Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists

for Kate and Anna, and for Dorinda

Once grant that species [of] one genus may pass into each other . . . & whole fabric totters & falls.

Charles Darwin, Notebook C

Masterpieces are not single solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Contents

Preface

1 Darwin’s List

2 Aristotle’s Eyes

3 The Worshipful Curiosity of Jahiz

4 Leonardo and the Potter

5 Trembley’s Polyp

6 The Consul of Cairo

7 The Hotel of the Philosophers

8 Erasmus Underground

9 The Jardin des Plantes

10 The Sponge Philosopher

11 The Encyclopaedist

12 Alfred Wallace’s Fevered Dreams

Epilogue

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Notes

Footnotes

Bibliography

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

Preface

I grew up in a Creationist household. As a child, I often thought about Charles Darwin; I wondered who he was and whether he knew, as my grandfather and the other preachers alleged, that he had been sent to earth to do Satan’s work. It seemed an odd reason to make a man, I thought, but then, in the scale of things, perhaps no more odd than the story of God and Satan tormenting Job or the angels who appeared in Sodom and Gomorrah, no more strange than the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife was turned into, or the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I also wondered if, as Satan’s man, Darwin might have hooves and scales. But generally it wasn’t a good idea to ask questions about such things.

One hot summer’s day, when I was around the age of nine or ten, knowing that I could not ask about Darwin or his ideas without being reprimanded, I went looking for him in the pages of the family Encyclopaedia Britannica. The house was empty – my preacher father was away from home and my mother was out gathering my younger brothers and sisters for the evening prayer meeting – but I still felt fearful as I eased out the volume marked D from the shelves. I knew I could be getting myself into serious trouble.

But the page where Darwin should have been was missing. Along the gap there was a perfectly straight stub: the page, my father told me much later, had been razored out by my grandfather some time in the 1950s. When the encyclopaedia volumes had arrived in their wooden crate, my grandfather had summoned the family to the sitting room in their Brighton house to admire them; during this ceremony he had picked up the D volume and taken a razor to the page, while delivering a sermon about the wickedness of Mr Charles Darwin.

The missing page only made me more determined to find out what Darwin had really said. Because we had only a small collection of carefully selected books on the shelves of the family home – including several morality tales such as The Story of Mary Jones and her Bible – I had already discovered the transgressive pleasures of the school library. There, a few days later, I found another encyclopaedia set and, in a stolen moment between lessons, I read as quickly as I could the definitions of evolution, animal–human kinship and natural selection, convinced that at any moment I might be discovered and denounced. I struggled to understand the complex ideas on the page. I dared not ask questions, however, even of my schoolteachers, for fear that news of my scientific interests might be revealed at a parent–teacher evening. Questions multiplied in my head. I began to daydream about half-animal, half-human forms, molten landscapes and prehistoric worlds.

When my parents later joined a moderate Anglican church and developed more permissive views, later still when my father had lost his faith and my mother had allowed us to work out our own beliefs for ourselves, when, as a teenager, I had the freedom to pursue my own intellectual curiosities unchecked, I continued to feel the simultaneous magnetism and frisson of danger when I wandered, as I often did, back to library shelves containing books on Darwin or evolution or genetics. I still feel it.

Certain curiosities, perhaps especially those that arise out of childhood prohibition and transgression, are not sated by a lifetime’s reading and thinking. Evolution opened up a new way of seeing the world for me that was quite different from the one I had grown up with, but not necessarily any easier to understand or any less odd or extraordinary.

Years later, I wrote a book about the young Darwin. I came to admire him for his doggedness, for his rebelliousness and for the range and brilliance of his imagination, as well as for the ways he had stuck to his guns and kept on pursuing answers to his questions about the origins of species even though he knew he would be denounced as a heretic.

