I’m studying science (see previous column), but I’m still an historian. I look for foundational texts.

Physics? Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night;

GOD said Let Newton Be! And all was Light.

That’s fine, but the Principia Mathematica is beyond me; ditto the “popular” works of Einstein and Hawking.

Biology? Yes, I can follow Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839), and The Origin of Species (1859). And, being a 19th Century naturalist, Darwin draws on and fertilizes geology, botany, zoology, palaeontology (fossils), physiology, etc. They weren’t entirely separate fields back then.

Darwin began to pull all these threads together during the five years he spent voyaging around the world. (Ships were slow, and the Southern Hemisphere very little known to Northerners; Darwin also explored meteorology and oceanography.)

The new geology gave him time: evolution could work over untold millions of years, not the 6,000 that theology had claimed as the age of the earth. Botany and zoology gave materials: descriptions and lists of species, and criteria for defining them. Political economy (Malthus On Population argued that human numbers outran the food supply) supplied a mechanism: survival of the fittest. And the journey, and the twenty following years before Origin appeared, gave him another kind of time: time to think.

How we read a foundational text is important. Add an atlas (and perhaps a magnifying glass) and The Voyage becomes a hypertext that can take many directions. A reader who’s lived and travelled in the South Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand, can both sympathize and argue with Darwin’s impressions. The vastness of the Pacific he describes can also be appreciated aboard a modern freighter. Some of Darwin’s specimens were beautifully displayed in Quebec’s Musee de la Civilisation last year. My annotated copies of Darwin let me compare what I thought when I read him years ago.

It’s hard to remember that The Voyage is the observations of a man who doesn’t know that he’s going to develop his theory of evolution. As Darwin says when introducing his greatest book: “When on board H.M.S. Beagle…I was much struck with certain facts…These…seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries…”

To be continued.

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