A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [137]
“Most of them.” Matthew didn’t even look up.
Like German printing, the early days of English drama were a subject for later discussion.
For the most part, Matthew’s books were in pristine condition. This was not entirely surprising, given their owner. Some, though, were well worn. A slender, tall book on the bottom shelf, for instance, had corners so torn and thin you could see the wooden boards peeking through the leather. Curious to see what had made this book a favorite, I pulled it out and opened the pages. It was Vesalius’s anatomy book from 1543, the first to depict dissected human bodies in exacting detail.
Now hunting for fresh insights into Matthew, I sought out the next book to show signs of heavy use. This time it was a smaller, thicker volume. Inked onto the fore edge was the title De motu. William Harvey’s study of the circulation of the blood and his explanation of how the heart pumped must have been interesting reading for vampires when it was first published in the 1620s, though they must already have had some notion that this might be the case.
Matthew’s well-worn books included works on electricity, microscopy, and physiology. But the most battered book I’d seen yet was resting on the nineteenth-century shelves: a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Sneaking a glance at Matthew, I pulled the book off the shelf with the stealth of a shoplifter. Its green cloth binding, with the title and author stamped in gold, was frayed with wear. Matthew had written his name in a beautiful copperplate script on the flyleaf.
There was a letter folded inside.
“Dear Sir,” it began. “Your letter of 15 October has reached me at last. I am mortified at my slow reply. I have for many years been collecting all the facts which I could in regard to the variation and origin of species, and your approval of my reasonings comes as welcome news as my book will soon pass into the publisher’s hands.” It was signed “C. Darwin,” and the date was 1859.
The two men had been exchanging letters just weeks prior to Origin’s publication in November.
The book’s pages were covered with the vampire’s notes in pencil and ink, leaving hardly an inch of blank paper. Three chapters were annotated even more heavily than the rest. They were the chapters on instinct, hybridism, and the affinities between the species.
Like Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of blood, Darwin’s seventh chapter, on natural instincts, must have been page-turning reading for vampires. Matthew had underlined specific passages and written above and below the lines as well as in the margins as he grew more excited by Darwin’s ideas. “Hence, we may conclude, that domestic instincts have been acquired and natural instincts have been lost partly by habit, and partly by man selecting and accumulating during successive generations, peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident.” Matthew’s scribbled remarks included questions about which instincts might have been acquired and whether accidents were possible in nature. “Can it be that we have maintained as instincts what humans have given up through accident and habit?” he asked across the bottom margin. There was no need for me to ask who was included in “we.” He meant creatures—not just vampires, but witches and daemons, too.
In the chapter on hybridism, Matthew’s interest had been caught by the problems of crossbreeding and sterility. “First crosses between forms sufficiently distinct to be ranked as species, and their hybrids,” Darwin wrote, “are very generally, but not universally, sterile.” A sketch of a family tree crowded the margins next to the underlined passage. There was a question mark where the roots belonged and four branches. “Why has inbreeding not led to sterility or madness?” Matthew wondered in the tree’s trunk. At the top of the page,