Revue Recto/Verso N 5 Décembre 2009 Dirk Van Hulle DARWIN S PERSONAL LIBRARY AND THE ORIGINS OF THOUGHTS 1. par Dirk Van Hulle

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1 Revue Recto/Verso N 5 Décembre 2009 Dirk Van Hulle DARWIN S PERSONAL LIBRARY AND THE ORIGINS OF THOUGHTS 1 par Dirk Van Hulle In his autobiography Charles Darwin wrote with the advantage or disadvantage of hindsight that he happened to read Thomas Robert Malthus s essay on population in October 1838 and that he was at once struck 2 by the crucial insight that natural selection had to be the mechanism of evolution. However, as Howard Gruber and others have shown, this insight did not come as a sudden Eureka moment. Darwin s notes do not indicate any particular excitement 3 and it seems as if it only gradually dawned on him how important this Malthusian insight was. And the corresponding excitement only followed more than two months later, when he wrote in one of his notebooks: Herschel calls the appearance of new species the mystery of mysteries & has grand passage upon problem.! Hurrah 4. Darwin does suggest in his autobiography that, before he could be struck by Malthus s essay, he was well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence (...) from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants 5. But observation was not the only form of preparation ; his reading in the same period cannot be neglected either. Thanks to Darwin s own reading lists, his marginalia and his notebooks, it becomes clear that Malthus s essay was merely one of the numerous books Darwin was reading in the Fall of This does not diminish the undoubtedly important role Malthus has played as a catalyst in the writing process of the theory of evolution, but none of Darwin s books is quite the same as if it had been read without the others, as Gillian Beer has duly pointed out: The miscegenation of texts is a powerful and uncontrollable force 6. Based on a comparative analysis of the style of Darwin s marginalia in his books, the elliptical style of his loose thoughts jotted down in his transmutation notebooks, his pencil sketch of 1842 and the draft of his essay of 1844 this study attempts to show not from a biological or historical perspective, but from the vantage point of genetic criticism how gradual the genesis of Darwin s thoughts was, in terms of both exogenetics ( focused on information stemming from a source exterior to the writing ) and endogenetics ( the process by which the writer conceives of, elaborates, 1 This article owes a debt of gratitude to English Heritage Curator Annie Kemkaran-Smith and the staff at Down House for allowing me to consult and study the Field notebooks at Down House. I also wish to thank Adam Perkins and the staff at Cambridge University Library for allowing me to consult Charles Darwin s personal library and making it possible to study the marginalia discussed in this article, which gratefully builds on the pioneering transcriptions and studies by Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn and Sydney Smith, Charles Darwin s Notebooks , Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1987; Mario Di Gregorio and N. W. Gill, Charles Darwin s Marginalia, New York City: Garland Press, 1990; Sidney Smith, The Origin of The Origin as discerned from Charles Darwin s Notebooks and his Annotations in the Books he read between 1837 and 1842, in The Advancement of Science XVI.64 (March 1960), ; Peter Vorzimmer, The Darwin Reading Notebooks ( ), Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1977), ; Charles Darwin s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe with the assistance of Kees Rookmaaker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin , ed. Nora Barlow, New York and London, Norton, 1958, p Howard Gruber notes that the crucial passage does not even contain a single exclamation point, although in other transported moments he [Darwin] used quite a few, sometimes in triplets. Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity. London: Wildwood House, 1974, p The idiosyncratic punctuation is Darwin s. Notebook E, p. 59, in Charles Darwin s Notebooks , ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn and Sydney Smith, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, The Cambridge University Library catalogue numbers of these notebooks are CUL DAR Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin , op. cit., p Gillian Beer, Darwin s Reading and the Fictions of Development in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, ; p ISSN

2 2 and transfigures pre-textual material, without recourse to outside documents or information ) 7. As Pierre-Marc de Biasi duly points out, there is no such thing as a purely exogenetic element: every exogenetic fragment bears the primitive seal of endogenetics 8. Starting from the examination of Darwin s personal library, this article investigates how the origins of this conceptual breakthrough relate to the gradual development of Darwin s thoughts through the act of writing. Exogenetics A short and certainly not exhaustive description of Darwin s extremely rich Nachlass suffices to indicate the difficulty of separating exo- and endogenetics. During the famous voyage with the Beagle, he jotted down his observations in small pocket-sized field notebooks. He also kept a record of his observations in the Zoological Notes and wrote a more elaborate account of the voyage in his Beagle Diary (transcribed by Richard Keynes), which was to become the basis of the Journal of Researches, published in 1839 and better known under the title The Voyage of the Beagle. At the end of the voyage Darwin started making more abstract or theoretical notes and in 1837 he opened the first of the so-called transmutation notebooks (numbered B, C, D and E). Notebook C already contained notes on subjects that did not strictly speaking deal with the subject of transmutation, so on 15 July 1838 Darwin decided to open two new notebooks simultaneously : D and M, followed respectively by E and N. The content of M and N is referred to as Man, Mind and Matter by Howard Gruber 9 ; Darwin s own description on the inside of the front cover of notebook M reads: This Book full of Metaphysics on Morals & Speculations on Expression 10. In the meantime, he read dozens of books, marking them and writing comments in the margins, so that he would qualify as a marginalist, according to the distinction suggested by Daniel Ferrer 11. But he was an extractor as well. The very first transmutation notebook opens with a reference to Zoonomia, the most important scientific work by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, thus marking from the start the close relationship between reading and writing that characterizes the writing process of On the Origin of Species. Apart from reading notes in this separate notebook, Charles Darwin also wrote several marginalia in his copy of this book (preserved at Cambridge University Library). On page 505 of the first volume his grandfather wonders whether it would be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great first cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end! 12 Erasmus Darwin further elaborated on this thought, which seems to have struck his grandson, to the extent that the latter wrote in the margin: what an assumption!!! 13 However, Charles simultaneously attempted to make clear in what respect this idea differed from what he was trying to achieve himself: I attempt to show means 14. This inquiry into the mechanism of evolution left its traces in the transmutation notebooks, which do contain numerous original ideas, but interspersed with reading notes. The first pages of notebook B indicate how 7 Pierre-Marc de Biasi, What is a Literary Draft? Toward a Functional Typology of genetic Documentation in Yale French Studies 89 (1996), 26-58; p Pierre-Marc de Biasi, What is a Literary Draft?, art. cité, p Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, London, Wildwood House, 1974, p. xix. 10 Charles Darwin s Notebooks , ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn and Sydney Smith, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1987, p Daniel Ferrer, Towards a Marginalist Economy of Textual Genesis in Reading Notes, ed. Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2004, p Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia: or, the Laws of Organic Life, vol. 1, London, J. Johnson, , p Ibid., p Ibid., p. 506.

3 3 Darwin s reading served as a run-up to the mental leap that was to take place in the privacy of his notebooks. Reading lists Notebook B was followed by C, at the back of which he started making a list of the books he had read. This list is followed by another list of books to be read. In 1839 he asked an amanuensis to copy these lists in a separate notebook according to a specific system: the left-hand page featured the author and title, the right-hand side was meant for brief comments. For instance, next to Turner s Embassy to Thibet the note on the right-hand side reads : perhaps worth reading, quoted by Malthus 15. After somewhat more than four double pages, the amanuensis s handwriting stops and Darwin has taken over. Page 10 is dated : December 1839 and from page 13 onward, the right-hand side is also filled with titles and authors, notably : Coleridge, Literary Remains, Inconsistency of Human Wishes (by which he possibly meant The Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson) and Bacons Essays. As soon as Darwin had read a book, he crossed out the title. Or he added explicitly that he had read it, for instance on page 15 : Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell (read). In the same notebook, starting from the other side, the first 4,5 pages feature the list of books read by Darwin, copied from notebook C by the amanuensis, again according to the same system titles on the left, comments on the right, starting with this note: N.B. These books have been read since I thought of my transmutation theory. The list mentions that Darwin finished reading Malthus on Population on 3 October Once in a while, Darwin added a short value judgement, such as skimmed, stupid, next to Evelyn s Sylva (a book on trees by John Evelyn, published in 1670, the first to appear under the auspices of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge). Darwin was thrifty with positive comments. Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle was one of the few books he considered excellent ; but On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History by the same author was merely moderate 16. The four volumes of James Boswell s Life of Samuel Johnson, mentioned in the list of books to be read, could be considered read on 14 February 1839 according to the second list 17. The last note the amanuensis copied was King & FitzRoy s Voyages (1 June 1839), after which Darwin took over, starting on 25 June with the next item, the life of the English poet William Cowper. Initially, Darwin continued employing the same system, making no difference between scientific and poetic works. But instead of using the facing right-hand page only for comments, he also added a few titles: Coleridge Table Talk. Campbell s Poems. Some of Shelley s Poems. This is the first time he distinguishes between literary and scientific works. From the next page onward the left-hand side is generally reserved for scientific books and the right-hand side for other (philosophical, historical, literary) works. In the meantime, Darwin continued writing down his thoughts in his transmutation notebooks and the ones on Metaphysics. Since Darwin started writing in notebooks D and M at the same moment (15 July 1838), the note-taking process on both topics resembles a relay race between Transmutation (D, E) and Metaphysics (M, N), in which the interaction between reading and writing plays a stimulating role. Thanks to the reading lists and the corresponding reading notes, it is 15 CUL DAR 119, p. 4. In 1977 Peter Vorzimmer has made a first transcription of these reading lists (Peter J. Vorzimmer, The Darwin Reading Notebooks ( ) in Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1977), p ). A complete transcription is included in Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, vol. 4, p CUL DAR 119, p. 10b: Feb. 7th Sartor Resartus excellent ( ) / March 25 Carlyle Hero Worship moderate. 17 C.269; Paul Barrett et al., Charles Darwin s Notebooks , op. cit., p. 323.

