Struggle For Existence
Alfred Tennyson wrote his great poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." which introduced the phrase "Nature, red in tooth and claw", and Darwin worked on The Struggle for Existence. A discussion with Thomas Huxley on how jellyfish might cross-fertilise got the witty response that "the indecency of the process is to a certain extent in favour of its probability". Darwin passed Huxley's remark on to Hooker with the comment, "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!", apparently a reference to the nickname given to the Radical Revd. Robert Taylor who had visited Cambridge on an "infidel home missionary tour" when Darwin was a student there (though the term goes back to Chaucer's Parson's Tale). Working class militants were seizing on the popularity of gorillas (which were now appearing in travelling menageries) to trumpet man's monkey origins. To crush these ideas, Richard Owen as President-elect of the Royal Association announced his authoritative anatomical studies of primate brains showing that humans were not just a separate species, but a separate sub-class. In July 1857, Darwin commented to Hooker, "Owen's is a grand Paper; but I cannot swallow Man making a division as distinct from a Chimpanzee, as an ornithorhynchus from a Horse: I wonder what a Chimpanzee wd. say to this?".
Darwin pressed on, overworking, until in March 1857 illness began cutting his working day "ridiculously short". He took a fortnight's water treatment at the nearby Moor Park spa run by Dr. Edward Lane, and this revived him. Wallace had contacted Darwin earlier and was now working for him, sending domestic fowl specimens from Indonesia. Darwin wrote to Wallace from the spa "I can see that we have thought much alike & to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions...This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book, on what way do species & varieties differ from each other...I am now preparing my work for publication...do not suppose I shall go to press for two years...I have slowly adopted a distinct & tangible idea,– whether true or false others must judge". On his return a cold and social pressure set back the recovery. He had to return to the spa, finishing "variation" in July and posting pages to Huxley for checking.
Read more about this topic: Publication Of Darwin's Theory
Famous quotes containing the words struggle for, struggle and/or existence:
“The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory. We love to see animals fighting, not the victor raving over the vanquished.... It is the same in gambling, and the same in the search for truth.... We never seek things for themselves—what we seek is the very seeking of things.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)