At Home - Bill Bryson [234]
Long before Darwin came along, however, people were already finding things that didn’t accord with orthodox beliefs. One of the first such finds, in fact, was just a few miles down the road from the Old Rectory in the village of Hoxne, where in the late 1790s a wealthy landowner and antiquary named John Frere discovered a cache of flint tools lying alongside the bones of long-extinct animals, suggesting a coexistence that wasn’t supposed to happen. In a letter to the Society of Antiquaries in London, he reported that the tools were made by people who “had not the use of metals … [which] may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed.” This was an exceedingly keen insight for the time—too keen, in fact, and it was almost completely ignored. The secretary of the society thanked him for his “curious and most interesting communication,” and, for the next forty years or so, that was the end of the matter.*
But then others began finding tools and ancient bones in puzzling proximity. In a cave near Torquay in Devon, Father John MacEnery, a Catholic priest and amateur excavator, uncovered more or less incontrovertible evidence that humans had hunted mammoths and other creatures now extinct. MacEnery found this idea so uncomfortably at odds with biblical precepts that he kept his findings to himself. Then a French customs officer named Jacques Boucher de Perthes found bones and tools together on the Somme plain and wrote a long and influential work, Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, which attracted international attention. At much the same time, William Pengelly, an English headmaster, reexamined MacEnery’s cave and another in nearby Brixham and announced the findings that MacEnery was too distraught to share. So by midcentury it was becoming increasingly evident that Earth possessed not just a lot of history but also what would come to be known as prehistory, though that word wouldn’t be coined until 1871. It is telling that these ideas were so radical that there weren’t yet even words for them.
Then in the early summer of 1858, from Asia, Alfred Russel Wallace famously dropped a bombshell into Darwin’s lap. He sent him the draft of an essay, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” It was Darwin’s own theory, innocently and independently arrived at. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” Darwin wrote. “If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract.”
Protocol required Darwin to step aside and allow Wallace full credit for the theory, but Darwin couldn’t bring himself to make such a noble gesture. The theory meant too much to him. A complicating factor at this time was that his son Charles, aged eighteen months, was gravely ill with scarlet fever. Despite this, Darwin found time to dash off letters to his most eminent scientific friends, and they helped him contrive a solution. It was agreed that Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell would present summaries of both papers to a meeting of the Linnaean Society in London, giving Darwin and Wallace joint priority for the new theory. This they duly did on July 1, 1858. Wallace, far away in Asia, knew nothing of these machinations. Darwin didn’t attend because on that day he and his wife were burying their son.
Darwin immediately set to work expanding his sketch into a full-length book, and in November 1859 it was published as On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was an immediate best seller. It is almost impossible now to imagine how much Darwin’s theory unsettled the intellectual world, or how desperately many people wished it not to be so. Darwin himself remarked to a friend that writing his book felt “like confessing to a murder.”
Many devout