11.20.05

The Ternate Letter

Posted in Evolution at 4:45 pm by nemo

The current Natural History exhibit has a fullscale mockup of Darwin’s study. Perhaps they should stage of replay of Darwin on the day of the arrival of the Ternate letter. Here is an analysis of the question of the date of the arrival of the letter by Arnold Brackman, in his A Delicate Arrangement, Chapter 3.

SINCE THE MANUSCRIPT Wallace mailed from Temate contained-in complete form-what is today known as the Darwinian theory of evolution, the date of its arrival at Down House acquires profound historical significance.
A quartet of dates is in the running as the date on which the postrider handed Wallace’s envelope to Parslow. The first of the four- Friday, June 4-is speculative; the second-Tuesday, June 8-is the day Darwin wrote Hooker that he had suddenly found the missing “keystone” of his theory; the third-Monday, June I4-is suggested by Darwin’s “little diary”; and the fourth-Friday, June I8-is the date publicly advanced by Darwin himself. Wherever the chronological reality may rest, June 1858 clearly marked for Darwin the moment
of truth.
The problem is compounded by the disappearance of the Wallace envelope. That envelope, with its postmarks, which has been searched for in vain at the Linnean Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the British Museum (Natural History), the University of London, and; elsewhere, contained irrefutable evidence of the precise date on which Darwin broke it open and read its contents. In all probability, it no longer exists. It has either been misplaced or, more likely, destroyed. The postal history of the period, the survival of a number of other Wallace letters from Temate, and a consensus among philatelists is that it would take a letter from Ternate some twelve weeks to reach Down. According to the evidence found in Wallace’s paper, he wrote out his complete theory of evolution toward the end of February and posted it March 9, when the first available Dutch vessel dropped anchor at Ternate. This is corroborated by a letter Wallace sent that same day by the same ship to Frederick Bates, the brother of Henry Walter Bates with whom Wallace had scoured the Amazon for species some years earlier. H. Lewis McKinney, a member of the University of Kansas faculty, was the first to draw attention to the Bates letter, which is in the possession of Wallace’s grandson, Alfred John Russel Wallace. The letter, mailed from Temate, bears the usual series of cancellations, showing its arrival at Singapore and transit to London via Southampton and then on to Leicester, where Bates lived. It arrived at Leicester June 3 and bears a cancellation of the Leicester post office for that date. Wallace’s letter to Darwin should have arrived the same day as Bates’, June 3, or perhaps a day or two later. “It is only reasonable to assume that Wallace’s communication to Darwin arrived at the same time and was delivered to Darwin at Down House on 3 June 1858, the same day as Bates’ letter arrived in Leicester,” said McKinney. “If this sequence is correct, as it appears to be, we must ask ourselves what Darwin was doing with Wallace’s paper during the two weeks between 4 June and 18 June (when Darwin claimed he received it).”
Clearly, the evidence favoring June 3 is strong. It is further strengthened by another piece of evidence dating from June 8.
On that day, five days after probably receiving Wallace’s Ternate manuscript, Darwin wrote the faithful Hooker that he, Darwin, was now suffering from an outbreak of boils but, discomfort aside, was elated to report that he had at last resolved the frustrating problem of how species diverged in nature. “I have a very great confidence it is sound,” Darwin said about the new principle. In his letter he confided that the new theory “is the keystone of my book.” In other words, he arrived at the complete solution of his theory on the origin of divergent species two years after he had begun writing his “big book.” In the letter to Hooker, Darwin-characteristically-did not spell out his latest discovery. He kept it a secret from his best friend.
Late in life, after ascending Olympus and entering the pantheon of the world’s greatest scientists, among them Aristode, Copernicus, and Newton, Darwin admitted in an autobiographical sketch that the principle of divergence had escaped him until almost the last moment.
“In June 1842 I first allowed myself the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in 35 pages,” Darwin said, “and this was enlarged during the summer of 1844 into one of 230 pages.” Then he added, “But at the time I overlooked one problem of great importance: and it is astonishing to me . . . how I could have overlooked it and its solution. This problem is the tendency in organic beings descended from the same stock to diverge in character as they become modified. That they diverged greatly is obvious from the manner in which species of all kinds can be classed as genera, genera under families, families under suborders, and so forth.
