November 25th [1835]. – In the evening four boats were sent for her majesty; the ship was dressed with flags, and the yards manned on her coming on board. She was accompanied by most of the chiefs. The behaviour of all was very proper: they begged for nothing, and seemed much pleased with Captain Fitz Roy’s presents. The queen is a large awkward woman, without any beauty, grace or dignity. She has only one royal attribute: a perfect immovability of expression under all circumstances, and that rather a sullen one. The rockets were most admired, and a deep “Oh!” could be heard from the shore, all round the dark bay, after each explosion. The sailors’ songs were also much admired; and the queen said she thought that one of the most boisterous ones certainly could not be a hymn! The royal party did not return on shore till past midnight.

Although Darwin undoubtedly did avoid writing about the thorny, old subject of religion, he did occasionally make passing comment on the subject, such as in this passage from The Voyage of the Beagle:

A strong desire is always felt to ascertain whether any human being has previously visited an unfrequented spot. A bit of wood with a nail in it, is picked up and studied as if it were covered with hieroglyphics. Possessed with this feeling, I was much interested by finding, on a wild part of the coast, a bed made of grass beneath a ledge of rock. Close by it there had been a fire, and the man had used an axe. The fire, bed, and situation showed the dexterity of an Indian; but he could scarcely have been an Indian, for the race is in this part extinct, owing to the Catholic desire of making at one blow Christians and Slaves.

In their book Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Desmond and Moore claim, with more than a little supporting evidence, that Darwin’s abhorrence of slavery heavily influenced his scientific thinking. It was certainly a subject very close to his heart—which perhaps goes some way to explaining his uncharacteristic dig at religion in the above passage.

This evening, a pair of them were feeding their young on the power-line outside my house, so I took a few photos. Here is a slideshow of the best ones (original photos here):

Swallows rock.

We did not reach the posta on the Rio Tapalguen till after it was dark. At supper, from something which was said, I was suddenly struck with horror at thinking that I was eating one of the favourite dishes of the country namely, a half-formed calf, long before its proper time of birth. It turned out to be Puma; the meat is very white and remarkably like veal in taste. Dr. Shaw was laughed at for stating that “the flesh of the lion is in great esteem having no small affinity with veal, both in colour, taste, and flavour.” Such certainly is the case with the Puma. The Gauchos differ in their opinion, whether the Jaguar is good eating, but are unanimous in saying that cat is excellent.

At the start of autumn, I sometimes help my farmer friend to bring her free-range beef cattle down from the local moor where they have been grazing throughout the summer. In winter, I help her to move them between various fields to ensure that they have enough grass to eat. In spring, I help return them to the moor.

Such experiences have given me a deep contempt for cattle, which I no longer try to conceal. Semi-wild cows are unbelievably stupid and wilful creatures. No force on Earth can compel them to go where they have decided they don’t want to go—even when it is in their own best interest.

But I’ve never had to get a cow into a boat.

Fortunately, if I ever find myself in the position of needing to get a cow into a boat, I now know exactly how to do it thanks to Charles Darwin, who observed how it is done and recorded the technique for posterity in his useful animal-husbandry manual, The Voyage of the Beagle:

The road to Cucao was so very bad that we determined to embark in a periagua. The commandant, in the most authoritative manner, ordered six Indians to get ready to pull us over, without deigning to tell them whether they would be paid. The periagua is a strange rough boat, but the crew were still stranger: I doubt if six uglier little men ever got into a boat together. They pulled, however, very well and cheerfully. The stroke-oarsman gabbled Indian, and uttered strange cries, much after the fashion of a pig-driver driving his pigs. We started with a light breeze against us, but yet reached the Capella de Cucao before it was late. The country on each side of the lake was one unbroken forest. In the same periagua with us, a cow was embarked. To get so large an animal into a small boat appears at first a difficulty, but the Indians managed it in a minute. They brought the cow alongside the boat, which was heeled towards her; then placing two oars under her belly, with their ends resting on the gunwale, by the aid of these levers they fairly tumbled the poor beast heels over head into the bottom of the boat, and then lashed her down with ropes.

