Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Volume I Part 38

CHARLES DARWIN TO J.D. HOOKER. May 11th [1856].

...Now for a MORE IMPORTANT! subject, viz., my own self: I am extremely glad you think well of a separate "Preliminary Essay" (i.e., if anything whatever is published; for Lyell seemed rather to doubt on this head) (The meaning of the sentence in parentheses is obscure.); but I cannot bear the idea of BEGGING some Editor and Council to publish, and then perhaps to have to APOLOGISE humbly for having led them into a sc.r.a.pe.

In this one respect I am in the state which, according to a very wise saying of my father's, is the only fit state for asking advice, viz., with my mind firmly made up, and then, as my father used to say, GOOD advice was very comfortable, and it was easy to reject BAD advice. But Heaven knows I am not in this state with respect to publis.h.i.+ng at all any preliminary essay. It yet strikes me as quite unphilosophical to publish results without the full details which have lead to such results.

It is a melancholy, and I hope not quite true view of yours that facts will prove anything, and are therefore superfluous! But I have rather exaggerated, I see, your doctrine. I do not fear being tied down to error, i.e., I feel pretty sure I should give up anything false published in the preliminary essay, in my larger work; but I may thus, it is very true, do mischief by spreading error, which as I have often heard you say is much easier spread than corrected. I confess I lean more and more to at least making the attempt and drawing up a sketch and trying to keep my judgment, whether to publish, open. But I always return to my fixed idea that it is dreadfully unphilosophical to publish without full details. I certainly think my future work in full would profit by hearing what my friends or critics (if reviewed) thought of the outline.

To any one but you I should apologise for such long discussion on so personal an affair; but I believe, and indeed you have proved it by the trouble you have taken, that this would be superfluous.

Yours truly obliged, CH. DARWIN.

P.S. What you say (for I have just re-read your letter) that the Essay might supersede and take away all novelty and value from any future larger Book, is very true; and that would grieve me beyond everything.

On the other hand (again from Lyell's urgent advice), I published a preliminary sketch of the Coral Theory, and this did neither good nor harm. I begin MOST HEARTILY to wish that Lyell had never put this idea of an Essay into my head.

FROM A LETTER TO SIR C. LYELL [July, 1856].

"I am delighted that I may say (with absolute truth) that my essay is published at your suggestion, but I hope it will not need so much apology as I at first thought; for I have resolved to make it nearly as complete as my present materials allow. I cannot put in all which you suggest, for it would appear too conceited."

FROM A LETTER TO W.D. FOX. Down, June 14th [1856].

"...What you say about my Essay, I dare say is very true; and it gave me another fit of the wibber-gibbers: I hope that I shall succeed in making it modest. One great motive is to get information on the many points on which I want it. But I tremble about it, which I should not do, if I allowed some three or four more years to elapse before publis.h.i.+ng anything..."

[The following extracts from letters to Mr. Fox are worth giving, as showing how great was the acc.u.mulation of material which now had to be dealt with.

June 14th [1856].

"Very many thanks for the capital information on cats; I see I had blundered greatly, but I know I had somewhere your original notes; but my notes are so numerous during nineteen years' collection, that it would take me at least a year to go over and cla.s.sify them."

November 1856.

"Sometimes I fear I shall break down, for my subject gets bigger and bigger with each month's work."]

CHARLES DARWIN TO C. LYELL Down, 16th [June, 1856].

My dear Lyell,

I am going to do the most impudent thing in the world. But my blood gets hot with pa.s.sion and turns cold alternately at the geological strides, which many of your disciples are taking.

Here, poor Forbes made a continent to [i.e., extending to] North America and another (or the same) to the Gulf weed; Hooker makes one from New Zealand to South America and round the World to Kerguelen Land. Here is Wollaston speaking of Madeira and P. Santo "as the sure and certain witnesses of a former continent." Here is Woodward writes to me, if you grant a continent over 200 or 300 miles of ocean depths (as if that was nothing), why not extend a continent to every island in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans? And all this within the existence of recent species! If you do not stop this, if there be a lower region for the punishment of geologists, I believe, my great master, you will go there. Why, your disciples in a slow and creeping manner beat all the old Catastrophists who ever lived. You will live to be the great chief of the Catastrophists.

There, I have done myself a great deal of good, and have exploded my pa.s.sion.

So my master, forgive me, and believe me, ever yours, C. DARWIN.

P.S. Don't answer this, I did it to ease myself.

