Calmly, he continued, “He’s widely acknowledged to be one of Great Britain’s best naturalists, and I don’t dispute that. His work on coral reefs and barnacles shows skill and care and the narrative of his long voyage is a compendium of useful observations. It’s a shame he’s thrown all that away to chase such a wrongheaded theory.”
THE BOLD QUESTION Daphne asked about Mr. Darwin was, Henrietta knew by then, more typical than not; Daphne was surprisingly self-assured. She spoke to the teachers as if she were one of them, asked questions without raising her hand, rose from her seat in the dining hall and walked calmly to the professor’s table to confirm an idea she’d had. In the laboratory, where she and Henrietta worked at the same dissections and experiments, their notebooks looked like they were taking two different courses. Henrietta did as she’d learned at Oswego: neat ruled columns, numbered lists of observations, modest questions framed without any trace of personality, and in such a way that they might be answered. The “I,” Mr. Robbins had said, has no place in scientific study. Daphne’s pages seemed, in contrast, to be filled with everything Henrietta had expunged. Scores of drawings filled the margins, everything from fish eggs to the fringed feelers of the barnacle’s waving legs. Describing a beach plum’s flowering parts, she broke into unrelated speculations — when an individual polyp of Laomeda geniculata dies, does it affect the entire compound creature? — circled these darkly, and then drew arrows from there to cartoons of the professor.
She had grown up, Henrietta learned, on a small farm in a hilly part of central Massachusetts. Her family kept an apple orchard and also some sheep, a vegetable garden, a grove of maple trees tapped for syrup. Her chaotic, lively notebook, in which she wrote down whatever occurred to her, was only the latest in a long series. She’d started writing for a local magazine when she was still in school, little articles about common plants and animals, and although for five years now she’d had a teaching job at a coeducational academy, she continued writing, sneaking back into the empty study room to work after everyone else was asleep. Recently she’d started describing insect pests.
“The potato worm, the pickle worm, the cabbage worm,” she told Henrietta. “All those hungry grubs and borers and maggots chewing up whatever we try to grow in our gardens and orchards. Teaching is a perfectly fine way to make a living, but — a person must have a project of her own, don’t you think?”
Henrietta nodded, abashed. Until now she’d thought that finding a job was by itself a huge accomplishment. In just a few weeks she would meet her first class, teach her first lessons without supervision. The prospect of simply completing those tasks each day had seemed formidable enough.
“I may try to do a whole book,” Daphne said. “Once I dispose of Ezra.”
Ezra, Henrietta learned, was a young clergyman from Daphne’s hometown, a friend since childhood suddenly grown determined to marry her. Her parents, eager for grandchildren and worried about her age — she was already twenty-six — were pushing her to accept.
“You must have an Ezra, yourself,” Daphne added, as they sifted dirt in the potato field near the barn. “Several Ezras, perhaps.” Her gaze brushed over Henrietta’s face. “Waiting at home to tie you down … do you think of marrying?”
“I don’t,” Henrietta said. There were men she’d been drawn toward at Oswego, men even here she found attractive, but marriage — her mother, with all the miscarriages and stillbirths she’d suffered in the eleven years between Henrietta and Hester, had taught her more than she’d meant. “But what’s wrong with your Ezra?”
“Everything, really,” Daphne said scornfully. She turned over another clump of dirt. “His carefulness, his closed-mindedness. Even if I wanted to marry in the first place, why would I choose a clergyman as backward as the professor?”
“I don’t see how you can call the most famous naturalist in the country backward.”
“He is Mr. Darwin’s staunchest enemy,” Daphne said. “Which in my opinion makes his own work suspect. Ha!” She plucked out a handsome striped pupa. “Our friend the potato worm.”
“Is that its tail?” Henrietta asked. A long, thin tube curved from one end and bent back under the body like a handle.
“Tongue case,” Daphne said, sticking out her own pink tongue. “Once it hatches into a sphinx moth, it’ll have a tongue that unrolls to be five or six inches long. You must have seen the moths hanging in the air at dusk, lapping up nectar from flowers. Mr. Darwin would say the tongue is a marvelous adaptation, slightly different in each species, selected for over time in response to the shape of blossoms. Whereas our professor would have some rapturous phrase about the elegant contrivances of the Creator.”
The two men, Daphne continued, were philosophical opponents, glaring at each other across an unbridgeable divide. Everything the professor taught about the immutable nature of species, Mr. Darwin opposed. Which was the same, Henrietta realized with a shock, as saying that everything she’d been taught, both at her village school in Hammondsport and, later, at Oswego, was in Daphne’s opinion purely wrong.
“You,” she said, “you think, then …”
She stepped over the dusty leaves behind her, suddenly queasy from standing so long in the sun and afraid to finish her question. Surely potato worms were and always had been only, exactly, potato worms. Even when they became sphinx moths. Mumbling something about needing more drawing paper, she left Daphne in the field.
A few days later, though, despite Henrietta’s efforts to avoid it, Daphne picked up that discussion again. Another of the professor’s wealthy supporters had supplied simple microscopes for each laboratory pair and the professor had shown them how to fashion stands using blocks of wood, metal rods, corks and wire and bits of glass. “Useful,” Daphne said approvingly, as they chloroformed bumblebees and prepared to examine the parts. “We could make these inexpensively for our own classes.” This sort of practical laboratory skill made the course seem worthwhile; she did not respect the professor’s old-fashioned views and she might not, she confided, have signed up for the session had she not needed to see less of Ezra.
She held a dead bee’s head as she spoke, waiting for Henrietta to drip a bit of melted sealing wax onto a glass slide. When the wax began to cloud she pressed the head onto the glass and passed the slide back to Henrietta, who positioned it under the lens. Whether he was talking about echinoderms or fossil fish, Daphne continued more quietly, all the professor’s lectures circled back to the same essential argument, in her opinion theological rather than scientific.
Henrietta made a careful diagram of the cavity housing the mouth parts, moving the mandibles with a needle and spreading open the sucking apparatus. Instead of returning to the field, Daphne claimed, and gathering actual data, the professor had wasted the last decade opposing Mr. Darwin’s theories. He could say as many times as he liked — indeed, he said it here — that the simple structural plans uniting groups of species were actually ideas, Divine Conceptions, which existed independent of any material expression of them: but what had he ever found to prove that? At home, all the young teachers in her natural history study group were ardent Darwinians, as was she. The professor was nearly alone in his beliefs.