Inception of Darwin's theory: Encyclopedia II - Inception of Darwin's theory - Return to celebrity and science

Inception of Darwin's theory - Return to celebrity and science

When the Beagle returned, Darwin was quick to take the coach home and arrived at the family home of The Mount House in Shrewsbury, Shropshire late at night on 4 October 1836. He went straight to bed, then greeted his family at breakfast and began catching up with news of his family and of the country: "all England appears changed". The Reform Bill had brought what the Tory Duke of Wellington described as a shift in power from decent Tory Anglicans to Whig manufacturers, shopkeepers and atheists. Everyone was discussing the writings of Thomas Malthus on population outstripping resources as the New Poor Law described by opponents as "a Malthusian bill designed to force the poor to emigrate, to work for lower wages, to live on a coarser sort of food" brought the construction of workhouses in the southern counties despite riots and arson. The government had not yet dared introduce these measures to London and the industrial north, and recession was bringing threats of mass unemployment.

Darwin wrote to Henslow that he was still "giddy with joy & confusion... I want your advice on so many points, indeed I am in the clouds" and on 15 October went on to Cambridge to get advice from Henslow and Sedgwick on the task of organising the description and cataloguing of his collections accumulated from the Beagle expedition. Henslow took on the plants, and Darwin was given introductions to the best London naturalists with a warning that they would already be busy with other work.

Charles went on to stay with his brother Erasmus in London, near the scientific institutions which were in the throes of renovation, while the city itself was being torn up to install new sewers and gas lighting. He went round the British Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Linnean, the Zoological Society and Geological Society, trying to get the experts to take on his collections. Henslow had already established his former pupil's reputation during the Beagle expedition by giving selected naturalists access to fossil specimens sent back as well as having Darwin's geological writings privately printed for distribution. Darwin went "in most exciting dissipation amongst the Dons in science", and as Charles Bunbury reported, "[he] seems to be a universal collector" finding new species "to the surprise of all the big wigs". While geologists were quick to take on the rock samples, zoologists already had more specimens arriving than they could deal with. Their institutions were in turmoil as democrats argued for reforms replacing the aristocratic amateurs with professional salaried scientists as in the French research institutes. At the Zoological Society the reformers were led by Darwin's tutor from Edinburgh days, Robert Edmund Grant. Darwin now had an allowance plus stocks from his father, bringing him around £400 per year, and his sympathies were with the amateur clerical "Dons in science" of Cambridge.

Inception of Darwin's theory - Owen and fossils

The geologist Charles Lyell invited Darwin to dinner on 29 October 1836. Over dinner Lyell listened eagerly to Darwin's stories (which supported Lyell's uniformitarianism) and introduced him to Richard Owen and William Broderip, Tories who had just been involved in voting Grant out of a position at the Zoological Society. Owen was rapidly ousting Grant as the country's leading anatomist. Darwin went to visit him at his Royal College of Surgeons, and Owen agreed to work on some animal specimens in spirits and the fossil bones. Owen shared Darwin's enthusiasm. He was a proponent of German ideas of "organising energy" and vehemently opposed to Grant's evolution. At around this time Grant was one the few to volunteer his help with cataloguing the collection. Darwin turned down the offer, not wanting to be associated with a disreputable radical who denounced his Cambridge friends.

On 12 November Darwin visited his Wedgwood relatives at Maer Hall and they encouraged him to publish a book of his travels based on his diary, an idea his sisters picked up when he visited his home.

On 2 December he returned to London and began finding takers for his specimens, with Thomas Bell (naturalist) and the Revd. William Buckland interested in the reptiles. Darwin's reputation was being made by the giant mammal fossils. Owen's first surprising revelation was that a hippopotamus sized fossil skull 2 feet 4 inches (710 mm) long which Darwin had bought for eighteen pence while on a "galloping" trip 120 miles (190 km) from Montevideo was of an extinct giant capybara, a rodent which Owen named Toxodon. Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline that "[the fossils] are turning out great treasures" and of the rodent, "what famous cats they ought to have had in those days!" The College of Surgeons distributed casts of the fossils to the major scientific institutions.

Darwin paid a visit to his brother Eras's lady friend the literary Whig Miss Harriet Martineau who had strong views on egalitarianism and whose writings had popularised the ideas of Thomas Malthus. "She was very agreeable" and they discussed the "process of world making" that she had seen on her visit to the Niagara Falls. While he later remarked on "how ugly" she was, she described Charles as "simple, childlike, painstaking, effective".

Inception of Darwin's theory - Geological début species related to places

Unhappy with life in a "dirty odious London" he returned to Cambridge on 13 December then presented a talk to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on glassy tubes he had found amongst Maldonado sand dunes, explained by lightning having fused the sand. He then wrote his first paper, showing that the Chilean coast and the South American land-mass was rising slowly, and discussed his ideas with Lyell. To Lyell's delight, Darwin went further in balancing the rising continent with sinking mountains forming the basis of coral atolls. Darwin then returned to London to read his paper to the Geological Society on 4 January 1837. Despite Darwin's nerves about his début, the talk was so well received that he felt "like a peacock admiring his tail".

On the same day Darwin presented 80 mammal and 450 bird specimens to the Zoological Society. The Mammalia were ably taken on by George R. Waterhouse. While the birds seemed almost an afterthought the ornithologist John Gould was quick to notice the significance of specimens from the Galápagos Islands and startlingly revealed at the next meeting on 10 January that what Darwin had taken to be wrens, blackbirds and slightly differing finches were "a series of ground finches which are so peculiar" as to form "an entirely new group, containing 12 species." The story was covered by the daily newspapers.

Owen was finding unexpected relationships from the fossils: a horse sized anteater, a gigantic ground sloth and an ox-sized armoured armadillo which he called Glyptodon. The Patagonian spine and leg bones which Darwin had thought might be from a Mastodon were from a gigantic Llama. Lyell saw a "law of succession" with mammals being replaced by their own kind on each continent, and on 17 February 1837 used his presidential address at the Geographical Society to present Owen's findings to date on Darwin's fossils, pointing out this inference that extinct species were related to current species in the same locality. He invited Darwin to come along, and the speech drew Darwin's attention to the question of why past and present species in one place should be so closely related. At the same meeting Darwin was elected to the Council of the Society. For Lyell this was "a glorious addition to my society of geologists", gentlemen (and amateurs of independent means) with duty only to scientific integrity, social stability and responsible religion, for Darwin it meant joining the respectable élite of eminent geologists developing a science dealing with the age of the earth and the Days of Creation.

Darwin had already been invited by FitzRoy to contribute his Journal, based on his field notes, as the natural history section of the captain's account of the Beagle's voyage. He now also plunged into writing a book on South American Geology, putting his and Lyell's ideas forward against the cataclysmic explanation of mountain formation Alcide d'Orbigny was promoting in a multi-volume account of the continent begun two years previously.

To supervise his collections Darwin had to return to London, and on Lyell's advice he arrived on 6 March 1837, in time for one of Charles Babbage's Saturday soirées, talking shops about the latest developments "brilliantly attended by fashionable ladies, as well as literary and scientific gents", bankers and politicians, where Babbage promoted such projects as his mechanical computer. Lyell had been impressed by Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise suggesting God was a divine programmer rather than miraculously producing new species on a Creative whim. At first Darwin stayed with Eras, then moved to nearby lodgings, joining Eras's circle of friends including Martineau and Hensleigh and enjoying his intimate dinner parties with guests such as Lyell, Babbage and Thomas Carlyle.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Return to celebrity and science", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki