The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (16 page)

So there was no delay. The insiders moved deftly and fast. The details were settled in a flurry of overnight letters between London and Downe. Hooker chose an excerpt from Darwin's 1844 essay and inserted that, along with the Gray summary and Wallace's manuscript, into an already full agenda for the Linnean Society meeting. These three statements were ordered alphabetically by author—Darwin's two, followed by Wallace's. On the evening of July 1, 1858, the Darwin-Wallace material and five other papers were read to an audience of about thirty people. Hooker and Lyell attended. By coincidence, so did Samuel Stevens, who may have wondered how this Wallace paper got to London without passing through his hands.

The two authors were absent. By hindsight you might view them as “conspicuously absent,” although Wallace's non-presence wasn't notable at the time. He didn't belong to the Linnean Society. His voice was admitted like the
crawk
of an exotic parrot, interesting and indelicate. He spent July 1 at a place called Dorey, a trading village on the northwestern coast of New Guinea, five hundred miles east of Ternate. The wet season had struck again, collectable birds were scarce around Dorey, but for insects the hunting was excellent. He'd been doing especially well with beetles. He was unaware of the event in London.

Darwin, acutely aware, missed the Linnean meeting, too. He was home in Downe with a dead child and a bad case of ambivalence.

29

The most remarkable thing about Darwin-Wallace night at the Linnean Society is how little immediately came of it. No general discussion followed the reading of papers. No one stood up in response to what Darwin and Wallace proposed and said,
That's brilliant!
or
That's outrageous!
Tea was served, probably. There was some private chat. And then the Linnean fellows went home. The foundations of science had shifted beneath their feet but they didn't notice.

Why not? This is hard to know. Possibly it was because the excerpts from Darwin and the paper from Wallace focused on the circumstances and details of the mechanism, natural selection, not on its larger significance. The word “transmutation” wasn't mentioned by either author, let alone the word “evolution” (though Darwin did allude to “the origin of species”). In the ears of a careless listener, on a hot July night, during an overlong meeting, the Darwin-Wallace readings with their roundabout logic may have seemed to involve merely varieties and variation. Another reason that the audience missed the point may have been that those Linnean fellows generally weren't asking themselves the question—
How do species change, one into another?
—that Darwin and Wallace were answering.

Two months later, the society's
Journal of Proceedings
published Darwin's fragments and Wallace's manuscript, lumping them as though they were a single co-authored paper. In the editing process, someone supplied a slightly garbled portmanteau title: “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and On the Perpetuation of Varieties & Species by Natural Means of Selection.” Printed, the three pieces carried more impact than they had in spoken delivery. At least a few scientists recognized that this was weighty stuff, for better or worse, though some only condescended to disparage it. The president of the Geological Society of Dublin declared to an audience, early the next year, that Darwin and Wallace's paper “would not be worthy of notice” if Lyell and Hooker hadn't acted as sponsors. “If it means what it says, it is a truism,” according to this man; “if it means anything more, it is contrary to fact.” Darwin heard about that criticism and savored it as “a taste of the future.” He was right.

Other readers came across the Darwin-Wallace amalgam and were deeply affected. “I shall never forget the impression it made on me,” one naturalist, young at the time, wrote later. Hooker included references to “the ingenious and original reasonings” of Darwin and Wallace in his forthcoming work on Tasmanian plants, and Asa Gray described the Darwin-Wallace theory to an elite science club at Harvard, causing a disagreeable buzz in the head of Louis Agassiz, the eminent professor of natural history. So there was a scattering of strong reactions, but no explosion of acclaim or alarm. Either the central idea shared by Darwin and Wallace was too shocking for immediate absorption, or else other circumstances, somehow, hadn't favored immediate uptake. Maybe the idea hadn't been clearly enough expressed, or not cogently enough supported with factual evidence—or maybe people just weren't paying attention. Anyway, it slipped past. When the president of the Linnean Society (who happened to be Darwin's old reptile identifier from the post-
Beagle
days, Thomas Bell) gave his annual address the following May, he offered a bland retrospect of the past year. It hadn't been enlivened, Bell said, by “any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize” a branch of science. Bell's comment is now famous for its obtuseness. But in a strict sense he was right. The joint Darwin-Wallace announcement didn't “at once” revolutionize biology. It was too elliptical and dry. Something more was necessary.