So now we know. Thanks, Charles.

Condor, Canyon del Colca, Peru (cc gudi&cris)

Darwin describes his condor experiment in The Voyage of the Beagle. He gets off to what would nowadays be thought of as a pretty bad start:

April 27th. … This day I shot a condor. It measured from tip to tip of the wings, eight and a half feet, and from beak to tail, four feet.

He then describes the range and habits of condors before getting on to his experiment on some live, captive condors:

Remembering the experiments of M. Audubon, on the little smelling powers of carrion-hawks, I tried […] the following experiment: the condors were tied, each by a rope, in a long row at the bottom of a wall; and having folded up a piece of meat in white paper, I walked backwards and forwards, carrying it in my hand at the distance of about three yards from them, but no notice whatever was taken. I then threw it on the ground, within one yard of an old male bird; he looked at it for a moment with attention, but then regarded it no more. With a stick I pushed it closer and closer, until at last he touched it with his beak; the paper was then instantly torn off with fury, and at the same moment, every bird in the long row began struggling and flapping its wings. Under the same circumstances, it would have been quite impossible to have deceived a dog.

…a classic blind test—although it seems strange to use the phrase when experimenting on the sense of smell.

Darwin goes on to observe:

The evidence in favour of and against the acute smelling powers of carrion-vultures is singularly balanced. Professor Owen has demonstrated that the olfactory nerves of the turkey-buzzard (Cathartes aura) are highly developed, and on the evening when Mr. Owen’s paper was read at the Zoological Society, it was mentioned by a gentleman that he had seen the carrion-hawks in the West Indies on two occasions collect on the roof of a house, when a corpse had become offensive from not having been buried, in this case, the intelligence could hardly have been acquired by sight. On the other hand, besides the experiments of Audubon and that one by myself, Mr. Bachman has tried in the United States many varied plans, showing that neither the turkey-buzzard (the species dissected by Professor Owen) nor the gallinazo find their food by smell. He covered portions of highly-offensive offal with a thin canvas cloth, and strewed pieces of meat on it: these the carrion-vultures ate up, and then remained quietly standing, with their beaks within the eighth of an inch of the putrid mass, without discovering it. A small rent was made in the canvas, and the offal was immediately discovered; the canvas was replaced by a fresh piece, and meat again put on it, and was again devoured by the vultures without their discovering the hidden mass on which they were trampling. These facts are attested by the signatures of six gentlemen, besides that of Mr. Bachman.

The degree to which certain birds use smell to detect food is still a controversial topic. Most birds seem to have a poor sense of smell, but others such as kiwis and certain sea birds do seem to make use of it while foraging/hunting for food. Although turkey vultures seem to have a good sense of smell, experiments have shown that it does not appear sufficiently acute to detect odours from high altitude.

167 years after Darwin performed his condor experiment, the controversy continues.

The only quadruped native to the island; is a large wolf- like fox (Canis antarcticus), which is common to both East and West Falkland. I have no doubt it is a peculiar species, and confined to this archipelago; because many sealers, Gauchos, and Indians, who have visited these islands, all maintain that no such animal is found in any part of South America.

Molina, from a similarity in habits, thought that this was the same with his “culpeu”; but I have seen both, and they are quite distinct. These wolves are well known from Byron’s account of their tameness and curiosity, which the sailors, who ran into the water to avoid them, mistook for fierceness. To this day their manners remain the same. They have been observed to enter a tent, and actually pull some meat from beneath the head of a sleeping seaman. The Gauchos also have frequently in the evening killed them, by holding out a piece of meat in one hand, and in the other a knife ready to stick them. As far as I am aware, there is no other instance in any part of the world, of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing so large an aboriginal quadruped peculiar to itself. Their numbers have rapidly decreased; they are already banished from that half of the island which lies to the eastward of the neck of land between St. Salvador Bay and Berkeley Sound. Within a very few years after these islands shall have become regularly settled, in all probability this fox will be classed with the dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth.