At the same time, I became preoccupied with the shadowy figures behind Darwin, his predecessors, the less well-known rebels who, I realised, had asked similar questions about the origins of species before him, in some cases a long time before him, and reached similar conclusions. What kinds of risks had they taken? What price had they paid for their curiosity? Why had understanding nature’s laws and the origins of species been so important to them that they had been prepared to challenge intellectual or religious orthodoxies and thus risk their reputations and sometimes even their freedom? I knew they must have been audacious as well as clever.

Priests and bishops denounced Darwin’s predecessors; police agents spied on them. They locked their ideas away for fear of bringing disgrace on their families. They deferred publishing. They searched out like-minded men and women and safe places to ask the questions about the origins of time and of species that pressed upon them. They went underground. All of them went on gathering evidence just the same, convinced that species were not fixed and that they had not all been created in seven days.

Many of Darwin’s predecessors were called infidels. The word has its origins in the fifteenth century and means in its broadest sense one who does not believe. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when religious leaders and university professors called Darwin’s predecessors infidels, they believed them to be as dangerous as the infidel soldiers of the Crusades; anyone who promoted a theory about the mutability of species, they declared, was an enemy of Christianity because such an idea contravened the sacred truth set out in the Bible. By the early nineteenth century it seemed there were so many infidels around – mostly radicals who were promoting atheism as part of a reformist agenda – that evangelicals wrote books with titles like The Young Man’s Guide Against Infidelity to warn young men how to recognise infidels in public places and how to steer clear of their dangerous traps and snares.¹

We cannot accurately call these men evolutionists, although I have done so in this book as a kind of shorthand. Even Darwin did not call himself an evolutionist. The word evolution, which means literally an unfolding or unrolling, did not come into common usage to mean the mutation of species through natural selection until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before then there had been no common phrase to describe the idea of species transformation or descent with modification. In early nineteenth-century France people like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck used the term transformism. In 1832, the British geologist Charles Lyell, deeply opposed to the theory of species change and scornful of the French who were all infidels as far as the British were concerned, labelled the idea transmutation, a word drawn from alchemy; he denounced it as both wrong-headed and heretical. Everyone knew that alchemists held nonsensical notions of magic and unicorns and making gold from lead. Transmutation was preposterous, Lyell declared in forty pages of close refutation in the second volume of Principles of Geology; it was a castle in the air.

In July 1837 Charles Darwin, who had been reading and re-reading Lyell’s Principles of Geology on the Beagle and had become convinced of the truth of species change through his own investigations, began the first of what would become a series of what he called the ‘transmutation of species’ notebooks. In 1847 he used the phrase ‘us transmutationists’ in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker to make his allegiances clear and to try to persuade Hooker to do the same.² He did not think there was anything ridiculous about such theories, but he knew he would be ridiculed for holding them, until he could find a way of proving them to be true beyond all reasonable doubt. He knew that what he was doing was dangerous.

When Darwin finally published On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859 and began to steel himself against the first waves of reprobation, he became increasingly preoccupied with his predecessors. He determined to put together a lineage, a line of intellectual descent, to bring these people out of obscurity, but he failed to uncover much information. He was, he wrote to a friend, a poor scholar of history. He was also afraid of getting that history wrong or of not doing his predecessors justice. He did what he could with the little knowledge he unearthed, adding a preface called ‘An Historical Sketch’ to the third edition of Origin in which he listed thirty men who had published evolutionary ideas before him. By the time he revised that list for the fourth edition, it had swelled to include thirty-eight men. The sketch was just that, a rather hesitant document, the best that Darwin could do in the time he had and perfectly adequate for what was needed. However, as a man who took intense pleasure in reading the biographies of the lives of the men and women he admired, he must have remained perpetually curious about the lost lives of his predecessors. This book, Darwin’s Ghosts, is dedicated to both him and them.

As I began to search for these lost forebears, I found men of science who were not on Darwin’s list, men who lived in medieval Basra or in Renaissance Italy and France who had been called ‘proto-evolutionists’ but about whom Darwin would have known nothing. I found others on Darwin’s list who should not have been there. To my frustration, I found no women who published evolutionary ideas before the Origin.

