Darwin's Pictures Page 2

  In this book, “Darwin’s pictures” can mean one of three things: pictures that Darwin drew himself, those that served him as models, or those that he commissioned from photographers, draftsmen, engravers, or lithographers. In terms of Darwin’s own skills, it is necessary to clarify initially that Darwin was not a good artist, at least in the classical sense. Between 1818 and his graduation in 1825 at the age of sixteen, he would have received drawing instruction at the boarding school he attended in his hometown of Shrewsbury. Drawing also would have been a minor part of his studies in natural history in Cambridge and Edinburgh, where he also learned the other craft of the naturalist, preparing animal specimens, from a former slave who had escaped from America. However, when it came to the ability to accurately depict animals, plants, or anatomical details, training was not enough. As a result, as Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “from not being able to draw … a great pile of MS. which I made during the voyage has proved almost useless.”

  Near the end of Darwin’s life, the painter and art theorist John Collier, who painted Darwin’s portrait in 1881, gave the scientist drawing lessons. Darwin thanked him and once again complained that he “could never draw a line.”14 By that time, however, he had learned to have others draw for him when his own skills were insufficient, or to collect the pictures that came to form an archive of his observations. The forgotten craftsmen who worked under his direction play a recurring role in this book.

  By presenting Darwin as a virtuoso artist, the Fun caricature is thus again inaccurate. As previously noted, it was Huxley and Owen who could draw brilliantly and who put this talent to use in their lectures, creating pictures on the board before the eyes of the audience. Ernst Haeckel, the famous German champion of evolutionary theory whose books such as Art Forms in Nature influenced the art deco movement, also springs to mind.15 However, objective drawing from nature is only one aspect of this skill; an area in which Darwin had significantly more practice and achieved a certain level of mastery was geological illustration (Figure 26 [Color Plate 5]). At seventeen he began his medical studies in Edinburgh and attended Robert Jameson’s geology classes, where he learned to identify the accumulations of stone material in the ground as layers and depict them in cross-section. The ability to identify a stone with a particular layer of the earth, to connect a fossil to a geological epoch, or to translate the earth’s hidden interior into large-scale drawings or colorful maps all were things he continued to practice aboard the Beagle, as entries in his notebooks and diagrams from this time show.16

  With this work he learned early to understand periods of time that are beyond our ability to grasp directly and bring them to life them in pictures. By the end of the eighteenth century, at least two disciplines were confronted with the problem of how to register processes that unfold so slowly that humans cannot observe them—or that even take longer than the human life span. New kinds of images were the result. In the decades before Darwin, embryologists learned how to present the development of organisms in series of individual pictures. During the same period, geologists portrayed the layers in the earth’s interior and their ages in the form of cross-sectional diagrams. This translation of form and time into a symbolic system of rows, lines, angles, or points opened up space for Darwin to conceptualize his theory of evolution. It taught him to think in terms of millennia, to consider the impact small changes in nature could have over long periods, and to imagine how a line might continue based on its angle of inclination. The fact that he dedicated the second edition of his travel book to Charles Lyell, his lifelong supporter and the most important English geologist of his day, demonstrates this proximity. By giving observers access to conceptual realms that were inconceivable previously, the images considered in the following chapters fulfill the function Paul Klee claimed for twentieth-century art: they do not reproduce the visible but make visible.17

  Another peculiarity in Darwin’s view of nature becomes evident in a letter that he sent to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, a botanist, in 1856. After musing about the mouth parts of mollusks, Darwin makes a most remarkable statement, claiming “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” Of course, Darwin himself went on to publish this very book in 1859. Both the words and the images in Origin of Species describe the two principles of evolution—the “blundering” and the “cruel works of nature” we know better as random change and natural selection. But while the written account and its plot of “the struggle for survival” emphasize selection, the pictures are dominated by the principle of randomness. Darwin expressed the ideas of competition, effort, and struggle in the medium of language, culminating in the expression “survival of the fittest,” which has taken on a life of its own and has become a byword in many languages.18 The other evolutionary principle, however—that of chance, variation, disorder, and incompleteness—was refined in images.19 Selection appears in the pictures only in terms of its consequences: when a line in an evolutionary diagram abruptly ends, the species it represents is extinct. The notion of chance, in turn, drives the very structure of this image in the form of the lines radiating from the nodal points that symbolize random variation.

