Bee lines and worm burrows: growing up as Darwin's little helpers

Charles and Emma Darwin moved from London to Down, Kent, in 1842, when their first two children, William and Annie, were still small. As Emma gave birth to more children, their father grew comfortably ensconced in the country house that he would rarely leave. His study, the sitting room, and greenhouses became a gentleman's laboratory; his gardens and the surrounding meadows and woodlands became field stations for his observations and experiments. The children's involvement in science began in infancy, as experimental subjects, while their affectionate, attentive, but intensely curious father scrutinized their development.

William ("Doddy") was born in 1839. The father's notes on the boy reflect Darwin's keen interest in the origin of expressions and the extent to which they were inherited. He noted William's smiles, frowns, and gestures. He knew it was hard to prove that children instinctively recognize any expression but was convinced that William "understood a smile and received pleasure from seeing one, answering it by another, at much too early an age to have learnt anything by experience" When his son was a year old, Darwin noted that, to "his word for food ... he gives the most strongly marked interrogatory sound at end ... analogous to cry for food of nestling-birds, which certainly is instinctive & peculiar to that time of life." Darwin later used his notes for his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and they formed the basis of "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant," an article published in 1877 in the journal Mind.

His children began discovering natural history themselves at an early age. In 1855 at age five, Darwin's fourth son, Leonard, ran to a flower exclaiming, "I've a fact to do." By then his father had launched into his botanical studies, with a particular interest in how insects cross-pollinate plants [see "The Miraculous Season," by David Kohn, page 38]. On at least one occasion he stationed several children at plants he knew to be pollinated by bumblebees. As a bee visited a flower, the child dusted the insect with flour and shouted where it was headed next. Mapping the flight of a bumblebee thus became a Darwin family project.

Darwin's longstanding enthusiasm for beetles and other insects apparently inspired several of his sons. As a teenager, Darwin's second son, George, clambered over the so-called Orchis Bank on summer nights, observing the pollination of Gymnadenia conopsea, the fragrant orchid, among others. Darwin, who described George as "an entomologist and careful observer," cited his work in the second edition of his 1862 book, On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. George, he recorded, caught four different moth species with "pollinia attached to their proboscides."

In the 1860s, William--once the subject of his father's observations on infant expression--assisted in Darwin's studies of dimorphic plants, species that have two reproductive forms. By then a young banker in Southampton, William happily labored on weekends collecting dimorphic Primulas, Pulmonaria (lungworts), and Lythrum (purple loosestrife), meticulously sketching and measuring anthers, pollen grains, stamens, and stigmas for his father. Their correspondence is crowded with diagrams and debates about the arcana of their passion.

Not always restricted to science, the letters from Down included household news--Emma's comments on her husband's health, how the heat had shortened the bloom of the azaleas. William's letters thanked his mother for the corn plaster just sent, or noted the dates of his next visit home.

Henrietta, Darwin's third daughter, also helped her father, though the historical evidence is harder to ferret out. Like most Victorian daughters, she was not sent away to school or to university as her brothers were, and she lived at home until she married. Nevertheless, botanical notes of Darwin's, written in her hand, make it clear that she was often at her father's side in the greenhouses and gardens. She probably helped by tying thread to stems to mark plants, or by examining flower parts with a magnifying glass. When Darwin received some new plants for the hothouse, he wrote to a friend that he and Henrietta "go & gloat over them." He added: "We privately confessed to each other, that if they were not our own, perhaps we shd. not see such transcendent beauty in each leaf."

Henrietta's involvement gave her a botanical background that would later be put to good use, in proofreading and editing many of her father's later books. Darwin wrote her in France that her criticisms on the manuscript for his 1868 book, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, were "excellent, excellent, excellent." Henrietta's work at Down is one more example of what is now a growing body of evidence for the participation of women in Victorian science. Most of the women were the relatives of men of science, and though many of their contributions were quiet, they were often significant.

Darwin made perhaps his most unusual requests for help during his study of worms. He enlisted his daughters and other female relatives to follow the creatures and measure the angles of their burrows. His helpers poked knitting needles into the worm holes and duly noted the results. Darwin wanted the information for the book, published in 1881, that would be his last: The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits. One of the best-known findings that Darwin reported in the book was that earthworms had played an important role in undermining and burying Roman ruins, by transporting soil to the surface. Three of Darwin's sons helped establish that result. And a fourth, Darwin's third son, Francis, famously played his bassoon over worms to test whether they could hear. (They couldn't.)

Darwin clearly appreciated his children's help, but his paternal delight may have far exceeded his appreciation. How wonderful it was for him to discover his children's growing awareness of what he was ultimately up to. In 1862 Darwin glowingly wrote to the American botanist Asa Gray about his fifth son, Horace, then eleven years old:

Horace said to me, "there are a terrible number of adders here; but if everyone killed as many as they could, they would sting less."--I answered "of course they would be fewer" Horace replied "Of course, but I did not mean that; what I meant was, that the more timid adders which run away & do not sting would be saved, & after a time none of the adders would sting."

Darwin proudly added: "Natural selection!!"

COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning