Nature and man: essays scientific and philosophical

Front matter

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM TH^E

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

Contents

MEMORIAL SKETCH.

I. Early Life ...

— II. A Student's Preparation III. Physiology and Religious Philosophy <*

Appendix

List of Dr. Carpenter's Writings ... .., ,., ... 467

WILLIAM BENJAMIN CARPENTER.

A MEMORIAL SKETCH.

WILLIAM BENJAMIN CARPENTER.

The Essays contained in this volume represent chiefly the later phases of their writer's thoughts on the problems concerned with the interpretation of nature and man. Some of the conclusions which they embody he believed to be of high importance in the guidance of life ; they were the result of long observation and reflection, and in some cases differed widely from the ideas which his early education and his first studies had led him to adopt. It is the aim of this sketch to indicate some of the processes which contributed to this change, and to present, as briefly as possible, the connection between Dr. Carpenter's widely varied work and the personality from which his manysided energy flowed out. The long list of writings which bear his name exhibits an extraordinary range of labour ; and the historians of different branches of science will come upon the traces of his activity in fields that are rarely cultivated by the same hand. It is not now desired to estimate the precise value of his numerous contributions to knowledge, but rather to show what were the hidden pur* poses and guiding aims of his life, what were the gifts of mind and heart which he brought to their fulfilment, and how these took outward shape and form.

MEMORIAL SKETCH.

William Benjamin Carpenter was born at Exeter, on October 29, 181 3. His father, Dr. Lant Carpenter, was then one of the pastors of George's Meeting ; but the removal of the family from Exeter to Bristol, in 18 17, when William was only in his fourth year, made the latter city the true home of his early life. It was there that the Rev. Dr. Carpenter's labours, which were to leave so deep an impress on all his children, bore their ripest fruit. Schools were created in connection with the congregation of Lewin's Mead ; he took a prominent share in the foundation of the Literary and Philosophical Institution ; he was an ardent promoter of Catholic Emancipation and Reform. This was, indeed, only the outer fringe of his home activities. To the work of his ministry he added the long and patient toil of the student, and the ceaseless diligence of the teacher. And the qualities which shone conspicuously through all these phases of his energy, his strong affections, his deep religious earnestness, his commanding sense of duty, his eager zeal for the public good, and especially for education, appeared in one after another of his family. William was his fourth child, and eldest son. Hardly less did the boy owe to his mother, a woman of unusual endowments of mind and heart, who fully shared the austere and high view of life characteristic of her Puritan ancestry. With few advantages of education, her native abilities had been, nevertheless, carefully cultivated ; she had a vigorous and independent mind, which often made it a pleasure for the trained scientific investigator to ask her opinion of his most advanced speculations ; and in the wisdom of her judgment, springing from the clear insight of a pure and tender heart, her children found again and again in their perplexities a secure repose.

EARLY YEARS. 5

To the education which he received under his father's superintendence, Dr. W. B. Carpenter always looked back with gratitude. Those who recall the tall spare figure and the iron-grey hair of his later years, will find it difficult to think of him as a child of rounded limbs and golden locks, who grew into a stout and chubby boy. In the home discipline no time was lost. He used to say that he " knew his " Latin grammar at five," though the extent of this knowledge was never defined ; and he had already before that gained a firm mastery of certain external realities, to which he attached the highest value. In a discourse delivered in connection with University College, Bristol, in 1880, he recalled one of these items of early acquisition.

Our whole fabric of geometrical knowledge is based upon ideal representation. My own feeling is very strong that all geometrical teaching ought to be from time to time shown to consist with actual objective facts. Going back to my own experience, I can remember the fact of our having in our nursery a box of cubes, which my father had happened to purchase from a lecturer who was disposing of some articles of the kind. The box of cubes was ten inches each way, and each cube an inch, and therefore the box contained a thousand cubes j and this plaything of our nursery has been of the greatest value to. me through life, in giving me a conception of the relation of solids to each other, for I have found continually that young people who have learnt and can repeat glibly arithmetic tables, have not the least idea what these tables mean. Hence the importance of bringing the reasoning powers of the mind to bear upon the facts which observation reveals to us.

This was one of the aims which Dr. Lant Carpenter invariably held up before the boys under his care. His school was remarkable for the prominence assigned to the enforcement and illustration of scientific principles. This side of knowledge was more congenial to his son William than literary or historical culture. He acquired, indeed, a fair mastery of the classical languages, and retained to the last a warm affection for his Greek Testament. But his intellectual sympathies were enlisted rather by the air-pump and the geological cabinet than by Homer or Horace. He received a good grounding in mathematics, and formed a strong desire to become a civil engineer ; he delighted (like his father) in construction of all sorts. A tradition still remains of a model of a ship made in the boys' workshop at the bottom of the garden ; while a maturer effort, in which he was aided by Mr. W. J. Odgers, then a resident master in the school, produced " a most beautiful trans- " parent instrument for showing the climates, which, being " rectified for any latitude, shows the length of the day and " night at the solstices and equinoxes, the altitude of the " sun at noon, and illustrates very well the reason why the ''days are longer as we approach the higher latitudes." This love of workmanship remained with him in afterdays. He fitted up his study with all sorts of small devices ; and he had a penetrating insight into the most intricate machinery. But he was never able to give effect to his early preference for the profession of engineering.

The railway system had not then been developed, and no suitable opening presented itself for the indispensable and costly training. So he finally agreed to submit to the wishes of his family, and under the kind proposals of Mr. Estlin, a leading general practitioner in Bristol, and a member of his father's congregation,* resolved to devote himself to the study of medicine. His cherished hopes were

* Mr. Estlin was the son of the Rev. Dr. Estlin, the predecessor of Dr. Carpenter at Lewin's Mead. He was a man of wide scientific culture, and frequently lectured at the Bristol Institution and the Mechanics' Institution. He was specially eminent as an oculist ; and weekly, for forty years, attended the Eye-dispensary which he founded. In later life he took a lead in philanthropic and religious movements.

EARLY YEARS, 7

relinquished for what seemed to him an obvious duty, though to the end of her life his mother regretted the sacrifice, and doubted whether it had been right to demand it. He set himself to work with a grim determination to make the best of it, and on July 2, 1827, he wrote to his sister Mary, whom he addressed as " Dear Sister soft Sea-urchin : " —

I have been over to Mr. Estlin for an hour this morning, to learn about the weights and measures used in surgery, and he recommends me to come over every morning, when I can spare time for an hour, to vaccinate children, and to pull out their teeth, and to make up pills and medicines. I think I shall like it pretty well.

On his fifteenth birthday, in 1828, he was formally apprenticed. He sent a mock account of the proceedings to his sister, adding— *

I am telling you all these things in a humorous way, but I assure you I felt it very much ; and at the end of the day, when I had time for quiet reflection, I formed many resolutions, which I hope I shall have strength and faith to carry into execution.

The beginning of a professional career did not, however, wholly remove him from the school. But he remains rather to teach than to learn. He discourses to the boys on chemistry, and hears his younger brother, Philip, his Latin. His mind is cultivated through the various lectures at the neighbouring Institution, and the books and reviews which pass in turn through the Reading Society. One of these awakens his early interest with a first attempt at demonstrating the correlation of the physical forces.

There is a book come into the society (he announces to his "dear old Poll"), Mr. Exley's " New Theory of Matter," by which he explains all the attractions of gravitation, cohesion, electricity — chemical, magnetic, etc., — upon the same principles. Mr. Exley read a paper at the Institution, in which he gave an outline of his theory, which greatly excited my curiosity to see the book.

The consciousness of power is increasing within him, and the longing to exercise it. He is in his sixteenth year, and so in May, 1 829, he communicates his plan to the same " dear old Poll," with a droll touch of boyish self- justification for so forward a step.

I am thinking about delivering some lectures on optics at the Mechanics' Institution next winter. I shall be glad if you will give me your opinion about it when you write next. I have paid a good deal of attention to optics lately, and feel myself pretty well qualified to do it, so far as information is concerned. I am grown a good deal during the past year, and look more of a man than I did.

The manly look, indeed, came early enough ; his speedy absorption in severe intellectual labour gave to his demeanour a gravity which caused him to be habitually regarded as older than he really was. Moreover, a serious illness completely altered his appearance, and the plumpness which he lost he never regained.

It was greatly to William Carpenter's advantage that while he was prosecuting his medical studies under Mr. Estlin, and subsequently at the Bristol Medical School and the Infirmary, he remained in close connection with the home circle in Great George Street. There he learned, under his father's guidance, to take an active interest in public affairs ; and the incidents connected with the Bristol riots in October, 1 83 1, left an ineffaceable impression in his mind. The boys' school had by that time been given up, and his mother and sisters had opened a girls' school instead. They felt in no danger, but it fell to him to escort a number of neighbours to a place of safety in Clifton, and as he looked back over the city, lighted with the blazing glare of gaol and custom-house, Mansion-house and

THE WEST INDIES. 9

Bishop's Palace, he received a lesson which he never forgot. In the slavery question he was also trained to take a livelyinterest ; but his views on the subject of emancipation were somewhat modified by a few months' stay in the West Indies, during the year 1833, as the companion of Mr. Estlin, whose health required a sojourn in a warm climate.