  His insistent focus on the imperfections, deficiencies, and peculiarities of living things provided Darwin with the nineteenth century’s most unusual perspective on nature. He peered into the cracks and tears of what had seemed liked God’s perfect creation until these gaps widened into a door to evolutionary theory. The “complete millionaire in odd & curious little facts,” as he once called himself, noticed and recorded phenomena that his colleagues, who viewed nature as a work of art, failed to notice—even after his works became famous.20

  Darwin’s pictures were produced with simple means: pencil, paper, the naked eye. In most cases they were reproduced using woodcuts, the most common technique in the nineteenth century. In one book, however, Darwin took advantage of both a new recording technology and a new printing process: Expression of Emotions employs photography and the heliotype method. But regardless of the tools used, Darwin’s letters and the instructions he sent to draftsmen or printers show the high degree of artistic precision required to depict chance on paper. To his frustration, the qualities of symmetry, order, and regularity tended to emerge more often in pictures than they do in nature itself. Whenever the specialists charged with producing his images smoothed out or “improved” his drafts, he sent them back with corrections, whether the pictures were abstract diagrams or representational images depicting apes, peacocks, humans, or other creatures. Working out his theory in images involved constant struggle over millimeters of difference—from the first drafts to the final plates.

  The following pages may contain aspects that the title Darwin’s Pictures did not lead readers to anticipate and omit subjects they were sure would be covered. Those familiar with Sternberger’s description of evolutionary theory as “an imposing painting of nature’s eternal warfare”—or who recall the battles shown in countless books about prehistory and dinosaurs from their youth—may expect more of the same from Darwin. They will be disappointed.21 It is true that the interpretation of selection in nature as necessarily violent—a view that implicitly equates evolutionary theory with so-called social Darwinism—dominates visual responses to Darwin’s work in both the arts and popular culture. However, Darwin’s own pictures—the ones examined in this book—are of a different nature. They highlight the other principle of evolutionary theory: variation.22

  Similarly, some readers may be bracing for racist images of the kind circulated well into the twentieth century that suggest some groups of people are closer to the animals than others. This foreboding will also go unfulfilled: Darwin never produced such pictures.23 Others did respond to the idea of evolution by generating these kinds of images, but in a history of how Darwin’s theory emerged they can be discussed only in isolation. No matter how valuable a study of racist misinterpretations of evolution would be, they are n
ot the subject of this book.

  The idiosyncrasy of Darwin’s approach to illustrating his books can be demonstrated by leafing through Descent of Man. Despite its title, the book does not include a single picture of a human being. Such surprises are not uncommon in Darwin’s work, and they can provide keys to understanding the theory of evolution. Finally, despite a common belief to the contrary, Darwin’s pictures hardly make the world a less magical or mysterious place. The lovely words of writer Osip Mandelstam testify to their heartening effect: “The inspiring clarity, like a clear day in a moderate English summer, the—if I may call it this—good weather for science, and the author’s restrainedly elevated mood rub off on the reader and help him to make Darwin’s theory his own.”24

  1 THE GALÁPAGOS FINCHES

  John Gould, Darwin’s Invisible Craftsman,

  and the Visual Discipline of Ornithology

  IN October 1836, the research ship H.M.S. Beagle returned to the port of Falmouth, England. It had sailed the oceans for five years at the behest of the world’s largest colonial power, Great Britain, visiting South America, the Galápagos islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mauritius, and Cape Town. The captain and his crew had spent more than half of this time mapping the coast of South America as well as filling in existing maps more precisely. Outfitted with the most up-to-date technical equipment available, the Beagle had the primary task of determining the exact longitude of the Brazilian town of Bahia—today Salvador—which was indicated differently on French and German maps. During its journey the Beagle crossed paths with a number of other vessels sailing along the South American coast under the British flag. From 1831 to 1835, two hundred and fifty British trading ships sailed to South America to drop off goods and purchase raw materials. Furthermore, two additional research expeditions set off shortly after the Beagle sailed and had the same charge of creating maps, exploring the interior, and keeping an eye out for sources of precious metal and stones.1

  This trip was the second for the Beagle—a fresh attempt to complete a voyage of discovery after the first had ended in tragedy several years earlier. The ship’s first captain shot himself while the boat was moored in Tierra del Fuego, thousands of miles from his English homeland, leaving behind a crew suffering from scurvy and a labyrinth of erroneous maps and drawings. His successor was the young Captain Robert FitzRoy, who first brought the ship safely back to England and later led her on two expeditions of his own. The Beagle’s second journey proved to be a success, resulting in not only new maps but a valuable collection of animals, plants, minerals, and fossils from the places it had visited. The Beagle was a rather small ship—a two-master just ninety-eight feet long and about twenty-six feet wide—and little space remained for the collection after accounting for the needs of its seventy-four-man crew. Many crates were shipped back while the ship was still under way, and just a few actually reached England in the hold of the Beagle itself. News of the ship’s amazing discoveries in South America thus sped back to England ahead of the Beagle’s arrival. For example, the fossil skull of a giant sloth, found in Argentina in 1832 and immediately shipped back to England, was displayed at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Cambridge in the summer of 1833, three years before the ship’s return.2

