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"Polly died," Emma Darwin, Charles's wife, noted in her diary for Thursday, April 20, 1882. That was the day after Darwin himself died. Polly was a terrier mix who first belonged to their daughter, Henrietta. When Henrietta married, she entrusted Polly to her father, as others had done with their superseded dogs. The grand man of science doted on Polly, according to his son Francis, and taught her cute parlor tricks. Polly became "perfectly devoted" to Darwin after a litter was taken from her, Emma wrote her daughter, and guessed that she had adopted him as her puppy. Polly licked Darwin's hands with an "insatiable passion," he wrote in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. She followed him underfoot, as certain as a shadow in a desert. Days she spent in his study in a pillowed basket on the hearth. Nights Emma had "to drag her away" from his side, she told Henrietta. Just about when Darwin suffered the heart attack that proved fatal, Polly "became very ill with a swelling in her throat...creeping away several times as if to die," Francis wrote.
The canine urge to suttee is the stuff of dog legend, of course. Nondog-people will persist in calling such events apocryphal, no matter how many diaries and memoirs recount them. Maudlin hogwash, they will harrumph. They will see as the cold cause of Polly's death a happenstance illness or Francis's consequent euthanasia. But "the word 'cause'... is an altar to an unknown god; an empty pedestal," William James told us, and dog people will say Polly died of heartbreak. They will say, too, that even the drunkard's dog story is true.
The dog stories in Darwin's life are the usual-sad and silly, mundane and inspiring. Some stories sparkle with Darwin's joy in dogs, some shimmer with tears, and some light up the ordinary depths of canine companionship. But all glow with the radiant passion of a man who saw "one living spirit" in the myriad forms of life, as he confided in a notebook, a man who took a most profound pleasure in the ant, the orchid, and a thousand and one other organic oddities. Because the plain fact of the matter-as embarrassing as it may be to a...