Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – February 26, 2006.

Darwin on the Beagle—and some news.

Hello again from Cambridge, England—where I have been working with Darwin scholar and botanist David Kohn virtually non-stop on the various sets of notes Charles Darwin made on his epochal 5 year voyage around the world (1831-1836) as ship’s naturalist on H.M.S. Beagle.

As a workaday paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, I really had no idea of the intricacies and difficulties of historical scholarship. For starters, consider the sheer volume of field notes; diaries arranged by subject matter (e.g. zoology, botany, geology—including fossils) based on those notes; Darwin’s summary notes based on those diaries, compiled near journey’s end (e.g. his famous "Ornithological Notes," in which he says that patterns of within and among island variation—as in the famous mockingbird example on the Galapagos—"undermine the stability of species," his earliest known written statement pointing to evolution); his letters to family and friends back home; his notes and marginalia on his shipboard reading materials (e.g. the three volumes of Lyell’s Principles of Geology—we sent in a call slip for Lyell’s volumes, and out came Darwin’s personal copies of these three books—the very ones he had with him and read on the Beagle!!!!!). You get the picture—there is a mountain of fantastic Darwiniana here at the Cambridge Library—and I’m speaking right now only about the papers from the Beagle voyage!

Then there is the not-so-small matter of actually reading Darwin’s handwriting. Not so bad really (better than mine!)—but then again, not exactly like reading the newspaper sports section either. David taught me the rules for transcribing Darwin’s papers—conventions scholars use, such as the protocol for recording a crossed-out word or phrase, and for noting insertions, rewrites and later comments. These and some other rules will enable us to add new material easily to the Darwin Digital Library of Evolution (see separate entry for the description and link to this very special project).

I spent hours last Sunday (after writing the previous blog) transcribing just a small part of a summary that Darwin had written in essay form—a summary of his observations and overall conclusions about the geology of southern South America east of the Andes. Darwin thought early on in the voyage that he might write a book about his geological observations from the Beagle journey. It was clear that this little essay—found embedded in the portfolios containing all his geological notes—was written with the aim of eventual publication in mind.

Though the zoological diaries have been published [Richard Keynes’ admirable Charles Darwin’s Zoology Notes & Specimen Lists from H.M.S. Beagle—Cambridge University Press, 2000 (we had tea last week with Richard and his wife Ann, who live just a few doors down from Clare Hall on Herschel Road) as have the already mentioned "Ornithological Notes," plus the entomology and botanical notes], other segments have not, and had to be consulted in their original handwritten form. These include his "animal" notes (meaning mammals)—and the voluminous observations on geology already mentioned—though Sandra Herbert’s excellent Charles Darwin, Geologist (Cornell University Press, 2005) draws on these notes extensively, and contains many important snippets from them.

We spent all last week poring over this pile of geological notes. What a joy! What a pain! Fortunately, in a sense, the rocks Darwin encountered on this trip were to a very great extent igneous (granites, lavas, etc.) or metamorphic. Interesting stuff—but not our focus—which was on the sedimentary strata, and especially the fossils in them. We are out to reconsider in fine detail just what it was that Darwin saw that led him to the idea of evolution in the first place—so it is the fossils that interested us the most in the geological folios. These include the famous large mammal fossils of Patagonia—but also the marine shells found with them and in many other places on islands and areas (many of them coastal) on both sides of South America—and elsewhere.

Have we found anything new? Do we have new insights on the "genesis" of Darwin’s evolutionary thinking? You bet!!!—though it is premature to discuss them now. We need to finish the job. Tomorrow, we’re off to Down House where Darwin lived the last 40 years of his life—where he wrote On the Origin of Species and most of his other books—to look at his geology field notebooks, which somehow ended up there (along with the famous "Red Notebook") rather than at Cambridge with virtually everything else. But stay tuned!

I will reveal my favorite single item that we found last week. There is a morass of small items towards the back of Darwin’s geological folios—fragments of cut-out pages of notebooks assembled for publication; relevant correspondence, specimen lists, etc. etc. Going through these, we stumbled on a card announcing the dates of meetings of the Zoological Society of London for 1837. Darwin was home by then, and was anxiously awaiting the results of the study of his collections by experts. At the meeting on September 7th, zoologist George Waterhouse wrote on the back of Darwin’s card a list of all the species of Edentates found living today in South America; these include the anteaters, sloths and armadillos. (Waterhouse later published a monograph on the mammals Darwin collected on the voyage). Darwin was interested in them for their own sake, of course—but also because most of the fossils bones he discovered were of giant edentates—such as the huge extinct armadillo Glyptodon. It was fantastic to hold the card that Darwin had on hand when he buttonholed Waterhouse at the meeting and badgered him into writing down a list of edentate species—on the back of the meeting card because that was what he had on him at the moment. It was obviously an unplanned, serendipitous encounter—and Darwin seized the opportunity. How utterly human!

Finally a bit of welcome news: my essay Confessions of a Darwinist, where I explore the nature and meaning of my own work in conjunction with the preparation of the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition Darwin, as well as writing my companion book Darwin. Discovering the Tree of Life, is due to be published in March by the Virginia Quarterly Review. I am happy to announce that an online version of this paper has already been posted at http://www.vqronline.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/9209.

Niles Eldredge

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