Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 2

Dear Sir,

I hope you will excuse the liberty which I take in writing to you. I have just read, though imperfectly, your 'Entstehung und Begriff,' and have been so greatly interested by it, that I have sent it to be translated, as I am a poor German scholar. I have just finished a new [4th] edition of my 'Origin,' which will be translated into German, and my object in writing to you is to say that if you should see this edition you would think that I had borrowed from you, without acknowledgment, two discussions on the beauty of flowers and fruit; but I assure you every word was printed off before I had opened your pamphlet. Should you like to possess a copy of either the German or English new edition, I should be proud to send one. I may add, with respect to the beauty of flowers, that I have already hinted the same views as you hold in my paper on Lythrum.

Many of your criticisms on my views are the best which I have met with, but I could answer some, at least to my own satisfaction; and I regret extremely that I had not read your pamphlet before printing my new edition. On one or two points, I think, you have a little misunderstood me, though I dare say I have not been cautious in expressing myself. The remark which has struck me most, is that on the position of the leaves not having been acquired through natural selection, from not being of any special importance to the plant. I well remember being formerly troubled by an analogous difficulty, namely, the position of the ovules, their anatropous condition, etc. It was owing to forgetfulness that I did not notice this difficulty in the 'Origin.' (Nageli's Essay is noticed in the 5th edition.) Although I can offer no explanation of such facts, and only hope to see that they may be explained, yet I hardly see how they support the doctrine of some law of necessary development, for it is not clear to me that a plant, with its leaves placed at some particular angle, or with its ovules in some particular position, thus stands higher than another plant. But I must apologise for troubling you with these remarks.

As I much wish to possess your photograph, I take the liberty of enclosing my own, and with sincere respect I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully, CH. DARWIN.

[I give a few extracts from letters of various dates showing my father's interest, alluded to in the last letter, in the problem of the arrangement of the leaves on the stems of plants. It may be added that Professor Schwendener of Berlin has successfully attacked the question in his 'Mechanische Theorie der Blattstellungen,' 1878.

TO DR. FALCONER. August 26 [1863].

"Do you remember telling me that I ought to study Phyllotaxy? Well I have often wished you at the bottom of the sea; for I could not resist, and I muddled my brains with diagrams, etc., and specimens, and made out, as might have been expected, nothing. Those angles are a most wonderful problem and I wish I could see some one give a rational explanation of them."

TO DR. ASA GRAY. May 11 [1861].

"If you wish to save me from a miserable death, do tell me why the angles 1/2, 1/3, 2/5, 3/8, etc, series occur, and no other angles. It is enough to drive the quietest man mad. Did you and some mathematician (Probably my father was thinking of Chauncey Wright's work on Phyllotaxy, in Gould's 'Astronomical Journal,' No.99, 1856, and in the 'Mathematical Monthly,' 1859. These papers are mentioned in the "Letters of Chauncey Wright.' Mr. Wright corresponded with my father on the subject.) publish some paper on the subject? Hooker says you did; where is it?

TO DR. ASA GRAY. [May 31, 1863?].

"I have been looking at Nageli's work on this subject, and am astonished to see that the angle is not always the same in young shoots when the lea-buds are first distinguishable, as in full-grown branches. This shows, I think, that there must be some potent cause for those angles which do occur: I dare say there is some explanation as simple as that for the angles of the Bees-cells."

My father also corresponded with Dr. Hubert Airy and was interested in his views on the subject, published in the Royal Soc. Proceedings, 1873, page 176.

We now return to the year 1866.

In November, when the prosecution of Governor Eyre was dividing England into two bitterly opposed parties, he wrote to Sir J. Hooker: —

"You will shriek at me when you hear that I have just subscribed to the Jamaica Committee." (He subscribed 10 pounds.)

