Francis Darwin

“ He wrote in November 1836: ‘Among the great scientific men, no one has been nearly so friendly and kind as Lyell. ... You cannot imagine how good-naturedly he entered into all my plans.’ Lyell received the theory of coral reefs with enthusiasm, although its adoption necessitated the destruction of his own views on the subject. It must have been a great encouragement to Darwin to find himself welcomed as a brother-geologist by such a man as Lyell, the value of whose work he had personally tested and learned to estimate in South America. ”

“ Darwin always enjoyed experimental work far more than writing, and the pleasure of following out the brilliant discoveries which he made in the natural history of insectivorous plants was a relief and rest to him from the drier labour of preparing a second edition of the 'Descent of Man.'
Darwin's last publications were two papers of no great importance, read before the Linnean Society in the autumn of 1881. ”

“ After reading the 'Journal' of 1845 we come back with a sense of surprise to the Manuscript Sketch of 1844, where his theory of evolution by means of natural selection is so completely given. Even in the note-book filled between July 1837 and February 1838 the views on evolution are striking in their completeness; thus he clearly believed in the common origin of animals and plants. ”

“ The great feature of his Cambridge life was undoubtedly his friendship with Henslow, the professor of botany in the university. Henslow was a man courteous and placid outwardly, but at the same time unbending and full of vigour where principle was concerned, and fully worthy of the great love and respect that Darwin felt towards him. He was eminently well fitted to be a friend to undergraduates. ”

“ At the time of the publication of the 'Fertilisation of Orchids' no one could positively assert that a plant which is adapted for cross-fertilisation has an advantage over others not so adapted. 'The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation' supplied this want, and showed therefore, that each variation affecting the capabilities of a flower for cross-fertilisation must be severely tested in the struggle for life. ”

“ What Darwin himself believed to be the great flaw in the 1844 sketch was want of the ' principle of divergence ' (see Origin of Species 6th ed.) By those who are imbued with evolution as taught in the 'Origin of Species,' this 'principle of divergence will hardly be missed in reading the sketch of 1844; we seem unconsciously to assume the principle, although it is not given. In his later years Darwin had something of this feeling, for it became all but incredible to him that he should at first have overlooked it. ”

“ It has been well said that one great service rendered by Darwin to science was the revival of teleology in a rational form, a form in which it is no longer opposed to, but 'wedded to morphology.' The knowledge of the manner in which the structures of living beings have become adapted to their various encfa gives a vigour to the study of the form and organisation of animals and plants, the importance of which can hardly be exaggerated. ”

“ Would any two workmen ever have hit on so beautiful, so simple, and yet so artificial a contrivance? It cannot be thought so. One Hand has surely worked throughout the universe.' In the manuscript journal the passage is continued: 'A geologist, perhaps, would suggest that the periods of creation have been distinct or remote the one from the other; that the Creator rested in his labour.' The passage quoted from the first edition does not occur in the 'Journal' of 1845, a fact which may be significant of the change which had come over Darwin's way of regarding nature during the interval 1837—45. ”

“ And it was to a great extent by his special botanical work that he wrought this cnange; for it was in botany that he showed in practice how powerful, for the study of adaptive structure, are the means of research which the ' Origin of Species ' has placed in our hands. It was work of this nature which occupied his later years; the subject-matter varied, but whether he investigated the fertilisation of flowers, the twining of steins, the movements of leaves, or the natural history of insectivorous plants, the character of the work remained the same. ”

“ Being urged by his friends to publish an abstract of his own views, he wrote to Lyell: 'Wallace might say, " You did not intend publishing an abstract of your views till you received my communication. Is it fair to take advantage of my having freely, though unasked, communicated to you my ideas, and thus prevent me forestalling you?" The advantage which I should take being that I am induced to publish from privately knowing that Wallace is in the field. ”

“ This new field of work, which has been so largely extended by Hermann Müller and others, has reacted in a way especially satisfactory to its founder, namely, in showing how points of importance to the welfare of an organism may be hidden in apparently unimportant peculiarities, and it thus gives a basis of solid experience to the often-repeated caution as to our ignorance of the relations of organisms to their environment. ”

“ I hope you do not grow disheartened. I am determined to fight to the last.’
The second edition of the ‘Origin of Species’ (three thousand copies) was published on 7 Jan. 1860, and two days later Darwin began looking over his notes in preparation for a new book, which should deal in detail with the evidence yielded by domestic animals and plants under cultivation. This book, ‘The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,’ was not published until 1868. But the eight years which elapsed between its commencement and completion were not entirely given up to it. ”

“ Later come the ‘delight’ and ‘more than enjoyment’ in his days of work at South American geology, after which he ‘could literally hardly sleep at nights.’ Later again comes the delight in home letters, or in home dreams of autumn robins singing in the Shrewsbury garden, and the longing to return home becomes ever stronger, with a corresponding loathing and abhorrence of the sea ‘and all ships which sail on it.’ The voyage ended at last, and on 6 Oct. ”

“ The study of the anatomy of plants made, as Sachs points out, small advance during the eighteenth century, but there was a revival of plant-physiology, to which Hales's work was the most original and important contribution. Much of his work was devoted to the study of the loss of water which plants suffer by evaporation, and to the means by which the roots make good this loss. In these subjects many of his experiments remain of fundamental importance. ”

