Voyage of the barnacle: Darwin paid his dues as a scientist by exploring a miniature universe of marine animals

Natural History, June, 2003 by Richard Milner

Darwin's friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, had warned him that "no one has the right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many." The barnacles won Darwin that right. Through his intense labor with them, he developed an extensive network of correspondents in the scientific community who would later greet his Origin with respectful attention. Classifying the barnacles gave Darwin new skills as a dissector, a microscopist, an observer, a classifier, and a theoretician. Moreover, he had satisfied himself that nature produced no sharp lines of demarcation between varieties and species.

"My life goes on like Clockwork," he wrote his old captain, Robert FitzRoy, during the barnacle years, "and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it." Stott sums up his forty years at Down House, his country estate in Kent, with an apt metaphor:

   The larval Darwin has metamorphosed.
   He has found his rock. Anchored to it, he
   will stay here like the adult barnacle, for the
   rest of his days, reproducing himself, fishing
   with his feet as the tide comes and goes.
   And his life ... as regular as the tides."

Richard Milner is an associate in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and a contributing editor of this magazine.