4 4 possible to reconstruct the exciting changeover between D and E on the one hand, and M and N on the other. 18 In early September 1838, D was taking the lead, but M was close on its heels: Reading list CUL DAR 119.3v Mitchell s Australia Walter Scott s Life 1 st, 2 nd & 7 th vols. Corresponding reading notes on page [D.132] [M.129] The next page in notebook M (M.130) mentions a date (3 September [1838]) indicating the moment Darwin jumped from the second to the last volume of John Gibson Lockhart s Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott. He continued to jot down his thoughts in This Book full of Metaphysics, while taking reading notes on Hunter s Animal Economy in notebook D (D ). These reading notes on John Hunter s Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Oeconomy with Notes by Richard Owen (1837) continue until page D.161, but since notebook M is twenty pages slimmer than D, it is no wonder that the changeover between M and N already occurred on 1 October. On 2 October, Darwin filled the first pages of notebook N with his reading notes on Charles Waterton s Essays on Natural History (1838) which corresponds to his reading list. But in spite of this head start, N was soon to be overtaken by E, because of the important and copious notes on Malthus s essay on population. Apart from the continued interest in geology, the mental process took shape in two parallel circuits. For a short while it looked as if Metaphysics (M, N) was going to play a more important role in Darwin s thought process, but Transmutation (D, E) in the end did preoccupy him just a little bit more and E s arrears were quickly made up: Oct. 2 nd Waterton s Essays on Nat. History [N.1-4] d[itt]o Trans. of Royal Irish Academy [D.164] Oct. 3 rd Lavater s Phisignomy [sic] [D ] Malthus on Population [D E.1-17] Oct. 12 th W. Earle s Eastern Seas [E.18] Keith Thomson suggests that Darwin is not completely honest in his autobiography, when he writes that he happened to read [Malthus] for amusement. According to Thomson, Darwin was possibly re-reading the essay 19 not unlike John Herschel s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which he was re-reading in the same Fall of The latter title features on the next page of the reading list (4v) as Herschel s Introd. to Nat. Philosophy, mentioning explicitly on the facing page (5r) that this was his 2d time of Reading. There is no such mention next to the entry Malthus on Population, but that does not alter the fact that Darwin had already been introduced to Malthus s ideas through his reading of William Paley s Natural Theology (about which he later wrote in a letter to John Lubbock [15 november 1859] that he hardly ever admired a book more 20. The inductive scientific method Both Paley and Herschel turned out to be of great help when Darwin tried to give shape to his thoughts based on Malthus s views. Paley had opened his magnum opus with a strong metaphor the analogy between complex machines (such as a watch) and complex organisms; Darwin was to open his work with the correspondence between artificial selection and natural selection. Herschel s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy was an exposition on scientific 18 In 1960 Sydney Smith compared a fragment of the reading list with the notes in his article The Origin of The Origin as discerned from Charles Darwin s Notebooks and his Annotations in the Books he read between 1837 and 1842, The Advancement of Science XVI.64 (March 1960), p Keith Thomson, The Young Charles Darwin, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 263n Correspondence 7, p. 388: I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley s Natural Theology. I could almost formerly have said it by heart.

