Conceding for a moment that there is any analogy between a bee and a man in a shirt and pantaloons (which I deny), and that it is settled that the man is to learn from the bee (which I also deny), the question still remains, what is he to learn? To imitate? Or to avoid? When your friends the bees worry themselves to that highly fluttered extent about their sovereign, and become perfectly distracted touching the slightest monarchical movement, are we men to learn the greatness of Tufthunting, or the littleness of the Court Circular? I am not clear, Mr Boffin, but that the hive may be satirical.

CHARLES DICKENS (1864)

Aldous Huxley once attempted the difficult task of rating the various pure sciences on an imaginative index - that is to say, on a scale which would show the relative intrinsic appeal of each science's revelations for the literary artist. Huxley placed biology very high on this scale, and in giving his reasons for doing so he made no reference to that science's state of development at different times. His assessment is, or claims to be, a universal one.

Biology, it is obvious, is more immediately relevant to human experience than are the exacter sciences of physics and chemistry. Hence, for all writers, its special importance. The sciences of life can confirm the intuitions of the artist, can deepen his insights and extend the range of his vision.¹

We need to bear in mind that novelists, especially those interested in an analytic way in the aesthetics of the novel, tend to ex cathedra pronouncements which do little more than justify their own practice. Without doubt Huxley is here inflating his own predilections into an expansive generalisation: one recalls that in Point Counter Point the character Philip Quarles, himself a novelist and an obvious Huxley persona, reads up assiduously on ichthyology before writing a scene full of fishy symbolism to be set in front of the tanks of an aquarium. Discounting the special pleading, then, is it really so 'obvious' that biology does indeed have that 'special importance' which Huxley claims for it? Is it universally true of all the life sciences from virology to ethology and at every stage of their development from the anecdotal to the rigidly statistical? Certainly if we draw the limits extensively enough; if, say, we define biology as the science of living things - the definition which Huxley's grandfather helped to publicise - then the biologist can legitimately concern himself with the entire span of human experience and activity. It reaches down and becomes entangled with chemical and physical reductionism; it reaches upwards into history, psychology, anthropology and maybe even parapsychology. Every student of the human world is a biologist, if a sufficiently catholic view be taken; and we might even say that the literary artist is not merely free to draw on biology for inspiration but that in exercising his craft he is himself a biologist. When pushed to its limit, therefore, Huxley's remark is nothing more than a banality; and short of that limit it is hard to see how it can be true. Could any imaginative writer, no matter how inclusive his genius, make, say, the matter of population genetics grist to his mill? One ventures to doubt it.