I have not included all the people who might have claims to a place in this book. Of those whom I have chosen, some have their own chapters; some, whose stories are particularly entangled with others, share chapters; some appear briefly in chapters that belong to others. All who appear here are pathfinders, iconoclasts and innovators, men whom Darwin would have claimed as kin even if he thought their pursuits and ideas misguided or fanciful. Most of them have regrettably disappeared from our view, obscured by the shadow of Darwin.

1

Darwin’s List

Kent, 1859

Just before Christmas in 1859, only a month after he had finally published On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, Charles Darwin found himself disturbed, even haunted, by the thought of his intellectual predecessors. He entered a state of extreme anxiety that had the effect of making him more than usually forgetful.

It had been a cold winter. Though Darwin might have liked to linger on the Sand Walk with his children to admire the intricately patterned hoarfrost on the trees, he knew he had work to do, letters to answer about his book, criticisms to face.

He had weathered the first blasts of the storm of censure in a sanatorium in Ilkley where he had been taking the water cure, wrapped in wet sheets in hot rooms, the skin on his face dry and cracked with eczema. Since his return to his family home Down House, now garlanded with Christmas holly, ivy and mistletoe by his children, he had braced himself every morning against the sound of the postman’s footsteps on the gravel outside his study window. The letters, he lamented to his wife Emma, came like swarms.¹

Each new postbag delivered to Down House brought letters voicing opprobrium, some veiled, some outspoken; a few contained praise. But, though some reviewers might be expressing outrage, Darwin reassured himself, hundreds of ordinary people were reading his book. On the first day of sale in November, the entire print run of 1,250 books had sold out. Even Mudie’s Select Lending Library had taken 500 copies. Now his publisher John Murray was about to publish a second edition; this time Murray intended to print 3,000 copies and he had agreed to let Darwin correct a few minor mistakes. Darwin was relieved. The mistakes embarrassed him.

As readers and reviewers took up their positions for or against his book, Darwin began to keep a note of where everyone stood on the battleground. ‘We shall soon be a good body of working men,’ he wrote to his closest friend and confidant, the botanist Joseph Hooker, ‘& shall have, I am convinced, all young & rising naturalists on our side.’²

The letter that launched Darwin into a prolonged attack of anxiety came from the Reverend Baden Powell, the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, a theologian and physicist who had been forthright in his support for the development theory for some time.i The elderly professor was on the brink of being prosecuted for ecclesiastical heresy.³ Of all the letters in that day’s pile, the one from Powell would be innocuous enough, Darwin assumed.⁴ He scanned it quickly, relieved to glimpse phrases like ‘masterly volume’ and a few other words of praise. But Baden Powell was not happy. Having finished with his compliments, the professor launched into a direct attack, criticising Darwin not for being wrong, not for being an infidel, but for failing to acknowledge his predecessors. He even implied that Darwin had taken the credit for a theory that had already been argued by others, notably himself.

This was not the first time Darwin had been accused of intellectual theft, but, until now, the accusations had been tucked away in reviews and had been only implicit. How original is this book, people were clearly asking. How new is this idea of Mr Darwin’s?

He might have protected himself better from charges of plagiarism, Darwin reflected fretfully, if he had only written a preface, as most scientists did when they published any controversial set of claims: a survey of all the ideas that had gone before. It gave the ideas a history and a context. It was a way of showing where the edges of other people’s ideas finished and your own began. But he had not done so, though he had planned to. And now he was being accused of passing off somebody else’s ideas as his own.

Darwin’s study in Down House, Kent.

