Sherry Chandler

Mr. Darwin also has a 200th birthday

�There is grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.� — Charles Darwin

And it is being celebrated big in the UK. I even heard that the Church of England issued an apology to the man. You can check out The Guardian for a nice video overview of Darwin’s life. The Guardian reminds us that Darwin enjoyed reading Lord Byron and William Shakespeare.

I will remind you that you can read Darwin’s Beagle Diariy online here. February 12, 1834 found Darwin in the Straits of Magellan:

With very baffling winds we anchored late in the evening in Gregory Bay, where our friends the Indians anxiously seemed to desire our presence. During the day we passed close to Elizabeth Island, on North end of which there was a party of Fuegians with their canoe &c. They were tall men & clothed in mantles; & belong probably to the East Coast; the same set of men we saw in Good Success Bay; they clearly are different from the Fuegians, & ought to be called foot Patagonians. Jemmy Button had a great horror of these men, under the name of “Ohens men”. “When the leaf is red, he used to say, Ohens men come over the hill & fight very much.”

And you can find the complete works of Darwin online here, including audio of the Beagle Diary.

And it might be a good time to re-post Langdon Smith’s poem:

Evolution

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into life again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man�s hand;
We coiled at ease �neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was passed.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing sod
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o�er the plain
And the moon hung red o�er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Than I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west to east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O�er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o�er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Til our brutal tusks were gone.

And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico�s.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet �

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnish�d them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world�s dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men made war
And the ox-wain creaks o�er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O�er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.

__________
Update: By way of Lance Mannion, see also this film from the Vancouver Film School.

Update 2: Michael Lind, writing in Salon, says that Abraham Lincoln “believed” in biological evolution but did not particularly believe in Jesus Christ:

While Lincoln did not believe that Jesus was the son of God, he did believe in biological evolution. His law partner Herndon recalled that Lincoln took great interest in “Vestiges of Creation” (1844) by Robert Chambers, a book that popularized the idea of evolution even before Darwin published his theory of natural selection as its mechanism: “The treatise interested him greatly, and he was deeply impressed with the notion of the so-called ‘universal law’ — evolution; he did not extend greatly his researches, but by continued thinking in a single channel seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine.”

Diaries

Just occurred to me that I’m currently reading on-line blogs/diaries from a 4-century sweep of British/American history.

From the 17^th Century London, there’s Pepys’ Diary. On October 12, 1665, a Thursday when it was 48 °F in London, Pepys says:

Called up before day, and so I dressed myself and down, it being horrid cold, by water to my Lord Bruncker�s ship, who advised me to do so, and it was civilly to show me what the King had commanded about the prize-goods, to examine most severely all that had been done in the taking out any with or without order, without respect to my Lord Sandwich at all, and that he had been doing of it, and find him examining one man, and I do find that extreme ill use was made of my Lord�s order.

…

Good newes this week that there are about 600 less dead of the plague than the last. So home to bed.

One hundred and ten years later and on another continent, from the 18^th Century, Boston 1775 (not actually a diary) takes a close look at that portentous year in Boston. J. L. Bell’s entry for October 13 seeks to solve a mystery:

Among many other things, the Declaration of Independence complains that bad, bad George III has harmed his American subjects by �transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses.� The standard line is that this is a reference to the Administration of Justice Act, which Parliament passed in 1774.

However, when I looked at the wording of that law, I saw that it applied only to employees of the royal government. It said nothing about any other criminal defendants. So it wasn�t designed to deprive colonists of fair trials by moving them far from their homes. Instead, it was designed to give Crown employees fair trials by moving them away from supposedly prejudiced juries.

So where, I asked, did the �transporting us beyond seas� complaint come from?

From the 19^th Century, Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, where on October 12, 1833, Mr. Darwin was socked in by bad weather, en route from Santa Fe to Buenos Aires:

Embarked on board the Balandra; a one masted vessel of a hundred tuns; we made sail down the current. The weather continuing bad, we only went a few leagues & fastened the vessel to the trees on one of the islands. The Parana is full of islands; they are all of one character, composed of muddy sand, at present about four feet above the level of the water; in the floods they are covered. An abundance of willows & two or three other sorts of trees grow on them, & the whole is rendered a complete jungle by the variety & profusion of creeping plants. These thickets afford a safe harbour for many capinchas & tigers. The fear of these latter animals quite destroyed all pleasure in scrambling in the islands. On this day I had not proceeded a hundred yards, before finding the most indubitable & recent sign of the tiger. I was obliged to retreat; on every islands there are tracks; as in a former excursion the “rastro” of the Indians had been the constant subject of observation, so in this was the “rastro” del tigre”.

.
The jaguar is a much more dangerous animal than is generally supposed: they have killed several wood-cutters; occassionally they enter vessels.

With a note from the editors:

Jaguars were historically found from the southwestern United States to southern Argentina. Its range is now reduced. The results from WCS’s workshop, held in Mexico in 1999, indicated that jaguars have been lost from over 50% of their range since 1900. Most of the loss has occurred in Mexico and the United States in the north, and in Brazil and Argentina in the south. The largest contiguous area of jaguar range is centered in the Amazon Basin and includes adjoining areas in the Cerrado, Pantanal, and Chaco to the south and extending to the Caribbean coast in Venezuela and the Guianas. Jaguar range has decreased due to deforestation, conversion of land to other uses, and killing of jaguars and their prey.

And about a hundred years later, in the 20^th century, October 12, 1938, George Orwell had domestic concerns—how to find decent livestock in Morocco:

A lot cooler. No snow now visible on the Atlas, but perhaps obscured by clouds.

Have installed the hens & goats. Hens about the size of the Indian fowl, but of all colours, some with a species of topknot, white ones very pretty. These are supposed to be laying pullets but have not laid yet. Twelve brought crammed together in two small baskets, then sent on donkey back about 5 miles, at the end of which one fowl was dead, apparently pecked to death by others. They appear not to like maize, probably not used to it, or possibly when unbroken it is too big for them. Arabs always keep them in completely grassless runs. Tried giving them some green stuff at which they pecked not very enthusiastically. Hope they may take to it later.

Goats are tiny. Searching all over the market could not find any of decent size or with large bags, though one does see some not actually bad goats in the flocks that graze on the hillsides. The breed here is very shaggy and tends to get its coat dirty.

The Beagle Diary

Well, while I’m pointing the way to famous diaries online, here compliments of Heraclitean Fire, is Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary.

As of this writing, nothing posted for August 12^th. On August 11^th, Orwell’s party seems to have encountered a version of the world tree:

Shortly after passing the first spring we came in sight of the famous tree, which the Indians reverence as a God itself, or as the altar of Walleechu. It is situated on a high part of the plain & hence is a landmark visible at a great distance. As soon as a tribe of Indians come in sight they offer their adorations by loud shouts. The tree itself is low & much branched & thorny, just above the root its apparent diameter is 3 feet. It stands by itself without any neighbour, & was indeed the first tree we met with; afterwards there were others of the same sort, but not common.

Being winter the tree had no leaves, but in their place were countless threads by which various offerings had been suspended. Cigars, bread, meat, pieces of cloth &c &c., poor people only pulled a thread out of their ponchos.