But, if in this sense the universality of Huxley's claim appears somewhat ridiculous, in another - his insistence that the human relevance of biology is a permanent feature of that science - is worth dwelling on. Though the foregoing chapters have stressed the unusual literary utility of late Victorian biology, no treatment of the relations between science and letters in that period should allow any impression to linger that those relations ceased with the final triumph of the neo-Darwinian 'modern synthesis'. There are in fact many continuities which have lasted up to the present day and which therefore testify to the permanent validity of Huxley's assessment. In the Introduction an opinion was quoted that the melting of the critical Darwinian issues into the cultural background has meant an equivalent ebbing of literary interest in biological themes, the sole survivors being by 1910 only cheap romances or 'comic strips and radio programmes exploiting the far-flung future and man's caveman past'² As we have argued throughout, such a judgement will only hold up if one takes a somewhat myopic view of the main drive of biological investigation (a drive which far transcended the issue of Darwinism as such) up to and beyond the end of the century. The truth is, rather, that after the establishment of Mendelism both speculative and purely literary interest in biological theory continued unabated. Certainly we must concur that, to a degree, the speculative writer has been forced in recent times to become much more cautious as some of the accretions which clung about the technical problems of a century ago have been shorn away by the patient labours of unimaginative specialists. No writer today, we must suppose, could gain a hearing for long gloomy prognostications about the future of European civilisation based on information about the evolutionary development of the liver-fluke. Pulpit science, 'bio-optimism' of the brand peddled by Drummond, has quite gone out of fashion. The catastrophes of modern history have left us little room or inclination to worry, as Greg and Hudson and Wells in their day worried, about the risk of permanent dull social harmony inducing racial senescence. We can now see pretty clearly that particular apocalypse as the vision of a society essentially at peace with itself, for good or bad. Nevertheless, the impulse to read out the future by inspecting the bowels of a science remains as strong as it ever was, and this is still specially so in that no-man's land between severely technical and frankly literary prose. The line whose last representative in our period was Samuel Butler continued fertile in the first part of the present century and, in a somewhat more professional form, has lasted to this day. One might mention in illustration the treatise by the South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950), Holism and Evolution (1926, but in part dating from 1910); several works by the political philosopher and pioneer sociologist Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse (1864-1929) such as Development and Purpose (1913); and the 1916-18 Gifford Lectures by his friend Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), later published as Space, Time and Deity (1920). These particular works originated in the confusion of the first decades of the century and ride a number of hobby-horses in presenting what are actually different brands of Emergent Evolution. But it would be very premature indeed to predict that our present neo-Darwinian biology has at long last stifled for good the evolutionary philosopher. The old debate, which might finally be summed up as the question 'Does biology tell us anything that might justify our extrapolation from minds to Mind?', continues apace. Conjectures in their own way as bold as anything in Winwood Reade are to be found in the pages of Alister Hardy's influential The Living Stream (1965). Certainly the tradition of 'biophilosophy' has responded to the shift of interest, with the rise of genetics and biochemistry, into much more carefully defined biological problems. For the interpretation of 'chance' as meaning, effectively, human ignorance of causes (one of the interpretations, we recall, authorised by Darwin himself) Mendelism substituted the much more suggestive demonstration of pure randomness at the microscopic level ofgene interchange - a process able to be described by probability theory. Randomness so observed is a far more perplexing element to incorporate into any evolutionary philosophy - into any form of evolutionism - since it by definition excludes any further introduction of teleology. Something of the spirit if not the message of Henry Drummond lived on, despite the conceptual restrictions, in Teilhard de Chardin's Phenomenon of Man (1959). The prose-poetry of evolutionism may be dead, but Chardin has sung of the emergence and the rise of the spirit of man out of the meaningless ebb and flow of energy transformations. Even in his terminology ('zoosphere', 'noosphere') he is but reworking the ideas behind Huxley's parable of the Unweeded Garden.

Other channels of expression - the novel of scientific versus religious controversy, the conversational set-pieces on Darwinism, the polemic pamphlets - have not survived. Naturalism, which forced many very different writers to seek the springs of character and motive in abstractions like Hardy's Immanent Will or in the genetic lottery, has proved a passing phase. Utopian fiction, prose epics and, above all, mainstream science fiction: these have proven to be the most hospitable genres for writers with biological interests, and many outstanding examples date from after the close of our period. Of the dozens oreutopias and dystopias written in the century since 1870 very few do not begin with evolutionary presuppositions or reckon with possible developments in the biological sciences. Huxley's own Brave New World (1932), for instance, is at once a gross realisation and a shocking condemnation of post-Galtonian eugenics. It makes final mock of his grandfather's tenuous hope for eugenics and of Wells's bumptious optimism in A Modern Utopia; and it expands into harsh and gripping satire all of Wells's ambivalent feelings about that hand sticking out of the Selenite breeding-bottle.³ Not many of the more recent Utopias have been so antagonistic to biology. Even Aldous Huxley's quarrel with it later proved to be with the applications rather than with the science itself; for in his last novel, the geographical eutopia Island (1962), he celebrates in detail never before attempted the applied biological sciences pharmacology, neurophysiology, agronomy - as potent means of individual liberation.

