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DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED IT |
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Chapter V: The Minor Evolutionists
I. Branching Evolution One thing that contributed to the failure of the early attempts to gain consideration for evolution -- even from scientists -- was the arrangement of life in terms of a single scale with man at its head. If one attempts to change the scale into a moving chain one is confronted by gaps. Lamarck was not able to connect invertebrates to vertebrates. An attempt by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, an early nineteenth-century transcendental morphologist and tentative evolutionist, to span the gap between the invertebrates and the vertebrates by introducing the cephalopods as a transitional form, a sort of "bent vertebrate; was easily refuted by Cuvier. [1] This famous controversy is sometimes described as an early, evolutionary debate. Actually, though the argument had some potential evolutionary overtones, it revolved about Geoffroy's transcendental unity of plan. Unity of structure did not then necessarily imply what it does today, namely, actual physical descent of related forms from a common ancestor. The rising interest in the similarities and dissimilarities of structure existing in the animal and plant kingdoms stimulated philosophical discussion in both Germany and France. With the rise of the romantic movement in philosophy and literature this thinking was not slow in seeping into England. Though Cuvier is often castigated as having crushed the evolutionary position in his attack on Geoffroy, the truth is that his rejection of a universal plan for all organisms, [2] and his insistence upon unrelated structural types no, longer arranged in a unilineal series with man at the head, was a necessary preliminary to the kind of branching evolutionary phylogeny which is now everywhere accepted. The attempts to fill in all the gaps represented in the old Scale of Being were bound to fail and to stand as an impediment to evolutionary thinking. Until the vast riches of the paleontological record were revealed, and until human embryology became better known, biologists were bound to regard the creation of man by successive slow transformations as, in the words of a contemporary thinker, "the most complex and circuitous method imaginable" -- a "dream of the imagination." One can understand this reasoning. The advocates of the development hypothesis were fond of speaking of the simplicity of nature, and the fact that the Deity, in the last analysis, controlled the powers behind nature. Why then, a devout' scholar could reasonably argue, should God not have chosen to create man simply and immediately? So long as one accepted the premise that man was preordained in the beginning it was difficult to account for the rationale of such a roundabout way of bringing him upon the scene. Only the emergence of a totally different way of looking at man and the forms of life related to him would offer a reasonable explanation for this seemingly unanswerable question. II. William Wells The major tenet of Darwinian evolution, the struggle for existence, is, as we have seen, an old principle. For it to be comprehended as a leading factor in organic change, other assumptions are necessary. Among these, variation which is capable of indefinite extension beyond specific and generic bounds is paramount. Plenty of people, from the time of conscious improvement of domestic stocks, understood the value of artificial selection but few had attempted to apply that principle to wild nature. Fewer still had glimpsed that mutability over long time periods might cause the slow disappearance of one fauna and the rise of another genetically related to but continuing to diverge from the first. The complex of ideas which later went to make up Darwinism was widely enough diffused in the eighteenth century that finding an unknown or forgotten evolutionist has about it something of the fascination of collecting rare butterflies. Moreover, writings involving the Scale of Nature and progressionism, both of which have faded out of general knowledge, are sometimes misinterpreted by naive investigators as true expressions of evolution. The occasional similarity of phrases results from the fact that we, with our modem evolutionary ideas, have unwittingly inherited so much from this preceding era of thought. Thus the Darwinian precursors have to be scanned with some care. There remain a few, however, who present us with interesting minor problems and upon whom we have not touched. All wrote before Darwin published, and of these men, four in England [3] and one in America glimpsed at least faintly the principle of natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace, in no sense a minor figure, I shall treat of later for purposes of convenience. He shares with Darwin the leading role in the discovery and demonstration of natural selection as a leading factor in organic change. As one examines the second decade of the nineteenth century -- a time when catastrophism held the field and Lyell was a young man quietly accumulating the data for his book -- one comes upon the name of an expatriate American physician who was at that time resident in England. William Wells delivered before the Royal Society of London in 1813 a paper which contains an almost complete anticipation of Darwin's major thesis, natural selection. The event is of particular Interest for two reasons. The paper was not given in obscure circumstances, yet its significance seems to have been totally ignored until it