The Wonders of Darwin's World

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume 40 ¦ Number 4 ¦ Summer 1997 THE WONDERS OF DARWIN'S WORLD EVELYN M. WITKIN* Charles Darwin, in the autobiography written for his children in his late sixties, mentioned that he enjoyed reading in his youth [I]. The only title that he specified was The Wonders of the World, a book that he recalled as having had an important impact upon him early in his schooldays at Shrewsbury School. He wrote "I believe this book first gave me a wish to travel in remote countries, which was ultimately fulfilled by the voyage of the Beagle." Darwin's biographers have probably assumed that a book having this title contained a straightforward geographic description of the ancient Seven Wonders or other remarkable manmade monuments and natural phenomena. It now seems possible, however, that in recalling his schooldays more than five decades later, Darwin may have forgotten one word in the title of the book in question and may have meant to cite a book by Nathaniel Wanley entitled The Wonders of the Little World [2]. Wanley's book, first published in 1678, is known to have had a powerful influence on one of Darwin's close contemporaries, the poet Robert Browning , who used it as a source of ideas for his poetry throughout his life [3] . Because of my interest in Browning, I recently spent time at the Armstrong Browning Library in Texas. There I was able to study Browning's own copy of The Wonders ofthe Little World, a first edition that had been in his father's library. The book is a compilation of thousands of brief excerpts from the writings of well-known philosophers, historians, physicians, philologists, etc., from classical times to the late 17th century, chosen to represent the history and scope of human nature. Wanley's goal in this 655-page tour de Correspondence: One Firestone Court, Princeton, NJ 08540. *Waksman Institute, Rutgers, The State University of NewJersey, P.O. Box 759, Piscataway, NJ 08855.© 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/97/4004-1027$01.00 ectives in Biology and Medicine, 40, 4 ¦ Summer 1997 471 force was to collect the most remarkable examples of human accomplishment and degradation, of excellence and deficiency, in all aspects of the physical, mental, emotional, and social qualities which men and women have exhibited, and which, taken together, define what Bacon called "the ultimities" of being human. While reading Wanley's book, I recalled Darwin's comment in the Autobiography that he had often "disputed with other boys about the veracity of some of the statements" in the book. The Wonders ofthe Little World contains many items that strain the reader's credulity, scattered among a larger number that could be true. The possibility occurred to me then that Wanley's book may actually have been the one that Darwin read in school. Descriptions of known geographic sites seemed unlikely to have stirred the lively disputes he described. On the other hand, a group of 10- or 12-year-old boys might well have argued about whether a woman could really give birth to a boy and to two serpents at the same time, or whether an island could really be populated by natives each having one eye in the middle of the forehead. Such tall tales abound in Wanley's book, as do items about exotic faraway places and cultures quite likely to awaken a boy's desire to travel. Assuming for the moment that Darwin as a schoolboy actually read The Wonders ofthe Little World, and read it avidly and often, as his autobiography suggests, could it have influenced his thinking years later? There are reasons to believe that it could have. Although The Origin of Species was not published until 1859, Darwin worked out his theory of evolution by natural selection in detail during the two years immediately after the Beaglevoyage, between 1836 and 1838, while he was still in his twenties, not much more than a decade removed from his schooldays. The Wanley book contains many items, some of them quoted below, that could have disposed young Darwin's mind toward the insights that led to the...