darwin these days, and Alma did not possess the necessary sort of influence to arrange a meeting with the most sought-after scientist of the age.

As time went on, she gleaned a clearer sense of this Charles Darwin, and it became evident that the gentleman was not a debater. He probably would not have welcomed the chance to argue with this obscure American bryologist, anyway. He probably would have smiled at her kindly and said, “But what do
you
think, madam?” before shutting the door.

Indeed, while the entire educated world strove to make up its mind about Darwin, the man himself stayed amazingly quiet. When Charles Hodge, at the theological seminary in Princeton, accused Darwin of atheism, Darwin did not defend himself. When Lord Kelvin refused to embrace the theory (which Alma thought unfortunate, as Kelvin’s would have been such a credible endorsement), Darwin did not protest. He also did not engage his supporters. When George Searle—a prominent Catholic astronomer—wrote that the theory of natural selection seemed to him quite
logical, and posed no threat to the Catholic Church, Darwin did not respond. When the Anglican parson and novelist Charles Kingsley announced that he, too, felt comfortable with a God who “created primal forms capable of self-development,” Darwin spoke not a word in agreement. When the theologian Henry Drummond tried to work up a biblical defense of evolution, Darwin avoided the discussion entirely.

Alma watched as liberal-thinking ministers took refuge in metaphor (claiming that the seven days of creation, as mentioned in the Bible, were in actuality seven
geological epochs
), while conservative paleontologists such as Louis Agassiz went red-eyed with anger, accusing Darwin and his supporters of vile apostasy. Others fought Darwin’s battles for him—the mighty Thomas Huxley in England; the eloquent Asa Gray in America. But Darwin himself kept a gentlemanly English distance from the entire debate.

Alma, on the other hand, took every attack on natural selection personally, just as she felt secretly buoyed by every endorsement—for it was not merely
Darwin’s
idea that was being scrutinized; it was
hers
. She thought at times that she was becoming more distressed and excited by this debate than was Darwin himself (another reason, perhaps, that he made a better ambassador for the theory than she ever could have). But she also felt frustrated by Darwin’s reserve. Sometimes she wanted to shake him and make him fight. In his position, she would have come out swinging like Henry Whittaker. She would have had her nose bloodied in the process, to be sure, but she would have bloodied some noses along the way, too. She would have fought to her stumps to defend their theory (she could not help but think of it as “their” theory) . . . if
she had published the theory at all, that is. Which, of course, she had not done. So she had no prerogative to fight. Therefore, she said nothing.

It was all most vexing, most engrossing, most confusing.

What’s more—Alma could not help but notice—nobody had yet solved the Prudence Problem to her satisfaction.

As far as she could see, there was still a hole in the theory.

It was still incomplete.

B
ut soon enough, Alma grew distracted, then increasingly captivated, by something else.

Dimly and incrementally, as the entire Darwin debate raged on, she
became cognizant of another figure concealed along its shadowy margins. In the same way that Alma—when she was young—would sometimes catch a glimpse of something moving on the periphery of her microscope slide and struggle to focus on it (suspecting, before she knew what it was, that it might be important), now, too, she could see something strange and perhaps significant hovering in the corner. Something was out of place. Something existed in the story of Charles Darwin and natural selection that should not exist. She twiddled the knobs and raised the levers and aimed her complete attention upon the mystery—and that is how she learned of a man named Alfred Russel Wallace.

Alma first saw Wallace’s name when, out of curiosity, she went back to explore the first official mention of natural selection—which had been on July 1, 1858, at a meeting of the Linnaean Society in London. Alma had missed the notes of that meeting’s proceedings when they’d originally been published, owing to her period of mourning, but now she went back and studied the record quite carefully. Immediately, she noticed something peculiar: another essay had been presented that day, just after the introduction of Darwin’s thesis. That other essay was titled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” and it had been written by one A. R. Wallace.

Alma tracked down the essay and read it. It said exactly the same thing Darwin had said, in his theory of natural selection. In fact, it said exactly the same thing Alma had said, in her theory of competitive alteration. Mr. Wallace argued that life was a constant struggle for existence: that there were not enough resources for all; that population was controlled by predators, illness, and food scarcity; and that the weakest would always die first. Wallace’s essay went on to say that any variation in a species that affected the outcome of survival might eventually change that species forever. He said that the most successful variations would proliferate, while the least successful would be rendered extinct. This was how species arose, transmuted, thrived, and vanished.

The essay was short, simple, and—to Alma’s mind—extremely familiar.

Who was this person?

