CHARLES DARWIN, THE MAN

By Dr. ADDISON GULICK

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

T the present time, which marks the fortieth anniversary of the

A death of Charles Darwin (died April 19, 1882), an odd re

crudescence of the old opposition to evolutionary thought in the less educated circles is challenging the attention of men of science in this country. But to us it seems much more appropriate to the anniversary to undertake to consider Darwin's personal traits, and especially such aspects of his character as bear upon his far-reaching influence upon men to-day.

Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809 of a family in which a considerable variety of excellent mental attainments are to be found; a family in which, if we should try to note any single outstanding mental characteristic that found repeated expression, we should have to say that the most constant trait was a very highly developed curiosity. Robert Waring Darwin, his father, was a physician. He was neither scientific nor philosophical in the strict sense, as it is reported that he did not try to generalize his knowledge under general laws. Yet he formed a theory for almost everything which occurred. He is described as having an extraordinary memory for people, events and dates, as being an unusually shrewd judge of character, and also a cautious and good man of business. The grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, showed a speculative turn in his curiosity, and was the author of the afterwards famous Zoonomia. Among more distant relations and ancestors are men who gave their enthusiasm to such subjects as numismatics, statistics and various branches of natural history.

On the maternal side, Darwin had the possibility of inheriting the unusual ability in practical arts for which the Wedgewood family was noted. His mother died early, when the son was only eight years of age, and the published record of her tells little more than that she was of a most kindly and sympathetic nature.

Charles Darwin felt the very deepest of personal devotion to his father, and many of his own traits of character are a very natural development from the family atmosphere in which he was raised. This applies especially to his kindliness and ready appreciation of others, and his extreme modesty as regards his own opinions and

accomplishments. As regards traits that were needed for his future career, it was his opinion that he acquired little besides the love of observing.

School seems to have been of exceptionally slight benefit to the young scientist. In fact the comments upon his education that he makes in his reminiscences are in surprisingly similar tenor to the ironic undercurrent in Henry Adams's reminiscences of his education. He was not taught to observe, nor to think, nor to use the languages which he would need, nor to make serious use of mathematics. To the end of his formal education, his desire seems to have been little more than to escape, usually into the country in company with congenial hunting companions and nature lovers. Strangely enough, this applies even to his life for two years as a medical student in Edinburgh, where he apparently came under a group of lecturers who were uncommonly devoid of inspiration, so that he felt positively repelled even from geology and botany. On the other hand, he began there to make acquaintances who developed his inclination toward acute observation of nature. He names in this connection the zoologist, Grant, and several other young university men, a negro taxidermist, and some of the fisher folk at Newhaven.

As the young Darwin showed only distaste for the medical sciences as presented to him, a church career was proposed instead, and he brushed up on his rusty Greek, to gain admittance to Cambridge. It is interesting that among his studies he found algebra and the classies unutterably dull, but geometry delightful for its vivid and precise logic, and Paley's "Evidences" and "Natural Theology" similarly pleasing for its keen deductive reasoning.

But in the main he shunned his studies in Cambridge as consistently as he had in Edinburgh. He became a devotee of hunting and riding, and then later became deeply engrossed with collecting beetles. "No poet," he says, "ever felt more delighted at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephens's Illustrations of British Insects the magic words 'captured by C. Darwin, Esq.'

Here again, as it had been in Edinburgh, the most important aspect of his life came from the friendships which he formed. Especially noteworthy were his constant companionship with Henslow, the professor of botany, and toward the end of his stay, his acquaintance with Professor Sedgwick of geology.

"Looking back," he says, "I infer that there must have been something in me a little superior to the common run of youths, otherwise the above-mentioned men, so much older than I and higher in academic position, would never have allowed me to asso

ciate with them. Certainly I was not aware of any such superiority."

Darwin's keen love of good logic and his passion for observation seem not to have been united in the same object in any of his activities in Cambridge, and the thought that they might conceivably be so united seems first to have been brought to him by a conversation with the geologist Sedgwick in the summer of 1831 (Life, p. 48): He told Sedgwick of a certain tropical volute shell that was supposed to have been found in an old gravel pit near Shrewsbury, England. "He at once said that it must have been thrown away by some one into the pit; but then added, if really embedded there it would be the greatest misfortune to geology, as it would overthrow all that we know about the superficial deposits of the Midland Counties. . . . I was . . . utterly astonished at Sedgwick not being delighted at so wonderful a fact as a tropical shell being found near the surface in the middle of England. Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realize, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them."

Darwin's appointment to H. M. S. Beagle, in 1831, when he was 22 years of age, was the beginning of his serious education. (Huxley, p. 271): "While at sea, he diligently collected, studied, and made copious notes upon the surface fauna. But with no previous training in dissection, hardly any power of drawing, and next to no knowledge of comparative anatomy, his occupation with work of this kind-notwithstanding all his zeal and industryresulted for the most part in a vast accumulation of useless manuscript." It was in geology that his training first began to show fruit. He had with him the first volume of Lyell's "Principles of Geology," and this book seems to have had a greater influence upon his scientific methods than any other one factor.