As for the evolutionary prose epic, there were flamboyant calls from the secular wing right from the beginning for a panegyric on the ascent of man. The call came 1oudest from the proud atheists and positivists eager to begin the writing of the Gospel of Man and eager, too, to have an epic standing in the same relation to the Origin as does Paradise Lost to the Bible. Winwood Reade, as might be expected, bellowed his affirmation that the biological history of man is 'a splendid narrative, the materials of which it is for science to discover, the glories of which it is for poets to portray'.⁴ No one in the nineteenth century rose to Reade's challenge - no one had quite his sanguinary verve - except for the very minor exception of Mathilde Blind, a poet who did in fact compose an Ascent of Man in 1888 - an epic by turns lugubrious and exalted, but always feeble - and later persuaded Alfred Russel Wallace to write an introduction to it. Victorian epics, when written at all, were written within the boundaries of limited models like Icelandic saga. The concepts of evolutionary biology were simply too expansive, too disconnected and too transitional to supply a stable metaphysical frame to any epic; nor was there an audience sufficiently homogenous in its beliefs to find the imaginative transformation convincing. In more recent years some epics of this kind have found more of an audience as the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy has grown more familiar and lost some of its initial and more unreasonable terrors. But such epics have been written as prose fiction, and directed towards the future rather than the past. Thomson's and Wells's vision of solar decay has been replaced by more immediate catastrophe; or, as in the novels of Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), by great cycles of decay and rebirth. Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) purports to tell nothing less than the whole future history of the human species, covering a timespan of a hundred million years. Stapledon took to heart Wells's strictures about static Utopias. On his huge canvas he has room enough for long periods of technological triumph when social mores seem fixed immutably, but the slow-acting pressures of evolution at length sweep away even the most long-lived and successful varieties of humankind. Stapledon's fiction (novel? philosophical treatise? - it is hard to classify it) is notable for its handling of eugenics. Man remaking himself is not the endpoint of evolution that Wells thought it might be: Stapledon was a writer of the succeeding generation, one disillusioned about such easy promises. Stapledon's scope is so great that, though he can indeed show eugenic changes, he can also show unaided natural selection transforming man many times over. He deals very harshly with his predecessors' dreams of evolutionary control, feeling that it expresses nothing more than enormous hubris. It is in just this sense that Stapledon, clearly in the grip of the Weismannism of his youth, makes his biological fantasia genuinely a Darwinian fantasia. Last and First Men has rightly been called 'by far the most ambitious and sustained attempt to create an "evolutionary bible" ',⁵ but while it is certainly part of Stapledon's intention to create an eschatology convincing to post-Darwinian man he cannot be said to grant much significance to the individual. His salvation is of no moment; in Stapledon's bleak universe he is at best just a very transient note in a great symphony. Stapledon's influence is perceptible, too, in some other attempts at evolutionary prose epics (for instance in Vardis Fisher's twelve-novel cycle The Testament of Man, 1943-60), but most writers have been content to investigate the less grandiose possibilities of contemporary biology and create on a much smaller scale. Much of this work fits more and more consciously into mainstream science fiction. This genre at first made use of only the crudest biology - like the living fossils in Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) - but in the last half-century sophistication has reached the point that the technical discovery and the story exploiting it have become almost simultaneous events.

Continuities such as the ones we have mentioned here help to vindicate Huxley's claim for the special imaginative import of biology. But, as Huxley himself is careful to note, writers are not normally interested in sciences as coherent structures of thought, and will simply ignore what is of no use to them. They will pick and choose: and may choose, as we have seen, the exotic, the absurd, or simply the inaccurate. Biology, therefore, as Huxley cautiously and properly implies, grants nothing: at most it can deepen an intuition - or confirm a prejudice. We cannot reasonably expect writers to distinguish between good data and bad; nor can we expect them to engage with issues which the biologists themselves were incapable of confronting. But all the interested parties will share areas of concern, and certain phrases, certain parables, certain metaphors will express that sharing. All the themes we have traced, for instance, have one common bond at least: each of them may be said to display one version of a uniform concern over the transmission and elaboration of human culture; and each theme poses the question in a different form of how far the natural biological mechanisms can be trusted for this task. One striking omission is any real appreciation in our period that there might be other modes of transmitting information down the generations and these other modes might be of much greater human significance than the genetic ones. Despite the cry from all the evolutionistic optimists that the time was right for man to remake himself in his own image, and despite the insistence from some others that he must cut himself adrift from natural process, there was no firm awareness that the onset of urban civilisation had itself inaugurated a new phase of evolution. There were, to be sure, some imprecise formulations of what might be termed 'cultural evolutionism' even in J.S. Mill's pre-Darwinian essay 'Nature': he speaks there of a 'self-culture' that would be impossible 'without aid from the general sentiment of mankind delivered through books, and from the contemplation of exalted characters real or ideal', calling this 'the only nature which it is ever commendable to follow'.⁶ Mill's concept of 'self-culture' reaches beyond more personal education. He is aware that the permanent records of society supply an impersonal inheritance, an 'artificially perfected nature' where truly human values may be forged and stored in a repository not subject to the defects of the flesh. But on this matter the four main interpreters of early Darwinian biology - Spencer, Darwin, Wallace and Huxley - were curiously silent. Spencer has a few comments about 'superorganic' evolution in his Principles of Biology of 1864-7, but nothing more. Darwin's handling in the Descent of the part played by man's cultural, as opposed to biological, inheritance is grotesquely inadequate and in fact constitutes his most considerable omission. In accounting for the aesthetic sensibilities, for instance, which to us are largely or wholly products of cultural conditioning, Darwin appeals at one point to genetic endowment and at another to personal training. Some of the more refined tastes, he argues (without defining them), are never found among barbarous or uneducated people in any society. He gives very insufficient weight to the supreme power of long tradition, and barely mentions the inventions which allow the invested capital (both physical and mental) to increase cumulatively despite the brief generations. Darwin's iraperception is shared by Wallace who, despite his optimism about educational advancement, has nothing but a casual aside in his essay 'Human progress' to the effect that 'each generation benefits by the trials and failures of the preceding generation'⁷ - an oddly insipid remark. As for Huxley, he was aware that it is language, letters and the printing press which in modern times have permitted people of genius to stand on one another's shoulders. And yet he never advanced beyond the point, expressed so vigorously in his last serious philosophical analysis Evolution and Ethics, that all human refinement can only be temporary ground wrested forcibly from a recalcitrant nature, and that the ethical struggle is now and forever in deadly conflict with the cosmic. Possibly Huxley was aware of the dubious logic of opposing one part of the evolutionary process against another. His simile of two hands driven by one brain in opposite directions to snap a piece of string (in the 'Prolegomena') is a nod in this direction. At any rate, he never anywhere gives cultural evolution its rightful due, and never uses the concept to overcome any of his fundamental theoretical perplexities.