“ Anatomy disgusted him, the operating theatre ('before the blessed days of chloroform') horrified him, and 'Materia Medica' left on his mind nothing but the memory of 'cold breakfastless hours on the properties of rhuharb.' Even in pure science he did not fare much better : the teaching in geology was of such a nature as to make him determme that, whatever else might be his fate, he would not be a geologist. But his time was not wasted ; he became a friend of Br. Grant, afterwards professor of zoology at University College, and was thus induced to attend to the seanshore fauna. ”

“ So that here within the limits of a single species we have a degree of sterility strictly comparable to what obtains in the crossing of distinct species. Thus our knowledge of heterostyled plants is of importance as bearing on one of the most difficult points in the statement of the case for evolution, the sterility of inter- specific crosses, and of hvbrids. ”

“ The acquaintance grew into a friendship which lasted throughout Lyell's life, and Darwin, nearly at the end of his own life, had still the same impression of Lyell's character, declaring that he had never known any man with so keen a sympathy in the work of others. ”

“ Dyer has remarked ('Charles Darwin,' Nature Series) , 'can doubt the importance of what Mr. Darwin has done in showing that, for the future, the phenomena of plant movement can, and indeed must, be studied from a single point of view.'
His book on 'Insectivorous Plants,' published in 1875, was the result of the completion and elaboration of observations made many years previously, during a holiday spent in Sussex. Two species of Drosera were abundant at Hartfield, where he was staying in 1860, and he noticed the numerous insects caught by the leaves. ”

“ One of the most remarkable qualities of his mind was the power of arresting exceptions, that is, of not allowing them to pass unnoticed. Most people are inclined to pass over a point, apparently slight and unconnected with their present work, with some half-considered explanation which, in fact, is not an explanation at all. ”

“ His ill-health was of a dyspeptic kind, and may probably have been allied to gout, which was to some extent an hereditary malady. It was the factor which more than any other determined the outward form of his life. For it was the strain of a London life that determined him to settle in the country, and it was the continuance of ill-health that forced him to lead for the rest of his days a secluded life of extreme regularity. ”

“ Darwin's pièces justificatives, and that after eight years all that he had to offer was a mass of details about pigeons and rabbits. But the fair critics saw its true character, an expansion, with unrivalled wealth of fact, of a section of the ‘Origin of Species.’
The ‘Descent of Man,’ which followed in 1871, grew out of the book on ‘Variation.’ It was his original intention to give a chapter on Man, as the most domesticated of animals. ”

“ No one with a knowledge of the wonderful mutual relations between flowers and insects will be inclined to dogmatise rashly as to the uselessness of any structure, or as to the consequent impossibility of its having been modified by means of natural selection.
A book which Darwin has described as the 'complement' of the 'Orchid' book was published fourteen years afterwards, in 1876. ”

“ One of Darwin's earliest references to a botanical subject occurs in the note-book of 1837-8, in which facts bearing on evolution were collected. 'Do not plants which have male and female organs together yet receive influence from other plants? ”

“ In the ‘Origin of Species’ he thought it best, ‘in order that no honourable man might accuse’ him of concealing his views, to add that ‘light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’ The belief that man must be included with other animals had been accepted by him from the first, so that his collection of facts bearing on the subject dated back to 1837 or 1838. ”

“ He has himself allowed that he was perhaps 'superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.' He attempted to analyse impartially the qualities which led to his success, summing them up in these words : 'Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. ”

“ He wrote well and clearly against the theory of the circulation of sap, then and long afterwards in vogue, a theory which rendered any advance in knowledge impossible; (2) finding that gas could be obtained from plants by dry distillation, he was led to believe that gas might be condensed or in some way changed into the substances found in plants. In thus recognising the fact that the air may be a source of food to plants, he was a forerunner of Ingen-Housz and De Saussure, the actual founders of the central principle of vegetable nutrition ”

“ The injury to the landed interest thus caused by the distillers of London he estimates at 600,000l. annually.
Hales made experiments or suggestions on the distillation of fresh from salt water; on the preservation of water and of meat in sea-voyages; on the possibility of bottling chalybeate waters; on a method of cleansing harbours; on a ‘sea-gage’ to measure unfathomable depths, the idea of which he took from the mercurial gauge with which he measured the pressure exerted by peas swelling in water; on a plan for preserving persons in hot climates from the evil effects of heavy dews ”

“ In his work on animals and plants alike the value of what he did depends not merely on facts and principles established, but on his setting an example of the scientific method and his making widely appreciated a sound conception of the living organism as a self-regulating machine.
Hales's best known invention was that of artificial ventilators. The method of injecting air with bellows he applied to the ventilation of prisons, ships, granaries, &c. ”

“ Thus he calculated the available amount of water in a given area of soil, and compared it with the loss of water due to the evaporation from the plants growing on that area. He also estimated the rain and dew fall from the same point of view; the variation in root force at different times of day; the force exerted by peas as they imbibe water and expand ”

“ This incident was a fortunate one for the progress of evolution, since it induced Darwin to write the 'Origin of Species,' a presentation of his views far more readable and more powerful for conversion than his projected fuller work could possibly have been. ”

“ Does not Lyell give some arguments about varieties being difficult to keep on account of pollen from other plants, because this may be applied to show [that] all plants do receive intermixture? ' It was especially his belief that intercrossing within the limits of each species played an important part in keeping specific forms constant that led him to pay attention to the fertilisation of plants. ”