Darwin's Island Read Free

biology and geology of his native island. He published his first scientific paper, on the eggs of an animal found in the Firth of Forth, in the twelve grey months he spent in Edinburgh. After a brief visit to Dublin, the young enthusiast then moved to Cambridge, where he spent many days knee-deep in bogs and fens in the search for specimens. Just before the departure of the Beagle , he travelled for three weeks across North Wales from Shrewsbury to Conwy and Barmouth with the geologist Adam Sedgwick, who taught him the elements of mapping so useful on the voyage. On his return he set off again to Scotland, where, in his first major scientific paper, he made a frightful error in his evaluation of a series of parallel shelves or ‘roads’ in Glen Roy as wave-cut beaches rather than the shores of drained glacial lakes (as he wrote many years later, ‘I am ashamed of it’). Later in life he criss-crossed Britain to pursue his researches or to take his family on holiday, or to escape the epidemics of infection that now and again swept through Downe (and killed two of his own children). They went to Wales, to the Isle of Wight (where he met Alfred, Lord Tennyson), to Torquay, to the Lake District (an audience there with Ruskin), to Stonehenge, to the heathlands of England and to a variety of grand mansions across the kingdom. Often, his experimental subjects - pots of orchids or of insect-eating plants - travelled with the family, at considerable inconvenience. He had plenty of time to explore the British Isles for in his forty years at Down House Charles Darwin spent two thousand nights away from home - the equivalent of a day a week. A few of his trips lasted a month and more.
    Some of his travels were in search of science, but many were a quest for health. He became chronically ill very soon after his return from the Beagle trip and his heavy use of snuff and tobacco did nothing to improve his well-being. Darwin visited spas in Great Malvern, in Guildford and in Ilkley (where he received the first copy of The Origin ). His later years were marked by a series of bizarre attempts to remedy his feeble state (even if he did write that illness, ‘though it has annihilated several years of my life, has saved me from the distractions of society and amusement’). The main symptom was vomiting, often brought on by stress, with the rushed last chapter of The Origin sparking off a severe episode that caused great prostration of mind and body. So severe were the attacks that he declined some invitations to stay in friends’ houses on the grounds that ‘my retching is apt to be extremely loud’.
    He tried Condy’s Ozonised Fluid, ‘enormous quantities of chalk, magnesia & carb of ammonia’, and rubber bags filled with ice and worn next to the spine. Nothing worked (although he learned to play billiards at one of the establishments and became a devotee of the pastime, which helped him to relax and, as he said, ‘drives the horrid species out of my head’). The author of The Origin was a victim of the Victorian ‘Demon of Dyspepsia’ and was joined in that unhappy throng by Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale and the evolutionists T. H. Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace and Herbert Spencer, together with his own brother Erasmus. Their troubles funded several pharmaceutical fortunes (including that of Henry Wellcome, which later helped pay for that Darwinian triumph, the sequence of human DNA). What his condition might have been is not known: a supposed conflict between Christian belief and rationalism, or a parasite picked up in Brazil or even, some say, the obsessive swallowing of air. He was diagnosed as having ‘waterbrash’ - heartburn, in modern parlance, the reflux of acid from the stomach - which can result from an ulcer. Dyspepsia’s nausea, depression and lassitude are, we know today, caused by a bacterium. The bug that swept through Victoria’s intellectuals might now be cured with a