A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral

Natural History, Sept, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

I had long been curious about Tremaux and sought a copy of his book for many years. I finally purchased one a few years ago--and I must say that I have never read a more absurd or more poorly documented thesis. Basically, Tremaux argues that the nature of the soil determines national characteristics and that higher civilizations tend to arise on more complex soils formed in later geological periods. If Marx really believed that such unsupported nonsense could exceed the Origin of Species in importance, then he could not have properly understood or appreciated the power of Darwin's facts and ideas.

We must therefore conclude that Lankester harbored no secret sympathy for Marxism and that Marx sought no Darwinian inspiration in courting Lankester's friendship. Our confusion only deepens: What brought these disparate men together? What kind of bond could have nurtured their friendship? The first question, at least, can be answered, and may even suggest a route toward resolving the second puzzle--the central conundrum of this essay.

Four short letters from Lankester remain among Marx's papers. (Marx probably wrote to Lankester as well, but no evidence of such reciprocity has surfaced.) These letters clearly indicate that Marx first approached Lankester for medical advice in the treatment of his wife, who was dying, slowly and painfully, of breast cancer. Lankester suggested that Marx consult his dear friend (and co-conspirator in both the Slade and the Charcot incidents), the physician H.B. Donkin. Marx took Lankester's advice and proclaimed himself well satisfied with the result, as Donkin, whom Marx described as "a bright and intelligent man," cared, with great sensitivity, both for Marx's wife and then for Marx himself in their final illnesses.

We do not know for sure how Marx and Lankester first met, but Lewis Feuer develops an eminently plausible hypothesis in his previously cited article--one, moreover, that may finally lead us to understand the basis of this maximally incongruous pairing. The intermediary may well have been Charles Waldstein, born in New York in 1856, the son of a German Jewish immigrant. Waldstein, who later served as professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge, knew Lankester well when they both lived in London during the late 1870s. Waldstein became an intimate friend of Karl Marx, an experience he remembered warmly in an autobiographical work written in 1917 (when he had attained eminence and respectability under the slightly but portentously altered name of Sir Charles Walston):

   In my young days, when I was little more than a boy, about 1877, the
   eminent Russian legal and political writer ... Professor Kovalevsky, whom I
   had met at one of G.H. Lewes and George Eliot's Sunday afternoon parties in
   London, had introduced me to Karl Marx, then living in Hampstead. I had
   seen very much of this founder of modern theoretic socialism, as well as of
   his most refined wife; and, though he had never succeeded in persuading me
   to adopt socialist views, we often discussed the most varied topics of
   politics, science, literature, and art. Besides learning much from this
   great man, who was a mine of deep and accurate knowledge in every sphere, I
   learnt to hold him in high respect and to love the purity, gentleness, and
   refinement of his big heart. He seemed to find so much pleasure in the mere
   freshness of my youthful enthusiasm and took so great an interest in my own
   life and welfare, that one day he proposed that we should become
   Dutz-freunde.