It was his first long separation from his family, and the closely written sheets which he sent back to England, bore witness to the strength of the feeling to which he had felt unable at parting to give expression. On his first Sunday on board ship, his thoughts go out with longing to the dear circle singing their evening hymn in the library, perhaps (in remembrance of him) to one of his favourite tunes ; his minute observations on sky and sea, and on the beautiful landscapes of St. Vincent, are all illustrated by familiar comparisons with objects nearer home. The estate on which he resided was remarkably well managed, and he was greatly struck with the physical comfort of the slaves, contrasted with their total want of mental and moral culture. This degradation of character filled him with far greater horror than the loss of personal liberty.

What I have hitherto seen does not in the least diminish, but rather increases, my aversion to slavery ; but the causes of it are certainly altered, and I am led to make more allowance for the planters, when I see more plainly the difficulties by which they are surrounded.

To this experience he frequently recurred in after-life when he was tempted himself, or saw others tempted, to a sternness of judgment which wider knowledge might have modified : " We should learn," he said, " to be tolerant of "others' intolerance." On his return in the summer, the record of his observations was communicated by his father to one of his Parliamentary friends, who was so much struck io MEMORIAL SKETCH.

by them that he sent them on to Mr. Stanley (afterwards Lord Derby), then in charge of the Government Emancipation Bill, just passing through the House of Commons. But the clause which they chiefly affected had been already adopted.

The medical studies interrupted by the voyage to the West Indies were resumed for another session in Bristol ; but in the autumn of 1834, William Carpenter proceeded to London. There he attended lectures at University College — sometimes as many as thirty-five in a week — and medical and surgical practice at the Middlesex Hospital, where he acted for a time as clinical clerk to Dr. Watson. Widening the ordinary range of professional study, he entered for the course delivered by Dr. Grant on Comparative Anatomy ; and to this he afterwards looked back with peculiar interest, not only for the information which he gained through it, but for the mental quickening and special love of the subject which it roused within him. In the meanwhile the severity of his studies was relieved by the one pursuit which in later years afforded him unfailing recreation, his music.

You ask me (he wrote to his brother Russell) how I get on with my music. I consider pretty well, seeing that I am entirely a self-taught genius. My instrument is a seraphine, which is made with keys like a piano or organ, and sounds by small reeds like those of the mouth-solians, which you may remember, only better tuned, and worked by bellows. I chose it in preference to a piano, because it has exactly the touch of the organ, which it is my great ambition some time or other to play.

Then came the inevitable examinations, with the natural comments of a successful candidate, not perhaps forgotten when in later days he himself sat in the examiner's chair.

MEDICAL STUDIES. n

To R. L. Carpenter.

London, October 24, 1835.

I am now a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a Licentiate of the Apothecaries' Company. I passed through the latter examination a month ago, and the other last night. In both cases I had the felicity of kicking my heels in the waiting-room for more than five hours, and you may suppose the state of agitation I was in when summoned into the awful room. . . . The College was much the most awful of the two, as only one candidate was examined at a time, whilst ten of the first surgeons in London were weighing every word I said, sitting at a long cross-table, so that all looked me in the face. However, I did not see any of them through fright, except Sir Benjamin Brodie, who examined me. ... It was rather curious that I spent the last week before going up to the Hall in getting up a quantity of technical knowledge of which I was asked nothing, whilst the subject I was most questioned on at the College I had looked over just before leaving Regent Street, and therefore had it all pat. Indeed, Sir Benjamin Brodie complimented me upon the attention I had paid to the subject, which I really knew little of compared with other points, and I was continually afraid lest he should get out of my depth. So much does chance govern affairs of this kind.

He was on the eve of starting for Edinburgh, where new companionships were to be formed, which would profoundly affect his subsequent course. But he had already his own plans, for he confided to his brother his intention of publishing the next year a little work on the philosophical study of Natural History. And he had just received what was to be one of the most powerful and enduring of the intellectual impulses of his whole life. It was a somewhat curious coincidence that it should come indirectly through the American philanthropist whose recent visit to Bristol had so deeply stirred his sister Mary.*

* See the "Life and Work of Mary Carpenter," chap. ii.

I had a pleasing little pignus from Dr. Tuckerman lately

(he wrote to his brother Russell, in the letter just quoted), as

he desired my father to lay out a sovereign owed by him to

Dr. Tuckerman in a book for me. I chose Lyell's " Geology."