“I can remember,” continued Darwin, “the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me, and this was long after I had come to Down.” (Italics added.)
Infuriatingly, as in other instances of crucial importance, Darwin did not pinpoint the date of his major discovery, although he was a meticulous notetaker and kept copious notes when he wanted to, right down to the number of candles he burned at Down annually. Yet the June 8 letter to his lifelong confidant indicates that he may have made the discovery shortly before that date. Did he make it after reading Wallace’s Ternate Paper-assuming that the latter had arrived some -; five days earlier? Or did Darwin make his discovery independently? With the exception of a relative handful of scholars, the academic community at large has never seriously resolved these questions. Dr. John L. Brooks, who is presently Deputy Division Director, Division of Environmental Biology, National Science Foundation, is convinced that Darwin drew his concept of divergence from Wallace’s Sarawak Law and the Ternate Essay (which Darwinphiles, incidentally, often refer to misleadingly as simply “Wallace’s Ternate letter” when, in point of fact, Wallace himself termed it a “paper.” [See p. 327.])
“Wallace was the first and the only person to conceive of the dynamics of the formation of the observed patterns of organic diversity through the action of inevitable natural process,” Brooks said in a summary of his forthcoming work which appeared in the American Philosophical Society’s 1968 yearbook. Brooks, who formerly taught evolutionary history at Yale, also charged that in Origin Darwin never acknowledged his debt to Wallace in resolving his difficulties with the principle of divergence. Further, on the basis of
his still unpublished research, Brooks believes that Darwin received Wallace’s Ternate essay on May 18, 1858, providing him with one month to rework the theory in his own mind before writing Lyell on June 18 and claiming that he had “to-day” received Wallace’s paper..
Significantly, perhaps, R. C. Stauffer of the University of Wisconsin, who made a critical study of Darwin’s unpublished “big book” and is a Darwin admirer who dedicated his work to Lady Barlow, concluded that Darwin completed his final revision of the chapter on divergence June 12, five days after he told Hooker that he, Darwin, had found the missing link, the “keystone” to “his” theory. If Brooks’ thesis is borne out, Darwin would have had three weeks in which to rewrite his chapter on divergence.
The strength of the June 4 and 8 dates notwithstanding, there is equally strong evidence in favor of June 14 as the date that Wallace’s manuscript arrived.
Darwin maintained a minilog, his “little diary,” he called it, a personal annual history that was sometimes compressed into less than a page. “[The] diary or pocketbook,” commented Sir Francis Darwin- his father’s biographer-”. . . contains little more than the dates of the principal events of his life.” (Italics added.)
The pocket diary observes that Darwin began working on the chapter about the principle of divergence in his “big book” on May 14, 1858. According to a notation, he completed work on this most difficult chapter on June I2-that is, some nine days after having received Wallace’s letter, assuming that the letter reached Down House on the same day that Wallace’s other letter, dispatched simultaneously from the Malay archipelago, reached Bates, and five days after Darwin confided to Hooker that he had finally resolved the problem that had thwarted him for almost twenty years. But Darwin’s June 8 date, on which he wrote to Hooker, is convenient-perhaps too convenient-if his statement that he received Wallace’s manuscript o~ June 18 is accepted. For it was Wallace’s manuscript that contained the first complete exposition, in writing, of descent and divergence with modification through variation and natural selection- What is now referred to as the “Darwinian” theory of evolution.
Thus, the next entry in Darwin’s “little diary” acquires particular significance. It reads as follows: “June 14th pigeons (interrupted).”
Darwin was then in the midst of a major experiment with pigeons and) there is no explanation for the interruption, nor for why Darwin should record the experiment as a “principal event” of that year. The sub
sequent entry is dated Thursday, July 20 and reads: “Began abstract
of species book.” This work-The Origin of Species-was the book: that was to catapult Darwin into immortality. It was not the “big book” into which Darwin had already put more than two years’ work.
That book never was completed. The jump in the “little diary” of principal dates from June 14 to July 20 excites the imagination. This is the period that included the announcement of the “Darwinian” theory of evolution to the world- July I, 1858, Francis Darwin, in his two-volume life and letters of his father noted that Darwin had embarked on his “big book” on May 14, 1856, and worked steadily on it “up to June 1858, when it was interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Wallace’s MS.” (Italics added.)