was resurrected by a correspondent of Darwin's in the 1860s. A reference to it was incorporated Into the latter's historical preface to later editions of the Origin. [4] Wells's paper was entitled "An Account of a White Female, Part of Whose Skin Resembles that of a Negro." There is no record that the paper aroused any particular attention and it was not published again until 1818 after the author's death. Nevertheless, there are Some strange aspects to this story. First of all, there can be no doubt that Wells did clearly indicate in. his discussion of the piebald woman who was the subject of his discourse the relation between artificial and natural selection. He put together, in other words, two essential ingredients of what was later to become Darwin's theory. "What is here done by art; he says, speaking of artificial selection in domestic animals, "seems to be done with equal efficacy, though more slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the countries they inhabit." As a physician he visualized that some stocks might better resist disease and multiply at the expense of others in particular areas. The case of Wells has aroused extensive discussion as to why his observations failed to attract the attention of scientists. He had gained considerable attention for some of his scientific work, including his memorable Essay on Dew, and was a member of the Royal Society. Darwin admitted that Wells's statement appeared to be the first published recognition of natural selection but he commented that so far as he could see Wells had applied the idea only to the human races. This objection of Darwin's has often been challenged of late years. It has been pointed out -- for example, by Kofoid [5] -- that Wells had in reality paid attention to animals since he had said that "amongst men, as well as among other animals, varieties of a greater or less magnitude are constantly occurring." Thus it has been generally argued that Darwin's restriction will not hold, and that Wells's briefly, though much too timidly, expressed conjecture is actually a full anticipation of the Darwin-Wallace thesis. My own interpretation differs in some degree from that of other writers. I introduce it here simply because it serves to illustrate some of the more subtle and elusive aspects in the growth of the Darwinian hypothesis and how easy it is to read back into this material something that may not have been present in the mind of its author. Darwin, obviously and naturally a little on the defensive about his originality, couched his analysis of Wells in terms of the human races. In this he was bound to lose because it is perfectly true that Wells mentions that varieties of great or small magnitude occur in animals. Moreover, he is perfectly cognizant that what today we would call a mutation can descend to posterity. There is no doubt that he is perfectly informed upon selective breeding. We have observed that Wells put together two essential ingredients of the Darwinian hypothesis-that he saw clearly the similarity between artificial and natural selection. There is, however, a third ingredient which has to be present before we are really dealing with a full-blown evolutionary system. It is the principle, or conception, of unlimited organic change in time. Try as one will, it is impossible from Wells's phraseology to make out whether this element had entered his thought. Darwin apparently sensed this lack but attributed it to Wells's treatment of human races alone. It is perfectly true that he mentioned animals, but, just as in the case of men, only in a varietal sense. There is no clear expression of unrestricted deviation in unlimited time. Let us recall what we have learned previously of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At that time there was considerable recognition of variation within circumscribed limits. Struggle, in nature, was supposed to be a sort of pruning device promoting strong and vigorous stock. It will now be seen that Wells's view, as expressed, is far more commonplace than it appears at first glance. His facts are set down with sharp analytical precision but without the specific expression of an extension of change through the species barrier; hence his remarks are not nearly so unique as they have been regarded as being. Just to re-establish the conclusions which we have already drawn from Lamarck and others, and which could readily be fortified from Zirkle's study of the early history of natural selection, [6] it is perhaps worth mentioning Joseph Townsend. [7] Townsend's paper once more forecasts the Malthusian problem, clearly recognizes the struggle for existence and the selection of the fittest, He tells the story of dogs and goats introduced on Juan Fern6ndez Island to illustrate his principles and describes how the weak under harsh conditions were destroyed while the fittest survived. As with most of the eighteenth-century writers there is no evidence that Townsend perceived that the perfecting principle could carry a stock beyond its normal range of Variability. In the case of Wells there is no doubt that his statement, brief though it is, contains a very clear analysis of principles which in some of these other writers are loosely and diffusely stated. For this reason it catches the modern eye. In its essence, however, it still lacks a clear expression of the principle of endless deviation which lies at the heart of the evolutionary philosophy. Wells's remarks, therefore, sound more iconoclastic to us than they actually were. As a matter of fact, I strongly suspect that this Is one of the reasons, though perhaps not the only one," why the public