On this subject I quote from a letter of my brother's: —

"With respect to Governor Eyre's conduct in Jamaica, he felt strongly that J.S. Mill was right in prosecuting him. I remember one evening, at my Uncle's, we were talking on the subject, and as I happened to think it was too strong a measure to prosecute Governor Eyre for murder, I made some foolish remark about the prosecutors spending the surplus of the fund in a dinner. My father turned on me almost with fury, and told me, if those were my feelings, I had better go back to Southampton; the inhabitants having given a dinner to Governor Eyre on his landing, but with which I had had nothing to do." The end of the incident, as told by my brother, is so characteristic of my father that I cannot resist giving it, though it has no bearing on the point at issue. "Next morning at 7 o'clock, or so, he came into my bedroom and sat on my bed, and said that he had not been able to sleep from the thought that he had been so angry with me, and after a few more kind words he left me."

The same restless desire to correct a disagreeable or incorrect impression is well illustrated in an extract which I quote from some notes by Rev. J. Brodie Innes: —

"Allied to the extreme carefulness of observation was his most remarkable truthfulness in all matters. On one occasion, when a parish meeting had been held on some disputed point of no great importance, I was surprised by a visit from Mr. Darwin at night. He came to say that, thinking over the debate, though what he had said was quite accurate, he thought I might have drawn an erroneous conclusion, and he would not sleep till he had explained it. I believe that if on any day some certain fact had come to his knowledge which contradicted his most cherished theories, he would have placed the fact on record for publication before he slept."

This tallies with my father's habits, as described by himself. When a difficulty or an objection occurred to him, he thought it of paramount importance to make a note of it instantly because he found hostile facts to be especially evanescent.

The same point is illustrated by the following incident, for which I am indebted to Mr. Romanes: —

"I have always remembered the following little incident as a good example of Mr. Darwin's extreme solicitude on the score of accuracy. One evening at Down there was a general conversation upon the difficulty of explaining the evolution of some of the distinctively human emotions, especially those appertaining to the recognition of beauty in natural scenery. I suggested a view of my own upon the subject, which, depending upon the principle of association, required the supposition that a long line of ancestors should have inhabited regions, the scenery of which is now regarded as beautiful. Just as I was about to observe that the chief difficulty attaching to my hypothesis arose from feelings of the sublime (seeing that these are associated with awe, and might therefore be expected not to be agreeable), Mr. Darwin anticipated the remark, by asking how the hypothesis was to meet the case of these feelings. In the conversation which followed, he said the occasion in his own life, when he was most affected by the emotions of the sublime was when he stood upon one of the summits of the Cordillera, and surveyed the magnificent prospect all around. It seemed, as he quaintly observed, as if his nerves had become fiddle strings, and had all taken to rapidly vibrating. This remark was only made incidentally, and the conversation passed into some other branch. About an hour afterwards Mr. Darwin retired to rest, while I sat up in the smoking-room with one of his sons. We continued smoking and talking for several hours, when at about one o'clock in the morning the door gently opened and Mr. Darwin appeared, in his slippers and dressing-gown. As nearly as I can remember, the following are the words he used: —

"'Since I went to bed I have been thinking over our conversation in the drawing-room, and it has just occurred to me that I was wrong in telling you I felt most of the sublime when on the top of the Cordillera; I am quite sure that I felt it even more when in the forests of Brazil. I thought it best to come and tell you this at once in case I should be putting you wrong. I am sure now that I felt most sublime in the forests.'

"This was all he had come to say, and it was evident that he had come to do so, because he thought that the fact of his feeling 'most sublime in forests' was more in accordance with the hypothesis which we had been discussing, than the fact which he had previously stated. Now, as no one knew better than Mr. Darwin the difference between a speculation and a fact, I thought this little exhibition of scientific conscientiousness very noteworthy, where the only question concerned was of so highly speculative a character. I should not have been so much impressed if he had thought that by his temporary failure of memory he had put me on a wrong scent in any matter of fact, although even in such a case he is the only man I ever knew who would care to get out of bed at such a time at night in order to make the correction immediately, instead of waiting till next morning. But as the correction only had reference to a flimsy hypothesis, I certainly was very much impressed by this display of character."]

