Where Australia Collides with Asiato his confidant Joseph Dalton Hooker, who was now the botanist with the Geological
Survey of Great Britain. Hooker was a medical graduate from Glasgow University
who at the age of twenty received a proof copy of Darwin’s forthcoming Voyage of the
Beagle and decided he wanted to follow in his footsteps. Two years later he sailed as
the assistant surgeon and volunteer naturalist on the HMS Erebus with Captain James
Clark Ross, on a voyage to the southern continents and Antarctica. As a result of their
shared interests and similar seaborn experiences Darwin and Hooker became life-long
friends and collaborators. As Darwin described it they were ‘co-circum-wanderers
and fellow labourers’. Hooker responded with notes giving Darwin critical feedback
on his ‘Essay’ and their correspondence continued throughout the development of
Darwin’s theory. If Darwin was to publish his work on the origin of species, he needed
absolute scientific proof, and he thought this may lie in a detailed study of barnacles.
In a letter to Joseph Hooker he tells of his plans:
I am going to begin some papers on the lower marine animals, which will last me some
months, perhaps a year, and then I shall begin looking over my ten year long accumulation
of notes on species and varieties, which with writing, I dare say will take me five years.Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French proponent of transmutation, believed that if all
species had evolved from single-celled life forms then marine invertebrates were the
key to understanding how all higher life forms had evolved. Darwin had returned from
his voyage on the Beagle with 1529 barnacle specimens bottled in spirits. He had been
able to call on an array of experts to classify his Beagle collection of fossil mammals,
birds, plants and reptiles. Yet there was no one who could classify the barnacles as
the amount of variation within these sea creatures had made the task very difficult. If
Darwin, who was not yet an expert on anything, could classify the world’s barnacles
then he would become a scientist of authority and perhaps find the scientific proof
needed for his theory on the origin of species.
Comfortable in his study, his one-year study of barnacles was to extend for the next
ten. All the while, his letter to be opened in case of his death remained in the desk
drawer. Now in poor health, it was better to enjoy the small pleasures of his research
and country life than to rock the establishment boat. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin
had challenged the Establishment, Church and society, but his grandson had no wish
to disturb his life at Down House.
Perhaps as the result of the death of his mother when he was only eight years old,
Charles Darwin needed to be loved and to please everybody. We can understand how
important this was to him from a letter he wrote to his eldest son William, while his
son was away at boarding school:
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