was not stirred by Wells's paper. His sentiments simply were neither unusual nor startling to that public without the time factor. Almost one hundred and fifty years later we are reading back into Wells's essay, because of its apt presentation of two of the necessary points out of the possible three which constitute Darwinism, a full- blown anticipation of Darwin which cannot be established. There is another curious side to the vicissitudes of this remarkable little paper which throws light on the labyrinthine ways of ideas and the way they may pass, like elusive and slippery fish, close to the hands that are groping for them and yet escape. Sir John Herschel's book, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London, 1833), is one of the best-known treatises on scientific method of the first half of the nineteenth century. We know that Darwin studied this book assiduously. In it Dr. Wells's Essay on Dew is referred to as a very beautiful specimen of inductive scientific logic. Ironically, in the light of after events, Herschel earnestly recommended this work to the student of natural philosophy -as a model with which he will do well to become familiar." [9] The little volume contains, in its 1818 version, the case history which preserves Wells's account of natural selection. There is no record that Darwin took Herschel's advice. Once more, however, and in a quite astonishing manner, this elusive essay was destined to pass across the Darwinian horizon. It came this time as Darwin was proposed by Hugh Falconer. for the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1864. Falconer, the distinguished paleontologist, was just Darwin's age, but was destined to die shortly after his letter was dispatched to the secretary of the society. In it he drew up a list of Darwin's scientific achievements, among them mentioning the study of coral reefs. "It may be compared," said Falconer, "with Dr. Wells's 'Essay on Dew' as original, exhaustive and complete -- containing the closest observation with large and important generalizations." [10] Here was a foremost scholar lauding, among other papers, Darwin's "great essay" on the Origin of Species. Yet Falconer, acquainted with Wells's work, seems never to have read the supplementary essay or, if he had, not to have perceived that he held in his hand a partial anticipation of the very friend he was later to propose for the Copley Medal. Moreover, Sir John Herschel himself, friend and correspondent of Lyell and Darwin, as well as the admirer of Wells's incisive scientific logic, seems never to have realized, or at least never to have voiced, the fact that this interesting anticipation of Darwin existed in the papers of a man not unknown to British science. [11] Darwin, instead, received that information in 1860 from an unknown American. William Wells's prize-winning Essay on Dew was, in a sense, perhaps, his downfall. It was regarded as a model of scientific method and it diverted attention from his all too brief formulation of natural selection. As Professor Shryock observes, Wells did not appear to grasp the significance of what he had done and this in itself suggests that the third important factor, time, had not received his serious consideration. Nevertheless, the lonely and embittered American royalist had come within a hairsbreadth of the greatest discovery of the age. The fact is revelatory of the endless flux of ideas which, in the social mind, await their moment of crystallization. Wells did not possess even a fragment· of that pirate chart which was then in the possession of William Smith of Bath. Wells loved to visit suburban gardens at full moon to study and tramp in the wet dew. It is thus that he passes from our sight, an exile who saw some kind of elusive shadow by moonlight but was unsure of what he saw. III. Patrick Matthew and Robert Chambers In 1831 an obscure Scotch botanical writer, Patrick Matthew by name, published a book entitled On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. Although Matthew was a contemporary of Darwin nothing seems to be known of his life or of his birth and death dates. [*] This is unfortunate because Patrick Matthew is the first clear and complete anticipator among the progressionists of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Unfortunately his book is now exceedingly rare. This has led to a tendency merely to repeat what Darwin said in his introduction to the Origin and let it go at that. As has been remarked by many students of the period, however, Darwin's little venture into, the history of the subject is meager and not particularly generous. In addition, Darwin was not in a position to look at his subject with the perspective we can bring to it today. Patrick Matthew was not, from all accounts, a very tactful man. He bristled over the failure of the world to recognize him, after the publication of the Origin. He had cards printed announcing himself as the discoverer of the principle of natural selection and he so nettled Darwin that the latter was obviously happy to announce, after the discovery of Wells, that Matthew had lost his own claim to priority. The truth is that Matthew never really lost his claim. One essential of the complete theory -- indefinite divergence through time - was not expressed by Wells, whatever his personal thoughts may have been. [12] Matthew, on the other hand, is precise on this point, and his remarks, though briefly expressed in the appendix to his treatise on tree-growing, are clear enough to make any confusion impossible. Darwin, it is true, said in his historical sketch prefixed to the Origin that he did not understand some