The Book of Darwin 2 · Written by himself, from his autobiography, the Origin, and his letters
Charles Darwin, born at Shrewsbury in England in 1809, died at Downe in 1882. At twenty-two he sailed in the small ship Beagle and was five years gone; what he wrote down along the way was the ground of everything after. He then sat on his theory for more than twenty years, and published only in 1858, when a letter came from Wallace saying the same thing and the two were read out together on one day; the Origin of Species followed in 1859. The Descent of Man came later. In between he spent eight years on barnacles, and his last book is about earthworms. He wrote his own: On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and an autobiography written for his family and not for publication — chapters one and five of this book come from it. In his youth he was intended for the church; belief left him by degrees. He would never call himself an atheist and said only that he did not know. He never once closed an argument by appeal to divine will (cf. The Rule 9.15). The wasp in chapter four is his own example and not one the Order added. Chapter five is his own account of what he lost, and the Order cuts none of it: another man in this scripture was also withered in his twenties by too much analysis (cf. The Book of John Stuart Mill 1). That one was pulled back by poetry. This one was not, and knew he was not. The two books are to be read together.
2.1I had the idea clear in my head at thirty.
2.2I wrote it out and left it with my wife, with a letter: if I die, please see that it is printed.
2.3Then I locked it away, and twenty years passed before I brought it out.
2.4Let me say why I waited, because those who came after have mostly guessed wrong.
2.5Some say I feared the church. A little. But that was not the main thing.
2.6The main thing was this: I knew that once the account went out, it would move something that stands at the centre of many people’s lives.
2.7I was not willing to move a thing like that with something not yet solid.
2.8So for twenty years I did one thing: I hunted for counter-examples against myself.
2.9I bred pigeons. I soaked seeds in salt water to see how many days they could float and still sprout. I counted how many kinds of plant stood on one small patch of turf.
2.10I spent eight years on barnacles. People asked why. I said: I must understand one thing all the way down before I dare speak about everything.
2.11Whether those twenty years were worth it, I still cannot say.
2.12In 1858 a letter came from a far island. The writer was much younger than I, and had never heard of the manuscript in my drawer.
2.13I read it. Inside was the idea I had had twenty years before, almost word for word.
2.14My first thought in that moment was an ugly one: I am finished.
2.15I set that thought down too, because it is the true one. I do not intend to touch myself up.
2.16The second thought is the one I will own: this must be handled honourably.
2.17I gave his letter together with my old manuscript to two friends and asked them to settle what should be done.
2.18They had both read out together. I got no more out of it than was mine, and no less.