Born 12 February 1809, Charles Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. This usually held due to his seminal book On the Origin of Species, first published in November 1859. But as L. Sprague de Camp observed in his Lost Continents (1970):
After the Darwinian revolution had provided scientists with a solid framework on which to hang the history of the Earth and its life, the closing decades of the last century saw a great surge of activity in the fields of biology and geology.
In fact Darwin wrote no less than ten other books:
On the Origin of Species was his second having been preceded two decades earlier by
The Voyage of the Beagle, still considered a classic. H had traveled as naturalist on the surveying voyage of
HMS Beagle to the coasts of South America, New Zealand and Australia between December 1831 and October 1836. It may have been in South America that he contracted the then-unknown Chagas’ disease that was to afflict him for the rest of his long life.
This did not halt his authoring either books or scientific papers – and half of those books dealt with plant life. His acclaimed
Origin was followed three years later in 1862 by the
Fertilization of Orchids, a subject that had long fascinated him. Here, if any further proof was really necessary, was shown his abilities as an astute observer.
Madagascar’s Star-of-Bethlehem orchid,
Angrecum sequipedale, bears star-shaped, fragrant ivory white flowers that bloom around Christmas. The nectar tube, a whitish-green spur, is about 30 centimetres long. Darwin, studying the fertilization of orchids by insects, predicted that in that great, mysterious island there would be found a moth with a 25-to-28-centimetre proboscis capable of reaching the nectar at the bottom of this tube and fertilizing the blooms. Years after Darwin’s death in 1892 just such a Lepidoptera was discovered, the night-flying
Xanthopan morgani praedicta.
His next book,
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), was not so successful as he had not the benefit of the work of Austrian monk Mendel, who had been labouring year after year in a monastery garden to discover the basis of genetics. Darwin, experimenting in his garden at Down House in a Kentish village, was frustrated. “The little beggars are doing just what I don't want them to,” he exclaimed.
Down House was the oasis he and his wife, Emma, daughter of prominent industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, sought for. Perhaps not inappropriately, the county of Kent was known as the Garden of England. He relished the calm surroundings Emma created for him in sickness and health. The countryside was forever a pleasure. In a letter, he explained how:
“The weather is quite delicious. Yesterday, after writing to you, I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour and a half and enjoyed myself – the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old birches, with their white stems, and a fringe of distant green fro the larches, made an excessively pretty view. At last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as I ever saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.”
This had not deterred him though from penning two further books, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and
The Expression if Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Neither was likely to please the more staid, conservative of Victorians on either side of the Atlantic. However, Darwin preferred phrases such as “natural selection” and not “survival of the fittest” and “the struggle for existence” used by his enthusiasts. However, both books confirmed that, as he said, “I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.”
For his next four volumes, however, he returned to botany, commencing in 1875 with
Insectivorous Plants. The first he encountered was a native sundew, Drosera, in 1860 on an English heath. “I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world,” he wrote, spending months researching the plant. He continued his studies with the North American Venus flytrap, observing that it took a week for the leaves to dissolve their prey before spreading open again.
The following year he published yet another study,
The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom. This was not a new subject for his curiosity to delve into. Indeed it was not the famed finches of the Galapagos that he first described in
The Origin of Species but the effects of artificial selection on gooseberries. And while gooseberry bushes do not occur as separate sexes some plants do, he observed. Then again though, many plants are hermaphrodite – and observation bound to perturb the conservative Victorians of his era.
His son Francis was enrolled to assist Darwin in his next endeavours. He had long been fascinated the ability of roots to spread through the soil, repeatedly dividing, pushing their tips out and down. Raising bean, pea and cucumber seedlings, the father and son nipped the tips of the roots and observed that they then continued to grow horizontally but failed in a vertical direction. Repeating this experiment in other ways, they established that plants respond to gravity but exactly how eluded the scientific pair. The results, however, appeared in Darwin’s next tome, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880).
A final book that still has the ability to fascinate gardeners was Darwin’s
The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881).
He died just over a decade later on 19 April 1892, aged 73 at his beloved Down House in Kent. While he would have preferred a local burial, the scientific establishment determined otherwise. He was interned at Westminister Abbey on the north side of the naïve, only a few feet from the grave of Isaac Newton.
As with many other, although perhaps less illustrious scientists, he lacked a Hollywood appeal and so was ignored by the silver screen until 1972, when a British production,
The Darwin Adventure starring Nicolas Clay made a somewhat less than appreciated appearance.
Not so the real world. The nearest thing to immortality is said to be having a species named after you. More than 120 species and nine genera have been named after Darwin, for instance the evergreen shrub
Berberis darwini, discovered by him in 1835. Only time will tell whether Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory similarly celebrates his memory. Originally named Port Darwin in 1839, it was renamed Darwin 1911. It would surely please the great naturalist to learn that the city is home to the Charles Darwin University.