As for Darwin, he rebounded quickly from tragedy and despair. On Tuesday of the bad week, with little Charles dead and other household members in danger, he had told Hooker, “I am quite prostrated & can do nothing” beyond sending the excerpts. By the following Monday, he and Emma had packed off their healthy children to stay with her sister in Sussex, getting them clear of the house, while Darwin resumed his scientific correspondence. Work bolstered him if it didn't (in excess) sicken him. That hadn't changed.

Work was his opiate, and science was his religion. He wrote to Asa Gray about bumblebees. He wrote to one of his pigeon contacts, asking for a young turbit he could pickle and measure. Mostly his thoughts were on natural selection: how to salvage his discovery, what to do next. The arrival of Wallace's paper had jolted him into a new frame of mind. There could be no more procrastination. No more plodding perfectionism and encyclopedic amassment of facts. No more timidity. With nudging from Hooker, he seized the idea of writing a sleek “abstract” of his theory, short enough to be published in a journal. Not just a fragmentary piece of the logic and data, as Lyell had suggested (“
pigeons
if you please”) two years earlier; no, this would be a small version of the full conceptual edifice. And he'd be sole author, of course, not entangled in a partnership with Wallace. Yes, that's it, he'd do an abstract. It could go to the Linnean Society
Journal
, for which Hooker played a guiding role. He set the big book aside and started fresh.

The new plan, and the Wallace scare, gave him new energy. During a July getaway to the Isle of Wight, complicated by transferring seven children plus servants into a seaside villa, Darwin wrote for several hours each day. His approach in these pages was slightly more brisk, more personal than in the half-written tome. He forced himself to focus on essentials. Choose the key points, hit them clearly, move on. Pick only the strongest and most vivid of his illustrative facts. He tried to construct a beguiling argument that might carry readers along, rather than erecting a mountain of data that would crush them into surrender. He wrote conversably, in the first-person singular and sometimes the first-person plural: “When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals….” He even found himself enjoying the work, unusual for Darwin as a writer. He was telling a great tale, as he'd told a great tale in his
Beagle
book—and telling it not so much from his research portfolios as off the top of his head.

This felt liberating, at least initially. Having resolved to pour his theory into an abstract, he vowed to do nothing else until it was finished. He mentioned as much in a letter to his friend Fox. I'll send you a copy when it appears in the journal, he added jauntily.

He tried to be severely concise. That wasn't easy. Just a month earlier, panicked by Wallace, he had longed for the chance to publish a dozen-page summary of his views. Now he found himself unable to do justice to the subject in twelve pages or even in thirty or forty. There were too many angles. He knew too much. He'd need that many words just to cover variation in domestic species, only one topic among many he meant to include.

The abstract was growing, he warned Hooker at the end of the month. It would be longer than expected. Returning to Downe in mid-August, he continued to write. He drew on his twenty-year archive of data, his notebooks and reference books and correspondence and portfolios stuffed with bits of loose paper—but he drew selectively now, striking a balance between factual evidence and persuasive discourse. He omitted footnotes and full citations of his sources. He mentioned other researchers and informants only passingly. His little piece on variation among chickens, dogs, ducks, and pigeons grew into a chapter. He finished a chapter on the struggle for existence and another presenting his central idea, natural selection. In autumn he took a week's rest at a hydropathic spa—not Malvern, with its memories of Annie, but a closer place called Moor Park, in Surrey, with another flaky doctor treating his mystery illness. Then back to work. He wrote chapters on the laws of variation (as best he discerned them, which wasn't very well), hybridization, instinct, some objections that might be raised against his theory, and other topics. By the end of the year, concentrating fiercely, churning out pages like a hack, calibrating the line between too much and too little, he had produced about half of what would be a 500-page book. He was still calling it his “abstract,” although soon it would be known as
On the Origin of Species
.