5 5 methodology that provided Darwin with a theoretical background that helped him structure his argumentation. Herschel based himself on Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton s so-called vera causa method. In order to be true, a cause had to meet three criteria: (1) it had to relate to a real phenomenon; (2) in terms of its scale and its nature the cause had to be capable of producing the observed result; (3) it had to be proven that this was indeed the cause that was responsible for the observed result 21. In his 1842 pencil sketch the first sustained effort to write out his theory Darwin attempted to present natural selection as the vera causa of evolution. Whether or not he happened to read Malthus for amusement, and whether or not the great breakthrough at once struck [him] as he later claimed in his autobiography, Darwin was professional enough to put his new insight to the test of a formal scientific method, for which he refreshed his memory by rereading Herschel between October 1838 and January 1839, probably around the same time (early December) as the ejaculation Hurrah, when he mentioned in his notes that Herschel called the origin of species the mystery of mysteries. It is remarkable that even during this strictly scientific enterprise, Darwin continued to be equally interested in matters pertaining to the arts and humanities. While he was engrossed in Whewell and Hershel s writings on scientific methology, Darwin also read essays such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing s Laocoon: or, The limits of Poetry and Painting 22. His list of Books to be read mentions that his brother Erasmus thought Charles should like it and he certainly thought it interesting enough to write a few pages of comments on Lessing s essay 23, focusing on the question what is beauty? As in a cathechism, the question is immediately followed by the answer: Lessings[sic] shows expression of pain cannot be represented. But what is beauty? it is an ideal standard, by which real objects are judged; & how obtained. implanted in our bosoms. how comes it there? 24 It is characteristic of Darwin s thought process that many questions could be left open in his notes. As a consequence, it may seem as if the story of his writing process skips from one subject to another, jumbling up important breakthrough moments and unimportant hesitations relating to irrelevant subjects. But the genesis in se is not a story; it has a dynamic of its own and does not proceed according to well-considered narrative strategies. In retrospect it is always tempting to reduce the genesis of a great idea to one source of inspiration. That Darwin s reading of Malthus s essay has been crucial is beyond dispute, but the writing of On the Origin of Species cannot be reduced to one single origin. The most striking aspect of Darwin s thought process is the diversity of reading impressions and the cross-fertilization between the arts and exact sciences that marks his notes. How diverse his reading was around the famous Malthusian insight, is evident from the reading list between October 1838 and January 1839: Oct 3 Lavater s Phisiognomy Malthus on Population Oct 12 th W. Earle's Eastern Seas. 12 th Sir S. Stauntons Embassy to China Kotzebue s two voyages Lutke s voyage Reynold s Discourses Lessings Laocoon Whewell inductive History Herschel s Introd to Nat. Philosophy skimmed well carefully read References at end d[itt]o 2d time of Reading 21 See David L. Hull, Victorian Philosophy of Science in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, , p. 180ff.; see also Keith Thomson, The Young Charles Darwin, op. cit., p Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: or, The limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. William Ross, London, Ridgeway, Notebook C, p. 266: Lessings. Laoccaon[sic]. (translated in 1837) on limits of painting & poetry. Erasmus thinks I should lik[sic] it. 24 Old & Useless Notes, CUL DAR 91, p. 22.

