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Letters to Charles Darwin from Edward Blyth at Calcutta- a Study in the Process of Discovery

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Letters to Charles Darwin from Edward Blyth at Calcutta- a Study in the Process of Discovery "Notes for Mr. Darwin": Letters to Charles Darwin from Edward Blyth at Calcutta- A Study in the Process of Discovery BARBARA G. BEDDALL 2502 Bronson Road Fairfwld, Connecticut I What think you of Wallace's paper in the Ann. N. Hist? . Has it at all unsettled your ideas regarding the persistence of species .... Edward Blyth to Charles Darwin, 8 December 1855 x Edward Blyth, curator of the museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, had been corresponding with Charles Darwin in England for upwards of a year when he hurriedly wrote out for Darwin a lengthy commentary on a paper that had recently come to his attention. Little did he know that this same paper, "On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduc- tion of New Species," written by his fellow Englishman, Alfred Russel Wallace, and published in September of 1855, marked a milestone not only for Wallace himself, but for Darwin and for Sir Charles Lyell as well. ~ From a series of propositions relating to geological and geographical distributions, Wallace had deduced that "every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species." z Evolution was clearly implied, although Wallace had not yet worked out a mechanism. Both Blyth and Lyell called Darwin's attention to the paper, and it was at this time that Darwin revealed his theory of natural selection to Lyell, who urged him to publish it. But Darwin, reluctant to put out a brief and unsupported 1. Barbara G. Beddall, "Wallace, Darwin, and Edward Blyth: Further Notes on the Development of Evolution Theory," J. Hist. Biol., 5 (1972), 155, 157. The full text of the part of Blyth's letter that refers to Wallace appears on pp. 155-158. 2. Alfred Russel Wallace, "On the Law Which Has Regulated the Intro- duction of New Species," Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. [2], 16 (1855), 184-196. 3. Ibid., p. 186. Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 1973) pp. 69--95. 69 BARBARA G, BEDDALL statement, instead began serious work on a large volume, itself interrupted two years later by the arrival of a letter from Wal- lace enclosing his own statement, independently arrived at, of the theory of natural selection. The rest is history--the reading of the joint papers of Darwin and Wallace before the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, followed in No- vember 1859 by the publication of Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Pres- ervation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 4 But many interesting questions remain. Why should it have been Darwin and Wallace who proposed evolution by means of natural selection and not Blyth, a perspicacious naturalist exposed to many similar influences? Darwin had formulated his theory as early as 1838, and Wallace's 1855 paper (and his subsequent letters to Darwin) gave unmistakable evidence of the direction of his thinking. But if Wallace posed a threat to Darwin's priority, Blyth did not. But if not, why not? Perhaps a comparison of Darwin's two correspondents, Blyth and Wal- lace, will shed some light on the process of discovery. Fortunately, a number of Blyth's letters to Darwin are still extant. Although Blyth himself had been in Calcutta since 1841, the correspondence probably began only in the fall of 1854, when Darwin finished his work on barnacles and returned to the species problem. On 9 September of that year, he "fin- ished packing up all my Cirripedes, preparing fossil balanidae, distributing copies of my work, etc., etc., etc .... Began Oct. 1, 1846. On Oct. 1 it will be 8 years since I beganl but then I have lost 1 or 9. years by illness." And on that same day he also "began sorting notes for Species theory." ~ Presumably it was shortly after this that he first wrote Blyth, for the earliest extant Blyth letter, dated 8 January 1855, refers to letters from Darwin written in the preceding November. Al- most all of the early letters from Blyth that Darwin saved fall in the year 1855 or in the first few months of 1856; if Blyth saved any of Darwin's letters, their whereabouts is unknown. Some are actual letters written at the time of mailing, as is the one in which Blyth commented on Wallace's paper; 4. H. Lewis McK.inney, "Alfred Russel Wallace and the Discovery of Natural Selection," 1. Hist. Med., 21 (1966), 350; Leonard G. Wilson, ed., Sir Charles Lyell's Scientific ]eurnals on the Species Question (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. xli-xlix, 59-55, 65-66, 80; Barbara G. Beddall, "Wallace, Darwin, and the Theory of Natural Selection: A Study in the Development of Ideas and Attitudes," 1. Hist. Biol., 1 (1968), 261-39.3. 