How the Falklands fox (also known as the Falklands wolf or warrah) got to the Falkland Islands, which lie 480km from the South American mainland, is still something of a mystery. Recent genetic analyses show that the animal’s closest living relative is the maned wolf of South America. But these analyses also indicate that the two canids’ lineages diverged over 6 million years ago—and canids do not appear in the South American fossil record until 2.5 million years ago. From this we can infer that, if absolute genetic dating is to be trusted (concerning which, I personally entertain some doubts), the two lineages most likely evolved in North America. We should expect, therefore, to find more recent ancestors of the Falklands fox in the South American fossil record. One possible candidate for such an ancestor is Dusicyon avus from Patagonia, which went extinct 6,000 to 8,000 years ago.

It is believed that the ancestors of the Falklands fox must have crossed over to the islands during the last ice age (which ended 11,500 years ago), when the lower sea-level probably caused a land-bridge between the Falkland Islands and the South American mainland. Darwin’s view was that they might have crossed to the Falkland Islands on icebergs (see below). Another, very unlikely suggestion is that the fox is descended from domesticated foxes transported to the islands by the Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego, who used culpeos as hunting dogs. But there is no archaeological evidence that any humans visited the Falkland Islands before the British first arrived there, and, as Darwin himself pointed out (see above) culpeos are quite distinct from Falkland foxes.

The Falkland fox “Canis antarcticus” from Mammalia, Part 2 No. 1 of The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle by George R. Waterhouse (Charles Darwin ed.)

En route home to Blighty aboard HMS Beagle in 1835, Darwin wrote up some Ornithological and Animal Notes from the voyage, in which he included some observations about the Falklands fox:

Out of the four specimens brought home in the Beagle, three will be seen to be darker coloured, they come from the East Is^d. The fourth is smaller & rusty coloured, & is from the West Is^d. — Mr Lowe, who has been acquainted with these Islands for twenty years, & who is an accurate observer of Nature, asserts that this difference between the Foxes of the two Is^ds is invariable & constant. He says he has long since observed it. — An accurate comparison of these specimens will be interesting. I have omitted to add that the difference was corroborated by the officers of the Adventure. —

So, perhaps the Falkland fox was actually two species living on the two main Falkland Islands. If so, it would have made another wonderful example of closely related species living on adjacent islands, as was to be the case with Darwin’s more famous examples of the Galápagos mockingbirds, tortoises and finches. Indeed, Darwin wrote about the Falkland fox again in passing in his ornithological notes, in an extremely famous passage about the Galápagos mockingbirds, in which he first questioned the stability of species:

… I have specimens [of Galápagos mockingbirds] from four of the larger Islands; the two above enumerated, and (3349: female. Albermarle Isd.) & (3350: male: James Isd). — The specimens from Chatham & Albermarle Isd appear to be the same; but the other two are different. In each Isld. each kind is exclusively found: habits of all are indistinguishable. When I recollect, the fact that the form of the body, shape of scales & general size, the Spaniards can at once pronounce, from which Island any Tortoise may have been brought. When I see these Islands in sight of each other, & possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure & filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties.

The only fact of a similar kind of which I am aware, is the constant | asserted difference — between the wolf-like Fox of East & West Falkland Islds.

— If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks the zoology of Archipelagoes — will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of Species.

But, by the time Darwin came to edit The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, he was no longer of the opinion that the Falklands fox comprised two distinct species, commenting:

… Mr. Gray, of the British Museum, had the kindness to compare in my presence the specimens deposited there by Captain Fitzroy, but he could not detect any essential difference between them.