CHARLES DARWIN TO J.D. HOOKER. Down [June] 17th, 1856.

...I have been very deeply interested by Wollaston's book ('The Variation of Species,' 1856.), though I differ GREATLY from many of his doctrines. Did you ever read anything so rich, considering how very far he goes, as his denunciations against those who go further: "Most mischievous," "absurd," "unsound." Theology is at the bottom of some of this. I told him he was like Calvin burning a heretic. It is a very valuable and clever book in my opinion. He has evidently read very little out of his own line. I urged him to read the New Zealand essay.

His Geology also is rather eocene, as I told him. In fact I wrote most frankly; he says he is sure that ultra-honesty is my characteristic: I do not know whether he meant it as a sneer; I hope not. Talking of eocene geology, I got so wrath about the Atlantic continent, more especially from a note from Woodward (who has published a capital book on sh.e.l.ls), who does not seem to doubt that every island in the Pacific and Atlantic are the remains of continents, submerged within period of existing species, that I fairly exploded, and wrote to Lyell to protest, and summed up all the continents created of late years by Forbes (the head sinner!) YOURSELF, Wollaston, and Woodward, and a pretty nice little extension of land they make altogether! I am fairly rabid on the question and therefore, if not wrong already, am pretty sure to become so...

I have enjoyed your note much. Adios, C. DARWIN.

P.S. [June] 18th. Lyell has written me a CAPITAL letter on your side, which ought to upset me entirely, but I cannot say it does quite.

Though I must try and cease being rabid and try to feel humble, and allow you all to make continents, as easily as a cook does pancakes.

CHARLES DARWIN TO C. LYELL. Down, June 25th [1856].

My dear Lyell,

I will have the following tremendous letter copied to make the reading easier, and as I want to keep a copy.

As you say you would like to hear my reasons for being most unwilling to believe in the continental extensions of late authors, I gladly write them, as, without I am convinced of my error, I shall have to give them condensed in my essay, when I discuss single and multiple creation; I shall therefore be particularly glad to have your general opinion on them. I may QUITE LIKELY have persuaded myself in my wrath that there is more in them than there is. If there was much more reason to admit a continental extension in any one or two instances (as in Madeira) than in other cases, I should feel no difficulty whatever. But if on account of European plants, and littoral sea sh.e.l.ls, it is thought necessary to join Madeira to the mainland, Hooker is quite right to join New Holland to New Zealand, and Auckland Island (and Raoul Island to N.E.), and these to S. America and the Falklands, and these to Tristan d'Acunha, and these to Kerguelen Land; thus making, either strictly at the same time, or at different periods, but all within the life of recent beings, an almost circ.u.mpolar belt of land. So again Galapagos and Juan Fernandez must be joined to America; and if we trust to littoral see sh.e.l.ls, the Galapagos must have been joined to the Pacific Islands (2400 miles distant) as well as to America, and as Woodward seems to think all the islands in the Pacific into a magnificent continent; also the islands in the Southern Indian Ocean into another continent, with Madagascar and Africa, and perhaps India. In the North Atlantic, Europe will stretch half-way across the ocean to the Azores, and further north right across. In short, we must suppose probably, half the present ocean was land within the period of living organisms. The Globe within this period must have had a quite different aspect. Now the only way to test this, that I can see, is to consider whether the continents have undergone within this same period such wonderful permutations. In all North and South and Central America, we have both recent and miocene (or eocene) sh.e.l.ls, quite distinct on the opposite sides, and hence I cannot doubt that FUNDAMENTALLY America has held its place since at least, the miocene period. In Africa almost all the living sh.e.l.ls are distinct on the opposite sides of the inter-tropical regions, short as the distance is compared to the range of marine mollusca, in uninterrupted seas; hence I infer that Africa has existed since our present species were created. Even the isthmus of Suez and the Aralo-Caspian basin have had a great antiquity. So I imagine, from the tertiary deposits, has India.

In Australia the great fauna of extinct marsupials shows that before the present mammals appeared, Australia was a separate continent. I do not for one second doubt that very large portions of all these continents have undergone GREAT changes of level within this period, but yet I conclude that fundamentally they stood as barriers in the sea, where they now stand; and therefore I should require the weightiest evidence to make me believe in such immense changes within the period of living organisms in our oceans, where, moreover, from the great depths, the changes must have been vaster in a vertical sense.

SECONDLY.

