Charles Darwin’s two years at Edinburgh University, passed there between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, were profoundly important for his later career. He was there ostensibly to study medicine, his father wishing him to follow in the paternal profession, but he so disliked the course that he paid it scarcely any attention, instead pursuing the passion for natural history that had been his primary avocation throughout boyhood at home in Shropshire.
Understandably, Edinburgh in particular and Scotland in general are eager to demonstrate their contribution to the development of Darwin’s world-changing ideas. Edinburgh was then the ‘Athens of the North’, the capital of the Scottish Enlightenment, home to a roll-call of genius that included David Hume, Adam Smith and Walter Scott. The grip of dour Calvinism had been sufficiently loosened for the fruits of intellectual liberty to appear, so that when in his second year Darwin met the anatomist Robert Grant, sixteen years older than himself and equally passionate about natural history, it was to encounter a freethinker who had been convinced by reading Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and by discussion with his geologist colleague Robert Jameson, of the truth of biological evolution by descent from common ancestors.
By Darwin’s own account Grant’s radical convictions on this subject had no more effect on him than those of his grandfather Erasmus, whose Zoonomia he had already read. ‘I listened [to Grant on evolution] in silent astonishment,’ Darwin later wrote, ‘and as far as I can judge, without any effect on my mind. I had previously read the Zoonomia of my grandfather in which similar views are maintained, but without producing any effect on me.’ Obviously, though, the convictions of both Erasmus Darwin and Robert Grant – and others such as Robert Jameson and the radical espousers of the ‘materialism’ which was said to be ‘too common among medical students’ – indeed had an effect on Darwin; those ideas had merely to wait upon the accumulated evidence of his Beagle voyage and his reflection upon it, to convince him in their turn.
Darwin’s brilliant powers of observation were already evident in the collecting, exploring and bird-watching of his childhood at The Mount in Shrewsbury. But they were fostered by his friendship with Grant, which was only occasionally clouded by Grant’s habit of claiming credit for some of the discoveries Darwin made in their explorations along the shores of the Firth of Forth, studying marine invertebrates. In addition to Grant’s tutoring, Darwin benefited from Jameson’s geological lectures, lessons in taxidermy with the freed slave John Edmonstone, meetings of the Wernerian and Plinian natural history societies, and the specimens provided by his favourite recreations of shooting and fishing; all this fertilised the soil from which his later work was to flower. When he went to Cambridge immediately afterwards he began collecting beetles with his natural-history-mad cousin William Darwin Fox, more influenced by this than the fact that his rooms at Christ’s College were those that had formerly belonged to William Paley.
Darwin’s Edinburgh years gave not just his interest in the study of nature, but his skill in carrying it out, a tremendous boost. The attitudes and beliefs of those he encountered there likewise had an effect, though not immediately. Had he gone straight to Cambridge he would still have been a naturalist; a clergy career for younger sons, or generally for youths with no inclination for medicine or law, was the most amenable for anyone in love with natural history – Gilbert White of Selborne is the type of the clergyman more in love with insects and birds than preaching. But Darwin learned more, and more quickly, at Edinburgh by his exposure to like-minded people, and to the wonderful opportunity of exploring the shores of the Firth with Grant, than he would have done at Cambridge. And it has to be said, despite the hopelessness of proposing historical counterfactuals, that it is likely that modern evolutionary biology would be citing the name of Alfred Russel Wallace far more than that of Charles Darwin if Edinburgh had not been on his life’s itinerary.
There is a general lesson in this. It is that climates of opinion, generally tendencies in the drift of ideas, opportunities for encounter between like-minded people, independence, the unfettered fostering of blue-sky interests, and the match of all or some of these things with a budding passion, make a powerful mixture. Of course original genius sometimes breaks through the antipathetic membrane of opposition and imposed orthodoxies. But Darwin’s progress is like that of a ship given a good following wind and favourable tides; and Edinburgh is very much part of what wafted him on over the bar and out into the ocean of discovery.