In this book Lyell expounds by the inductive method the "uniformitarian" conception of geological history, which, unlike the cataclysmic theory which was then generally accepted, viewed the course of this history as controlled by the prolonged action of the very same forces that we can study at work to-day. The influence of this volume upon him was profound and manifold; so great indeed, that later when he had convinced himself of the doctrine of natural selection, it became his conscious ambition to present his theory to the public in a book modelled along the same logical lines as Lyell's great work. Under the guidance of this book he became a keen and systematic geological explorer, and he was able at the end of his voyage to present the world with three important monographs in that science, covering the coral islands, the volcanic

islands and the South American continental regions which he visited. It is interesting that he recommends geology to his cousin, W. D. Fox, telling him that in it "there is so much larger a field for thought than in the other branches of natural history;" also "Geology is a capital science to begin, as it requires nothing but a little reading, thinking and hammering." Evidently the instinct for generalization had at last got control over him.

From this date on, investigative science becomes more and more frankly his predominant interest, so that a year later (1836) he confesses about certain ports which he expected to visit "these will be a poor field for natural history, and without it I have lately discovered that the pleasure of seeing new places is as nothing."

When he returned to England in 1836, at the age of 27, his characteristics as a scientific man were fully formed. Thereafter the chief scientific events of his life are summed up in the development and publication of the great generalizations for which he will ever be remembered. So we can stop tracing his biography, and concern ourselves with his outstanding traits.

One of the traits which shows most vividly to the reader of Darwin's letters, and of his "Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle," is his keen ability to place his finger precisely upon the unsolved mysteries of contemporary science, and his apparently instinctive sense as to which of these mysteries ought to be capable of solution. It is obvious what a depth of intuition he showed, when he started, in 1837, a notebook on the nature and mutability of species and varieties in nature and under domestication. The related mystery of geographical distribution is most vividly handled in the "Voyage of the Beagle." As early as 1835 the discussion of an epidemic among the Maories gave him the occasion for a similarly clear expression of the scientific mystery of contagion. Thus his mind was perpetually setting him problems of the most fundamental nature, which he simply could not leave alone. His son quotes the characteristic remark which a new experimental idea would often bring from him: "I can't rest now, till I have tried it."

The problems to which he gave his time were always ones which were capable of approach by the methods of a naturalist, and the naturalist's methods were always his preference. Almost always he collected great masses of facts, the qualitative range of which usually occupied his attention much more than their quantitative mathematical analysis. His method did, however, lead him to gather facts in such quantities that it was only possible to master and present them by using the simpler form of statistical treatment, and he may almost be said to have introduced this method as a mental tool for naturalists.

As to the solutions to his problems, he confesses that only in the rarest instances did he have an inkling of the right clue, until after extensive data had been collected. He mentions only one important exception to this rule, and that is one of his earliest contributions. to science, the theory of the formation of coral reefs. In all other important cases he started either without any hypothesis at all, or else with a tentative hypothesis that had later to be discarded.

It is small wonder that the unwritten history of his discarded hypotheses left him increasingly mistrustful of all elaborately deductive reasoning. For all deduction is based on the preliminary acceptance of a group of laws or hypotheses. In this respect he seems to us of to-day to contrast sharply with many of the characteristics of his own age, which was certainly much given to farflung systems of speculative reasoning.

It is possible that some one may feel like challenging this statement that Darwin's speculations were not built into far-flung and elaborate systems like those of his leading contemporaries. But I believe that his methods in seeking a scientific solution of the problem of species fully justify the assertion. When he became dissatisfied with the orthodox doctrine of special creation, he did not turn at once to one of the doctrines of descent, several of which had already been propounded. Instead he insisted upon waiting to detect some process by which species are actually undergoing transformation at the present day and then he merely pointed out that within the vast extent of geological time there was room for this process to achieve results of the most startling magnitude.

Only in the one instance of his "Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis" he appears superficially to deviate from his preference to keep away from elaborate systems of theory. But he was himself most keenly alive to a difference in status between this provisional, unproved hypothesis which he brings forward as probably a helpful stimulus to the investigation of heredity, and the other theses he has defended, such as natural and sexual selection, which are to him scientific principles, the actual proofs of which are already substantially in hand. Had he taken the latter attitude toward Pangenesis, he would have been committing the typical intellectual sin of his era, and perhaps of many another era, of building great speculative structures upon slight foundations.

In the second place, in spite of certain intricacies in the details of the hypothesis, the speculative foundation of Pangenesis is not really intricate. It rests simply on two suppositions: (1) that all heredity is by continuity of substance, and (2) the now discarded supposition that every part in a many-celled animal begets. the corresponding part in the offspring. It follows from these