6 6 R. W. Darwin's Botany. References at end. Mayo Pathology of Human mind Evelyn s Sylva skimmed stupid Browne's travel s in Africa well skimmed 1839 Jan 10 All life of W. Scott except 5 th vol. 25 Although the reading lists contain a wealth of information regarding the exogenetic side of the writing process, they are much more than merely indications of potential source texts. For instance, Whewell s History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time (3 volumes, London, 1837) was not so much employed as a source text to find examples to support or corroborate his theory, but rather as a guide to reflect upon his method of thinking. The inductive method was based on Francis Bacon s principle of starting from observations before drawing general conclusions. This was the way he proceeded for instance when he found the two types of rhea in South America, which raised the question: why would a Creator have made a smaller rhea on the same continent when the larger type was perfectly fit. Via the inductive method he thus concluded that evolution was a fact. The hypothetico-deductive method The question, however, is to what extent Darwin was aware of his scientific method at that moment. Whewell s book was published in 1837 but in Darwin s reading list it is mentioned toward the end of 1838, after his reading of Malthus. The idea of natural selection had come to him indirectly (while reading an essay by an economist); this idea served as a hypothesis for further research, which came closer to the so-called hypothetico-deductive method than to the inductive method 26. He seems to have sensed that this approach deviated from the inductive method, so that the innovative thinker in Darwin came into conflict with his more conformist side. Apparently, his first reflex after his reading of Malthus was a level-headed, formal analysis of his working method to see if the vera causa principle was still applicable. Later on, he wrote in his autobiography that he had steadily endeavoured to keep [his] mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis ( ) as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. He concluded that it led him to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences 27. But Niles Eldredge draws another conclusion. Darwin s readiness to give up any hypothesis as soon as the facts indicated the opposite suggests, according to Eldredge, that Darwin was actually applying Karl Popper s falsifiability principle avant la lettre. And this method was inspired by the special situation of Darwin s secret notebooks: if his theory was wrong, he wanted to be the first to notice 28. When the first editions of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection came out in 1859, the text was preceded by two mottoes. The first was a text by William Whewell, the second was a passage from Francis Bacon s Advancement of Learning: let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God s word, or in the book of God s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficiency in both. Perhaps this choice was part of a strategy to make On the Origin of Species as acceptable as possible by placing his theory very clearly in the venerable tradition of the inductive sciences, referring both to the inventor of this scientific method and to the author of the History of the Inductive Sciences. But according to Eldredge, Darwin s approach had already undergone a change 29. By means of the inductive method, he had come to realize 25 CUL DAR 119, p. 4v-5r. 26 Niles Eldredge suggests Darwin already made use of the hypothetico-deductive method. Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, New York: W. W. Norton, 2005, p. 56ff. 27 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin , op. cit., p Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, op. cit., p Eldredge refers to Michael Ghiselin s The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (1969): Ghiselin, a biologist, makes a strong case that Darwin was indeed among the first to make conscious use of what is now called the

7 7 that evolution was a fact, but in order to discover the mechanism of evolution, he applied a slightly different strategy. Darwin seems to have managed to reconcile the inductive and the hypotheticodeductive scientific methods without too many problems. In notebook D he wrote: The line of argument often pursued throughout my theory is to establish a point as a probability by induction, & to apply it as hypotheses to other points, & see whether it will solve them 30. Darwin reformulated observed patterns as predictable results of a process of evolution. His notes increasingly took the shape of a hypothesis: if evolution was a correct hypothesis, how, then, did species come into being and what would that mechanism look like? Functions of metaphors The first time Darwin tried to answer this question, he employed a metaphor: a tree, irregularly branched, some branches far more branched. Some branches died. There is nothing stranger in death of species, than individuals 31. In the meantime, the image of the tree of life is so familiar that it is barely recognized as a metaphor. It is one of the metaphors we live by as they were called by the linguists Lakoff and Johnson. They are merely images and we are not always aware of this fact, but to a certain extent they do determine the way we think. To Darwin this particular metaphor was a very conscious choice. As soon as he had devised it he wondered whether he could find a better metaphor: The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead 32. As he had been able to observe in the Pacific Ocean, corals grow upward while the bases of the branches die. Nonetheless, Darwin eventually decided in favour of the arboreal metaphor. To his short-lived idea of the coral of life, he immediately added: no, only makes it excessively complicated 33. And ten pages further, on page B.36, he made his famous drawing of the tree of life. Fig. 1: Charles Darwin, Transmutation Notebook B, p. 36. hypothetico-deductive method, and he agrees with other historians and biologists that, despite what Darwin himself said about his methods, he was no naïve inductivist, no slavish follower of Baconian principles. (Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, op. cit., p. 57) 30 D.117; Paul Barrett et al., Charles Darwin s Notebooks , op. cit., p Notebook B, p Notebook B, p Notebook B, p.26