It was not until the middle 1890s at the earliest that the novel suspicion began to assert itself that evolutionary biology as then understood had only the most limited contribution to make to an understanding of the tiny span of all recorded history and prehistory. The suspicion began to be articulated only as the controversy mounted over the claim, touched on in Chapter 3, that only supernatural interventions could account for the advanced qualities of the human intellect. Men began to look about them for alternative explanations, and soon they settled on what Romanes called 'the inestimable advantage' of a 'transmission of the effects of culture from generation to generation'.⁸ This 'advantage' had not in Romanes' eyes reduced the ferocity of the evolutionary struggle one whit, but it had taken that struggle on to a new level where language and other symbolic systems were the new (and potent) instruments of aggression. Biologically speaking, the human race was now seen to be mentally, morally and physically much what it has been since the Palaeolithic. To account for any other changes there is after all no need to invoke Wallace's angelic legions: anthropology was by that time beginning to show how a vital precondition of growth into full humanity is submersion in the nourishing medium of human culture. This realisation was brought home by the 'wolf-boy' studies popular at the time, from which evidence was garnered about the amount of socialisation - more or less zero - achieved by infants raised by animals outside the pale of any human society. Such new awareness, and the consequent reduction in the significance which could reasonably be placed on the strictly biological and physiological determinants ofbehaviour, began to be characteristic of some of the more speculatively daring writing at the extreme end of this period. Wells, in his The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), introduces beasts transformed surgically into travesties of men; but what humanity these tortured monsters display flows more from their rudimentary culture, the legal and theological system (the 'Law') in which they are enmeshed, than from anatomical changes. As individuals they are freaks ofa Faustian science, pathetic, contemptible; but as social units they have some dignity and acquire a cohesiveness which for a while challenges their creators. Whatever Wells's intentions were in constructing it, his fable impresses more as an anthropological than as a biological one.

What might the literary consequences have been, had these imaginative possibilities gathered about the metaphor of cultural evolutionism been drawn out earlier? It is hard to believe that the wide-ranging concern over evolutionary optimism or pessimism, over avenues of inheritance, over the ability of natural selection to bring about social reform, would have taken quite the shape displayed in previous chapters. Perhaps eugenics, and the social and political attitudes which commingle with that creed, would have been replaced by a greater interest in euthenics - the improvement of the race by the adjustment of the environment - among the biological popularisers. As it was, all the involvements which have been documented earlier took place within a frame of reference which barely admitted sociocultural factors at all. This is not to say (of course) that these theoretical inadequacies had any dissolutive effect on the literary art based on them. The supersession of Weismannism did not bring down Tess of the d'Urbervilles! Nor does the failure of the 'proofs' for evolutionism spoil the optimistic rhetoric of The Martyrdom of Man - though that failure reduces Reade's impassioned tract for the times to rhetoric. What the writer who uses current science has most to fear from the flux of time is not being proven 'wrong' but being rendered incomprehensible. In three hundred years' time Hardy's 'bio-pessimism' in Tess may require as much elaborate glossing as Donne's natural philosophy in 'The Extasie' does today. And yet we read Donne despite his utterly obsolete physiology.