CHARLES DARWIN TO J.D. HOOKER. Down, December 10 [1866].

... I have now read the last No. of H. Spencer. ('Principles of Biology.') I do not know whether to think it better than the previous number, but it is wonderfully clever, and I dare say mostly true. I feel rather mean when I read him: I could bear, and rather enjoy feeling that he was twice as ingenious and clever as myself, but when I feel that he is about a dozen times my superior, even in the master art of wriggling, I feel aggrieved. If he had trained himself to observe more, even if at the expense, by the law of balancement, of some loss of thinking power, he would have been a wonderful man.

... I am HEARTILY glad you are taking up the Distribution of Plants in New Zealand, and suppose it will make part of your new book. Your view, as I understand it, that New Zealand subsided and formed two or more small islands, and then rose again, seems to me extremely probable... When I puzzled my brains about New Zealand, I remember I came to the conclusion, as indeed I state in the 'Origin,' that its flora, as well as that of other southern lands, had been tinctured by an Antarctic flora, which must have existed before the Glacial period. I concluded that New Zealand never could have been closely connected with Australia, though I supposed it had received some few Australian forms by occasional means of transport. Is there any reason to suppose that New Zealand could have been more closely connected with South Australia during the glacial period, when the Eucalypti, etc., might have been driven further North? Apparently there remains only the line, which I think you suggested, of sunken islands from New Caledonia. Please remember that the Edwardsia was certainly drifted there by the sea.

I remember in old days speculating on the amount of life, i.e. of organic chemical change, at different periods. There seems to me one very difficult element in the problem, namely, the state of development of the organic beings at each period, for I presume that a Flora and Fauna of cellular cryptogamic plants, of Protozoa and Radiata would lead to much less chemical change than is now going on. But I have scribbled enough.

Yours affectionately, CH. DARWIN.

[The following letter is in acknowledgment of Mr. Rivers' reply to an earlier letter in which my father had asked for information on bu-variation:

It may find a place here in illustration of the manner of my father's intercourse with those "whose avocations in life had to do with the rearing or use of living things" ("Mr. Dyer in 'Charles Darwin,'" "Nature Series", 1882, page 39.) — an intercourse which bore such good fruit in the 'Variation of Animals and Plants.' Mr. Dyer has some excellent remarks on the unexpected value thus placed on apparently trivial facts disinterred from weekly journals, or amassed by correspondence. He adds: "Horticulturists who had... moulded plants almost at their will at the impulse of taste or profit were at once amazed and charmed to find that they had been doing scientific work and helping to establish a great theory."]

CHARLES DARWIN TO T. RIVERS. (The late Mr. Rivers was an eminent horticulturist and writer on horticulture.) Down, December 28 [1866?].

My dear Sir,

Permit me to thank you cordially for your most kind letter. For years I have read with interest every scrap which you have written in periodicals, and abstracted in MS. your book on Roses, and several times I thought I would write to you, but did not know whether you would think me too intrusive. I shall, indeed, be truly obliged for any information you can supply me on bud-variation or sports. When any extra difficult points occur to me in my present subject (which is a mass of difficulties), I will apply to you, but I will not be unreasonable. It is most true what you say that any one to study well the physiology of the life of plants, ought to have under his eye a multitude of plants. I have endeavoured to do what I can by comparing statements by many writers and observing what I could myself. Unfortunately few have observed like you have done. As you are so kind, I will mention one other point on which I am collecting facts; namely, the effect produced on the stock by the graft; thus, it is SAID, that the purple-leaved filbert affects the leaves of the common hazel on which it is grafted (I have just procured a plant to try), so variegated jessamine is SAID to affect its stock. I want these facts partly to throw light on the marvellous laburnum Adami, trifacial oranges, etc. That laburnum case seems one of the strangest in physiology. I have now growing splendid, FERTILE, yellow laburnums (with a long raceme like the so-called Waterer's laburnum) from seed of yellow flowers on the C. Adami. To a man like myself, who is compelled to live a solitary life, and sees few persons, it is no slight satisfaction to hear that I have been able at all [to] interest by my books observers like yourself.