As he sat reading and re-reading Powell’s letter, Darwin’s excuses came thick and fast. He should have included a short preface, he wanted to tell Powell, but his book had been rushed. He had not been at all well. His closest friends, the botanist Joseph Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell, had been badgering him to publish for years. Then, when Alfred Russel Wallace had sent him that alarming essay from the Malay Archipelago which showed that Wallace had worked out natural selection too, Hooker and Lyell had practically forced him to go straight into print. For months, he had hardly slept for writing. He had never written so fast or for so long. And in all that rush, he had neglected to acknowledge those who had gone before.⁵  Besides, aware that he was a poor scholar of history, he had not been confident that he knew exactly who had gone before or that he had the skills to describe their ideas accurately and fairly.⁶ They wrote in every language under the sun. Some of them were obscure, others mad. It would have taken years.

Darwin had known from Wallace’s enthusiastic letters that he was getting close to working out natural selection, but until seeing Wallace’s essay he had underestimated the speed at which the brilliant young collector was working. The thought that, after all this procrastinating, someone like Alfred Russel Wallace could step in and publish his essay and make a claim to the discovery of natural selection before him was more than he could bear. At that point Hooker and Lyell had intervened, explaining to Wallace that Darwin had first formulated the idea some twenty years earlier. Wallace had been generous. He had given up any claim to being the discoverer of natural selection. He had even written to Hooker to say that he did not mind in the least that Darwin was going to take the credit and that it was right that he did so. He considered himself lucky, he confessed, to have been given some credit.⁷

So Wallace had renounced his claim on natural selection. But now, only a year after Darwin had escaped the Wallace tangle, here was another claimant rising like Marley’s ghost from the postbag – the Reverend Baden Powell. Darwin had forgotten about Powell.

My theory. My theory. My doctrine. Darwin had been writing those words for years in his notebooks. But was it his alone? He had told Hooker and Lyell that he was not ready. It was all very well for them to urge him into print. After all they were not going to be deluged with disgust and outrage. They were not going to have to explain to their troubled wives; they were not going to have to apologise and mollify bishops and clerics and bigots or answer plagiarism charges. And now John Murray was about to send another three thousand copies of Origin out into the world.

There was no stopping any of it. His theory had not leaked quietly into the public domain as he had planned; it had entered the world as a deluge, like the water pipes in the Ilkley water-cure establishment, cold and gushing and unstoppable. He, Lyell and Hooker had simply pulled the rope and released the valve. And here were the consequences.

A portrait of Charles Darwin in his forties, made from a photograph taken in 1854.

Hooker would know what to do. Darwin wrote to invite him to Down House. Bring your wife, he wrote, bring the children. On 21 December 1859, Joseph Hooker’s wife wrote to Darwin to say that her husband would be happy to visit the Darwins in the second week of January and that he would bring their eldest son William with him. Darwin was delighted. Such a visit would do him tremendous good, he wrote to Hooker, for though the water cure had improved his health, now that he was in the midst of the critical storm, he was, he wrote, ‘utterly knocked up & cannot rally – I am not worth an old button’.⁸ The eczema had broken out again. He was sick to his stomach.

The following day, three days before Christmas, while Darwin was still trying to compose a reply to the Reverend Powell, a third claimant emerged, this time from France. Darwin’s butler told him that a parcel had arrived in the evening post. Though the children protested, Darwin left the warm parlour where Emma had been reading aloud to them in the shadow of the Christmas tree and slipped away across the hall to the darkened study to retrieve it.

With pleasure and relief, he recognised the handwriting on the label as Hooker’s. The parcel contained an essay by Hooker that Darwin had promised to read and a heavy volume of a French scientific journal, the Revue Horticole. Hooker explained in an accompanying letter that a scientist called Decaisneii had written to him to tell him that a botanist named Charles Naudin had discovered natural selection back in 1852. Darwin, Decaisne wrote, had no right to claim natural selection as his idea. Hooker enclosed the volume of the journal in which Naudin’s paper on species had been published, so that Darwin could judge the claim for himself.⁹ Darwin had read and admired Naudin’s work years before but he had entirely forgotten the paper.

