The mystery of mysteries, 1836

'Time! Time! Time!'

In my last piece here, I introduced the wonderful Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), unsung heroine of comet spotting. I mentioned her vital role in the work of her more famous brother William – and this time I want to introduce another Herschel family member, whom Caroline was very attached to.

The person in question was her nephew John, William’s son born in 1792. Caroline’s day-books of her observations also contain many references to him, worrying over his childhood illness, proudly watching him go up to Cambridge University (where he became chums with Charles Babbage, another friend of Histories), and nurturing his own enthusiasm for science – she was the one who first taught him about astronomy, “shewing him the constellations in Fl[amsteed’s] Atlas”. “Not a day was spent without I had the pleasure of seeing him,” she noted.

Her many letters to him invariably begin “my dear nephew” and perhaps she thought of him as the son she never had herself (in 1829 she wrote to him directly of her “Motherly feelings”). It was for him that she wrote her “little history of my life from 1772–1778” and he in turn preserved many of her notes and letters (his wife Margaret Brodie Stewart, a notable botanical artist, was the one who compiled them into the 1876 volume Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel).

And John – perhaps the cleverest of all in this impressive family? – was clearly very fond of his aunt in return. In June 1832, when she was already in her eighties, he wrote of her:

I found my aunt wonderfully well and very nicely and comfortably lodged, and we have since been on the full trot. She runs about the town with me and skips up her two flights of stairs as light and fresh at least as some folks I could name who are not a fourth part of her age… In the morning till eleven or twelve she is dull and weary, but as the day advances she gains life, and is quite “fresh and funny” at ten or eleven, p.m., and sings old rhymes, nay, even dances! to the great delight of all who see her…

Now, John went on to a stellar career. He was one of the founders of the Royal Astronomical Society, made important observations about the eye conditions astigmatism and colour blindness, was the inventor of the photographic blueprint and for that matter coined the word photography, and even wrote a translation of Homer’s Iliad – a proper platinum-grade polymath.

In 1831, John Herschel wrote one of his most influential works, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, setting out the proper use of the scientific method and inductive reasoning. In the same year, a 22-year-old student at Cambridge read this work and in his own autobiography (written in 1876) noted that this work (along with Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799–1804) “stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two.” In 1831, this same young scientist set off on his own journey across the world – and a key stopping point for him was Cape Town in 1836, which happened to be where Herschel was staying.

John Herschel observing Halley’s Comet from Cape Town in 1835.

On 13th November 1833, John Herschel, with his wife and three young children, set out from Portsmouth for South Africa, the principle aim being to observe the night sky from the southern hemisphere. Aunt Caroline was jealous: “Ja! if I was thirty or forty years junger [sic] and could go too? in Gottes nahmen!” she wrote. Herschel and his family would end up staying for more than four years (by which time they had three more children).

Naturally, John wrote to his aunt Caroline about the voyage:

Cape Town, Jan. 21, 1834

My dear aunt,—

Here we are safely landed and comfortably housed at the far end of Africa, and having secured the landing and final stowage of all the telescopes and other matters, as far as I can see, without the slightest injury, I lose no time in reporting to you our good success so far. M. and the children are, thank God, quite well; though, for fear you should think her too good a sailor, I ought to add that she continued sea-sick, at intervals, during the whole passage. We were nine weeks and two days at sea, during which period we experienced only one day of contrary wind… On the night of the 14th we were told to prepare to see the Table Mountain. Next morning (N.B., we had not seen land before since leaving England), at dawn the welcome word “land” was heard, and there stood this magnificent hill, with all its attendant mountain range down to the farthest point of South Africa, full in view, with a clear blue ghost-like outline, and that night we cast anchor within the Bay… [He continues with vivid detail of their arrival, search for a home and the “perfect paradise” they found, signing off “Your affectionate nephew”.]

