Charles Darwin and Associates, Ghostbusters
Editor's Note: We are reposting this article from the October 1996 issue of Scientific American in commemoration of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday this week.
After lunch on September 16, 1876, Charles Darwin stretched out on his drawing-room sofa, as was his unvarying routine, smoked a Turkish cigarette and read the “bloody old Times.” He often fumed at its politics (the editors supported the South in the American Civil War), and his wife, Emma, suggested that they give up the paper altogether. But he replied he would sooner “give up meat, drink and air.” In the “Letters” column, he noticed a report that a young zoologist named Edwin Ray Lankester was bent on jailing a celebrated spirit medium, “Dr.” Henry Slade, who was bilking gullible Londoners. By hauling Slade into court as “a common rogue,” Lankester would become the first scientist to prosecute a professional psychic for criminal fraud—an action Darwin thought long overdue. Although he was delighted at Lankester’s attack on Slade, Darwin was distressed to learn that Alfred Russel Wallace, his friendly rival and co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, was also a target. The Slade trial was to become one of the strangest courtroom cases in Victorian England. Some saw it as a public arena where science could score a devastating triumph over superstition. For others, it was the declaration of war between professional purveyors of the “paranormal” and the fraternity of honest stage magicians. Arthur Conan Doyle, the zealous spiritualist whose fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, was logic personified, characterized it as “the persecution [rather than prosecution] of Slade.” But what made the trial unique was that the two greatest naturalists of the century ranged themselves on opposite sides. The “arch-materialist” Darwin gave aid and comfort to the prosecution, and his old friend Wallace, a sincere spiritualist, was to be the defense’s star witness—making it one of the more bizarre and dramatic episodes in the history of science. Wallace was respected as an author, zoologist, botanist, the discoverer of scores of new species, the first European to study apes in the wild and a pioneer in the study of the distribution of animals. But he constantly courted ruin by championing such radical causes as socialism, pacifism, land nationalization, wilderness conservation, women’s rights and spiritualism. In addition to his classic volumes on zoogeography, natural selection, island life and the Malay Archipelago, he had written Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, which lauded spirit-mediums. And he had just allowed a controversial paper on “thought transference” to be read at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—touching off an uproar that led him to avoid scientific meetings for the rest of his life. Wallace wanted the best of both worlds. With insects or birds, he was even more rigorous than Darwin in applying the principle of natural selection, but he questioned its efficacy for humans. If early hominids required only a gorilla’s intelligence to survive, Wallace asked, why had they evolved brains capable of devising language, composing symphonies and doing mathematics? Although our bodies had evolved by natural selection, he concluded, Homo sapiens has “something which he has not derived from his animal progenitors—a spiritual essence or nature . . . [that] can only find an explanation in the unseen universe of Spirit.” Wallace’s position did not stem from any conventional religious belief but from his long-standing interest in spiritualism: a melding of ancient Eastern beliefs with the Western desire to “secularize” the soul and prove its existence. When Wallace published this view in 1869, Darwin wrote him: “I differ grievously from you; I can see no necessity for calling in an additional and proximate cause [a supernatural force] in regard to Man.... I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child”—meaning their theory of natural selection.
Darwin the “Materialist” Like Wallace (and his New Age intellectual descendants), many Victorians recoiled from the materialism axiomatic in physical science; they sought a “wireless telegraph” to an intangible world. Although Darwin and most other scientists kept miracles out of their theories, a few shared Wallace’s views. Among them were the physicist Oliver Lodge and the chemist William Crookes, discoverer of the element thallium. Spiritualism attracted people with a wide spectrum of interests, but its major focus was on the possibility of communication with the dead. This part of the movement began in 1848, with the rise of Margaret and Kate Fox, sisters from Hydesville, N.Y. When the teenage girls conversed with “spirits,” mysterious rapping sounds spelled out lengthy messages. (Thirty years later, after gaining fame and fortune, one of the sisters admitted that she had always produced the taps by snapping her big toe inside her shoe.) In England, the U.S. and Europe, over the next 80 years, spiritualism enjoyed tremendous popularity. In the early 1870s Darwin’s cousin and brother-in-law Hensleigh Wedgwood became a convert. Wedgwood yearned to become a respected savant like Darwin, their cousin Francis Galton and Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus. But a pair of swindlers, Charles Williams and Frank Herne, recognized that he was the most gullible of the clan. At their urging, Wedgwood begged Darwin to come and see the self-playing accordions, levitating tables, automatic writing and glowing spirit hands at Williams’s séances. Darwin always managed to be too tired, too busy or too ill to attend. “I am a wretched bigot on the subject,” he once admitted. In January 1874, however, Darwin sent two close members of his circle to attend a séance with Williams. His friend and lieutenant, the famous zoologist Thomas H. Huxley, was introduced as “Mr. Henry” (his middle name). Darwin’s son George, then 29 years old, went as well. Although bottles moved around and a guitar played by itself, the two concluded they had observed nothing but crude trickery. George, a budding astronomer, wrote that he was shocked to find his uncle Hensleigh’s account of Williams’s séances “so worthless.” Later that year Darwin wrote to a newspaperman, urging him to expose Williams as “a scoundrel who has imposed on the public for so many years.” The following year Huxley’s young laboratory assistant, Edwin Ray Lankester, decided to catch Williams and Herne in fraud—an act he knew would impress his heroes Darwin and Huxley. But after Huxley and George’s visit, the medium became wary, avoiding anyone connected to Darwin’s circle. Then, in April 1876, a tempting new target moved into Lankester’s sights: a celebrated American psychic, “Dr.” Henry Slade, had come to London “to prove the truth of communication with the dead.” Slade claimed that his wife’s spirit wrote him messages on slates. Lankester and his fellow medical student, Horatio Donkin, went to Slade’s pretending to be believers. They paid the admission fee, asked questions of the spirits and received mysteriously written answers. Then, in the darkened room, Lankester suddenly snatched a slate out of Slade’s hands, found the written answer to a question he had not yet asked, and proclaimed him “a scoundrel and an impostor.” The next day Slade and his partner, Geoffrey Simmonds, were in the hands of the police, charged with violating the Vagrancy Act, an old law intended to protect the public from traveling palm readers and sleight-of-hand artists. Throughout the fall of 1876, all London was abuzz over the Slade trial. The little courtroom was packed with Slade’s supporters and detractors and 30 journalists, who spilled out into the street. The Times of London carried trial transcripts day after day. Darwin, whose beloved 10-year-old daughter Annie had died in 1851, had nothing but contempt for the “clever rogues” who preyed on grieving relatives. Yet he avoided saying so publicly—On the Origin of Species had stirred up enough controversies for a lifetime. Privately, he wrote Lankester an effusive letter of congratulations. Jailing Slade was a public benefit, he said, and insisted on contributing £10 to the costs of prosecution. (Under English law, the complainant paid court costs; £10 was a substantial sum, comparable to a month’s wages for a workingman.)