Darwin ordered the study fire to be relit. He read and re-read Naudin’s paper late into the night, struggling with some of the French scientific terms, reaching for his French dictionary, making notes as high winds rattled the window panes.¹⁰ Naudin’s claim was not a serious threat, he finally told Emma a few hours later. The French botanist had not discovered natural selection. He was quite sure of that.

The following morning, returning to his desk cluttered with the debris of the previous evening’s struggle with French verbs, and the notepaper with all his scribblings across it, he wrote to allay Hooker’s fears, explaining with relief: ‘I cannot find one word like the Struggle for existence & Natural Selection.’ Naudin had got no closer to natural selection than the French evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, he wrote emphatically. Darwin asked Hooker to pass on his refutation of the claim to their mutual friend Lyell, adding with a touch of embarrassment, ‘though it is foolish work sticking up for independence or priority’.¹¹ He had nothing against Naudin, after all. He was a good botanist.

Darwin could not decide how best to answer these phantom claimants. Should he let others intervene as Hooker and Lyell had done with Wallace? Should he write directly to each new claimant or simply ignore them? What was the gentlemanly thing to do? Even through Christmas dinner the question troubled him. While the children were playing, he slipped away to write to Hooker in the afternoon, scribbling, as if struggling with his own conscience, ‘I shall not write to Decaisne: I have always had a strong feeling that no one had better defend his own priority: I cannot say I am as indifferent to the subject as I ought to be; but one can avoid doing anything in consequence.’¹² The Reverend Baden Powell was different. He needed answering. The man had a point: Darwin was the first to admit that he should have acknowledged all those natural philosophers who had had the courage to publish evolutionary ideas before him – men such as his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin and the misguided but brilliant Lamarck and others. It was bad form not to have done so. In the rush to publish he had forgotten them.

Everyone had forgotten them.

All through New Year, all through the singing and the feasts and the toasts, Darwin struggled to formulate a letter to Powell. He imagined the outspoken professor spluttering his outrage to the fellows of Oriel or at Geological Society meetings. Conversations with Powell opened up in Darwin’s head again and again, sometimes angry, sometimes defensive or apologetic. Christmas was no time to be defending one’s reputation, he told himself, trying to attend to the family celebrations, to be a good father and husband and to be attentive to his eldest son, William, home from Cambridge for Christmas and for his birthday on 27 December.

Despite his resolutions, Darwin still woke in the night, slipping out of bed so as not to disturb Emma and pacing the floor in his study. How many other predecessors had he forgotten? How many did he simply not know about? He had never been a good historian of science. How would he ever write a definitive list?

Hooker’s visit was not to be. Down House seemed besieged both from outside and inside; terrible storms lashed the country. There were shipwrecks reported around the coast; a tornado in Wiltshire uprooted trees, destroyed hayricks and swept the thatch from the roofs of cottages. Heavy lumps of ice fell in a freak hailstorm killing birds, hares and rabbits.¹³ As the year turned, nine-year-old Lenny Darwin began to run a fever. When the first flush of spots appeared, Emma urged Darwin to write to Hooker to put him off his visit. Darwin wrote sadly to his friend, repeating his wife’s words of warning: ‘Lenny has got the Measles & it is sure to run like wild-fire through the house, as it has been extraordinarily prevalent in village. If your boy Willy has not had measles, I fear it will not be safe for you to bring him here.’¹⁴

In the first week of January 1860, as the measles spread first to twelve-year-old Elizabeth and then to eleven-year-old Francis, and having not been able to talk to Hooker, Darwin resolved to write to Powell and to draft a historical sketch just as he had planned to do years before. The timing was good: the American botanist Asa Gray was organising an authorised American edition of Origin and he wanted a preface from Darwin. Darwin talked aloud to himself, resolving to put it all straight in the American preface by adding a full historical sketch, reminding himself that the idea of species mutability was not his. Not even the idea of the descent with modification was his. It belonged to Lamarck and Maillet and further back it was probably in Buffon and even in his grandfather’s book Zoonomia. He had never claimed that descent with modification was his idea, though of course Powell thought that he had. But natural selection – the idea that nature had evolved by selecting the fittest to survive – was his. No one, not even Wallace, had discovered natural selection before he had or at least put all the ideas together in such a way as to make it explain so many large groups of facts. He owed it both to himself and to his predecessors to explain what was his and what was theirs.

