Darwin and the Barnacle

  • Rebecca Stott
Faber and Faber: 2003. 336 pp. £14.99
Robert Grant: an early influence on Darwin.

Books about Charles Darwin now form a considerable library in their own right. Yet one period of his life seems to have been rather neglected: the years between 1844, when he completed the first draft of his ideas about the species problem, and the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species. These are the barnacle years, when Darwin trained himself in zoology.

In Darwin and the Barnacle, Rebecca Stott tries to throw light on what happened during this period. She tells us that “it is the story of one tiny creature and history's most spectacular scientific breakthrough”. I suppose it is difficult to avoid hyperbole when it comes to Darwin — after all, he wrote some 19 books, many of them founding canons of their individual sciences. Few scholars have been so productive and so influential in so many fields. The tendency to canonize Darwin is almost irresistible, especially for someone who is English and a denizen of Cambridge, as is Stott.

This book focuses on the eight years between 1846, when Darwin published his last geology tome, and 1854, when the final barnacle volume appeared. According to Stott, Darwin complained in his letters that this was a long time. But I doubt that any taxonomist starting work on a group from scratch would find any need to apologize for taking eight years to produce four monographs comprising over 1,200 pages. In fact, throughout his career Darwin learnt quickly and was a fast worker. He put his species theory aside because there were things he needed to clarify in his own mind, and he recognized the need for hands-on experience with real species.

'Mr Arthrobalanus', a specimen of boring barnacle picked up by Darwin on the coast of Chile in 1835, keeps appearing again and again throughout the book, like the tolling of a funeral bell. If Stott intended this as a dramatic device to convey the un-ending tedium of Darwin's barnacles, she has succeeded. By mid-volume one cries “Enough already!” But she adds insult to injury by never revealing what Mr Arthrobalanus was (apart from its eventual scientific name, Cryptophialus minutus). A hint is given in the footnotes to chapter 11, but if you don't read footnotes at the back or are not familiar with barnacles then you are out of luck. Mr Arthrobalanus is not a true barnacle, but rather a member of an entirely different superorder.

There are also errors and omissions. Midway through, Stott takes up the cause of the peculiar stalked barnacle Ibla. Unlike most hermaphroditic barnacles, Ibla has a unique way of separating the sexes, with tiny males that are little more than gonad bags attached outside the female's shell. But Figure 14, which purports to illustrate the vexing Ibla, actually shows a scalpellomorph, which represents a completely different suborder. We are also introduced to Proteolepas, but we are not told that this mysterious animal proved to be nothing but a parasitic isopod.

Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in Darwin and the Barnacle. The description of a Victorian water cure is delightful. Darwin was addicted to them, and the episode at Dr Gully's establishment at Malvern is told with the right degree of tongue in cheek. The story of the last months of Darwin's daughter, Annie, is incredibly touching, linked as it was with a hopeless water cure for the dying girl. And the chapter on Robert Grant, the Darth Vader of sponge studies, working by night in his “castle by the sea” had me wishing for more. Stott tells us too of young Thomas Huxley on the make — not a pleasant person at all, by the sound of it — and poor John Coldstream, wrestling with his sexuality.

What bothered me most about the book, however, is that Stott seems to have missed the point about the barnacle years. This was when Darwin really came to grips with variation in species. He knew he had to do this. He went looking for variation in nature — his species theory demanded it — and by golly he found it. The problem is that he overestimated it. What Darwin recognized as species are now, more often than not, classified as genera, and what he delineated as varieties are today separate species.

For an accurate scientific account of Darwin and barnacles, I recommend William Newman (Crustacean Issues 8, 349–434; 1993). But if you want to meet some interesting characters, Darwin and the Barnacle is great.