The Signature of All Things

wavered, as she read it, between heartbreak and vindication, between regret and admiration.
    Darwin wrote, “More individuals are born than can possibly survive. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die.”
    He wrote, “In short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere, in every part of the organic world.”
    She felt an upswell of complicated emotion so overwhelming, so dense, that she thought she might faint. It hit her like a blast from a furnace: she had been correct.
    She had been correct!
    Thoughts of Uncle Dees swarmed her mind, even as she continued reading. Her thoughts of him were constant and contradictory: If only he had lived to see this! Thank God he had not lived to see this!How simultaneously proud and angry he would have been! She would never have heard the end of it: “See, I told you to publish!” Yet he would have celebrated this great, endorsing confirmation of his niece’s work, as well. She did not know how to digest this circumstance without him. She longed for him terribly. She would have gladly suffered his scolding for some of his comfort. Inevitably, too, she wished her father had lived to see this. She wished her mother had lived to see this. Ambrose, too. She wished she had published it herself. She did not know what to think.
    Why had she not published?
    The question stung her—yet as she read Darwin’s masterpiece (and it was, quite obviously, a masterpiece) she knew that this theory belonged to him, and that it needed to belong to him. Even if she’d said it first, she could never have said it better. It was even possible that nobody would have listened to her had she published this theory—not because she was a woman or because she was obscure (although these factors would not have helped), but merely because she would not have known how to persuade the world as eloquently as Darwin. Her science was perfect, but her writing was not. Alma’s thesis was forty pages long, and On the Origin of Species was more than five hundred, but she knew without question that Darwin’s was by far the more readable work. Darwin’s book was artful. It was intimate. It was playful. It read like a novel.
    He called his theory “natural selection.” It was a brilliantly concise term, simpler and better than Alma’s bulkier “theory of competitive alteration.” As he patiently built his case for natural selection, Darwin was never strident or defensive. He gave the impression of being the reader’s kindly neighbor. He wrote of the same dark and violent world that Alma perceived—a world of endless killing and dying—but his language contained not a trace of violence. Alma would never have dared to write with such a gentle hand; she would not have known how. Her prose was a hammer; Darwin’s was apsalm. He came bearing not a sword but a candle. Everywhere in his pages, moreover, he suggested a spirit of divinity—without ever evoking the Creator! He summoned a sense of miracle through rhapsodies on the power of time itself. He wrote, “What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!” He marveled at all the “beautiful ramifications” of change. He offered up the lovely observation that the wonders of adaptation made every creature on the planet—even the humblest beetle—seem precious, astonishing, and “ennobled.”
    He asked, “What limit can be put to this power?”
    He wrote, “We behold the face of nature, bright with gladness . . .”
    He concluded, “There is grandeur in this view of life.”
    She finished the book and allowed herself to weep.
    There was nothing else she could do, in the face of an achievement so splendid and so devastating, but weep.
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    E veryone read On the Origin of Species in 1860, and everyone argued about it, but nobody read it more carefully than Alma Whittaker. She kept her mouth closed during all the drawing room debates on natural selection—even when her own Dutch family took up the subject—but she followed every word. She attended every lecture on the topic and read every review, every attack, every critique. What’s more, she revisited the book repeatedly, in a spirit as probing as it was admiring. She was a scientist, and she wanted to put Darwin’s theory under a microscope. She wanted to test her theory against his.
    Of course, her paramount question was how Darwin had managed to solve the Prudence