THREE CENTURIES' PERSPECTIVES
The Moral State of Tahiti—and of Darwin
Childhood precocity is an eerie and fascinating phenomenon.
But let us not forget the limits; age and experience confer some
blessing. The compositions that Mozart wrote at four and five are
not enduring masterpieces, however sweet. We even have a word
for such "literary or artistic works produced in the author's youth"
(Oxford English Dictionary)—-juvenilia. The term has always borne a
derogatory tinge; artists certainly hope for substantial ontogenetic
improvement! John Donne, in the second recorded use of the word
(1633) entitled his early works: "Iuuenilia: or certaine paradoxes
and problemes."
I shouldn't place myself in such august company, but I do feel
the need to confess. My first work was a poem about dinosaurs,
written at age eight. I cringe to remember its first verse:
Once there was a Triceratops
With his horns he gave big bops
He gave them to an allosaur
Who went away without a roar.(I cringe even more to recall its eventual disposition. I sent the
poem to my boyhood hero, Ned Colbert, curator of dinosaurs at the
American Museum of Natural History. Fifteen years later, when I
was taking his course as a graduate student, Colbert happened to
clean out his old files, found the poem, and gleefully shared it with
all my classmates one afternoon.)
Now, a trivia question on the same theme: What was Charles
Darwin's first published work? A speculation on evolution? Perhaps
a narrative of scientific discovery on the Beagle? No, this greatest and
most revolutionary of all biologists, this inverter of the established
order, published his first work in the South African Christian Recorder
for 1836—a joint article with Beagle skipper Robert FitzRoy on "The
Moral State of Tahiti." (The standard catalogue of Darwin's publica-
tions lists one prior item—a booklet of Beagle letters addressed to
Professor Henslow and printed by the Cambridge Philosophical So-
ciety in 1835. But this pamphlet was issued only for private distribu-
tion among members—the equivalent of an informal modern