5. Gavin de Beer, ed., "Darwin's Journal," Bull. Brit. Mus. (Nat. Hist.), Hist. Ser., 2 (1959), 13; comas added. 70 "Notes for Darwin" others are more or less extended "Memoranda" or "Notes for Mr. Darwin." Darwin arranged them in an order to suit himself and numbered the pages consecutively, but as the arrange- ment is not chronological, there is some difficulty in determin- ing the dates of various sections, e Many passages that inter- ested Darwin for one reason or another were marked by him. Without the letters from Darwin to Blyth, it is not always possible to determine exactly what Darwin was asking him, or whether, for example, he systematically proposed his Ques- tions about the Breeding of Animals, although he certainly asked some of them. In any case, the range of subjects seems far wider than in the letters Darwin wrote to the poultry breeder W. B. Tegetmeier, with whom he began to correspond soon after, in the summer of 1855, about the breeding of pigeons. 7 Darwin appears to have told Blyth that he was work- ing on "the subject of the races of domestic animals . with reference to Ethnology," and a large part of the correspondence is devoted to various domestic animals, their origin, breeds, hybrids, etc. The many references to Blyth in Darwin's Vari- ation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and in his Descent of Man, in particular, were later to attest to the value of Blyth's observations to him. s Beyond these more technical matters, Blyth made many other observations, writing at times as ff the floodgates had burst---delighted, perhaps, to have as knowledgeable a corres- pondent as Darwin. It would seem that some of this, at least, was volunteered. But whether or not this supposition is correct, the Blyth-Darwin correspondence scarcely supports Eiseley's 6. Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL), Handlist of Darwin Papers at the University Library, Cambridge (Cambridge: University Press, 1960), p. 27. The Blyth letters from Calcutta run from p. 25 to p. 145 of vol. 98 and equal nearly 250 single sheets, written in what Darwin de- scribed to Lyeli as "a dreadful handwriting" (Francis Darwin, ed., More Letters of Charles Darwin: A Record of His Work in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters [New York: Appleton, 1903, I, 155]), and described even by Blyth himself as a "villainous scrawl" (p. 93[b] of the Blyth letters). 7. Charles Darwin, Questions about the Breeding of Animals [1840]: Sherborn Fund Facsimile No. 3, with an Introduction by Sir Gavin de Beer (London: Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, 1968); Peter 5. Vor~mmer, "Darwin's Questions About the Breeding of Animals (1839)," J. Hist. Biol., 2 (1969), 269-281. The Darwin letters to Tegetmeier, of which 14 were written between August 1855 and December 1856, are in the Library of the New York Botanical Garden. 8. Blyth, in CUL, Darwin Papers, 98 (21 April 1855), 57[b]; Charles Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Appleton, 1892); The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, new ed. (New York: Appleton, 1892). 71 BARBARA G. BEDDALL assertions that Darwin owed a still wider and unacknowledged debt to Blyth as a major source of inspiration for his Origin of Species. 9 Blyth had summarized his own thinking for Darwin shortly before writing him about Wallace's paper. Included among his comments were numerous criticisms of Lyell's Principles of Geology; in this he was similar to Wallace, who also dis- agreed with LyeU on many points and indeed was even then falling a notebook with his own extensive criticisms. But the philosophical outlook of the two men could not have been more different, Wallace struggling toward a complete evolu- tionary theory, Blyth restating his position of many years be- fore. Although Blyth recognized the evolutionary implications of Wallace's paper, he was not an evolutionist himself; indeed, he had failed to grasp some of the most fundamental concepts of evolutionary theory. The interest here lies not in criticizing Blyth, however, but in comparing him with Wallace. The following extracts come from documents written in September and October 1855, quoted here with the kind per- mission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library. Some paragraphing has been added, as well as various ex- planatory notes; Darwin's notations, followed by the initials C.D., are enclosed in brackets. The original spelling and punctuation have been retained. 9. Loren C. Eiseley, "Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, and the Theory of Natural Selection," Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., 103 (1959), 94--158. This con- tains reprints of the following papers by Blyth: "An Attempt to classify the "Varieties' of Animals, with Observations on the marked Seasonal and other Changes which naturally take place in various British Species, and which do not constitute Varieties," Mag.
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