The Book of Darwin 6 · 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 He wrote his own: On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and an autobiography written for his family and not for publication — chapters one and five of this book come from it.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.
6.1Most of what I did with my life was slow work.
6.2I spent eight years on barnacles. People thought I had lost my senses. When my son was small he visited another house and asked the boy there: and where does your father do his barnacles? He supposed every household had a father doing barnacles.
6.3I spent forty years on earthworms. My last book was about earthworms.
6.4People supposed that was an old man with nothing to occupy him. It was not.
6.5I wanted one thing settled: how large a work can be done by a crowd of quite unremarkable creatures, each doing a very little, if the time is long enough.
6.6I measured it. I laid a bed of chalk over a field, and years later dug down to see how far it had sunk.
6.7I calculated how much soil the worms on one acre bring up in a year.
6.8The figure is large enough that people will not believe it. The whole topsoil of this country has passed through their bodies.
6.9What you see is a smooth field of grass. Underneath it are thousands of years and untold billions of very little.
6.10Every account I have ever given rests on the same thing:
6.11A very small amount, multiplied by a very long time, equals a very large amount.
6.12People will not believe this, because people live too briefly to see the multiplication.
6.13I am not a clever man. My memory is poor, my arithmetic is bad, and I cannot follow a long abstract argument.
6.14I have only one thing: whatever I have decided to get to the bottom of, I am willing to sit with, for a long time, long after everyone else has walked off.
6.15If there is anything to be learned from my life, it is probably not in the things I thought of. It is in that.