8 8 The drawing is followed by a short description, but the most remarkable aspect of this page is the upper left corner, where Darwin simply wrote: I think. It has been suggested that Darwin added this as an afterthought, after having made the drawing. But is equally plausible that he wrote I think first, then tried to formulate what he thought and eventually decided he could express it more readily by drawing it. A few other instances of the interjection I think elsewhere in the notes may corroborate this alternative hypothesis. When the young Charles Darwin went on a geological expedition to North Wales with his professor Adam Sedgwick (shortly before his voyage with the Beagle), he already made a set of notes. Paul H. Barrett compared these notes to Sedgwick s and comes to the following conclusion: Sedgwick s notes are mainly descriptive and in the best tradition of inductive science; they are almost entirely restricted to geological facts. Darwin s notes are not only descriptive, but deductive and speculative 34. They are also interspersed with hypotheses, preceded by the words I think or I should think ; for instance: Abegele. Very cold & excellent springs break out about the town; this I should think was owing to the strata being broken 35. During the voyage with the Beagle, in February 1835, he wrote in his so-called Santiago field notebook about his geological observations in the Andes: I think the gr step-like upheaval of the land, assisted by earthquakes would is the index of explanation. 36 It is merely a loose jotting but the words I think signal instances when Darwin is formulating a hypothesis and deviating from the strictly inductive method. In the case of the tree of life, he tried to make a visual representation of his metaphor, which was actually a hypothesis. Very often his hypotheses were inspired by his reading. During his voyage with the Beagle he had formulated a theory on the origin of coral reefs on the basis of what he had read in Charles Lyell s Principles of Geology without ever having seen a coral reef. Only at a later stage during the voyage did he have the opportunity to check his hypothesis. Endogenetics. The importance of Darwin s reading of source texts (the exogenetics examined in the previous section), raises the question how original Darwin s thoughts were and in more general terms what originality consists of. Darwin was interested in this notion of originality from a scientific point of view. In notebook M he noted: Perhaps one cause of the intense labour of original inventive thought is that none of the ideas are habitual, nor recalled by obvious associations, as by reading a book. Consider this 37. While Darwin was considering this, he carefully preserved the material traces of his original inventive thought experiments. The habit of systematically keeping one s notes and drafts was a trend that only gradually became common practice in the eighteenth century. This trend related to the increased importance of the author and especially of originality, which according to Edward Young was of a vegetable nature and rose spontaneously from the vital root of Genius 38. Young s Conjectures on Original Composition was a source of inspiration of the young Goethe, but even in the twenty-first century the term genius is still in vogue, particularly outside of literature, as is evidenced by Niles Eldredge s description of Darwin s creative scientific genius 39. However, Darwin also realized that writing is not just a matter of Romantic inspiration and geniality, but also a craft. During the voyage of the Beagle he started realizing how difficult it is to formulate an original thought, as he explained in a letter to his sister Caroline: 34 Paul H. Barrett, The Sedgwick-Darwin Geologic Tour of North Wales in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (April 1974), p CUL DAR 5, p. 8r. 36 Santiago field notebook, p Notebook M, p Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, London, Miller & Dodsley, Niles Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, New York: W. W. Norton, 2005, 54.

9 9 My occupation consists in rearranging old geological notes: the rearranging generally consists in totally rewriting them. I am just now beginning to discover the difficulty of expressing one s ideas on paper. As long as it consists solely of description it is pretty easy; but where reasoning comes into play, to make a proper connection, a clearness & a moderate fluency, is to me, as I have said, a difficulty of which I had no idea. 40 The drawing of the tree of life is an example of the struggle to express his reasoning and to formulate an original inventive thought. On the one hand, the preceding tag I think indicates a degree of uncertainty; on the other hand, the combination with the drawing may serve as an indication of the way in which an original thought manifested itself in the first instance. This process corresponds to Giambattista Vico s exposition on the origin of language and its relation to thought, as summarized by Samuel Beckett: Poetry was the first operation of the human mind, and without it thought could not exist. Barbarians, incapable of analysis and abstraction, must use their fantasy to explain what their reasons cannot comprehend. Before articulation comes song; before abstract terms, metaphors. ( ) Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passion and feeling and animates the inanimate 41. The tree of life came before the abstract notion of natural selection. In this sense, Darwin s earliest transmuation notebook can be regarded as a form of poetry. But even later on, Darwin continued to animate the inanimate abstraction called natural selection. In the 1842 pencil sketch, the notion of natural selection was animated and presented as a benign selector. On page 19r of the pencil sketch (CUL DAR 6), just before the page with the heading Natural Selection, Darwin introduced a being that was infinitely