I have been much interested in reading his third book " On the

Distribution of the Animal Kingdom."

To this treatise he ever afterwards felt himself most

deeply indebted. In returning thanks for the Lyell medal,

which was awarded to him in 1883, in recognition of the

value of his investigations into the minute structure of

various fossil Invertebrates, and his deep-sea researches, he

thus referred to this early influence : —

This distinction is yet more gratifying to me from its having been founded by one whom I have held in the highest honour from my boyhood, when (as I well remember) I heard Charles Lyell spoken of as a young man who was advancing in the Geological Society doctrines of a most heretical kind, but was defending them so ably as to hold his own against the most weighty opponents. The study of his " Principles " was not only the delight of my youth, but a most valuable part of my scientific training ; and the privilege of subsequent intercourse with him through nearly forty years was one which I ever highly esteemed ; for whilst it brought me under the immediate influence of his philosophic spirit, it also afforded me the continual stimulus of his kindly encouragement. I would recall a little incident which is doubly illustrative. When, in 1855, I made my monograph of the genus Orbitolites the basis of a disquisition on the general subject of the variability of species (a doctrine impressed on me by Dr. Prichard), I sent him a copy of the memoir (published in the " Philosophical Transactions "), with a sort of apology for having tried to make so much out of what might be thought so small and trivial a subject ; he replied with a most kindly approval of the object and manner of my work, adding " any single point is really the universe," — a remark whose pregnancy left an impression on my mind that time has only deepened.

Beside the influence of Lyell's " Principles " must be set

RESIDENCE AT EDINBURGH. 13

that of another writer no less eminent, Sir John Herschel, whose "Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy" contributed another potent element to the formation of William Carpenter's intellectual character. Just before his departure from London to Edinburgh, at the end of October, 1835, he wrote to his parents —

I quite agree with you in all your feelings respecting the valuable influence of my stay here upon me. I feel, however, that the high standard I have set myself of intellectual excellence is no small assistance to religious principle; and I should say that I have derived more benefit in a moral point of view from Sir John Herschel's book than from any other than my Bible.

II

To his residence at Edinburgh, William Carpenter always looked back afterwards with deep and abiding pleasure. He formed there some of the most valued of his friendships ; he laid the foundations of some of his most fruitful work ; he felt a more vivid mental stimulus from the society around him than he had found in London ; and he gained a heightened confidence in his powers. He carried with him letters to some of the most eminent teachers of the University, and the leaders of the literary and scientific coteries of the Northern Athens. One of his first visits was paid to Professor Wilson, who had been a class-mate of Dr. Lant Carpenter's, at Glasgow. The following account of it in due time found its way to Bristol : —

Edinburgh, November 15, 1835.

I was not a little astonished to be introduced to a very wildlooking man, with a velveteen shooting-coat, and his hair straying down his shoulders in all directions, looking as little as possible like a professor of moral philosophy. ... On a little conversation, he discovered me to be the son of his old fellow-student, and we began to talk about Dr. Blair, with whom he keeps up a correspondence. He subsequently asked me to dinner, where I met Taylor (author of "Philip van Something"), who was the lion of the last London season, Professors Pillans and Muir, and some more intelligent men. Wilson and Taylor had some interesting conversation on Wordsworth, which would have delighted Mary. Both seemed to think him too minute in describing nature, and that he has been very much soured by his early want of success. They also began to discuss the various translations of " Faust," and, the conversation turning on Goethe in general, I was able to edge in a word as to his having been the first propounder of the doctrine of morphology in plants. Professor Muir and I fell out about the date of this production. I set it as far back as 1795, but allowed that it was not noticed until at least fifteen years later. Professor Muir was positive that it was not more than twenty years ago. I, of course, yielded, but had the satisfaction when I returned home, on referring to Lindley, to see that it was 1 7 90.

Many friendly houses were soon open to the young Bristol student, who found more sympathy with his heresy than he expected ; for he wrote shortly after : " As far as I " have seen, the moderate party of the Scotch Church are " extremely liberal, and I believe that many of them are " Unitarians at the bottom." But he was astonished at the superior freedom from conventional restraints which marked the education of women ; and though he had been accustomed to see his own sisters trained in the principles of science, and familiar with the fossils or the shells in their own cabinet, yet an extension of the same method of education caused him an amusing shock.

The tone of society (he wrote to his father) is certainly much more well-informed here than in London. At least, there is less reserve among the ladies with regard to scientific pursuits, which many pursue here to an extent which even I think hardly feminine ; such as practical (hammer-in-hand) geology, practical

RESIDENCE AT EDINBURGH. 15

chemistry in classes — a row of young ladies performing experiments all at the same time, like a company of soldiers going through the exercise.