For a diary which purportedly compresses into a few lines “the dates of the principal events” in Darwin’s life, the entry about pigeons and the failure to note the announcement of the theory of evolution on
July I, 1858, are as astonishing as they are inexplicable. Further, if the minilog was designed to record important dates, there should at the very least have been a June 1858 entry observing the arrival of
Wallace’s manuscript. Darwin’s “little diary,” it should be noted, only came to light about twenty years ago. It first appeared in the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Sir Gavin de Beer, the distinguished
geneticist and Darwinian, edited the work and, in a foreword, observed, perhaps unwittingly, that “there is always an element of indiscretion in perusing a document which was never meant by its author for publication.” De Beer offered no explanation for the mysterious interruption at that critical juncture.
As for the June 18 date, this is Darwin’s interpretation of events and-since he was respected for his honor and integrity-is the date almost universally accepted by biographers and historians, and cited in encyclopedias, textbooks, and other works, as the date on which Darwin received Wallace’s manuscript.
In the privacy of his study a troubled Darwin opened Wallace’s letter from Ternate. The contents consisted of a personal note from Wallace and an essay entitled, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” ‘:
!
Chapter 3 2 I
Like the envelope, the note is no longer in existence. It, too, was either lost or destroyed, accidentally or intentionally.
What does exist, however, is a letter which Darwin wrote to Lyell, and which Lyell preserved. It is dated “Down, 18th.” The date is without month or year, a Darwinian idiosyncrasy, for either Darwin had neither the time nor the patience to date his correspondence or, to maintain his seclusion, he deliberately nurtured a vague sense of time as another barrier between himself and the world. Emma, his wife, was of a similar frame of mind and many of her letters are dated loosely. However, in the light of the fast-moving events in the wake of June 18, particularly between June 18 and July I, there is not a . shard of doubt that Darwin mailed his letter to Lyell on Friday, June
18, 1858. “My dear Lyell. . . ,” begins Darwin, “Wallace. . . has today sent me the enclosed, and asked me to forward it to you.” Ana, exercising extraordinary understatement, even for an Englishman, Darwin added, “It seems to me well worth reading.” The letter to Lyell interlocks with Wallace’s own recollection of what he mailed to Darwin the previous March 9. In his autobiography, Wallace confirmed that he had sent his Ternate Paper to Darwin with the request that, if Darwin felt the paper had merit, he should pass it on to Lyell, the doyen of the British scientific aristocracy.
As Julian Huxley, the grandson of Thomas Huxley, later expressed it, the Wallace paper was a “bombshell.”
Until the receipt of Wallace’s letter, and until July 1 of that year, when the “Darwinian” theory of evolution was proclaimed publicly, Darwin-through insecurity, fear of the consequences, failure to have fully developed the theory, simply because he had studied the trees so closely and for so long that he could no longer ‘distinguish them from the forest, or for whatever other reason that may have haunted him- had not published a single line on the species question. Not a word. Moreover, as the record shows, Darwin never took his most intimate colleagues, Hooker and Lyell, completely into his confidence about his life’s work until Wallace forced his hand, and then did so only after receipt of Wallace’s lucid, brilliantly conceived, and thoroughly executed presentation of the theory of evolution through natural selection, including the “keystone” of the concept, the principle of divergence.
In June 1858, Darwin understandably panicked. Indeed, he had been in a state of controlled panic since the end of 1855, when Wallace’s first paper on the question appeared in print. Now the panic was un- controllable. A logical speculation surges to the fore: Why didn’t Darwin destroy Wallace’s damaging manuscript? The explanation is that Darwin was in essence a true scientist, a man of honesty and; integrity. His behavior following his receipt of the Temate Essay was ‘ a tragic, human error of judgment, and the consequences were deplorable.
When panic flies in, reason flies out. Thus, in this moment of weakness which was to deeply trouble his conscience all his life, Darwin engaged in what Leonard Huxley called “a delicate arrangement,” the greatest conspiracy in the annals of science.

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