passages, and that Matthew "attributes much influence to the direct action of the conditions of life." Nevertheless, Darwin was forced to admit that Matthew had anticipated both himself and Wallace. Matthew, he wrote to De Quatrefages in 1861, "most expressly and clearly anticipated my views." [18] In 1860 he had written similarly to Wallace, italicizing the statement, "He gives most clearly but very briefly ... our view of Natural Selection. It is a most complete case of anticipation." [14] Wallace, in a letter to Samuel Butler, who explored the subject and gave an extended series of quotations from Matthew in his Evolution, Old and New, confessed, "To my mind your quotations from Mr. Patrick Matthew are the most remarkable things in your whole book, because he appears to have completely anticipated the main ideas of the Origin of Species...." [15] It is now important, if we are to understand Matthew and his role, to remember that his book was published in 1831 at a time when the catastrophist doctrine In geology was at its height. It tends to bear out my contention, expressed previously, that the intellectual climate of catastrophism and its accompanying biological analogue, progressionism, was peculiarly favorable to the eventual development of the idea of evolution. The only obstacle standing in the way of this modification was the physical break supposed to exist between one biological world and its succeeding one. It is, therefore, of great interest to observe that Matthew, a geological catastrophist, succeeded In evading this difficulty. Darwin and the men who were to become his disciples and publicists, Wallace, Huxley, Hooker, and Lyell, were all uniformitarians who clung to continuity of action, but finally introduced a modified organic progressionism into their philosophy. Patrick Matthew, by contrast, clung to geological catastrophism but introduced a kind of faint uniformitarian continuity into his organic system. In both cases it is evident that some compromise between the two schools was necessary before a real evolutionary philosophy could emerge. Matthew's system perished, not only because it had been published obscurely by an obscure man but because uniformitarian geology at the hands of Lyell was about to weaken and overthrow the catastrophist philosophy. Over and over in the works of the post-Lamarckian evolutionists it is made abundantly clear that a compromise on one or the other side of the two extreme wings of the opposed geological schools was necessary in order for a true evolutionary philosophy to emerge. Patrick Matthew seems to have been the only genuine evolutionist produced from the ranks of the English catastrophist school. It is thus regrettable that no published information exists, beyond what we can gain from his book, as to the intellectual life history of this crotchety but perceptive man. "As nature in all her modifications of life has a power of increase," Matthew wrote, "beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time's decay, those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing- either a prey to their natural devourers; or sinking under disease ... their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind who are pressing on the means of subsistence." [16] Here, of course, we have, clear and well stated, what the eighteenth century had already observed. Remove the struggle for existence, Bruckner had long ago commented, and "a universal inundation would ensue." [17] So far we are at the position of Wells almost twenty years before. Matthew did not stop here, however, as did Wells, leaving his evolutionary position unclear. Instead, he turned directly to geology, and we are thus in a position to see how a catastrophist attempted to handle the evolutionary succession in the rocks. "Geologists," he maintained, "discover a like particular conformity -- fossil species -- through the deep deposition of each great epoch, but they also discover an almost complete difference to exist between the stamp of one species or stamp of life, of one epoch from that of every other. We are therefore led to admit either of a repeated miraculous creation; or of a power of change, under a change of circumstances, to belong to living organized matter, or rather to the congeries of inferior life, which appears to form superior. The derangements and changes in organized existence, induced by a change of circumstance from the interference of man, affording us proof of the plastic quality of superior life and the likelihood that circumstances have been very different in the different epochs, though steady in each, tend strongly to heighten the probability of the latter theory." [18] Matthew, to put the matter briefly, observed that species and varieties under artificial selection "soften into each other." [19] He took this as proof of the "plastic quality" of life and what he called the "circumstance-suiting power of organisms," that is, adaptability. He noted in his book several types of ecological adaptation and he went on to observe that when changed circumstances occur the struggle for existence may be enhanced. Under such conditions individuals of superior adaptive power and "greater power of occupancy" eliminate the less well adapted. All of this is very Darwinian; it is, in fact, pure Darwinism. As a catastrophist, however, Matthew upheld the usual belief in periods of calm alternating geologically with great convulsions and upheavals of the earth's surface, His evolutionism is adjusted to the convulsionist doctrines in the following manner: 1. He appears to have believed in a vast destruction of fauna at each upheaval but with a few low forms surviving so that the chain of life remains unbroken. 