These points are well elaborated in Aldous Huxley's Literature and Science, and all confirm what he has to say about the universal literary potential of biology. In one way only, as this survey reaches its close, must we insist for the last time on the historical distinctiveness of biology throughout the final four decades of the last century. The tenor of the argument has been that at certain stages in its development - and not necessarily at its emergence - a science will be relatively accessible to the lay mind, while at other points it may be effectively sealed off from all but severely technical scrutiny. The sciences of chemistry and electrochemistry had a great deal of power in them for the writers of several decades before 1859, at a time when it was supposed in some quarters that the origin and processes of life are essentially electrical. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is much more of a physicist and chemist than he is a biologist. The dread secret he uncovers is a way of animating with the vital spark a collection of dead organs stolen from charnel houses rather than a probing into physiology as such. Later on in the century, despite the very far-reaching nature of its discoveries and their practical applications, chemistry lost much of its imaginative appeal: it had become at once too recondite and too mundane. Other sciences' insights came to fill the gap - Tennyson used palaeontology in The Princess (1847); Ruskin meteorology in The Storm Cloud (1884); and Meredith astronomy in 'Meditation under Stars' (1883) - and of these biology was the most amenable to imaginative treatment. The degree to which a science may become popularly accessible is inversely related to the degree to which its findings have become quantifiable and unequivocal, and for just this reason literary interest in Victorian biology centred on the issue of teleology in evolution. Repeatedly in the previous chapters we have seen the teleologically inclined writer leaning on some supposedly empirical support for his belief that willing has a compelling power all of its own, just as real as mechanistic cause and effect. Such support was not found wanting. Cultural evolutionism made no headway because much optimistic energy flowed into the ultimately futile controversy on the inheritance of acquired characters. Even at the scientific and philosophical levels this was a strongly emotional issue. The shocking determinism of classical Darwinism revolted some idealistic minds - minds which attacked it, not because it was too revolutionary for the times but because on the contrary it was a reactionary force apparently putting a brake on brave hopes for the future. And in compensation grew up the profound wish to believe that skills acquired by individual sweat do not vanish with each generation but are to some small degree transmissible to posterity. Many social theorists and educationalists, encouraged by Darwin's own flirtation with 'soft' inheritance and perhaps also encouraged by his theory ofpangenesis which gave some respectability to neo-Lamarckism, reacted with fear and distaste to the revival of Darwinism in the 1890s and the contributions of Weismann. After all, over the previous years men like Spencer had made an enormous intellectual and emotional investment in Lamarckian explanation. In his Synthetic Philosophy use-inheritance played a key role: it is proposed as the source of all inherited knowledge, as the basis of the conscience, and as the final basis of certainty for the transcendental axioms. Spencer had attempted, in his metaphysics, to marry the Kantian categorical imperative with modern biology, finding a justification for the first in the supposedly demonstrable facts of the second. It is not surprising, then, that he attacked neo-Darwinism with such ferocity, for he had stretched Lamarckism to the widest limits it ever attained. Among less totally committed thinkers, too, Weismannism threatened to dissolve the freshly laid foundations of social psychology into, in Grant Allen's words, 'a slough of pre-Darwinian and pre-Spencerian chaos'⁹ When considered coolly, of course, it is obvious that the corollary of the 'law' that educational improvements are genetically transmissible must inevitably be that evil and anti-social behaviour also has a persistency it lacks in the neo-Darwinian account. Indeed, the latter theory has this'advantage: even if the valuable effects of education are not passed on, it is also true that originality or genius when once thrown up by the random permutation of the genes cannot be weakened by the direct influence of a mediocre environment in successive generations. Mendelian genetics and the particulate theory asserted that no characteristic can readily be blended away.

