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  DARWIN’S PICTURES

  J U L I A V O S S

  Translated by Lori Lantz

  Darwin’s Pictures

  Views of Evolutionary Theory,

  1837–1874

  Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW HAVEN & LONDON

  Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany

  A joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, and the German Publishers & Booksellers Association.

  Originally published as: “Darwins Bilder”

  Copyright © 2007 Fischer Taschenbuch in der S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main

  Copyright © 2010 by Yale University.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Designed by James J. Johnson and set in New Aster type by Westchester

  Book Group, Danbury, Connecticut.

  Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Voss, Julia. 1974–

  [Darwins Bilder. English]

  Darwin’s pictures: views of evolutionary theory, 1837–1874 / Julia Voss; translated by Lori Lantz.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-14174-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  1. Evolution (Biology) 2. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882. 3. Zoological illustration—History. I. Title.

  QH366.2.V67413 2010

  576.8—dc22

  2010003829

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1 The Galápagos Finches: John Gould, Darwin’s Invisible Craftsman, and the Visual Discipline of Ornithology

  2 Darwin’s Diagrams: Images of the Discovery of Disorder

  3 The Picture Series: On the Evolution of Imperfection

  4 The Laughing Monkey: The Human Animal

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not exist without the support of many people and institutions. I would like to thank Hans-Jörg Rheinberger as well as my colleagues at the Max Planck Insitute, especially Peter Geimer, Michael Hagner, Anke te Heesen, Bernhard Kleeberg, Wolfgang Lefévre, Staffan Müller-Wille, Henning Schmidgen, Skuli Sigurdsson, and Margarete Vöhringer.

  I am very grateful to Nick Hopwood for reading the manuscript and for his valuable suggestions, and to Philipp Osten and Cara Schweitzer, who also read the manuscript.

  I also owe thanks to Frank Steinheimer for his help related to the ornithological collection of the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in Berlin and for the discussions about the history of ornithology, which never failed to widen my horizons.

  I also owe a debt of gratitude to the staff of the Cambridge University Library and the Darwin Correspondence project, especially Paul White, who gave me much advice and constructive criticism.

  Thank you to Tori Reeve for her assistance at the Down House archive.

  The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude all provided valuable financial or institutional assistance.

  In addition, Jochen Büttner, Alexander Damianisch, Max Müller-Härlin, and Kostas Murkudis provided highly appreciated support, corrections, advice, and more.

  I thank Barbara Liepert of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Sunday edition for sending me around the world in the tracks of Darwin and Wallace.

  I thank my two anonymous referees for their helpful and supportive criticism. My sincere thanks go to Jean Black, Joseph Calamia, and Jeffrey Schier of Yale University Press for making this book possible and for parenting the project in such an enjoyable way. I thank the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels for subsiding the translation. Finally, I cordially thank Lori Lantz for her elegant translation.

  And last, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my parents.

  INTRODUCTION

  IN July 1871 the English satirical magazine Fun published a caricature of the theory of evolution and its creator (Figure 1). The man in question—Charles Darwin—was now sixty-two years old and had become famous as the author of one of the most significant books of the nineteenth century. In fact, several of his works are still well known today: Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by HMS Beagle, written at the age of thirty, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle of Life, published when he was fifty, and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, which appeared in 1871 and was the subject of the caricature a few months later.1

  The picture from Fun combines two elements. The first is Charles Darwin himself, squatting and with a handkerchief fluttering from his pants pocket like an animal’s tail—an image playing on the idea of mankind’s kinship with the apes. The other component is the series of drawings mounted on a blackboard, at which Darwin gestures with a pointer. The eleven numbered drawings illustrate “a little lecture by Professor D-N on the development of the horse.” Number 1 opens the series with a picture of horseradish, while number 11 concludes it with one of an English racehorse. The visual joke caricaturing Darwin’s theory as positing the evolution of racehorses from vegetables is accompanied by a pun in which horseradish, by virtue of its name, finds a place in the evolution of the horse.2

  Figure 1. Caricature from the July 22, 1871, issue of Fun magazine (Darwin Archive [DAR 255.183], with the permission of the Cambridge University Library Syndicate)

  As a historical document parodying actual events, the caricature falls short. From the thorough work of Darwin’s biographers we know, for example, that he never gave a single public lecture. Publicity-shy and plagued by chronic stomach problems, he avoided speaking in public his entire life. Photographs or engravings do exist, however, that show both his ally Thomas Henry Huxley and his opponent Richard Owen standing in lecture halls and pointing at blackboards. Darwin, in turn, never taught at a university or spoke before a large audience. Furthermore, the historical facts do not correspond to the contents of the lecture Darwin is shown presenting; the evolution of horses was not a topic he explored. Instead, it was Huxley and Owen who lectured on the fossil remains of the horse family, whose origins date to the Paleolithic era. Huxley spoke about the horse fossils to an “overflowing lecture hall” at the Royal Institution in April 1870, claiming that they offered proof of the existence of evolution. Owen, in turn, had already published on the topic in the 1840s, asserting that the phenomenon proved his “archetype theory,” in which everything in the animal world was based on one of four structural plans.3