He relapsed into bad health in February 1859, suffering “the old severe vomiting,” plus a swimming sensation in his head. “My abstract is the cause,” he figured. Probably so. During another visit to Moor Park, where he could forget about species, almost, and amuse himself reading novels, playing billiards, flirting jovially with young women at dinner, he got some relief. He favored junky romantic novels with pretty heroines and happy endings, but he also enjoyed
Adam Bede
. He liked the billiards so much that he eventually bought himself a table. Back in the traces at Downe, he had only two chapters to write, followed by revising, and then he'd be “a comparatively free man,” he told Fox.

Free of what? Free of the burden of secrecy? Free of the fear of preemption? Free of the duty to publish? Never mind, it was the casual comment of a tired man. Free of this damn book, anyway. But he was wise to qualify it:
comparatively
free. He would never escape the responsibilities and tensions that came with his great idea.

30

Wallace got news of the arrangement, by letter, when he returned to his base in Ternate. There wasn't one letter but two—from Darwin and from Hooker. Darwin's contained Hooker's as an enclosure, leaving Hooker to do the main explaining. Darwin was understandably abashed and tried to portray himself as a passive party swept along by events. (Later he would assure Wallace that “I had absolutely nothing whatever to do in leading Lyell & Hooker to what they thought a fair course of action,” a claim that was weaselly at best and arguably untrue, given his strong hints and lamentations to both men. He would also misstate the dating of his own excerpts in the Darwin-Wallace package, telling Wallace that they'd been “written in 1839 now just 20 years ago!” In fact, they'd been written in 1844 and 1857.) Both letters to Wallace have been lost, but Darwin mentioned elsewhere that he considered Hooker's to be “perfect, quite clear & most courteous” in presenting the fait accompli.

How did Wallace react? Picture a lonely, long-suffering, self-educated man on a tropical island. Opening his mail, he learns suddenly that his malarial brainstorm of months earlier has yielded a theory that some of Britain's foremost scientists consider important—so important, even, as to be worth scuffling over. And he finds that, the scuffle having been settled without him, his allotted portion is a lesser half share of intellectual ownership and glory. His name is now famous, at least among the Linnean Society crowd; he has been recognized as a partner (a junior partner) with eminent, unimpeachable Mr. Darwin. His idea is launched, not just on the strength of his own arguments but with the authority of that unexpected co-discoverer. Well. Gracious sakes. It must have taken a few moments to sink in.

Maybe he spoke aloud to his dried beetles. There was no one around, in Dorey, with whom he could really share the news. He must have reread the letters, once, twice, tasting the words. Possibly he felt a twinge of resentment. So:
My
brilliant idea is now
ours
. Then, more wisely and cannily, Alfred Wallace decided that he was delighted.

The loss of sole credit was outweighed by another consideration: the honor, not to mention the practical advantages, of being welcomed as a colleague by these scientific insiders. To this honor Wallace responded gratefully, and with humility so dignified that in retrospect it seems almost smarmy. On October 6, probably just after receiving the two letters, he wrote to thank Hooker, endorsing the Linnean Society arrangement and declaring that it would have pained him if Mr. Darwin's “excess of generosity” had resulted in Wallace's paper being published alone. He was glad to know that Darwin had studied the same subject long and deeply. The more discussion of these facts and questions, the better. Too often a first discoverer gets all the credit, Wallace said, to the exclusion of another researcher who arrives at the same results independently. (He was right about that. Scientists, more competitive than many classes of people, generally race one another to make and announce discoveries, and the politics of priority were already intense in Darwin's day, even without grant-giving agencies and Nobel prizes. The adjudicated tie decreed by Hooker and Lyell went against standard scientific practice.) Notwithstanding its unusualness, their action had been “strictly just to both parties,” Wallace claimed to believe, but if anything too favorable to him. He also wrote to Darwin, saying roughly the same thing.