A few weeks later and Herschel was properly set up for his astronomical observations. He was also reading a book called Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell, whose central idea was that our planet has been shaped for millennia by the same natural processes we observe now – a major challenge to the Christian notion at the time that Earth was only 6,000 years old. Herschel was inspired, and on 20th February he wrote to Lyell, whose work he said offered “a complete revolution”:

Of course I allude to that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others. Many will doubtless think your speculations too bold, but it is as well to face the difficulty at once… we are led, by all analogy, to suppose that [the Creator] operates through a series of intermediate causes, and that in consequence the origination of fresh species, could it ever come under our cognizance, would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process…

In the same letter, Herschel drew an analogy between this gradual development of the earth’s inhabitants and natural languages:

Words are to the Anthropologist what rolled pebbles are to the Geologist – battered relics of past ages often containing within them indelible records capable of intelligent interpretation… Time! Time! Time!

And indeed Herschel had made some particular observations from his love of gardening – again articulated in the same letter to Lyell:

…when you find a species which fills up as you fancy a wanting link between two others – it does not merely fill it, but does so with the superaddition of some new characters – or some analogy with a 3rd species which the others do not offer.

(Lyell is later alleged to have said “If ever there was a heaven-born genius it was John Herschel!”)

At the end of May, the other young scientist I mentioned arrived in Cape Town, eager to meet Herschel in person (“I have heard so much about his eccentric but very amiable manners,” he wrote to his sister). With him was the captain of their ship, Robert FitzRoy – the man who invented the term ‘weather forecast’ and set up what would become Britain’s Met Office. The ship was called HMS Beagle. And the young scientist was, of course, Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s diary records that he met Herschel on 15th June, though sadly gives no detail other than to say it was “the most memorable event which, for a long period, I have had the good fortune to enjoy”. On 9th July, Darwin wrote to his friend and mentor John Stevens Henslow, a priest and fellow scientist (it was thanks to him that Darwin got a place on the Beagle):

At the Cape, Capt Fitz Roy, & myself enjoyed a memorable piece of good fortune in meeting Sir J. Herschel.— We dined at his house & saw him a few times besides. He was exceedingly good natured, but his manners, at first, appeared to me, rather awful. He is living in a very comfortable country house, surrounded by fir & oak trees, which alone, in so open a country, give a most charming air of seclusion & comfort. He appears to find time for every thing; he shewed us a pretty garden full of Cape Bulbs of his own collecting; & I afterwards understood, that every thing was the work of his own hands…

This is as close as we can get to their meeting, alas – although some giants of their era were all in one place, this was no Immortal Dinner recorded in detail. Herschel’s own diary tersely noted, “Captain Fitzroy, Mr Darwin, Capt Alexander, Mr C Bell & Mr & Mrs Hamilton dined here at 6. Capt F. & Mr D. came at 4 & we walked together up to Newlands.”

The immortal dinner, 1817

But Darwin clearly got over Herschel’s initial bad manners – they met on a few further occasions back in Britain and in his autobiography Darwin would write of Herschel, “He never talked much, but every word which he uttered was worth listening to.” And in a notebook entry of 1838, Darwin picked up on a particular phrase of Herschel’s from the letter to Lyell, which had become widely circulated: “Herschel calls the appearance of new species the mystery of mysteries, & has a grand passage upon the problem! Hurrah – ‘intermediate causes’.”

And there can be no clearer debt Darwin owed Herschel than that acknowledged in the very first paragraph of the his 1859 ground-breaking foundation stone of evolutionary theory, On the Origin of Species:

When on board HMS Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts on the distribution of organic beings inhabiting South America. These facts seemed to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.

Darwin also sent Herschel a copy of the book before it came out:

I cannot resist the temptation of showing in this feeble manner my respect, & the deep obligation, which I owe to your Introduction to Natural Philosophy. Scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me: it made me wish to try to add my mite to the accumulated store of natural knowledge.

Small changes over time. Subtle chains of influence. The evolution of ideas. Of course we can’t say that Caroline Herschel’s nurturing of her nephew directly caused Darwin to arrive at his ideas on evolution (Lyell and others, including his own grandfather Erasmus, influenced him too) – but it’s all connected, and maybe if she hadn’t sat down with the infant John and shown him the atlas of the heavens, he would not have had such a broad scope of thinking. When he returned from the Cape in 1838, he would be fêted as the nation’s greatest scientist, honoured at a dinner attended by 400 eminent scientists and made a baronet at Queen Victoria’s coronation. But he never forgot the role his aunt played. In 1824 he had written to her:

“The Sacrifices you have individually made for your family are above all praise.”