It was only when he began to write his letter to Powell on 8 January that Darwin suddenly remembered that he had started writing a list of his predecessors several years earlier. He went to find it. The embryonic historical sketch was in the drawer where he had left it, in the file with the big still-to-be-published full manuscript version of the species book. The list was not finished, of course; it was just a scribbled catalogue of predecessors with notes. But it was there. He had started it back in 1856, knowing that his species book would have to have one. And – it made him blush again to see the scale and extent of his own forgetting – there was the Reverend Powell in the catalogue, properly acknowledged and praised.

So he wrote to Powell. ‘My dear Sir,’ he began,

my health was so poor, whilst I wrote the Book, that I was unwilling to add in the least to my labour; therefore I attempted no history of the subject; nor do I think that I was bound to do so. I just alluded indeed to the Vestiges & I am now heartily sorry I did so. No educated person, not even the most ignorant, could suppose that I meant to arrogate to myself the origination of the doctrine that species had not been independently created . . . Had I alluded to those authors who have maintained, with more or less ability, that species have not been separately created, I should have felt myself bound to have given some account of all; namely, passing over the ancients,

and here Darwin had to glance again at his earlier catalogue so as to remember the names, and some of the spellings, ‘Buffon (?) Lamarck (by the way his erroneous views were curiously anticipated by my Grandfather), Geoffry St Hilaire [sic] & especially his son Isidore; Naudin; Keyserling; an American (name this minute forgotten); the Vestiges of Creation; I believe some Germans. Herbert Spencer; & yourself . . . I had intended in my larger book to have attempted some such history; but my own catalogue frightens me. I will, however, consult some scientific friends & be guided by their advice.’¹⁵

Darwin read back over the letter to check the tone. His glance snagged on the sentence: ‘my own catalogue frightens me’. That was overly candid perhaps, and a touch histrionic. But candour might well disarm Powell. And after all, it was true: the catalogue did frighten him. Those scribbled names on the sheet of paper frightened him.

Predecessors? Who were they? Most of them were dead. Their names slipped away from his memory. Why could he not remember the name of the American evolutionist?iii Exhausted by the very idea of writing a historical sketch, he folded up the letter to Powell and handed it to Parslow, his butler, for the post.

It seemed as if his work would never be done. He felt the burden of censure heavy on his shoulders now that he was back in the study, stoking the fire, feeling the heat agitating the itching on the dry and flaking skin of his face. He had placed himself at the mercy of all his readers as soon as he had gone into print – the priests, the theologians, the reviewers, the letter writers. Four days before his book had been published, an anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum had denounced Origin and declared it too dangerous to read. Darwin wrote to Hooker the following day: ‘The manner in which [the reviewer] drags in immortality, & sets the Priests at me & leaves me to their mercies, is base . . . he would on no account burn me; but he will get the wood ready & tell the black beasts how to catch me.’¹⁶

And there in the light from the fire, Darwin remembered the heretics who had been burned in the marketplaces of England. Burned because they kept mass or because they did not keep mass. Burned because, even under torture and starvation, they would not recant. Even his close friends would turn against him now that he had gone into print. Their priests and bishops would expect it of them. This was the final reckoning. The taking of sides. He had warned the naturalist Hugh Falconer on 11 November that when he read Origin, ‘Lord how savage you will be . . . how you will long to crucify me alive.’¹⁷ ‘It is like confessing a murder,’ he had admitted to Hooker back in 1844 when he had finally summoned the courage to tell his friends about his species theory for the first time.