Had Darwin been more convinced that the Falklands fox comprised two species, he might well have given it/them more prominence in On the Origin of Species. As it was, however, the poor creature only earns a passing mention:

… as yet I have not found a single instance, free from doubt, of a terrestrial mammal (excluding domesticated animals kept by the natives) inhabiting an island situated above 300 miles from a continent or great continental island; and many islands situated at a much less distance are equally barren. The Falkland Islands, which are inhabited by a wolf-like fox, come nearest to an exception; but this group cannot be considered as oceanic, as it lies on a bank connected with the mainland; moreover, icebergs formerly brought boulders to its western shores, and they may have formerly transported foxes, as so frequently now happens in the arctic regions.

Nowadays, the Falkland fox is known by the scientific name Dusicyon australis, meaning literally foolish dog of the south—a reference to the animal’s absence of fear of humans.

Perhaps it was this lack of fear which was the beast’s undoing. For Darwin’s prophesy turned out to be tragically accurate: the once-common species was hunted by American fur traders in the 1830s, and was later persecuted by Scottish settlers wishing to protect their sheep.

It is believed that the last individual Falkland fox was killed at Shallow Bay, West Falkland in 1876.

Not so the hapless fox encountered by Charles Darwin in the Chiloé Archipelago:

In the evening we reached the island of San Pedro, where we found the Beagle at anchor. In doubling the point, two of the officers landed to take a round of angles with the theodolite. A fox (Canis fulvipes), of a kind said to be peculiar to the island, and very rare in it, and which is a new species, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching the work of the officers, that I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer. This fox, more curious or more scientific, but less wise, than the generality of his brethren, is now mounted in the museum of the Zoological Society.

The species, which now has the scientific classification Lycalopex fulvipes and the highly appropriate common name Darwin’s fox, is still extremely rare, and and is listed as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union.

Darwin’s fox (cc Prof. Fernando Bórquez Bórquez)

Darwin made quite a habit of braining specimens with his geological hammer, which I got to examine at the London Natural History Museum’s wonderful Darwin exhibition a couple of years ago. I did not notice any spots of blood.

No, really, I had never read it.

In my defence, I had dipped into it many times, usually to look up some obscure snippet of Darwiniana or other. And I had read Darwin’s Beagle Diary, upon which large chunks of The Voyage of the Beagle were based. But I had never set off to read The Voyage of the Beagle from cover to cover before—despite owning several copies.

My favourite copy of The Voyage of the Beagle, complete with index card bookmarks.

I picked up my favourite copy of The Voyage of the Beagle in a now-defunct second-hand bookshop in my home town of Hebden Bridge. It cost me £2. I like this particular copy for a number of reasons: I like it for the Charles Darwin signature embossed in (presumably fake) gold on the cover; I like it for the purple, rubber-stamped advertisement on the flyleaf saying “F. Pearson & Son / BOOKSELLERS & Stationers EST^D. 1875 / SOUTHGATE, ELLAND. LEATHER GOODS A SPECIALITY.”; I like it for its proud boast “Illustrated By Eight Photographs”; but I like it most for its size—the book was clearly designed to slip conveniently into one’s pocket. It’s a wonderful format, and one which I wish more publishers would rediscover.

Indeed, so conveniently sized is my favourite copy of The Voyage of the Beagle that it has been an obvious book to take on holiday with me—many, many times. It has travelled the world with me. It has been to Australia with me, where I consulted it about Darwin’s trip to Govett’s Leap the day I also visited Govett’s Leap. It has been to Tobago with me, and the Canary Islands, and Barcelona, and Sicily, and Rome, and Florence (twice). But it has always remained unread.

Until my latest holiday in Italy, that is. In March this year, I sat on my hotel room balcony overlooking the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius looming menacingly in the background, and finally began to read The Voyage of the Beagle from cover to cover.

And, I am glad to report, it was utterly fantastic. You should read it. You really should. Just like I did. Eventually.