more sagacious than man, but as he immediately added (not an omniscient creator). If during thousands and thousands of years this being were to select all the variations which tended towards certain ends it would be able to produce new species. Without caring too much about grammar, Darwin immediately illustrated what he had in mind: for instance, if he foresaw a canine animal would be better off, owing to the country producing more hares, if he were longer legged and keener sight, greyhound produced 42. By means of this anthropomorphization, Darwin made a smooth transition from artificial to natural selection. The same narrative strategy was applied to the essay of and in On the Origin of Species as it was published in Interestingly, this is not merely a rhetorical and/or narrative strategy; it also reflects the way Darwin actually thought. A genetic study of the notes reveals that the analogy between artificial and natural selection was also the way the mechanism became comprehensible to Darwin himself, shortly before his reading of Malthus. In notebook C, for instance, Darwin presented the mechanism of natural selection as a conscious act of nature, which he compared to man s picking : The infertility of crosse & cross is method of nature to prevent the picking of monstrosities as man does. One is tempted to exclaim that nature, conscious of the principle of incessant change in her offspring, has invented all kinds of plans to insure sterility 45. In the private environment of his transmutation 40 Charles Darwin, The Beagle Letters, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, 2008, p Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, New York, Grove Press, 1984, p. 24; emphasis added. 42 CUL DAR 6, p. 19r. 43 Let us now suppose a Being with penetration sufficient to perceive differences in the outer and innermost organization quite imperceptible to man, and with forethought extending over future centuries to watch with unerring care and select for any object the offspring of an organism produced under the foregoing circumstances; I can see no conceivable reason why he could not form a new race (or several were he to separate the stock of the original organism and work on several islands) adapted to new ends. Transcription: Francis Darwin, ed., The Foundations of The Origin of Species: Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909, p Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1859, p Transmutation notebook C, p CUL DAR 122. The note was probably written in June 1838 as it follows only a dozen pages after the date June 5 th on page 40 of the same notebook.

10 10 notebooks, marked by parataxis, Darwin first made a mental transition from artificial to natural selection by anthropomorphizing or animating the abstract concept; he subsequently employed his own thought process as a narrative strategy to the synthesizing exercise of the 1842 pencil sketch and the 1844 essay; and eventually he also applied it to the text of On the Origin of Species as a rhetorical and didactic devise to make the abstract concept of natural selection compehensible to a broad audience. Conclusion Darwin thought on paper. To what extent this thought process accorded with an inductive or with a hypothetico-deductive scientific method is not always unequivocal, and perhaps it is more fruitful to see the notebooks as a continuum between both methods. Rather than the strict application of the predominant scientific method of the day, the proceeding that seems to have facilitated his thought process in the most helpful way was the very act of writing itself, in whatever form. Notes, excerpts, comments on his reading, ideas taken from a book, original thoughts, trivia, drawings, jottings, all the material vestiges of his thought process were equally worth preserving. This raises the question why he preserved so many of these vestiges. With regard to the notes of Émile Benveniste, Irène Fenoglio asks the pertinent question: «Pourquoi les garde-t-il?» Her answer is equally applicable to Darwin s notes: «Parce que c est le lieu où il pense, réfléchit, organise, s informe. Il s agit d un espace stratégique où l idée prend lieu, place et forme, où la pensée naît parce qu elle s inscrit.» 46 A similar conclusion does not only apply to Darwin s notes, but even to his marginalia. In the series called Library of Useful Knowledge Darwin read William Youatt s Cattle: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases. In his reading list he mentioned that he had read it on 26 March 1839 and that he had written References at end 47. These notes and marginalia are quite important, for according to Camille Limoges it was in the margins of this book that Darwin first made the link between selection and the adjective natural : on page 230 he noted in the margin: This makes cases very like selection from small varieties naturally produced 48. So, both as an extractor and as a marginalist, Darwin constantly used the act of writing to give shape to his ideas. Whether or not the idea of natural selection came into being because it was written down ( parce qu elle s inscrit as in the case of Benveniste s notes according to Irène Fenoglio) is hard to determine, but it seems safe to conclude that writing, drawing or any other form of commiting thoughts to paper clearly facilitated Darwin s thought process. Because he carefully preserved his notes, he could easily keep track of the way his thoughts had proceeded, including the way he had made the transition from artificial to natural selection by animating the abstract concept. Darwin s skill as a writer shows in the way he turned his own mental process into an effective rhetorical and narrative strategy in On the Origin of Species. 46 Irène Fenoglio, «Les notes de travail d Émile Benveniste : où la pensée théorique naît via son énonciation,» in Langue & société 127 (Écritures scientifique : Carnets, notes, ébauches) (mars 2009), ; p. 44 ; emphasis added. 47 CUL DAR 119, p. 7v. 48 Di Gregorio et al., Darwin s Marginalia, New York City: Garland Press, 1990, p. 888; see also Camille Limoges, La sélection naturelle, Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1970, p