2. At each such interval the destruction of life is so great that new corridors, new adaptive zones, to use a modern term, are opened for exploitation. There is thus a re-radiation and evolution of life, the world fills up once more, but the new forms are never precisely like the old. As a consequence, each great period in the rocks is different though the continuity of life on a low level remains. What Matthew upholds, therefore, is the comparative stability of life in the calm intervals when the world is filled up and, on the other hand, he appears to visualize marked rapidity of evolution by selective principles when the amount of life on the globe is greatly reduced by catastrophic events. The idea is really another version of Cuvier's notion of the new fauna, which replenishes a damaged area, coming from elsewhere. In Matthew's case this fauna evolves and there is even a hint, never developed, of spontaneous generation. We may now observe that such a catastrophist evolution, if Matthew had ever gone on to elaborate it, would have had to account for an extremely rapid ability to evolve high forms within the course of a single geological epoch. He might also have been called upon to explain why the results differed so much from one era to another. Actually Matthew, in embryonic form, had answers prepared to both these questions. They are worth giving because they reveal a remarkable parallelism of thought existing between himself and Darwin on one point where Darwin, when he wrote his historical sketch, thought himself and Matthew to be the furthest apart. Matthew, as Darwin was later to do, believed that natural selection operated ·upon the slight but continued natural disposition to sport in the progeny." [20] Unlike the usual progressionist he does not appear to have been particularly man-centered, although he makes a kind of polite perfunctory exception in his discussion of the human race. With the exception of man, he observes, "there does not appear to have been any particular engrossing race, but a pretty fair balance of powers of occupancy, or rather, most wonderful variation of circumstance parallel to the nature of every species, as if circumstance and species had grown up together." [21] Matthew, in other words, here intimated that life is in a kind of dynamic balance which is never twice the same from one era to another because the web of living things is both subject to chance, in the shape of fortuitous variation, and to natural law, in the guise of selective survival. In this respect life is undirected, chanceful, and will never emerge twice the same on the planet after any great catastrophe. Matthew thus ignores the supernatural metaphysics of the progressionists: geological prophecy and the conception of a divinely inspired series of events leading step by directed step to the human emergence. In all these respects Matthew appears to have had as purely a naturalistic outlook as Darwin. "But," said Darwin, "it seems that he attributes much influence to the direct action of the conditions of life." This Lamarckian factor was played down in the first edition of the Origin, though as we will have occasion to see in a later chapter, Darwin was forced to fall back upon it when heavy criticism and a reduced allowance of geological time sorely beset him. Now Matthew, as we have observed, was confronted with a peculiar problem in developing his views. Unlike the uniformitarian Darwin, he had to account for, not the evolution of life upon one world, but in reality a succession of worlds. I say this because, if one had to explain the almost total rise of a new fauna and flora after each catastrophic episode in the earth's history, one was, in actuality, explaining the rise of life within a series of almost unrelated worlds. The continuity in Matthew's system is reduced, in other words, to a bare minimum of primitive organisms. His system, therefore, demands great and rapid malleability on the part of the organism, yet the selective aspect of the theory emphasizes slight but continuous variation. It is apparent that Matthew, even though he did not feel impelled to justify himself to the extent that the writer of a longer work might have, felt some concern over the relation of time to his natural selection theory. He needed, to put it briefly, an accessory principle which might speed the process of organic change. Thus we find that Matthew "does not preclude the supposed influence which volition or sensation may have over the configuration of the body." [22] At this point we are back with Erasmus Darwin and Jean Lamarck. This fact threatened for a time to make fortuitous and undirected evolution a logical impossibility. Darwin, after earlier dissociating himself from Matthew's thought along these lines, was forced to move in the same direction and for what was, basically, the same reason -- a restriction of the amount of free time at his disposal. One other interesting observation can be made: in some of Matthew's phrases, such as the familiar "millions of ages," and in his emphasis upon "volitions and sensations" one can perceive the ghost of Erasmus Darwin. There would seem to be an actual continuity of intellectual descent here. so far as the inheritance of acquired characters is concerned. There is, however, no doubt, also, of the genuine originality of Patrick Matthews thinking. It is a great tragedy that he did not bring his views into the open because the amount of ground he was able to cover in a few paragraphs suggests that he might have been able to sustain a longer treatise. As the