Over the next three weeks as winter deepened, a cold spell iced over the lakes and rivers of Britain and high winds returned, whistling around Down House and rattling the window panes, Darwin’s list grew. There had been only ten names on the list he had sent to Powell, he told Emma, ‘and some Germans’ whose names he had also forgotten. Now, as the predecessors came one by one out of the shadows and into the clear light of his own prose, his fears began to subside. Not only did he come to feel their presence as a kind of protection, a shield from charges of intellectual theft, but he began to think of them as allies, as fellow outlaws and infidels. He read and re-read their words, increasingly reassured by his new knowledge. Now, if pressed, he could define exactly where his ideas had been pre-empted and where they were entirely new.

He admired them. He stopped forgetting their names.

Three weeks later, on 8 February, Darwin sent the first version of his ‘Historical Sketch’ to America for the authorised American edition, a corrected and revised version of the first (pirated) version. Darwin’s list had almost doubled in length since he had assembled the first tentative ten names for Powell in mid-January. There were eighteen names on this new list published in the summer of 1860. Darwin’s catalogue of predecessors was now, he was sure, as definitive as he could make it. He sent the same version of the ‘Historical Sketch’ to Heinrich Georg Bronn in Heidelberg who was translating the Origin into German for the first German edition of 1860.

Eighteen predecessors. A good number. But still a relatively small one.

Meanwhile the hostile reviews of Origin were becoming more overtly aggressive. The gloves were off. ‘The stones are beginning to fly,’ Darwin wrote to Hooker, and he reassured Wallace that ‘all these attacks will make me only more determinately fight’.¹⁸ To Asa Gray he wrote: ‘I will buckle on my armour & fight my best . . . But it will be a long fight. By myself I shd. be powerless. I feel my weak health acutely, as I cannot work hard.’¹⁹

There were still important evolutionists yet to step out of the shadows to claim some of Darwin’s glory.

On 7 April 1860, his favourite journal, the Gardeners’ Chronicle, carried an article by a man he had never heard of called Patrick Matthew, a Scottish landowner and fruit farmer. Matthew claimed that he had discovered natural selection back in 1831, twenty-eight years before Darwin. There was no beating about the bush. This was a direct accusation: Darwin had no right to claim natural selection as his own, Matthew wrote. By way of proof, he republished numerous short extracts from his original book, unpromisingly entitled Naval Timber and Arboriculture.

Darwin was horrified that such an attack should be rehearsed in the pages of his beloved Gardeners’ Chronicle. Moreover, Matthew’s claim to be the discoverer of natural selection was a strong one. Seriously alarmed, Darwin sent for the book and was reassured to find that the passages in question were tucked away in the appendix of what was a very obscure and specialist book. Nonetheless he determined to be a gentleman.

A week or so later Darwin sent a letter to the Gardeners’ Chronicle. ‘I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection,’ he wrote. ‘I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, has heard of Mr. Matthew’s views, considering how briefly they are given, and that they appeared in the Appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture. I can do no more than offer my apologies to Mr. Matthew for my entire ignorance of his publication.’²⁰

Darwin’s response took the wind out of Matthew’s sails. Flattered and mollified, the fruit farmer published his final word on the matter in the Gardeners’ Chronicle on 12 May: ‘To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr. Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had; to me it did not appear a discovery.’

Matthew had conceded the throne, but he retained his claim to an important place in Darwin’s list.

Eighteen names became nineteen.

That same May Charles Lyell sent Darwin a paper on natural selection by a Dr Hermann Schaaffhausen published in 1853; nineteen names became twenty.

In October 1860 an Irish doctor called Henry Freke sent Darwin a pamphlet he had published in 1851 describing animals and plants evolving from a single filament. The pamphlet was, Darwin told Hooker with some relief, ‘ill-written unintelligible rubbish’.²¹ But if he was to play by the rules of the game, even eccentric Henry Freke had a claim to a place in the list.