Alma had never before heard of him. This was unlikely in and of itself, for she made an effort to be aware of everyone in the scientific world. She wrote letters to a few colleagues in England, asking, “Who is Alfred Russel
Wallace? What are people saying about him? What happened in London in July 1858?”

The stories she learned intrigued her only more. She discovered that Wallace had been born in Monmouthshire, near Wales, to middle-class parents who later fell on hard times; and that he was more or less self-educated, a surveyor by trade. As an adventurous young man, he had shipped off to various jungles over the years, and became a tireless collector of insect and bird specimens. In 1853, Wallace had published a book entitled
Palm Trees of the Amazon and their Uses
, which Alma had missed entirely, as she’d been traveling between Tahiti and Holland at the time. Since 1854, he had been in the Malay Archipelago, studying tree frogs and the like.

There, in the distant forests of the Celebes, Wallace had contracted malarial fever and had nearly died. In the depths of his fever, focused upon death, he’d had a flash of inspiration: a theory of evolution, based on the struggle for existence. In a mere few hours he’d written down his theory. He then mailed his hastily penned thesis all the way from the Celebes to England, to a gentleman named Charles Darwin, whom he’d met on one occasion, and whom he much admired. Wallace, quite deferentially, asked Mr. Darwin if this theory of evolution might perhaps have any value. It was an innocent question: Wallace had no way of knowing that Darwin himself had been toiling on this exact idea since approximately 1840. In fact, Darwin had already written nearly two thousand pages of what would become
On the Origin of Species
, but had shown his work to no one except his dear friend Joseph Hooker, of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Hooker had for years been encouraging Darwin to publish, but Darwin—in a decision that Alma could well appreciate—had held back, from lack of confidence or certainty.

Now, in one of the great coincidences in scientific history, it appeared that Darwin’s beautiful and original idea—which he had been privately cultivating for almost two decades—had just been expressed, almost word for word, by a nearly unknown, thirty-five-year-old, malaria-suffering, self-taught naturalist on the other side of the planet.

Alma’s sources in London reported that Darwin had felt compelled by Wallace’s letter to announce his theory of natural selection, afraid that he would lose ownership of the entire notion if Wallace were to publish first.
Quite ironically, Alma thought, it appeared Darwin feared being
out-competed
over the idea of competition! Out of gentlemanly courtesy, Darwin had decided that Wallace’s letter should be presented at the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858—right alongside his own research on natural selection—while at the same time putting forth evidence that the hypothesis had belonged to him first. The publication of his
Origin of Species
had swiftly followed, less than a year and a half later. That rush to publish now suggested to Alma that Darwin had panicked—as well he should have! Wallace was closing in! As do many animals and plants under threat of annihilation, Charles Darwin had been forced to move, forced to take action—forced to adapt. Alma remembered what she herself had written in her own version of the theory: “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”

Reviewing this extraordinary story, there was no question in Alma’s mind: natural selection had been Darwin’s idea first. But it had not been Darwin’s idea
uniquely.
There was Alma, yes, but there had been somebody else, too. Alma was beyond amazed to learn of this. It seemed an utter intellectual impossibility. But it also brought her strange comfort, to know that Alfred Russel Wallace existed. She drew warmth from the knowledge that she was not alone in this. She had a peer. They were Whittaker and Wallace: comrades in obscurity—although Wallace, of course, had no idea that they were comrades in obscurity, because she was even
that much more obscure than he
. But Alma knew it. She felt him out there—her strange, miraculous younger brother of the mind. If she had been more religious, she might have thanked God for Alfred Russel Wallace, for it was that small sense of kinship that helped her move gracefully and safely—without debilitating resentment, despair, or shame—through all the clamoring commotion surrounding Mr. Charles Darwin and his colossal, transfiguring, world-changing theory.

Darwin would belong to history, yes, but Alma had Wallace.

And that, at least for now, was comfort enough.

T
he 1860s passed. Holland was quiet, while the United States was riven by an unthinkable war. Scientific discourse carried less weight for Alma during those terrible years, with the news from home of endless, appalling slaughter. Prudence lost her eldest son, an officer, at Antietam. Two of her
young grandsons died of camp diseases before even seeing a battlefield. All her life, Prudence had fought to end slavery, and now it was ended, but three of her own had been lost in the fight. “I rejoice and then I grieve,” she wrote Alma. “After that, I grieve some more.” Again, Alma wondered if she should return home—and even offered to—but her sister encouraged her to remain in Holland. “Our nation is too tragic at the moment for visitors,” Prudence reported. “Stay where the world is quieter, and bless that quietness.”