record stands, neither Matthew nor Wells can be said to have advanced the subject. Their words were obscure flashes in the dark, firefly indications that some kind of intellectual ferment was working behind the orthodox surface of things. [23] It was time for something weightier to appear. The hour came in 1844 with the publication of The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The book was written by a scientific amateur and published anonymously for reasons of discretion. Condemned by the critics as immoral and godless, it promptly took the public by storm. Four editions appeared in seven months and by 1860 some 24,000 copies had been sold." Two hundred copies of the first edition were distributed to prominent scientists in the attempt to arouse interest. The result of this effort to bring attention to the subject is of extreme interest to the scientific historian. Robert Chambers, the anonymous author, had hoped for a scientific hearing but was promptly shouted down. Thomas Huxley, who was later to become Darwin's chief defender, attacked the book with the utmost savagery. Phrases such as "foolish fancies," "charlatanerie," "pretentious nonsense," "work of fiction," "mean view of Nature" rolled from his pen. None of Huxley's reviews of anti-Darwinian opponents equal the ferocity of this onslaught upon the Vestiges. Ironically, the review defends men like Owen and Sedgwick who were later to assault Darwin mercilessly. Chambers was berated for every possible minor error -- and they were admittedly numerous -- that could be found in his work. "It is surprising," remarked Persifor Frazer at a later date, "that the influence of the Vestiges ... which appeared anonymously should be so rarely and slightingly alluded to (if not entirely ignored) by masters like Huxley." [25] Any reading of Huxley's review of the tenth edition of the Vestiges in 1854 will give one an idea of why he preferred later that the book be forgotten. The scientists as well as the theologians, however, overdid their case. The disputatious and vindictive storm they aroused made evolution public property. Thus, as Draper commented many years ago, "happily the whole subject was brought Into such prominence that it could be withdrawn into obscurity no more." [26] The increasing growth of literacy among the working classes was contributing to a widespread Interest In the new ideas of science. While the critics fulminated, the public, in which Chambers had placed little faith, read his book with eagerness and enthusiasm. Years later Francis Darwin was to write, "My father's copy [of the Vestiges] gives signs of having been carefully read a long list of marked passages being pinned In at the end." Francis Darwin points out that Charles, seeing the difficulties Chambers got Into with certain attempts to explain phylogenetic lines, wrote, "I will not specify any genealogies -- much too little known at present." [27] It is customary among biographers of Darwin to speak of the excitement which greeted the appearance of the Origin and of Huxley's able defense of Darwin at Oxford In his clash with Bishop Wilberforce. Actually, however, by the time Darwin published, Robert Chambers had drawn much of the first wrath of the critics and the intelligent public was at least reasonably prepared to consider a more able, scientific presentation of the subject. Not least among the curious realignments of forces which took place In 1860 is the fact that it was Robert Chambers who persuaded Huxley to attend the meeting at which he became engaged with Wilberforce. Huxley had had no Intention of listening to the bishop, and had expressed an aversion to being "episcopally pounded." Chambers ad urged Huxley not to desert the evolutionists In their hour of need and as a consequence he had finally consented to go. [28] If it had not been for the urging of Chambers the episode which, more than any other, dramatized Huxley's powers as a public speaker and defender of the Darwinian cause would never have taken place. In his willingness to forget the assaults to which he had been subjected, Robert Chambers showed a rare quality of mind for which he was little enough rewarded even by those whom he helped to defend. To understand more fully his position in the controversies of his time a short resume of the leading ideas of the Vestiges is now necessary. Through aI1, it must be borne in mind that Chambers, as part owner of a successful publishing house, had to remain anonymous in order to protect the business interests of himself and his brother William. This is a measure of the damage which threatened a man who transgressed established views in the first half of the century. [29] Robert Chambers (1802-71) was not a trained scientist but a philosophically minded journalist who had become convinced of the reality of both cosmic and organic evolution-another illustration, if one were needed, of the ideas which were beginning to emerge from the works of the geologists. Chambers had absorbed many diverse ideas and some of his own errors are partly the result of eclectic gatherings from a variety of sources. The essentials of his position are as follows: (1) He adopted from the progressionist philosophy the idea that there is an advance in the complexity of life as one traces it upward through the sedimentary rocks of the planet. (2) He rejected with the Huttonian geologists the idea of total breaks in stratigraphy and recognized that certain forms appeared to extend from one era to the next. He believed in the world's great age and rejected the notion that the entire surface of the planet had been under water. "Time," he said, "and a