28 MAY 1977, Page 20

Original

Christopher Booker

Darwin and his Flowers Mea Allan (Faber and Faber £6.95)

Shortly after arriving at Shrewsbury Scho01 in the early 'fifties, I developed a reputation as a highly eccentric little boy by insisting 011 cycling out into the countryside Sunday afternomto look for fossils. To t'„1 staff of a school where scholarship boys st" specialised in classics as a matter of course, and whose most honoured son was Sir Philip Sidney, the idea of standing around the rain peering at Silurian staliles in the, limestone quarries of Wenlock Edge, looking for the squiggly traces of graptohtes, in the shadow of the Stiperstones, seal° little less than insane. It was only some years later that! realisedf the full irony of this. For another old b0)'°, the school, who had spent the afternoons his youth in remarkably similar pursuitsci was Charles Darwin. Almost a hundree years later it still did not really seem to had sunk in at Shrewsbury that the school ha,,, produced the author of one of the ha.'e dozen most influential books of our entlin post-Renaissance civilisation. And eve_ though the climate has changed considet't bly in the past twenty years, I suspect tr',,t there are still few non-specialists, :e Shrewsbury or anywhere else, who ha actually read The Origin of Species, or who could given even the barest, accurate summary of just how it was that Darwin Shifted the whole foundation of our thinking about man and the universe in a Way that very few.others have equalled. Mea Allan has pulled off a remarkable feat not just in producing a highly readable (and beautifully illustrated) account of Darwin's life for the general reader, but in Showing more clearly than ever before how his views were shaped more than anything else by his extraordinary, meticulous and 1"ing observation of plants. It was scarcely surprising that Darwin should have shown verY early an intense curiosity about the natural world. His grandfather Erasmus, another remarkable man (who invented among other things an automated water closer, an office copying machine and a rocket motor), had been the first British Publisher in 1783 of Linnaeus's classification of plants. But in the first twenty years of his life it was never quite clear which branch of natural history would most seize Charles's imagination. In his teens he became a ferocious collector of insects. After reading Gilbert White's Selborne he wondered 'why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist'. He was drawn to the burgeoning science of geology, went on a geological tour of North Wales with the great Sedgwick, and at Cambridge (where he was a student of divinity) he fell under the spell of the Revd John Stevens Henslow, who was not only Professor of Botany but also of Mineralogy. When, in 1831, Darwin embarked on what was to be the great lemin al experience of his life, the trip round outh America and through the South Seas ln the little ship Beagle, he still thought of himself first and foremost as a student of rocks and fossils. But over the five long years of that ,Voyage, while he was sending back to t, .rigland crate after crate of specimens of all kinds (rocks, seeds, insects, birds, flowers, nimals — the logistics that must have been Involved!), a shift of interest gradually took Place. Faced with the vivid tropical flowers and creepers of the Brazilian rain-forest, he Was in 'raptures . . . a chaos of delight . . . ‘.`ne most moving experience of the whole v9Yage'. And most important of all was the _visit to the Galapagos Islands in 1835, when he collected 199 varieties of plant indigen!us to those strange islets, 180 of them "known to science. How had this profusion of unique plants ier.?me to be on the Galapagos? When

Work returned to England, he began

on various geological memoirs, such aS his book on how coral reefs are formed. ctur more and more his thoughts were on Plants, and on 'the origin of things'. Already he idea that God had created a fixed and

Immutable number of species at the begin

ning eng of the world had long since begun to Jumble away. Lamarck (whose statue in the Luxembourg Gardens I was once ?leased to note bears simply the legend Fondateur de la Theorie de ['Evolution') had already conceived the notion that species developed their characteristics by a kind of 'inner will' (eg the giraffe developed a long neck in order to reach high branches). By 1842 (now happily married and moved to Down House in Kent, where he was,to spend the rest of his life) Darwin had come to a much more revolutionary position. All species produce countless minor variations: and eventually it is only the variations which are best adapted to their environment which survive, and which pass on their superior adaptation by heredity until the variations evolve into new species. No more Divine Plan! No more 'inner willing'! Evolution is determined by sheer chance, the infinite random permutation of minute variations (the phrase 'the survival of the fittest' was coined by Herbert Spencer, in the 1860s, and at once incorporated by Darwin into his fifth edition).

The story of how Darwin sat on his theory, mulling it over (often in correspondence with his closest friend, Joseph Hooker, the botanist) for nearly twenty years, is well-known. Finally in 1858 he had a terrible shock — a letter from the naturalist 'Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Archipelago, showing that he had independently evolved a remarkably similar theory (Darwin was now ten chapters into his book). Within little over a year Darwin had produced an 'abstract' of his thory of natural selection ready for publication (a mere 502 pages). In November 1859 it sold its first edition of 1250 copies in a day. The following year came the historic meeting of the British Association, when a Dr Draper from New York 'droned out 'a paper' attacking Darwin, which was followed by the exchanges between `saponaceous Sam' Wilberforce (who had not read The Origin of Species) and the young T. H. Huxley (ineffective), concluding with a magisterial blast demolishing Bishop Wilberforce by Hooker CI hit him in the wind at the first shot in ten words taken from his ugly mouth'). The field was won.

The remaining twenty years of Darwin's life were dominated by a series of extraordinarily detailed observations of the various properties of plants. Mea Allan gives beautiful expositions of Darwin's researches into the astonishing complexity of the ways in which orchids are fertilised; how climbing plants actually climb; how root ends (the 'brain' of a plant) find their way round obstacles, and towards nourishment; how plants sleep; how (based on his studies of the carnivorous flowers, sundews and butterworts) plants have 'nerves' and 'muscles'. As he wrote in his Autobiography, 'It always pleases me to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings'. And as Mea Allan shows, these researches were the love-affair of Darwin's life. He was plagued by ill-health, which appears to have been a kind of unconscious protection for his work, stemming from his terrible fear of the distractions of social intercourse. His