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By Root 1761 0

Visited by H. M. S. Beagle, 1839), Darwin describes how he felt after going ashore during the ship’s first stop at Porto Praya: “The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is one of great interest; if, indeed, a person, fresh from the sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of any thing but his own happiness.”7 This is not the voice the world expects from Darwin, usually pictured as worn, somber, old, long-bearded, and distinctly Victorian; but it is very much the voice of the young Darwin. The exuberance and feeling expressed here never did entirely disappear although the older Darwin sank into ill health and became sedentary. He simply switched his immediate attention and excitement from the wonders of the tropics to the marvels of his own garden, weeds and ants and worms too.

Darwin’s remarkable powers of observation transformed every natural phenomenon into a kind of miracle. He was extremely sensitive to the slightest variations in the organisms he studied—pigeons or bees or worms or the tiniest of barnacles, a family of sea creatures to which he devoted eight painstaking years. Like the romantic poets, he could see the world in a grain of sand, although he would insist on getting out the microscope to allow him to see yet further. Beer calls him a “romantic materialist.” In Origin, for a moment at least, science and a romantic, even reverent attitude toward the natural world became compatible.

Ironically, Darwin, who is taken to have done most to upset traditional readings of the world as reflecting the intentions of God, learned to think and argue about nature in part from a book dedicated to demonstrating evidences of God in nature. Darwin much admired the brilliant powers of argument manifest in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), which for at least fifty years was required reading at Cambridge University. Making the very case that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was designed to refute, Paley builds his argument from the striking fact of adaptation, which he detected in all living organisms and which he pursued often in minutest detail. “Contrivance” is a favorite word of both writers, and contrivance, of course, would seem to imply a contriver. Wherever Paley looked, he found contrivance. “The admirable structure of the feather,” he notes, to take one of hundreds of examples, works with an “apparatus of crotchets and fibres, of hooks and teeth,” to insure that the fibres will unite and will relock if separated. This is design, as is the “black down” that lies beneath those feathers of birds and warms them as they winter in cold climates.8 The more deeply Paley penetrates into the microscopic elements of organisms, the more clear it is to him that almost miraculous mechanisms are in operation so as to guarantee their usefulness. Darwin may have penetrated deeper, but it was to a similar end with far different implications. For Paley such mechanisms could be no accident, but had to signify intention and design.

No natural theologian was more sensitive to the fineness of adaptations than Darwin. He talks of the “exquisite adaptations” and “co adaptations” of animals, things like the shape of hummingbirds’ bills in relation to flowers, a relation that suggests mutual aid and amazing coordination between two apparently unrelated organisms. Early on he talks of “the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird.” He sees adaptation “in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze,” and, he says, “we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world” (pp. 59-60). The quality of delighted attention to the minutest phenomenon is a mark of all of Darwin’s writing; the joy he takes in those observations is always manifest. The miracles that Paley observes Darwin observes even more closely, and his astonishment is greater in part because he sees more than adaptation.

What he sees, however,