succession of forms in gradation and affinity, become elements in the idea of organic creation. It must be seen," he continued, "that the whole phenomena thus pass into a strong analogy with those attending the production of the individual organism." It is only fair to recognize at this point something which, except for the observations of Professor Lovejoy, [30] has rarely been clearly assigned to Robert Chambers. It is this: He actually put the separate pieces of the lost chart of Hutton, Cuvier, and Smith together and came up with the idea that organic as well as cosmic evolution was a reality. The time of his publication, and the fact that he was a highly intelligent amateur, justifies my comment that so ar as the accumulation of ideas was concerned it was not necessary to sail around the globe to develop a theory of evolution. The voyagers had already provided much of the necessary information. Rather it was necessary to break out of a particular, man-centered way of looking at the world. Chambers has often been castigated for the uncritical acceptance of naive ideas upon the spontaneous generation of such complex organisms as plants and insects. It should be said in fairness, however, that while he held such reports favorable to his hypothesis, he saw that these creations were not indispensable to a theory of evolution. Although this conception of spontaneous generation led to accusations of atheism the truth is that Chambers never totally escaped the religious aspects of the old progressionism. He took rudimentary structures, as did the transcendental French and German anatomists, merely as evidences of continuing plan, "evidences of the manner in which the Divine Author bas been pleased to work." On the other hand, like Lamarck, he believed that the original life impulse could be modified or adapted to particular environmental circumstances. He recognized, in other words, that there may be numerous branches or radiations within the ascending phyla. The marked rises in organization, as when a more advanced class like the Vertebrata appears, Chambers thought (and we' cannot differ from him on this today), were very rare events in the course of untold millions of years. At the same time he believed that varietal and species differentiation was constantly occurring in a wild state. In this respect his botanical examples sound very much like the macro-mutations of De Vries, which will be discussed in a later chapter. Although Chambers was perfectly aware, like so many before him, of struggle in nature, he seems to have retained the eighteenth century teleological conception that it was a method of keeping the forms of life in proper balance. Carnivores were a necessary policing accompaniment "to the weaker tribes, the fertility of which would otherwise produce complete anarchy." Like Lamarck he saw two principles at work. an inner "gestative" or internal developmental principle which brought about according to divine plan the greater advances in organization, and a second "variative power connected with the will and ... working to minor effects." The Vestiges retains also elements of geological prophecy. "It might have been seen, ere man existed," commented Chambers, "that a remarkable creature was coming upon the earth." We may now observe that the Vestiges is a revised progressionism with Lamarckian and Huttonian elements. It was actually as progressionism that it was attacked by Huxley who was, prior to his Darwinian affiliation, apparently an adherent of Lyell's non- progressionism. The weakness of the Vestiges lay in the inability of its author to produce a vera causae for evolution outside the metaphysical field of final cause. He is, in detail, occasionally ambiguous and uncertain as to the precise method of emergence of new forms. Nevertheless, as both Millhauser and Lovejoy have observed, he had made out a very impressive case for the reality of evolution, irrespective of the precise nature of the process. He recognized unity of structure, the significance of the fossil record and its genuine continuity. He was intensely, even exaggeratedly, aware of variation. Pathetically he had personal reasons for this knowledge. Both he and his brother William had been born full hexadactyls, that is, with six digits on both hands and feet. he attacks which the scientific world launched upon the Vestiges have, in retrospect, a: quite unreal character. They belabor minutiae and amateurish minor errors as though there was some subconscious recognition that the heart of the thesis was unassailable. This attitude is revealed in the letter of an educator to William Whewell in 1846. "You have read," writes this principal of an English school, "the sequel to the Vestiges. [31] ... It was well that he [Chambers] began to write in the fullness of his ignorance and presumption for, had he begun now, he would have been more dangerous." [32] The principal was wrong on just one point. The work was destined to become more dangerous, not less so. With its publication and success as a best seller, the world of fashion discovered evolution. The restricted professional worlds of science and of theology both lost their ability to suppress or intimidate public thinking upon the matter. The cause lay partly in the very anonymity of the author. Public curiosity was aroused. Speculation as to the name of the author was widespread. As is always apt to occur under such circumstances, names higher and higher in the ranks of society began to be mentioned. Finally it was whispered about that Prince Albert, Victoria's con- sort, who was known to be interested in science, had written the volume. People