I wrote a letter to [Darwin] in which I said that I hoped the idea would be as new to him as it was to me, and that it would supply the missing factor to explain the origin of species. I asked him if he thought it sufficiently important to show it to Sir Charles Lyell, who had thought so highly of my former paper.
A.R.W., My Life
He was a man entranced by life’s variety. As a child, he had collected—fossil, flower, beetle, stone—and it was as a collector that he would come to understand his purpose. Forced by his father’s debts to abandon school in his thirteenth year, he learned from what he could gather: broadsheets and belemnites, discarded primers, Milton and Crusoe. Let the great men of Oxford and Cambridge proceed with their philosophies. No: the machinations of a Creator with the whimsy to make birds of paradise, place hearts on the left, and twist seashells to the right—this was beyond his ken. But the search! The search was his calling. Hadn’t a phrenologist told him he would always be seeking? Of the twenty-seven brain organs of Gall, he had large protuberances in Ideality and Wonder. When he contemplated nature and all her permutations, it filled him with an ecstasy that at times felt like lust.
To Samuel Stevens, his agent in London, he sent his collections, destined for cabinets of curiosities and municipal museums, and from Stevens came the means to finance his expeditions. From Wales, he left for the River Amazon, where bees entangled themselves in his beard and his legs erupted with the bites of the pium. In Barra, he hypnotized street urchins. In the slack-water lagoons at São Gabriel, pink dolphins circled his boat. Ants attacked his bird skins, with preference for the eyes. Those specimens he wished to keep whole he bottled in cane liquor, and well into his old age, when he thought of life and its vast diversity arrayed, it smelled to him of spirits. By the time he returned to England at the age of twenty-nine, he had endured the loss of his brother to yellow fever, eight bouts of malaria, the destruction of his collections in a fire on the Sargasso Sea. To such misfortunes, he would add the general indifference of his homeland to his discoveries, his dismissal as a bug collector and a species man. He swore he would never travel again. In March of 1854, he left once more, for the Malay Archipelago, on a steamer of the P&O Line.
If, in his letters to his mother, he wrote joyfully of where he went, his physical travels were but a faint trail through the vastness of his wonder. Whether he expected great revelations from his early collections, he didn’t know; the collections were an end in themselves, the consequences of which he did not consider until the consequences seized him. When he turned, at last, to theory, one thing was clear: he did not intend to destroy faith; he intended to explain the shaping of a beetle’s horns. Should faith fall in the process, he thought (and then thought about it no more), it was a matter for theologians to resolve.
And so he was unprepared for the magnitude of the epiphany, when it came, on that spectacularly warm, tropical spring morning in 1858. Indeed, they said he had the naïveté of a child: too trusting, too awed by others’ greatness to know that he deserved greatness himself. There were hours when he thought: I know nothing. And there were other hours, chiefly at night, waking from dreams he didn’t remember, when a different thought came: that idea, that beautiful burning idea, that recasting and refiguring and resculpting of the world, that idea burst forth from me, and me alone.
Later, back among Englishm