  Yet, despite these errors, the caricature draws our attention to an important characteristic of evolutionary theory: the high level of visibility it enjoyed during the nineteenth century. Darwin as well as his theory were familiar enough to be parodied in a popular picture, a situation which is quite unusual in the history of science. Very few scientists or scientific images enjoy the prominence granted to politicians, actors, or famous works of art—all more common subjects of caricature. But scholarly literature has shown how closely Darwin is identif
ied with his work, as the catchword “Darwinism” suggests. The worldview based in evolutionary teachings could just as easily have been called “Wallacism” after Alfred Russel Wallace, who formulated the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin but never became as famous. It was Darwin, the bearded naturalist of Downe, who became the personification of evolution.4 And Darwin’s theories, as we will see, are closely linked with particular modes of visual representation.

  When this book was originally published in Germany three years ago, little was known of the visual history of evolutionary theory. In a pioneering effort, art historian Phillip Prodger had explored Darwin’s photographic archive and the scientist’s close collaboration with photographers as he studied the expression of the emotions in man and animals.5 Janet Browne, the renowned biographer of Darwin, had documented the astounding speed with which images of evolution entered popular culture after the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Bowdlerized depictions of evolutionary theory quickly appeared in the form of satirical publications, children’s books, china figurines, company logos, and product packaging.6

  Exhibitions marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species in 2009 further expanded our awareness of the visual culture that surrounds evolutionary theory in general and Darwin’s writings in particular. The “Darwin effect,” a term coined by American art historian Linda Nochlin to describe the immediate impact of Darwin’s theory on certain artists, has turned out to be an even broader phenomenon than Nochlin suspected. From the most prominent proponents of impressionism and symbolism to less celebrated but commercially successful and widely known visual artists—the ramifications of evolutionary thought could be seen everywhere. Exhibitions such as Darwin and the Search for Origins in Frankfurt and Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts in New Haven and Cambridge demonstrated the Darwinian component in Western visual culture at large.7

  While understanding how evolutionary theory has changed our way of seeing and interpreting the world is important, this book takes a different approach. The pictures that it explores do not primarily represent the reception of Darwin’s ideas, but rather are visualizations that helped Darwin to formulate his theories in the first place. A glimpse into the Darwin archive at the Cambridge University Library suggests the importance that pictures must have held in Darwin’s research. The binders, boxes, books, and magazines contain an extensive and diverse collection of visual material and show the care with which Darwin amassed pictures. Even today the archive preserves a vast number of studio photographs of men, women, and children; medical and anthropological shots; and copper etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs of exotic and common animals. They are supplemented by drawings, elaborately colored in some cases, sent by his correspondents from all over the world. Letters accompany them or are even simply worked into the drawings themselves in miniature. In one such letter, two butterfly wings that a correspondent in the Brazilian rainforest pasted to a piece of paper and then mailed bears witness to the visual nature of natural history. This fragile cargo traveled to Darwin in England and has survived into the twenty-first century in its original envelope, packed away in a gray carton.8

  The books and scholarly journals that Darwin read and kept in his library also contain many illustrations. Furthermore, he often drew himself—from making sketches in his early notebooks to correcting the illustrations prepared for his books. The number of pictures in his books on evolution increases from volume to volume: while the first edition of Origin of Species from 1859 contains just a single illustration, this number climbs to seventy-eight in the 1871 Descent of Man. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals from 1872 features not only twenty woodcuts, but also seven plates comprising between two and seven photos each. Darwin watched over all these illustrations with a careful eye. He either drew them himself, selected them from his collection, or gave precise instructions for their design to the artists commissioned to prepare them. He insisted on the inclusion of a number of illustrations, often over the protests of his London publisher, John Murray, who complained that they drove up costs and reduced the profit margin on Darwin’s books. When necessary, Darwin himself swallowed this loss by paying for the preparation of the plates himself. He even kept copies of caricatures like the one that appeared in Fun, although this material constitutes only a small part of the collection as a whole.9

  Darwin’s visual collection continued to grow over his lifetime of research. Despite the considerable size of the archive, however, it is no longer complete. Letters from Darwin’s correspondents often refer to originally enclosed photos or engravings that are now lost. As a result, researchers must sometimes reconstruct the location and context of pictures to which Darwin or his correspondents refer. In other cases, these images can still be found in the archive as a reproduction or original drawing, many of which are published here for the first time.

