“Even better,” the professor said, and without quite meaning to started talking about the mound-building Indians of the Ohio. He meant to let them get back to work; he meant only to reinforce the idea, which this trench so beautifully showed, that one set of things lying above another, as fossils lay above each other in strata, did not in any way suggest that the beings of one layer had developed from those of another. One simply lay atop the other: succession, not development. Why make such an elaborate hypothesis for what could be so simply explained? And why accept the repulsive poverty of the material explanation? The resources of the Deity could not be so meager that, in order to create a being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.
But why, if he meant to say that, was he talking about serpent-shaped earthworks and copper tools? And why, while his mouth framed those words, was he thinking again about Mr. Darwin and his theories? He had tried to make sense of them; really he had made an enormous effort. During his last convalescence, while he was stuck in his sickbed unable to walk or even to speak, youngsters had uncovered fossils in Montana and Wyoming that hinted, tantalizingly, at new relationships. They’d used those discoveries to support Darwin’s theories, writing papers in which, if he was mentioned at all, he was cast as a kind of dinosaur himself. So upsetting had this been that he’d set off on yet another journey, this time bringing with him all of Darwin’s important books. On the ocean, away from the bother of everyday life, he’d meant to consider this question of descent with modification as perhaps — he admitted this only to himself — he had not done thoroughly enough in earlier years.
Down the Atlantic coast of both Americas, through the Strait of Magellan, up the Pacific coast to California. With the new deep-sea dredge he’d planned to sample the ocean bottom, bringing up specimens that might allow him to determine if species in the northern and southern hemispheres were possibly related. Instead the dredge broke again and again, and the ship itself often needed repair. So did he; he was often sick. During long hours in his berth, he flipped through the books but couldn’t concentrate. Places he’d hoped to visit had to be skipped; places he visited didn’t yield what he’d hoped. The shape of his own mind, he learned, was as fixed as the shape of his skull, a kind of instrument for registering patterns. The spiral of a narwhal’s horn like the spirals of willow leaves like the spiral of a snail’s operculum, all pointing clearly to a single underlying Mind. He reached San Francisco sure that the real work left to him lay in articulating clearly, to as many people as possible, the flaws in Darwin’s arguments and the strengths of his own.
Which didn’t mean, he knew, that the students before him were fully on his side. Half or more of those here, he suspected, believed in Darwin’s theories even while respecting his own abilities as a naturalist and a teacher. None of them knew, as he did, how the theories seized on with such enthusiasm by one generation might be discarded scornfully by the next. He poked at a round stone embedded in the wall. One might find, layered in such a wall, a whale, a reed, a mackerel, a star-nosed mole, a liverwort. The relics of six discarded theories — or the traces of six young men with their shirtsleeves rolled up, shovels smoothing and scraping the trench while others sketched the section they’d so neatly uncovered.
ON THE MORNING after the August full moon, Henrietta found herself in a little boat with Daphne, Edward, and the professor’s wife, who now behaved as if she hardly knew Henrietta. The china they’d scrubbed, the beds they’d made, their arms mirroring each other as they snapped sheets in the air, apparently counted for nothing in the light of the lectures Henrietta had skipped and her obvious absorption in something other than the professor. It wasn’t just the book, which Henrietta didn’t think the professor’s wife had seen. More likely it was the sight of her and Daphne talking so intently outside of class, and the way Daphne acted as a magnet for the other students interested in Darwin’s ideas. In the dining hall the tables were defined, now, by scientific beliefs as well as personal alliances. She and Daphne had places at the far end of the table nearest the door, among a particularly lively group — David, Rockwell, Charles, Lydia, and a few others — swayed by Darwinism. While the professor might not know what bound them, his wife surely did.
Henrietta sat next to Daphne in the stern of their dory, facing Edward, who rowed; the professor’s wife sat in the bow, lecturing on the transformations of the Acalephs. “An excellent example of alternate generations,” she said in her clear voice. Around them bobbed fourteen other dories, the rest of their little fleet. “To the untrained eye, their different phases appear so distinct and apparently unconnected that previous observers assumed they were separate species.”
The sandbar flashed beneath the bottom of the boat. Into the water dipped Edward’s oars, the blades slicing the surface, pulling through the depths, rising, and then, with a deft roll of the wrist, flattening to slip through the air. Henrietta tried to visualize the sequence of transformations. “In the autumn, eggs of some species hatch into free-swimming globular bodies, covered with cilia. After a while these attach themselves to a solid surface and then assume a hollow hydroid shape. In early spring, buds appear on the hydroids, each eventually assuming the shape of a medusoid disc that grows and then frees itself. The full-grown medusae of some species swarm together at this time of year, for the purposes of spawning.”
One, two, three different stages. The sea was white and shining, the surface quiet but the whole mass undulating in long, slow, shallow swells. Sea urchins too, said the professor’s wife, underwent fantastic transformations. A narrow puddle at the bottom of the boat moved forward and back, forward and back, in time with Edward’s strokes, while the two buckets awaiting their specimens tilted gently from side to side and the stack of glass bowls clicked together, flashing as the sun hit the rims. The water was glittering too, the jumbled lights making Henrietta drowsy.
“Again and again,” said the professor’s wife, her words drifting by, “we see one creature seem to change into another.” Henrietta touched elbows with Daphne, her friend as fresh and alive as a tree, and for a moment her soul stretched away from her body.
Grub to beetle, larva to barnacle. Now the professor’s wife was speaking about the majestic and unexpected paths by which God arrived at the completion of his designs. “The Divine handiwork,” she concluded, “exists to remind us always of the greater wonder, the mystery of the moment when God became man.”
Henrietta’s soul snapped elastically back into place. That wasn’t right; those two domains were best kept separate. She turned toward Daphne, who was frowning, and then she bent once more, searching for transparent creatures in transparent water. Her eyes were sore, her head ached, her stomach was announcing, with peculiar clarity, its exact contours.
Splish, said Edward’s oars. Splish, splish.
The professor, from the dory just ahead of theirs, called out a question to the fleet. “What are the three classes of Acalephs?”
“The ctenophores,” said Edward. “And the discophores and the hydroids.”
Daphne, whose lower back now touched Henrietta’s — they were leaning over opposite sides, skirts together, heads and arms far apart — said something Henrietta couldn’t hear. The professor’s wife told Edward to lift his oars once they rounded the rocky point. The bowls clicked, the edges flashed, and the drops falling from Edward’s oars sparkled like broken glass.