There are therefore massive difficulties in placing Lamarckian inheritance at the base of any optimistic social philosophy, but unfortunately the difficulty of gathering really definitive technical evidence tended to obscure this fact. It is hardly credible that as late as 1936 Robson and Richards in their important The Variation of Animals in Nature were saying dismissively of natural selection that

we do not believe that Natural Selection can be disregarded as a possible factor in evolution. Nevertheless, there is so little positive evidence in its favour, so much that appears to tell against it, and so much that is as yet inconclusive, that we have no right to assign to it the main causative role in evolution.¹⁰

They were thus passing the same judgement in words only slightly different from Romanes' forty years earlier. One of the most influential experiments which sustained the controversy was carried out over a period of several years by the psychologist William McDougall, who taught a skill to many successive generations of rats in the expectation that it would eventually show itself to be innate. He frankly admitted to a strong personal bias to Lamarckism, and he did so in words which might have come straight from a Butler essay of the 1890s: 'on my own part, there was a feeling that a clear-cut positive result would go far to render tenable a theory of organic evolution, while a negative result would leave us in the Cimmerian darkness in which Neo-Darwinism finds itself.¹¹ The Miltonic epithet intriguingly reinforces the intellectual fervour behind it, but unfortunately the daybreak when McDougall's results were positive proved to be a false dawn. His positive results were a statistical error; but these phenomena are so elusive that the experiments which decisively rejected McDougall's work consumed fifteen more years and many more generations of test animals. Slowly the belief has hardened that to inquire whether habits or skills may be inherited is, in philosophical terms, a pseudo-question because it violates Popper's principle of potential disprovability. No breeding strain of organism, it has been argued more recently, can ever be fully controlled or described; and therefore it is impossible to rule out genetic drift and hence natural selection in favour of the characteristic being looked for. If this is true, the Lamarckian controversy reduces to little more than a battle over the use of terms. Even what looked to be a clear division in nature to the Victorians has become muddied with Conrad Waddington's concept of genetic assimilation - a complex process which can, when the breeding conditions in a population are just right, simulate Lamarckian effects even though the only processes at work are Mendelian ones.¹² Gradually, then, a thicker carapace of professionalism has grown over the animosities of rival theories, and the parties no longer thrash out their differences in those long monologues fostered by the medium of the great periodicals. The splenetic hatred of a George Romanes for a Samuel Butler is no longer quite as public, though it persisted well into the present century. No Victorian biologist, after all, went so far as to blow his brains out over the Lamarckian issue, as did Paul Kammerer in 1926 when his specimens allegedly displaying induced inheritable characteristics were denounced as fakes. Just how high tempers rose before that last act, and the vindictive part played by William Bateson out of professional envy, has been well described by Arthur Koestler in The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971 ). The story is an ugly one, but it does help to bring to mind the full human reality behind what are at first sight abstractions. Then, when we know something of the passions it could arouse, the spectacle of Bernard Shaw as late in the day as 1921 cursing the Darwinians for sucking the meaning out of the universe no longer appears entirely ridiculous. By that time the best that Shaw could muster were dubious anecdotes about idiots savants, but he still had influential friends in the biologists' camp as did Butler forty years earlier; even if (again like Butler) he did not choose to acknowledge them. It is Shaw's rhetoric rather than his sentiments which is notable when placed against, for example, Kammerer's writings on education in the late 1920s. By teaching children properly, claims Kammerer, 'we give them more than short benefits for their own lifetime - because an extract of it will penetrate their substance which is the truly immortal part of man'.¹³ If only it were true! Yet as we have seen repeatedly, and especially in Chapter 7, while disproof is lacking an erroneous scientific belief may show great vitality if it quenches the thirst of the creative imagination for human significance. So it was with neo-Lamarckism, which, simply because of the deficiencies in experimental research, is commonly and falsely understood to have been the aberration of another society more stupid and gullible than our own.