The subject remained in his mind, for he recurred to it a few weeks later : —

I should be very sorry to see women restraining their natural feelings by reason and philosophy as much as men ought to do. I have often been afraid myself lest too close attention to scientific subjects should blunt my natural feelings ; and I should think that the new-fashioned system of female education might be in danger of making the pupils too much matter-offact.

Shortly after his arrival in Edinburgh, William Carpenter joined the Medical Society, formed in connection with the University, and at once began to take an active part in its debates. " I find it exceedingly useful," he said, in writing home ; " and in nothing more so than in showing me my " deficiencies, for I find many here who in purely professional " knowledge are far before me." His mind at this time preferred to dwell on large and general conceptions, to discover analogies, to follow out principles, rather than to come into close contact with actual facts. He was capable, as many of his subsequent writings showed, of minute and laborious investigations ; and he could marshal details with singular skill as soon as he could reduce them into classes. But though his memory was well-trained and retentive, it did not easily assimilate much of the material presented to him in the lecture-room, or prescribed for an examination. When the news reaches him of the college successes of his younger brothers, Russell and Philip, " Alas, poor me ! " he exclaims (July 4, 1836), " I seem doomed to get no prizes." But he adds : " However, it does not make me despair of " myself, for I feel a good deal more confidence in my powers, " if I have strength to exert them, than I have ever done ;

"and, I believe I may say, a well-grounded confidence." Three weeks later he, too, can announce an addition to the family honours : " I had the pleasure this morning of re- " ceiving a gold medal as a prize for an essay on a depart- ■ " ment of Physiological Botany.'7

By this time he had fairly entered on the labours of authorship. These were not indeed lightly undertaken. His home-training had impressed him with a serious and steadfast purpose ; and while circumstances had led him to the profession of medicine, in which he had no expectation of special success, he had embraced the study of science with a vivid moral ardour which gave it, for him, the force of a vocation. This vocation he sedulously nourished ; he threw into it the whole power of his being. The life of Kepler awakened in him an eager and enthusiastic devotion ; and he recurred to it again and again long afterwards as a support in protracted and perplexing inquiries. A collection of passages from the works of Herschel, Whewell, Mrs. Somerville, Channing, and other writers, entered in his commonplace-book, reveals some of the guiding motives of his thought ; one of these, to which he often referred through half a century of teaching and research, is here subjoined. It was derived from a Lecture on Universal History by Schiller, with whose life and spirit he was acquainted through the pages of Carlyle.

Just as sedulously as the trader in knowledge severs his own peculiar science from all others, does the lover of wisdom strive to extend its dominion and restore its connection with them. I say to restore, for the boundaries which divide the sciences are but the work of abstraction. What the empiric separates, the philosopher unites. He has early come into the conviction that in the dominion of the intellect, as in the world of matter, everything is linked and commingled, and his eager longing for universal harmony and agreement cannot be satisfied by fragments. All his efforts are directed to the perfecting of his

A BOOK PROJECTED. 17

knowledge ; his noble impatience cannot be restrained till all his conceptions have arranged themselves into one harmonious whole, till he stands at the central point of arts and sciences, and thence overlooks the whole extent of their dominion with a satisfied glance. New discoveries in the field of his activity, which depress the trader in science, enrapture the philosopher. Perhaps they fill a chasm which the growth of his ideas had rendered more wide and unseemly, or they place the last stone, the only one wanting to the completion of the structure of his ideas. But even should they shiver it into ruins — should a new series of ideas, a new aspect of nature, a newly discovered law in the physical world, overthrow the whole fabric of his knowledge, he has always loved truth better than his system, and gladly will he exchange her old and defective form for a new and fairer one. Under such intellectual impulses, as these, he had conceived the idea, while still only in his twenty-second year, of a work which should serve as an introduction to the philosophical study of Natural History. The treatises of the day appeared to him deficient in grasp of the underlying principles of physiological science ; they were filled with facts and observations which were sometimes ill understood, because their true relations were only imperfectly apprehended. He boldly grappled with the difficulty, and resolved to aim at nothing less than a general view of the entire realm of organic nature, so as to set forth the fundamental laws which might be discerned in the life alike of plants and animals. His thoughts had been playing round special questions in this wide domain as far back as his voyage to the West Indies. The subject haunted him during the session which he spent at University College, and rose into a positive though immature design. His first printed paper, published before he left London, in the West of England Journal, October, 1835, dealt with "The Structure and Functions of the Organs of Respiration in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms." * Starting from the recognized * It was continued in January, 1836.