Fossils, Finches and Fuegians: Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle. Richard Keynes

or that the length of an anteater’s nose and loss of its teeth resulted from perpetual sniffing into anthills, and was inherited over many generations. In the absence of any good evidence for such an inheritance of acquired characteristics, the term ‘Lamarckian’ soon had pejorative connotations. The occasion to which Charles referred was possibly the first when Grant revealed his extreme views on transmutation in invertebrates, and metamorphoses in extinct fossils. At the end of 1827 Grant became the first Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London,^* and his strongly Lamarckian approach was more widely disseminated. He held this post until his retirement in 1874, and though he was reported by Charles’s friend Frederick William Hope in 1834 to be ‘working away at the Mollusca & Infusoria publishing at a great rate’, in 1867 he was still teaching a defunct 1830s zoology in a frayed swallow-tail coat. Charles later noted that ‘he did nothing more in science – a fact which has always been inexplicable to me’. Grant’s excessively radical attitude, coupled with the disillusionment stemming from their falling out that March, may help to explain why their subsequent relations were never close, and there is no suggestion that Charles was ever subjected to the intimate approaches from Grant that may eventually have led to the nervous breakdown suffered by another of his students, John Coldstream.

      Robert Darwin was far from pleased with Charles for giving up medicine, and told him angrily, and as Charles thought somewhat unjustly, ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’²² After careful consideration, Robert decided that the only alternative for which there were several precedents in the Darwin and Wedgwood families would be for Charles to go up to Cambridge to take an ordinary Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican clergyman. In order to fulfil in due course the requirements for entry into the university, he had to brush up the Latin and Greek that he was supposed to have learnt at school, and a private tutor was therefore engaged for the last eight months of 1827. The period was not a very happy one for Charles, though he managed to escape to Uncle Josiah Wedgwood’s house at Maer Hall in Staffordshire, seven miles from Stoke-on-Trent, for at least the start of the shooting season, and made his first and only visit to France to collect his youngest Wedgwood cousins from Paris. But he did not record whether he also fitted in a visit to Cuvier’s famous Musée d’Histoire Naturelle.

      Charles duly matriculated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in January 1828. Here he quickly fell in with a new circle of young men from his own background and sharing his own tastes, one of whom described him at the time as ‘rather thick set in physical frame & of the most placid, unpretending & amiable nature’. Some years later, Charles advised his eldest son William at school:

      You will surely find that the greatest pleasure in life is in being beloved; & this depends almost more on pleasant manners, than on being kind with grave & gruff manners. You are almost always kind & only want the more easily acquired external appearance. Depend upon it, that the only way to acquire pleasant manners is to try to please everybody you come near, your school-fellows, servants & everyone. Do, my own dear Boy, sometimes think over this, for you have plenty of sense & observation.²³

      Charles’s own amiability and good relations with the rest of the world at every level were always among his most outstanding characteristics, and he had a true genius for friendship.

      His new acquaintances included a number of schoolmates from Shrewsbury, and his cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood from Staffordshire, who had earlier seen a lot of Charles’s brother Erasmus in Cambridge. By far his closest friend to begin with was a cousin from the other side of the family, William Darwin Fox, the only son of Robert Darwin’s cousin Samuel Fox, who was then in his third year at Christ’s and due to become a parson in Cheshire. William Darwin Fox’s abiding passion, just as Charles’s had been in his childhood, was for the collection of exotic natural history specimens that filled every cubic inch of his rooms. He took great pleasure in shooting and riding, and kept two dogs named Fan and Sappho at Christ’s, about whose exploits, matching that of Charles’s Mr Dash at Shrewsbury, they had a regular correspondence. Fox encouraged Charles to take an interest in both art and music, and together they visited print shops and the Fitzwilliam Museum, and attended concerts of choral works in college chapels. Charles later joined a musical set headed by another good friend, John Maurice Herbert.²⁴ They went regularly to King’s College chapel to hear the anthem sung, and occasionally Charles hired the choristers to perform in his rooms. But as Herbert soon discovered, and as he himself freely admitted, Charles’s pleasure in listening was not in fact accompanied by a good musical ear. The interests of the group were wide-ranging, and extended at one time to the formation of the ‘Glutton’ or ‘Gourmet’ Club at which they dined when not eating in hall, and consumed a range of animals that did not usually appear on the menu. The club was finally brought to an end by an attempt to eat an old brown owl whose flavour was considered by all to have been ‘indescribable’. One wonders what the club would have made of some of the weird dishes later consumed in an experimental spirit by Charles on the Beagle.

      The principal and most time-consuming occupation to which Charles was introduced by Fox was collecting and learning to identify beetles. Charles recalled later:

      No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one. I was very successful in collecting and invented two new methods; I employed a labourer to scrape during the winter, moss off old trees and place [it] in a large bag, and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of the barges in which reeds are brought from the fens, and thus I got some very rare species. No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen’s Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, “captured by Charles Darwin, Esq.”²⁵

      Public interest in natural history was at that time about to expand hugely, but few people pursued the new hobby with the passion, practical competence and competitiveness displayed by Fox and Charles. After breakfasting together daily, they scoured the fields and ditches closest to them at the ‘backs’ of the colleges, and the countryside further to the south of Cambridge, often accompanied by a bagman to carry their heavier equipment and their captures. When this man had learnt just what they were after, he would also collect for them when they were otherwise occupied. Returning to Charles’s rooms they would go through his reference books, from Lamarck to Stephens, to identify any rarities they had secured, and pin them out on a board for all to admire. On one such occasion after Charles had, after a ‘famous chace’ in the Fens, caught an especially rare beetle, he was pleased when Leonard Jenyns, vicar of Swaffham Bulbeck, and one of his principal collecting rivals in Cambridge, quickly came round to inspect it. Some years later, it was Jenyns who identified the fishes brought back by Charles in the Beagle.

      When in June 1828 Fox went down from Cambridge, Charles felt himself ‘dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects’. During the next three years, before the departure of the Beagle, he and Fox exchanged frequent letters, mainly concerned with entomology. They corresponded regularly during the voyage, and continued to keep closely in touch on family matters until Fox’s death in 1880. On sending Fox a copy of The Descent of Man in 1870, in which he had finally faced up to bringing Man into the picture, Charles added: ‘It is very delightful to me to hear that you, my very old friend, like my other books.’

      In the summer of 1828 Charles and a number of friends went to Barmouth on the coast of Wales as a reading party that was intended to brush up their