I Have Landed (21 page)

I had long been curious about Trémaux and sought a copy of his book for many years. I finally purchased one a while ago—and I must say that I have never read a more absurd or more poorly documented thesis. Basically, Trémaux argues that the nature of the soil determines national characteristics, and that higher civilizations tend to arise on more-complex soils formed in later geological periods. If Marx really believed that such unsupported nonsense could exceed the
Origin of Species
in importance, then he could not have properly understood or appreciated the power of Darwin's facts and ideas.

We must therefore conclude that Lankester harbored no secret sympathy
for Marxism, and that Marx sought no Darwinian inspiration in courting Lankester's friendship. Our puzzle only deepens: What brought these disparate men together; what kind of bond could have nurtured their friendship? The first question, at least, can be answered, and may even suggest a route toward resolving the second, and central, conundrum of this essay.

Four short letters from Lankester remain among Marx's papers. (Marx probably wrote to Lankester as well, but no evidence of such reciprocity has surfaced.) These letters clearly indicate that Marx first approached Lankester for medical advice in the treatment of his wife, who was dying, slowly and painfully, of breast cancer. Lankester suggested that Marx consult his dear friend (and co-conspirator in both the Slade and Charcot incidents), the physician H. B. Donkin. Marx took Lankester's advice, and proclaimed himself well satisfied with the result, as Donkin, whom Marx described as “a bright and intelligent man,” cared, with great sensitivity, both for Marx's wife and then for Marx himself in their final illnesses.

We do not know for sure how Marx and Lankester first met, but Feuer develops an eminently plausible hypothesis in his article cited previously—one, moreover, that may finally lead us to understand the basis of this maximally incongruous pairing. The intermediary may well have been Charles Waldstein, born in New York in 1856, the son of a German Jewish immigrant. Waldstein, who later served as professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge, knew Lankester well when they both lived in London during the late 1870s. Waldstein became an intimate friend of Karl Marx, an experience that he remembered warmly in an autobiographical work written in 1917 (when he had attained eminence and respectability under the slightly, but portentously, altered name of Sir Charles Walston):

The last comment is particularly revealing. Modern English has lost its previous distinction
(thou
versus
you)
between intimate and formal address, a difference that remains crucially important—a matter not to be taken lightly—in most European languages. In German,
Dutz-freunde
address each other with the intimate
Du
, rather than the formal
Sie
(just as the verb
tutoyer
, in French, means to use the intimate
tu
rather than the formal
vous)
. In both nations, especially in the far more conservative social modes of nineteenth-century life, permission to switch from formal to intimate address marked a rare and precious privilege reserved only for one's family, one's God, one's pets, and one's absolutely dearest friends. If an older and established intellectual like Marx suggested such a change of address to a young man in his early twenties, he must have felt especially close to Charles Waldstein.

Lankester's first letter to Marx, written on September 19, 1880, mentions Waldstein, thus supporting Feuer's conjecture: “I shall be very glad to see you at Wellington Mansions. I had been intending to return to you the book you kindly lent to me—but had mislaid your address and could not hear from Waldstein who is away from England.” Lankester and Waldstein remained close friends throughout their lives. Waldstein's son responded to Feuer's inquiry about his father's relationship with Lankester by writing, in 1978, that he retained a clear childhood memory of “Ray Lankester . . . coming to dinner from time to time at my home—a very fat man with a face like a frog.”

Waldstein's memories of Marx as a kind man and a brilliant intellectual mentor suggest an evident solution to the enigma of Marx and Lankester—once we recognize that we had been asking the wrong question all along. No error of historical inquiry can match the anachronistic fallacy of using a known present to misread a past circumstance that could not possibly have been defined or influenced by events yet to happen. When we ask why a basically conservative biologist like Lankester could have respected and valued the company of an aging agitator like Karl Marx, we can hardly help viewing Marx through the glasses of later human catastrophes perpetrated in his name—from Stalin to Pol Pot. Even if we choose to blame Marx, in part, for not foreseeing these possible consequences of his own doctrines, we must still allow that when he died in 1883, these tragedies only resided in an unknowable future. Karl Marx, the man who met Lankester in 1880, must not be confused with Karl
Marx, the posthumous standard-bearer for some of the worst crimes in human history. We err when we pose E. Ray Lankester, the stout and imposing relic of Victorian and Edwardian biology, with Karl Marx, cited as the rationale for Stalin's murderous career—and then wonder how two such different men could inhabit the same room, much less feel warm ties of friendship.

In 1880, Lankester was a young biologist with a broad view of life and intellect, and an independent mind that cared not a fig for conventional notions of political respectability, whatever his own basically conservative convictions. Showing a rare range of interest among professional scientists, he also loved art and literature, and had developed fluency in both German and French. Moreover, he particularly admired the German system of university education, then a proud model of innovation, especially in contrast with the hidebound classicism of Oxford and Cambridge, so often the object of his greatest scorn and frustration.

Why should Lankester not have enjoyed, even cherished, the attention of such a remarkable intellect as Karl Marx—for that he was, whatever you may think of his doctrines and their consequences? What could possibly have delighted Lankester more than the friendship of such a brilliant older man, who knew art, philosophy, and the classics so well, and who represented the epitome of German intellectual excellence, the object of Lankester's highest admiration? As for the ill, aging, and severely depressed Karl Marx, what could bring more solace in the shadow of death than the company of bright, enthusiastic, optimistic young men in the flower of their intellectual development?

