Charles Darwin 3tried out various chemical experiments in a shed at the bottom of the garden. No
surprise here. Chemistry is the industrial sciencepar excellence, and the Darwin-
Wedgwood family were doing very well out of industry. When Darwin went off
to Edinburgh, he may have hated the courses in medicine — one major factor
with which anyone could sympathize was the need to rise early in the morning,
in the winter long before daybreak, to listen to Scots professors on pharmacology
— but he started to mix with people interested in natural history, biology as we
would call it today. One figure in the group was Robert Grant, one of the few
evolutionists of the day.
The pattern continued down at Cambridge. Becoming a clergyman for one such
as Darwin was the ideal profession. It was respectable, it did not require too much
work (especially if one could afford to hire a curate to do the hard jobs), and
(to speak very euphemistically) it was not a post that required an abundance of
grey matter. It was the perfect job for a gentleman. Darwin was not expected to
work too hard at his studies and he did not. Enough to get through respectably.
However, he continued with his interests in natural history — collecting beetles,
attending the lectures of the Professor of Botany, John Henslow, and talking to
those few men who were trying to make Cambridge more science friendly. The
offer of theBeaglevoyage at the end of the time was no chance. Initially Darwin
was intended to be basically a companion for the captain, but soon he matured
into the ship’s naturalist, sending massive collections back home to England.
Darwin’s first major scientific forays were into geology [Herbert, 2005]. This
was a much-discussed science around the 1830s. Like chemistry, it was a major
factor in the Industrial Revolution. Minerals were needed, and coal also. No one
wanted to spend a fortune on sinking mines in areas that were simply not going to
be productive. Roads were being built, and canals were the major way in which
goods could be transported. Again, no one wanted to try to bore a tunnel through
a mountain that proved to be granite rather than sandstone. Railways were just
around the corner. Hence interest in geology was high, and the scientific group to
which Darwin had attached himself was in the thick of things.
There were two major theories about geological change. On the one hand,
named by the scientific polymath William Whewell [1837], there were thecatas-
trophists. Much influenced by the thinking of the French comparative anatomist,
Georges Cuvier [1813], they argued that every now and then there are mighty
convulsions, and after these cataclysmic events organisms are recreated miracu-
lously, to meet the new conditions. Earth’s history is directional, from hot to
cold, and leads to the world that we have today. On the other hand, there were
those that Whewell labeleduniformitarians. Their leader was Charles Lyell, and
in his three-volumePrinciples of Geology [1830–1833] he argued that the same
laws and effects hold throughout geological history — rain, sleet, wind, volcanoes,
earthquakes, and so forth can do it all. The only requirement is masses and masses
of time.
Darwin might have been expected to attach himself to the catastrophic camp.
His teacher of geology was a leading catastrophist, Adam Sedgwick, professor of