Twenty names became twenty-one.

By the time Darwin revised the ‘Historical Sketch’ again for the third English edition of the Origin of Species in late 1860, his list of predecessors included thirty men, including his own grandfather. New claimants included Patrick Matthew, Henry Freke, Constantine Rafinesque, Robert Grant, Dr Schaaffhausen and Richard Owen.

Putting the poison-tongued Oxford naturalist Richard Owen on the list gave Darwin particular pleasure. Owen had written a spiteful and envious review of Origin in April 1860. ‘Odious,’ Darwin had called it. Owen had not even had the courage to sign his name to it, he complained; instead he had taken cover in anonymity, although Darwin’s friends had later rooted out his identity. Owen had also sneered at Darwin’s failure to include a list of his predecessors. So putting Owen on the list was for Darwin a way of getting even, a way of ridiculing Owen’s philosophical inconsistencies and contradictions. In the new version of the ‘Historical Sketch’, he quoted Owen’s extraordinary claim of 1852 that he had discovered natural selection, allowing himself a touch of scorn: ‘This belief in Professor Owen that he then gave to the world the theory of natural selection will surprise all those who are acquainted with the several passages in his works, reviews, and lectures, published since the Origin, in which he strenuously opposes the theory; and it will please all those who are interested on this side of the question, as it may be presumed that his opposition will now cease.’

Robert Grant, who was also new to the list, was Darwin’s old mentor at Edinburgh. Now impoverished and mocked for his views, he was teaching at the University of London. Reading Darwin’s Origin had prompted Grant finally to publish his evolution lectures and to remind Darwin that he had published articles on evolution in Scottish journals all through the 1820s. Darwin disliked Grant’s radical political views and wanted to distance himself from them, but he knew he would have to include him in the list if he was to stick to the rules of gentlemanly behaviour.

There were demotions too. In 1860 Darwin took one name off the list: Benoît de Maillet, the eccentric Frenchman who had worked up a theory of animal–human kinship in Cairo in the early eighteenth century. In his savage review of Origin Richard Owen had implied that Darwin was as foolish as the fantasist Maillet who had believed in mermaids. That was more ridicule than Darwin could bear. He took a pen and put a line through Maillet’s name.

By the fourth edition of Origin, completed in ten weeks in 1866, Darwin’s list had swelled to no fewer than thirty-seven names. Since the publication of the third edition, he had found another eight European evolutionists in an article published back in 1858 by his German translator Heinrich Georg Bronn, which he had not been able to read until Camilla Ludvig, the Darwin family’s German governess, translated it for him. Darwin no longer had the time or the patience to test each of the claims individually so he placed all eight new names inside a single footnote.

And then in 1865, just as Darwin was completing the final amendments to the fourth edition of the Origin, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle stepped out of the shadows as a claimant. Clair James Grece, a town clerk and Greek scholar from Redhill, wrote to Darwin claiming that he had found natural selection in Aristotle’s work, ideas recorded in lecture notes scribbled in Athens two thousand years earlier. He had translated the passage into English for Darwin as proof. Darwin had read Aristotle at school. He admired him above all other naturalists, he told Hooker – even more than Linnaeus or Cuvier. But he knew so little of his work and he was not going to learn Greek at this stage in his life. So in every version of the ‘Historical Sketch’ he had written so far, he had simply ‘passed over’ the ‘ancients’, apologising for the limitations of his knowledge.

The passage Grece sent was from a book that Darwin did not know and, given that Grece’s translation was pretty incomprehensible, and that he was reading the words out of context, it was difficult for him to tell whether it really was an ancient Greek version of natural selection, as Grece claimed. But Darwin was prepared to give the clerk the benefit of the doubt because he admired Aristotle; he was the first man to have looked closely at animals and the structures and connections of their bodies – all animals, right down to the sea