Waldstein's memories clearly capture, in an evocative and moving way, this aspect of Marx's persona and final days. Many scholars have emphasized this feature of Marx's later life. Diane Paul, for example, states that “Marx had a number of much younger friends. . . . The aging Marx became increasingly difficult in his personal relationships, easily offended and irritated by the behavior of old friends, but he was a gracious mentor to younger colleagues who sought his advice and support.” Seen in this appropriate light of their own time, and not with anachronistic distortion of later events that we can't escape but they couldn't know, Marx and Lankester seem ideally suited, indeed almost destined, for the warm friendship that actually developed.

All historical studies—whether of human biography or of evolutionary lineages in biology—potentially suffer from this “presentist” fallacy. Modern chroniclers know the outcomes that actually unfolded as unpredictable consequences of past events—and they often, and inappropriately, judge the motives and actions of their subjects in terms of futures unknowable at the time. Thus, and far too frequently, evolutionists view a small and marginal lineage of pond-dwelling
Devonian fishes as higher in the scale of being and destined for success because we know, but only in retrospect, that these organisms spawned all modern terrestrial vertebrates, including our exalted selves. And we overly honor a peculiar species of African primates as central to the forward thrust of evolution because our unique brand of consciousness arose, by contingent good fortune, from such a precarious stock. And as we northerners once reviled Robert E. Lee as a traitor, we now tend to view him, in a more distant and benevolent light, as a man of principle and a great military leader—though neither extreme position can match or explain this fascinating man in the more appropriate context of his own time.

A little humility before the luck of our present circumstances might serve us well. A little more fascination for past realities, freed from judgment by later outcomes that only we can know, might help us to understand our history, the primary source for our present condition. Perhaps we might borrow a famous line from a broken man, who died in sorrow, still a stranger in a strange land, in 1883—but who at least enjoyed the solace of young companions like E. Ray Lankester, a loyal friend who did not shun the funeral of such an unpopular and rejected expatriate.

History reveals patterns and regularities that enhance our potential for understanding. But history also expresses the unpredictable foibles of human passion, ignorance, and dreams of transcendence. We can only understand the meaning of past events in their own terms and circumstances, however legitimately we may choose to judge the motives and intentions of our forebears. Karl Marx began his most famous historical treatise, his study of Napoleon Ill's rise to power, by writing, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”

W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
FAMOUSLY
DESCRIBED
THE
S
OVIET
Union as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” This essay, impoverished by contrast, features only two levels of puzzlement—the tale of an anonymous author defending an odd theory that only becomes, in Alice's immortal words, curiouser and curiouser as one reads. However, in a fractal universe, a single mote can mirror the cosmos, giving literal meaning to Blake's famous image of the “world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.” Forgotten documents that now seem ridiculous can offer us maximal instruction in human foibles and in the history of our attempts to make sense of a complex natural world—the enterprise that we science.

In his important book on the development of conventions for illustrating extinct faunas of the geological past,
Scenes from Deep
Time
(University of Chicago Press, 1992), the British historian of geology (and former paleontologist) M. J. S. Rudwick reproduced a figure from 1860 that, in his words, “broke the standard mold by suggesting a sequence in deep time.” Previously, most authors had presented only one or two reconstructions of particular past moments or intervals—with Mesozoic dinosaurs and large Cenozoic mammals already emerging as “industry standards.”

Few charts, however, had attempted to depict the flow of change through successive faunas. But this elaborate version from 1860, inserted as a large fold-out (eight by fourteen inches in my copy) into an ordinary octavo book, shows the history of life in three layers, with dinosaurs and their allies on the bottom, large mammals in the middle (including the nearly obligatory giant ground sloth, mammoth, and Irish elk), and modern creatures in a top layer that also affirms a human presence by including the great pyramids of Egypt in the upper right.

Although authors usually describe such pictures as supposedly unbiased factual summaries, nearly all complex representations must, whether consciously or not, express favored theories about patterns and causes for the history of life. This author, at least, makes no bones (bad pun) about the didactic character of her chart. In particular, she depicts the first two layers as a continuous development, even though the basic faunas of the two stages differ so profoundly. In a dramatic middle location, to reinforce this central claim,
Iguanodon
(then falsely depicted in a crocodilian pose, but now recognized as a bipedal duckbilled dinosaur) slithers up a slope connecting the two layers.

But the top layer of modern life has been completely severed from all that came before by an intervening lifeless interval, depicted as a forbidding, ice-covered world. The original chart intensifies the theme by printing this lifeless layer in stark white, thus establishing a marked contrast with the three faunas, all overprinted in a soothing yellowish pink. Obviously the author believed that life's history includes two distinct phases: a long older. period of continuity and at least occasional change, abruptly terminated by a cold and lifeless world and then followed by the much shorter interval of modern organisms.

To state the first conundrum: The book containing this plate appeared in 1860 under anonymous authorship, and with the title
Pre-Adamite Man: The Story of Our Old Planet and Its Inhabitants
. I have never before been so unsuccessful in searching through the literature, but I have found absolutely nothing about the life or other works of the author beyond her name: Isabelle Duncan. I have frequently written about the sadness and anger of women naturalists in these Victorian times. They often published anonymously in highly restricted formats of sentimentalized effusions and versifications for children or dilettantes,
although several of these women developed fully professionalized skills and longed for equal participation with male colleagues. But one can usually find
some
documentation in standard bibliographic listings, or in the scholarship of modern feminist historians, who have taken the rehabilitation, or at least the identification, of these forgotten women as a mission and solemn duty.