Submerge our present continents, leaving a few mountain peaks as islands, and what will the character of the islands be,--Consider that the Pyrenees, Sierra Nevada, Apennines, Alps, Carpathians, are non-volcanic, Etna and Caucasus, volcanic. In Asia, Altai and Himalaya, I believe non-volcanic. In North Africa the non-volcanic, as I imagine, Alps of Abyssinia and of the Atlas. In South Africa, the Snow Mountains.

In Australia, the non-volcanic Alps. In North America, the White Mountains, Alleghanies and Rocky Mountains--some of the latter alone, I believe, volcanic. In South America to the east, the non-volcanic [Silla?] of Caracas, and Itacolumi of Brazil, further south the Sierra Ventanas, and in the Cordilleras, many volcanic but not all. Now compare these peaks with the oceanic islands; as far as known all are volcanic, except St. Paul's (a strange bedevilled rock), and the Seych.e.l.les, if this latter can be called oceanic, in the line of Madagascar; the Falklands, only 500 miles off, are only a shallow bank; New Caledonia, hardly oceanic, is another exception. This argument has to me great weight. Compare on a Geographical map, islands which, we have SEVERAL reasons to suppose, were connected with mainland, as Sardinia, and how different it appears. Believing, as I am inclined, that continents as continents, and oceans as oceans, are of immense antiquity--I should say that if any of the existing oceanic islands have any relation of any kind to continents, they are forming continents; and that by the time they could form a continent, the volcanoes would be denuded to their cores, leaving peaks of syenite, diorite, or porphyry. But have we nowhere any last wreck of a continent, in the midst of the ocean? St.

Paul's Rock, and such old battered volcanic islands, as St. Helena, may be; but I think we can see some reason why we should have less evidence of sinking than of rising continents (if my view in my Coral volume has any truth in it, viz.: that volcanic outbursts accompany rising areas), for during subsidence there will be no compensating agent at work, in rising areas there will be the ADDITIONAL element of outpoured volcanic matter.

THIRDLY.

Considering the depth of the ocean, I was, before I got your letter, inclined vehemently to dispute the vast amount of subsidence, but I must strike my colours. With respect to coral reefs, I carefully guarded against its being supposed that a continent was indicated by the groups of atolls. It is difficult to guess, as it seems to me, the amount of subsidence indicated by coral reefs; but in such large areas as the Lowe Archipelago, the Marshall Archipelago, and Laccadive group, it would, judging, from the heights of existing oceanic archipelagoes, be odd, if some peaks of from 8000 to 10,000 feet had not been buried. Even after your letter a suspicion crossed me whether it would be fair to argue from subsidences in the middle of the greatest oceans to continents; but refres.h.i.+ng my memory by talking with Ramsay in regard to the probable thickness in one vertical line of the Silurian and carboniferous formation, it seems there must have been AT LEAST 10,000 feet of subsidence during these formations in Europe and North America, and therefore during the continuance of nearly the same set of organic beings. But even 12,000 feet would not be enough for the Azores, or for Hooker's continent; I believe Hooker does not infer a continuous continent, but approximate groups of islands, with, if we may judge from existing continents, not PROFOUNDLY deep sea between them; but the argument from the volcanic nature of nearly every existing oceanic island tell against such supposed groups of islands,--for I presume he does not suppose a mere chain of volcanic islands belting the southern hemisphere.

FOURTHLY.

The supposed continental extensions do not seem to me, perfectly to account for all the phenomena of distribution on islands; as the absence of mammals and Batrachians; the absence of certain great groups of insects on Madeira, and of Acaciae and Banksias, etc., in New Zealand; the paucity of plants in some cases, etc. Not that those who believe in various accidental means of dispersal, can explain most of these cases; but they may at least say that these facts seem hardly compatible with former continuous land.

FINALLY.

For these several reasons, and especially considering it certain (in which you will agree) that we are extremely ignorant of means of dispersal, I cannot avoid thinking that Forbes' 'Atlantis,' was an ill-service to science, as checking a close study of means of dissemination. I shall be really grateful to hear, as briefly as you like, whether these arguments have any weight with you, putting yourself in the position of an honest judge. I told Hooker that I was going to write to you on this subject; and I should like him to read this; but whether he or you will think it worth time and postage remains to be proved.

Yours most truly, CHARLES DARWIN.

[On July 8th he wrote to Sir Charles Lyell.

"I am sorry you cannot give any verdict on Continental extensions; and I infer that you think my argument of not much weight against such extensions. I know I wish I could believe so."]