The ambiguity of the evidence about biological teleology had its impact, too, on those writers who were temperamentally unable to avert their eyes from the determinism of Darwinian biology. Even here the available options were wide indeed, ranging from a soft Arcadianism tempered with a little applied eugenics, to a harsh worship of the fittest, the 'sole humane', as Meredith termed these evolutionary successes. To the very pessimistic mind biology could even suggest that all human capacities and achievements are the outcome of blind physical forces, and could thereby encourage and endorse a materialistic personal and social psychology. By placing no weight on the value of co-operative enterprise, of mutual aid, and by emphasising that even the minutest variation has to be tested against the iron principle of survival, such a reading could inspire a tragedy of truly Sophoclean gloom, or a system of ethics of unparalleled absolutism. Such men could seek what gloomy comfort they could in the fact that the metaphysical tendency of the life sciences towards some variety of materialism has a respectable pedigree. Chaucer's Doctour of Phisik whose 'studie was but litel on the Bible' is the prototype of a line which runs, apart from the occasional Religio Medici, through the biologists of life and literature alike: the surgeon Julien de la Mettrie with his L'Homme-Machine (1747); Frankenstein; the original thought of Lamarck; the doctor Franz Gall and the phrenologists; the German physiologists of the Darwinismus, of whose work Wilde recorded that it gave 'curious pleasure' to Dorian Gray, as he traced 'the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body'. For a few less resilient minds (fewer, on the whole, than one would have anticipated) man's whole relationship with nature was permanently corrupted and a fountainhead of morality dried up. The command in 'The Tables Turned' at the beginning of the nineteenth century had been to 'let Nature be your teacher'. But, whereas those attending the Wordsworthian academy had majored in Pantheism, Natural Theology and Moral Earnestness, some of the new students found the curriculum changed for the compulsory disciplines of Wastefulness, Cruelty and Disharmony. But only some. To other minds the greatest challenge the century could offer intellectually was to make some facet of the evolutionary theory - and, yes, even Darwinism itself - serve as the foundation to a cheerful new theory of progress, of history, of religion, of economics, or a new technique for personal development. In Darwin's own autobiography of 1876 there are deeper and more violent oscillations of belief from one standpoint to the other than are to be found in any comparable document. Because Darwin is only too aware of taking his categorical imperatives from bloody nature, his tone at some points is positively agonised: 'what advantage', he asks, 'can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time'? Here we have a man forced into misery by his fear and distaste for a natural agency of torture. Yet the determination to make what he can of an optimistic interpretation of this theory was no less strong in Darwin than it was in many other writers whose versions we have surveyed. For in the autobiography there is also a strand of thought designed to persuade himself (and his immediate family, for whom this meditation was alone intended) that 'happiness decidedly prevails', for if it did not, 'if all the individuals of any species were habitually to suffer to an extreme degree they would neglect to propagate their kind; but we have no reason to believe that this has ever or at least often occurred'.¹⁴ Whatever we wish to make of this argument (and there is nothing much more to it than a restatement of Reade's evolutionistic tenet that past suffering is justified by present and future happiness), at least we see Darwin here abandoning his pose of aloofness: like many others, he clearly wants deterministic selection to work for the greater good of all. Even when Victorian materialism was expressed in its purest, most elegant and most reductive form it was not devoid of a certain romanticism. The physicist John Tyndall made the claim that 'all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, all our art. . .are potential in the fires of the sun',¹⁵ which in one sense puts them in their place; but there is also the sense, which Tyndall surely wishes to touch upon, that the scientist who understands such things may gain access to colossal if shadowy powers; may be the inheritor of the mantle of both the Sibyl and Prometheus. In biology, certainly, the reductionist impulse has continued, with Mendel's statistical treatment becoming the norm and the final links being forged between probability theory and cytology. The processes of life have come to be explained more thoroughly than any Victorian could have dared - or feared - to imagine in terms of chemistry and finally physics; that is to say, in terms of organic matter. But what, after all, is matter? No scientific assumption of the period up to 1900 now seems more question-begging, after the work of Roentgen, FitzGerald, Dirac and Feynman, than that materialism is the simplest and most coherent philosophical position. After three-quarters of a century a clear victory has gone neither to the Haeckelian materialists nor to the Wallacean spiritualists. All the difference of emphasis between nineteenth- and twentieth-century biological reductionism stands revealed in the well-known apophthegm of the modern geneticist Sir Ronald Fisher that 'natural selection is a mechanism for generating improbabilities'.

We may conclude therefore that Victorian biology had something for everyone who took an interest in it, and needed to do violence to no one's deepest persuasions. Bearing no unambiguous truth, it had in itself neither a constructive nor a corrosive effect on literary activity. It was merely available for half a century or so as a repository and mine for all sorts of extra-scientific cultural preoccupations. For a short time the most flexible and suggestive of the sciences, its concepts were malleable, ready to plasticise under pressure and ready to fill every cranny of whatever mould had been prepared to receive them.