In Pursuit of the Gene

14 ¨ VIVA PANGENESIS
nal.” 44 In a swoon, Galton had written back the following day: “There is no
one in the world whose approbation in these matters can have the same
weight as yours.” 45 Twenty years later, on the occasion of being awarded the
gold medal by the Royal Society, Galton still put Darwin before anyone: “I
valued his encouragement and approbation more, perhaps, than that of the
whole world besides.” 46
For his part, Darwin leaped at the opportunity to test his hypothesis,
unaware of the perils this posed to his beloved pangenesis. With Darwin’s
help, Galton had no difficulty procuring several different rabbit breeds and
enlisting an expert from the Zoological Society to help him with the transfusions
into the jugular veins of his rabbits. In March 1870, Galton reported
on the first experiment, which had ended in premature death of the litter
but contained a “hopeful” case. One of the offspring of a pair of truebreeding
silver greys transfused with the blood of a common yellow showed
a head much lighter than its siblings. “The head was certainly ...irregularly
coloured, being especially darker about the muzzle, but I did not and
do not care to build anything about such vague facts,” Galton wrote Darwin,
expressing the cautious optimism of an impartial experimentalist.
“Quite sick with expected hope and doubt,” he added, concealing, perhaps
even from himself, the true nature of his hope and doubt. 47
Two days later Galton reported another sign that could be construed
as evidence for mongrelization, but immediately pointed out how it might
not in fact mean anything at all. Consciously or not, Galton was toying
with Darwin. It appears, though, that Darwin was not so easily put off the
track. Several days after Galton’s letter, Mrs. Darwin wrote to her daughter
Henrietta with news of her father’s collaboration: “F. Galton’s experiments
about rabbits (viz. injecting black rabbit’s blood into grey and vice versa) are
failing, which is a dreadful disappointment to them both.” At the end of
the month Galton sent another positive message, proclaiming, “Better
news—decidedly better,” and again, eight days later, he reversed himself. In
May, Galton wrote yet again of “Good rabbit news!”—a white forefoot on
one of the progeny of a transfused doe. 48 By June this latest evidence had begun
to show signs of unraveling.