  But even without sensational discoveries, an expedition to South America was sure to arouse public interest. Ever since Alexander von Humboldt’s Travels to the Equinoctical Regions of America and Views of Nature had appeared, travelers to South America could count on a broad following. The continent was considered a paradise for naturalists, and its tropical regions were synonymous with exotic adventure.3 Like moths to a flame, generations of researchers were lured to the distant lands portrayed in Humboldt’s texts and pictures at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the romantic enthusiasm that infused them. Those who remained at home, both experts and laymen, longingly waited for the latest news of the teeming beauties of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, or Patagonia. “At present I am only fit to read Humboldt; he like another Sun illumines everything I behold,” noted the Beagle’s most famous passenger, the young Cambridge graduate Charles Darwin, as he described the impression Humboldt’s writings had made on him. Eight months before the ship set sail he wrote to his sister Caroline: “In the morning I go and gaze at Palm trees in the hot-house and come home and read Humboldt: my enthusiasm is so great that I cannot hardly sit still.” He would be able to relax, he added, only when he saw Humboldt’s great dragon tree with his own eyes.4At the same time, he prepared himself for his journey by studying pictures such as the lithographs of tropical forest scenes by the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas. He would recall these scenes when he first set foot in the real jungle in 1832.5 The young Darwin had yet to leave English soil when he was sweating out his tropical fever in the hothouses of Cambridge and dreaming of discoveries and adventures to come. And although he would end up traveling the world, he would never set foot on the Continent: Darwin visited Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, St. Helena, and Sydney, but he never saw Rome, Paris, or Berlin.

  There was never any question that the Beagle would encounter previously unknown species of animals and plants. As a direct consequence of the increase in global trade, the number of newly discovered species grew faster in the first half of the nineteenth century than ever before. The world’s waterways pulsed with traffic between England and its colonies, and the ports filled up with larger and larger ships—ships that carried not only silk, rubber, spices, coffee, ivory, gold, and silver over the seas, but also living things.6 Business was booming on London’s docks for animal dealers such as Charles Jamrach, who bought the exotic cargo, dead or alive, to supply museums, zoos, exhibitors, and menageries throughout Europe. The overwhelming wealth of new discoveries meant that universalists in the mold of Carl Linnaeus became a rare breed. Few scientists stepped up to succeed the eighteenth century’s great Swedish naturalist, who had devised a scheme to classify not only all known animals and plants, but minerals as well.7 Specialists devoted to every division of the animal and vegetable kingdoms emerged, and as a result new species were increasingly unlikely to be discovered during an expedition itself. Instead, they were first identified back at home by scientists working in museums. In the field, thousands of miles from the closest zoological collection, it was impossible to compare an animal with similar specimens. Without such comparison, it was difficult to determine whether a find truly represented a new species or one that already had been identified. Very few beetles, fish, frogs, birds, or mammals are so spectacularly unique that researchers in the 1830s could immediately tell whether a specimen they encountered had previously been seen or collected on one of the many earlier journeys. Even sensational finds were often first identified only after they had been delivered to a museum and turned over to the specialists there. While the young Darwin prepared twelve catalogs during the journey as a record of the plants and animals collected, these were just preliminary. Furthermore, the twenty-two-year-old, who had a degree in theology, basic knowledge of medicine, and a great interest in geology, had been invited to join the trip as a companion for the captain: to avoid falling prey to the loneliness that had driven his predecessor to suicide, FitzRoy had requested the company of a gentleman with standing and education to match his own. Once the voyage was under way, however, Darwin took on the function of ship’s naturalist as well.8

  An enthusiastic collector since childhood, and equipped by his studies with a knowledge of scientific collecting, Darwin conscientiously assigned every object found during the voyage to a taxonomic category and gave it a preliminary name. But the task of accurately determining the species to which each specimen belonged was well beyond the expertise of any single zoologist, especially one so inexperienced. Darwin’s task as ship’s naturalist was therefore less to identify the species of the finds than it was to organize, record, and store them. At sea he sorted what was found in the nets and oversaw the preservation of selected discoveries. On l
and he personally made long expeditions or, when he could not go himself, gave his servants extensive instructions on which kinds of animals to hunt, collect, and preserve. He personally tied a paper label to every specimen brought on board and marked it with a number that corresponded to an entry in the catalog, which typically contained the name and sex of the object, as well as the date and location of its discovery. However, in a number of cases Darwin failed to indicate the location, and he wrote the names inconsistently in English, Latin, or the local language—usually Spanish. The ornithological notes that use Latin names are particularly prone to errors.9