Whenever I read a book, I use an index card as a convenient bookmark upon which I can jot down brief notes about anything that interests or amuses me in the book. In the cases of certain interesting books, I have even managed to fill both sides of my index card. But, in the case of The Voyage of the Beagle, I managed to fill four entire cards! There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there for the Darwin groupie. But there’s also plenty of other interesting, fascinating, and, dare I say it, amusing stuff in there for the general reader. Which probably explains why The Voyage of the Beagle became an instantly popular book in Darwin’s own day.

So, to atone for my sin of having taken so long to read Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, I have decided, over the next few days and weeks, to put up a few posts based on the index card notes I took while reading the book. Please don’t expect anything too profound or insightful, though: I just want to share with you some of the snippets of Darwiniana which interested, fascinated and amused me as I finally got round to reading Darwin’s first masterpiece.

When I say ‘small local population’, I really do mean small. I seldom see more than two or three bats at any one time—unlike my friend Stense, who counted over 60 bats leaving the roost in her attic recently. Stense also has ospreys nesting outside her window. I am consumed with jealousy.

Yesterday evening, I naively decided to try to photograph the local bats as they hunted for insects above my back garden. Well, naive is probably the wrong word as I knew that my efforts were doomed to failure; I was really just being ridiculously optimistic. So I set my camera’s ISO and aperture to maximum and fired away, capturing dozens of photos of empty skies and blurred trees. Bats are fast little buggers.

But I did manage to capture a few images of blurs remotely resembling bats:

A bat flittering above my back garden last night.

Yes, I know the photos are crap, but I rather like their ethereal, crepuscular nature—which pretty much sums up bats, as far as I’m concerned.

Some recently uncovered missing links

Awesome! Thanks, Bill.

An aptly named whitethroat [Sylvia communis] in Liverpool last week.

Always nice to add a new bird to one’s life list. Especially during one’s lunch break.

Kids love dinosaurs. Kids love science. I wonder what we do to so many of them to drive away their natural sense of wonder and curiosity.

Good grief, we need something to inspire them.

Mick and Brita will talk about their latest book, What Mr Darwin Saw and tell us about how they got the idea for this fantastic book which explores Mr Darwin’s exciting life, explorations and discoveries.

This is a free event for children age 7-11. Children must be accompanied by an adult but you’ll need to collect your ticket from the appropriate library, either Orpington or Central, Bromley

For further information contact: Orpington Library: 01689 831551 or Central Library Bromley: 020 8460 9955.

Part of the Discover Darwin Project.

The show notes are available here.

Postscript [28-Mar-2010]: You can now also download a video of the show here (137MB mp4).

We now have members in 82 countries.

Eleanor & Charlie Armitage

New to our childrens’ book reviews section, a review of What Mr Darwin Saw, a beautifully illustrated book about Charles Darwin. The review was written by a person highly qualified for the role: Eleanor Armitage, aged 7.

Very good work again, Eleanor!

February 20th. – This day has been memorable in the annals of Valdivia, for the most severe earthquake experienced by the oldest inhabitant. I happened to be on shore, and was lying down in the wood to rest myself. It came on suddenly, and lasted two minutes, but the time appeared much longer. The rocking of the ground was very sensible. The undulations appeared to my companion and myself to come from due east, whilst others thought they proceeded from south-west: this shows how difficult it sometimes is to perceive the directions of the vibrations. There was no difficulty in standing upright, but the motion made me almost giddy: it was something like the movement of a vessel in a little cross-ripple, or still more like that felt by a person skating over thin ice, which bends under the weight of his body. A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; – one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced. In the forest, as a breeze moved the trees, I felt only the earth tremble, but saw no other effect. Captain Fitz Roy and some officers were at the town during the shock, and there the scene was more striking; for although the houses, from being built of wood, did not fall, they were violently shaken, and the boards creaked and rattled together. The people rushed out of doors in the greatest alarm. It is these accompaniments that create that perfect horror of earthquakes, experienced by all who have thus seen, as well as felt, their effects. Within the forest it was a deeply interesting, but by no means an awe- exciting phenomenon. The tides were very curiously affected. The great shock took place at the time of low water; and an old woman who was on the beach told me that the water flowed very quickly, but not in great waves, to high- water mark, and then as quickly returned to its proper level; this was also evident by the line of wet sand. The same kind of quick but quiet movement in the tide happened a few years since at Chiloe, during a slight earthquake, and created much causeless alarm. In the course of the evening there were many weaker shocks, which seemed to produce in the harbour the most complicated currents, and some of great strength.

