the experience of the trip would prove to be life-altering. He concluded
that the auk was gone—“for all practical purposes therefore we may
speak of it as a thing of the past”—and he developed what one biographer
referred to as a “peculiar attraction” to “extinct and disappearing
faunas.” Newton realized that the birds that bred along Britain’s long
coast were also in danger; he noted that they were being gunned down for
sport in great numbers.
Great auks laid just one egg a year.
“The bird that is shot is a parent,” he observed in an address to the
British Association for the Advancement of Science. “We take advantage
of its most sacred instincts to waylay it, and in depriving the parent of life,
we doom the helpless offspring to the most miserable of deaths, that by
hunger. If this is not cruelty, what is?” Newton argued for a ban on
hunting during breeding season, and his lobbying resulted in one of the
first laws aimed at what today would be called wildlife protection: the Act
for the Preservation of Sea Birds.
AS it happens, Darwin’s first paper on natural selection appeared in
print just as Newton was returning home from Iceland. The paper, in the
Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, had—with Lyell’s help—been
published in a rush soon after Darwin had learned that a young naturalist