As I shall publish on my present subject, I presume, within a year, it will be of no use your sending me the shoots of peaches and nectarines which you so kindly offer; I have recorded your facts.

Permit me again to thank you cordially; I have not often in my life received a kinder letter.

My dear Sir, yours sincerely, CH. DARWIN.

CHAPTER 2.V. — THE PUBLICATION OF THE 'VARIATION OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS UNDER DOMESTICATION.'

JANUARY 1867, TO JUNE 1868

[At the beginning of the year 1867 he was at work on the final chapter — "Concluding Remarks" of the 'Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,' which was begun after the rest of the MS. had been sent to the printers in the preceding December. With regard to the publication of the book he wrote to Mr. Murray, on January 3: —

"I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear of the enormous size of my book. (On January 9 he wrote to Sir J.D. Hooker: "I have been these last few days vexed and annoyed to a foolish degree by hearing that my MS. on Dom. An. and Cult. Plants will make 2 volumes, both bigger than the 'Origin.' The volumes will have to be full-sized octavo, so I have written to Murray to suggest details to be printed in small type. But I feel that the size is quite ludicrous in relation to the subject. I am ready to swear at myself and at every fool who writes a book.") I fear it can never pay. But I cannot shorten it now; nor, indeed, if I had foreseen its length, do I see which parts ought to have been omitted.

"If you are afraid to publish it, say so at once, I beg you, and I will consider your note as cancelled. If you think fit, get any one whose judgment you rely on, to look over some of the more legible chapters, namely, the Introduction, and on dogs and plants, the latter chapters being in my opinion, the dullest in the book... The list of chapters, and the inspection of a few here and there, would give a good judge a fair idea of the whole book. Pray do not publish blindly, as it would vex me all my life if I led you to heavy loss."

Mr. Murray referred the MS. to a literary friend, and, in spite of a somewhat adverse opinion, willingly agreed to publish the book. My father wrote: —

"Your note has been a great relief to me. I am rather alarmed about the verdict of your friend, as he is not a man of science. I think if you had sent the 'Origin' to an unscientific man, he would have utterly condemned it. I am, however, VERY GLAD that you have consulted any one on whom you can rely.

"I must add, that my 'Journal of Researches' was seen in MS. by an eminent semi-scientific man, and was pronounced unfit for publication."

The proofs were begun in March, and the last revise was finished on November 15th, and during this period the only intervals of rest were two visits of a week each at his brother Erasmus's house in Queen Anne Street. He notes in his Diary: —

"I began this book [in the] beginning of 1860 (and then had some MS.), but owing to interruptions from my illness, and illness of children; from various editions of the 'Origin,' and Papers, especially Orchis book and Tendrils, I have spent four years and two months over it."

The edition of 'Animals and Plants' was of 1500 copies, and of these 1260 were sold at Mr. Murray's autumnal sale, but it was not published until January 30, 1868. A new edition of 1250 copies was printed in February of the same year.

In 1867 he received the distinction of being made a knight of the Prussian Order "Pour le Merite." (The Order "Pour le Merite" was founded in 1740 by Frederick II. by the re-christening of an "Order of Generosity," founded in 1665. It was at one time strictly military, having been previously both civil and military, and in 1840 the Order was again opened to civilians. The order consists of thirty members of German extraction, but distinguished foreigners are admitted to a kind of extraordinary membership. Faraday, Herschel, and Thomas Moore, have belonged to it in this way. From the thirty members a chancellor is elected by the king (the first officer of this kind was Alexander v. Humboldt); and it is the duty of the chancellor to notify a vacancy in the Order to the remainder of the thirty, who then elect by vote the new member — but the king has technically the appointment in his own hands.) He seems not to have known how great the distinction was, for in June 1868 he wrote to Sir J.D. Hooker: —