The earthquake that Darwin witnessed first-hand in 1835 destroyed the town of Concepcíon. Here’s hoping today’s massive Concepción earthquake is less severe.

In the evening, that is, after he had read as much as his strength would allow, and before the reading aloud began, he would often lie on the sofa and listen to my mother playing the piano. He had not a good ear, yet in spite of this he had a true love of fine music. He used to lament that his enjoyment of music had become dulled with age, yet within my recollection his love of a good tune was strong. I never heard him hum more than one tune, the Welsh song “Ar hyd y nos,” which he went through correctly;

Ar hyd y nos—better known to us heathen English as All Through the Night—is a classic Welsh folk tune. Perhaps Darwin was familiar with it having been brought up near the Welsh border.

I think it’s delightful that we know which tune Darwin used to hum to himself. Especially since it is such a wonderful, moving tune:

Happy 201st birthday, Mr D.

Iechyd da!

Unfortunately, you can’t download the programmes as mp3 files to listen to in your car (I have a work-around, but it’s complicated), some of the older programmes are only available in crappy RealPlayer™ format, and you need to be in the UK to listen to the programmes (unless you can figure out how to access the BBC iPlayer via a proxy server)—but, despite these reservations, this is a very big move by the Beeb.

Some programmes I shall enjoy listening to again include:

Baconian Science
On the Jacobean thinker Francis Bacon and Baconian Science.

Calculus
The dispute between Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz over who invented calculus.

Darwin: On the Origins of Charles Darwin
Darwin’s early life in Shropshire and his three years at Cambridge.

Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle
How Darwin’s work during the Beagle expedition influenced his theories.

Darwin: On the Origin of Species
How Darwin was eventually persuaded to publish On the Origin of Species in November 1859.

Darwin: Life After Origins
Melvyn visits Darwin’s home at Down House in Kent.

Electrickery
On the dawn of the age of electricity.

Evolution
On the future of gene therapy and advances in evolutionary biology.

Human Evolution
On the six million year old story of human evolution.

Human Origins
On the evolution of the human species.

Humboldt
On the Prussian naturalist and explorer, Alexander Von Humboldt.

Lamarck and Natural Selection
On Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 18th century French precursor to Darwin.

Mammals
On the rise of the mammals which began 65 million years ago.

Maxwell
The work and legacy of the often overlooked 19th century scientist James Clerk Maxwell.

Nature
On the attempt to define humanity’s part in the natural world.

Plate Tectonics
On plate tectonics, a theory that transformed our idea of the earth.

Popper
On the Anglo-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper.

Science’s Revelations
On whether science has ruined our sense of poetic wonder at the world.

The Cambrian Period
On the Cambrian period, when there was an explosion of life on Earth.

The Geological Formation of Britain
On the geological formation of Britain.

The KT Boundary
On the KT Boundary and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The Lunar Society
On the 18th century group of pioneering scientists and engineers.

The Natural Order
On the science of taxonomy; the classification of the natural world.

The Origins of Life
On when and how life on earth originated.

The Permian-Triassic Boundary
On the Permian-Triassic boundary in evolutionary history.

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 1
Melvyn Bragg travels to Oxford, where the young Christopher Wren and friends experimented.

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 2
How Newton tested the lines between government-funded research and public access.

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 3
The 19th century blooms scientifically with numerous alternative, specialist societies.

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 4
The more discreet role played by the Society in the 20th century.

The Scientist
On the origin of the concept and the historical role of the scientist.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics
On the Second Law of Thermodynamics from steam to the Big Bang.

The Whale – A History
On the evolutionary history of the whale.