who might never have read the book otherwise now did so. In the words of G. M. Young, the distinguished English historian, "The Vestiges of Creation, issued with elaborate secrecy and attributed by a wild surmise to Prince Albert, was a national sensation; translated into golden verses by Tennyson, evolution almost became a national creed." [33] Darwin, as we have seen, pored carefully over the book. Wallace and his fellow collector Bates perused it before setting forth for the Amazon. Many an unconverted biologist had to scurry hastily through his papers seeking information to resist the harsh questions being asked by the uninitiated and irreverent public. There was a great bustling, and dusting off of half-forgotten facts and fossils. By 1859, when the Origin of Species was published, an aroused and eager audience was considerably prepared for the revelations of Charles Darwin. The great amateur disputant and the great professional scholar should always be remembered as having together won the public mind to evolution. It was one of those events, beautifully timed by accident, which rarely occurs in the history of thought. Those who are unwilling to accord Chambers a place in the history of evolution because he was not a professional biologist and because, in a confused time, he was guilty of errors should remember what Chambers himself remarked of his own work, "It may prove to be a true system, though one half the illustrations presented by its first explicator should be wrong." [34] Darwin himself asked for no more. "I have only opened a path," he once ventured modestly, "that others may turn into a high road." Robert Chambers, who first drew the lightning upon himself in England, deserves, better than most men, the tolerance and affection of posterity. Even Huxley lived to express regret over the impetuous cruelty of his review. _______________ Notes: 1. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's importance as an early evolutionist has been somewhat exaggerated. The English reader will find a very able discussion of his views on morphology and evolution in Chapter V of E. S. Russell's Form and Function, New York, 1917. 2. "There is, philosophically speaking," Geoffroy once wrote, "only a single animal. He aimed to link insects, crustacea, and molluscs with the vertebrates in terms of anatomical pattern. 3. Wells, Blyth, Matthew, Wallace. For Grimes, the American, see pp. 314-15. For Edward Blyth, a recent discovery, see my "Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth and the Theory of Natural Selection" Proc. Am. Philosophical Society, 1959, Vol. 103, pp. 94-158. 4. For an excellent historical treatment of this episode the reader is urged to consult Dr. Richard Shryock's "The Strange Case of Wells s Theory of Natural Selection" In Studies and Essays In the History of Science and Learning In Honor of George Sarton, Cambridge, 1946. Charles Kofoid's "An American Pioneer in Science, Dr. William Charles Wells, 1757-1817," Scientific Monthly, 1943, Vol. 57, pp. 77-80, supplies some interesting personal details of Wells's life. 5. Op. cit., p. 78. 6. Op. cit. 7. A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, By a Well-Wisher to Mankind, London, 1786. 8. See Shryock for additional material and a very able discussion. 9. Op. cit., p. 163. 10. MLD, Vol. 1, p. 254. 11. It should be noted that there were several editions of the Essay on Dew which did not incorporate the evolutionary paper. * Since the above was written Sir Gavin de Beer has established his dates as 1790 to 1864. 12. As a physician Wells was, of course, acquainted with the Zoonomia. 13. MLD, Vol. 1, p. 187. 14. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and and Reminiscences, New York. 1916, p. 118. 15. A. R. Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, New York, 1905. Vol. 2, p. 84. 16. Op. cit., p. 365. 17. Bruckner, op. cit., [as cited In text p. 38.] p. 149. 18. Matthew, op. cit., pp. 381-82. 19. Ibid., p. 381. 20. Op. cit., p. 385. 21. Ibid., p. 387. (Italics mine. L.E.) 22. Op. cit., p. 385. 23. Grant Allen, one of Darwin's earliest biographers, wrote, in 1892, "Long before Charles Darwin published his epoch-making work, conjecture and speculation were rife in England as to the origin of species and the evolution of organic life." Fortnightly Review, 1892, Vol. 58, p. 799. 24. A. R. Wallace, The Wonderful Century, New York, 1898, p. 138. 25. "Was the Development Theory Influenced by The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation?" The American Geologist, 1902, Vol. 30, p. 262. 26. John W. Draper. "Evolution: Its Origin, Progress and Consequences," Popular Science Monthly, 1877, Vol. 12. p. 181. 27. LLD. Vol. 1. p. 333. 28. E. B. Poulton, "A Hundred Years of Evolution," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1931, pp. 72-73. 29. Anyone interested in a full and sympathetic treatment of Chambers is urged to consult Milton Millhauser's unpublished doctoral dissertation, Robert Chambers, Evolution, and the Early Victorian Mind (1951), a copy of which is on file in the Columbia University Library. A microfilm copy of this thesis is also possessed by the Library of the American Philosophical Society In Philadelphia. 30. A. O. Lovejoy, "The Argument for Organic Evolution before the Origin of Species," Popular Science Monthly, 1909, Vol. 75. pp. 499-514; 537-49. 31. Explanations: A Sequel to the Vestiges, London, 1846. 32. Popular Science Monthly, 1874, Vol. 5, p. 247. 33. Early Victorian England, Oxford University Press, 1934, Vol. 2, p. 477. 34. Cited by Millhauser, op. cit., p. 246.
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