  At the heart of this book are four of Darwin’s images that provide a chronological journey through his work. Researchers still primarily published in book form in Darwin’s time (only later did the article became the more common publication venue), and each of these illustrations comes from one of his books. Chapter 1 examines the picture of the Galápagos finches that Darwin added to the second edition of Journal of Researches in 1845 (see Figure 2). Chapter 2 is devoted to the evolutionary diagram that served as the only illustration to The Origin of Species in 1859 (see Figure 33). Chapter 3 looks at a series of pictures showing various stages in the evolution of the pattern found on the wings of the Malaysian argus pheasant—a series of the type parodied in the Fun caricature (see Figure 41). Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on the picture of a laughing monkey (see Figure 78) that appears in Expression of Emotions, which was published in 1872. These publication dates of 1845, 1859, 1871, and 1872 provide a framework for referring to the rest of Darwin’s oeuvre. The chronological sequence also makes it possible to link the pictures to important events in Darwin’s life, such as his journey around the world, his return to London, or his move to Downe in the county of Kent, an hour from London. The discussion here follows the order in which the pictures were published, even when this sequence deviates from that of their creation. Back in 1837 Darwin had written the words “I think” in a notebook and sketched a diagram beneath them—his first picture of the evolutionary process (see Figure 12). However, because the image of the Galápagos finches was published in 1845 and the diagram, despite being drawn earlier, did not appear until 1859, the bird illustration forms the topic of the first chapter.

  The notebook sketch from 1837 marks the point at which Darwin began producing images of evolution. This particular current of his work ended in 1874 with the appearance of the expanded second edition of Descent of Man. This revised version of the book contained many new illustrations, including the series of pictures examining the argus pheasant’s showy plumage. The works that followed included numerous illustrations, but they are not, strictly speaking, images of evolution in the sense that they do not systematically explore Darwin’s theory. For this reason, this book does not discuss Darwin’s work after 1874.

  Finally, these four pictures were selected with the present day in mind: the four types of images they represent are the ones biology textbooks, books about evolutionary theory, posters, or natural history museum displays use to explain evolution. They have become icons that every schoolchild recognizes—so omnipresent that mass media, such as advertising, can play off references to them.10 And as the caricature from Fun shows, this phenomenon could already be observed early in the history of the theory of evolution. Faced with this situation, the historian must ask, Why are images and evolutionary teachings so closely entwined?

  Answering this question involves recounting the story of how evolutionary theory came to be, tracing the way the Darwin developed his ideas in the nineteenth century by tirelessly creating, reworking, and revising pictures. Although scientists before Darwin had formulated related theories or ev
en evolutionary concepts, his views were a radical departure from those of his predecessors. These breaks with tradition can be followed step by step in his sketches. Two main aspects of his thinking were new: his theory that, if inheritable, tiny differences among organisms form the basis of species change, and the creative role he assigned to extinction. Thanks to the many fossil discoveries during this time, every layperson in the nineteenth century knew that species could become extinct; and many naturalists had already determined that species compete and can eliminate others by, for example, eating them. But it remained for Darwin to incorporate extinction and survival into a system that examined the potential advantages or disadvantages of differing characteristics, as well as the theory that animals select their mates with an eye to variation.11

  What images did Darwin himself have in mind when he initially sketched out his theory in a diagram? In his 2005 book Darwins Korallen (Darwin’s Corals), art historian Horst Bredekamp places Darwin’s ideas about evolution within the tradition of art collecting as practiced since the sixteenth century. This book arrives at a different conclusion: that Darwin’s diagrams are responses to a specifically nineteenth-century approach to collections. These new collecting practices also help explain why Darwin’s theory of evolution differs from those of his predecessors.

  England’s rise to become the largest global colonial and trading power enabled London’s British Museum to acquire the most comprehensive natural history collection in the world, and this situation had a number of consequences.12 The national museum differed from aristocratic art collections in several ways: works of art and natural objects were displayed separately, for example, and the collection was the property not of a private person, but of the nation. Most important, while princely collections had focused on the rare and unique, the bulk of the material in the new museum consisted of objects that served to typify a particular animal or artifact. In the name of the state, explorers, traders, and scientists—including Darwin during the journey of the Beagle—combed through Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America, as far as the distant Galápagos islands, and brought back specimens in untold quantities. More was collected than could be processed in decades, perhaps even centuries. Even today the Natural History Museum in London, which took over the natural history collection of the British Museum in 1881, houses unopened boxes dating from this period of unbridled collecting fever. Unlike earlier collections, which might contain a single particularly beautiful or rare animal specimen, the museum had hundreds or even thousands of such items. Because of their overwhelming number, for the first time one could recognize the room for variation within species. This disorder-producing overcollecting, and the museums’ resulting loss of control over their own content, led Darwin—and Wallace—to ponder evolution. That these two scientists developed the same theory at the same place and time supports the idea that the theory of evolution and the images associated with it sprang from factors located in nineteenth-century England. What remains to be shown is how this new image of nature initially drew on the dense symbolic system that had developed in natural history in the waning years of the previous century to depict considerations such as time, variety, or change.13