Natural Selection before the Origin: Public Reactions of Some Naturalists to the Darwin- Wallace Papers (Thomas Boyd, Arthur Hussey, and Henry Baker Tristram) Author(s): Richard England Source: Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 267-290 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4331436 . Accessed: 25/05/2013 19:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Biology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 150.135.115.40 on Sat, 25 May 2013 19:59:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Journal of the History of Biology 30: 267-290, 1997. 267 ? 1997 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Natural Selection Before the Origin: Public Reactions of Some Naturalists to the Darwin-Wallace Papers (Thomas Boyd, Arthur Hussey, and Henry Baker Tristram) RICHARDENGLAND St. Michael's College Colchester,Vermont USA 05439 In 1858 Thomas Bell, president of the Linnean Society, uttered the words that would make him the fool of a hundredhistories: the year, he said, "has not, indeed, been markedby any of those strikingdiscoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the departmentof science on which they bear."1 Of course on July 1 of that year, at a meeting of the Linnean Society, the joint communicationof CharlesDarwin and Alfred Russel Wallacedescribed the process of naturalselection, now known to have been one of the most revolutionary concepts in the history of science. But Bell was not alone in missing the revolution:the sixteen months between the meeting and the publicationof the Origin of Species have been called a "curiouslatent period" duringwhich there was "no"(or at least "astonishinglylittle") response from the scientific community.2 Of course, these accounts exaggerate the silence. The Darwin-Wallace papers were published in the Journal of the Linnean Society, reprintedin the Zoologist, mentionedat the British Association, and commented on in at least three Britishjournals. To consider this response astonishinglylittle is to compare it implicitly with the larger volume of comment that followed the ' Cited in A. T. Gage and W. T. Steam, A Bi-CentenaryHistory of the Linnean Society of London (London:Linnean Society Academic Press, 1988), p. 57. See also J. Gribbinand M. White, Darwin: A Life in Science (New York:Dutton, 1995), p. 210. 2C. F. A. Pantin,"The Darwin-WallaceCentenary Celebrations," Proc. Linn. Soc. London, 170 (1958), 222; Peter Bowler, Evolution, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1989), p. 186; Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 1982), p. 423. Most modern biographies of Darwin pass over the intervalbetween the Darwin-Wallacecommunication and the publicationof the Origin very briefly; an exception is R. Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin (New York:Random House, 1984), pp. 108-110. See also n. 26 below. This content downloaded from 150.135.115.40 on Sat, 25 May 2013 19:59:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 268 RICHARDENGLAND publication of the Origin. But the natural selection of the Darwin-Wallace paperswas not the naturalselection of Darwin's best-knownwork. Certainly the basic process described is the same, but in the Origin naturalselection was the driving mechanism behind a radical, evolutionary revision of the phenomena of life. In the Linnean Society papers, it was a process that principallydescribed the relationshipbetween varietiesand species; the larger evolutionaryimplications were only hinted at. Two paleontologists who noticed the communication,Richard Owen and Samuel Haughton, seem to have appreciatedits evolutionary implications, but the gentlemen naturalistswho respondedto it were more concernedwith its relevance to problems of speciation and variation.3Thomas Boyd and Arthur Hussey dismissed the evolutionary aspect of the papers as merely imaginative rather than scientific, and criticized the authors' assumptions about the indefinite variation of species. Henry Baker Tristram,the first naturalistto publicly use the new theory of naturalselection, applied it to a series of closely relatedlarks, but did not extend his use of the theorybeyond the level of species and varieties.These naturalists,like Thomas Bell, did not read the Darwin-Wallacepapers as revolutionarytexts. Their reactions must be understoodin light of the content of the commu- nication itself, and what they regardedas its zoological context: the question of the difference between varieties and species, ratherthan that of transmu- tation. The work of Thomas VernonWollaston had focused the attentionof Britishnaturalists on this difficulttaxonomic problem. Tristram's reactions to the LinneanSociety papers,and later to the Huxley-Wilberforcedebate, have been interpretedby I. BernardCohen as a conversion to naturalselection, and a reconversionto orthodoxy.But a close reading of Tristram'searly use of naturalselection proves that he saw nothing unorthodoxabout it, since he applied it as an extension of Wollaston'sconservative model of the relation- ship between species and varieties. The Darwin-Wallacepapers were, in the words thatDarwin used of his own abstract,"most imperfect."Given their limited presentationof the implica- tions of natural selection, it is hardly astonishing that naturalistsdid not 3 S. Haughton,"Presidential Address," J. Geol. Soc. Dublin, 8 (1857-60): 151-152; Richard Owen, "PresidentialAddress," Rep. Brit. Ass. Adv.Sci. (1858), xci-xciii. As I pursuequestions of species and variationhere, I will not considerthe responsesof Owen and Haughton;both are mentioned in I. Bemard Cohen, "ThreeNotes on the Reception of Darwin's Ideas on Natural Selection," in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 590-592. On Owen's evolutionism and response to the papers,see Nicolaas Rupke, Richard Owen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 236-237. Haughton's early response to evolutionism has been addressed in W. J. E. Jessop, "Samuel Haughton: A Victorian Polymath,"Hermathena, 116 (1973), 5-26; and Arnold Brackman,A Delicate Arrangement:The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Times Books, 1980), pp. 73-74. This content downloaded from 150.135.115.40 on Sat, 25 May 2013 19:59:10 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NATURALSELECTION BEFORE THE ORIGIN 269 imagine what they foreshadowed. In this paper I explore the context of Englishnaturalists' views on variationin the 1850s andthe imperfectionof the Darwin-Wallacepapers. These factors underlieboth the limited volume and the muted characterof the response to the papers, which was interruptedby the publicationof the more explicitly radicalOrigin. After all, the revolution broughtabout by naturalselection came not in 1858, but in 1859.4 Thomas Bell was no fool. Species, Varieties, and TYansmutationin the 1850s Recent histories have shown that English naturalhistory societies of the last century tended to be conservative in ideology and methodology.Dominated by gentlemenamateurs, their meetings and journals were filled with paperson systematics, notes on sightings of rareforms in Britain,and long descriptive accountsof the floraand faunaof exotic and domesticlocales. These empirical studies were supportedby the philosophical dicta proclaimed in addresses, prefaces, and debate: since inductionwas the only way to do naturalhistory, no empirical observationwas useless; and naturaltheology was the ultimate justificationfor the close study of nature."Through Nature to Nature'sGod" was not only a common epigraphemblazoned on title pages, it was a deep, sharedassumption of most gentlemennaturalists.5 In these circles the doctrine of transmutationhad few friends. As Adrian Desmond has demonstrated,in the early nineteenth century evolutionary views had radical connections, social and scientific, and they were rarely found among gentlemen.6Just as its proponents- radicals of various stripes - transgressedagainst social codes, so the doctrine of transmutationtrans- gressed against the philosophicalcodes of naturalhistory. Transmutationism was speculative rather than inductive, and promoted a less-than-orthodox view of God's creative action. With such social and theological associations, it was considered an absurdand dangerousdoctrine. Most conservative naturalistsdismissed out of hand the idea that species might transmuteinto other species. Their job, as they saw it, was to deter- mine just what constituted a species. For gentlemen naturaliststhis was a 4Indeed, the term "naturalselection" appeared only once in Darwin's 1858 abstract. Throughoutthis paper,I use naturalselection as a shorthandto denote the processes described by Darwin and Wallace in their 1858 communication,though I recognize that the term was not used by Wallace, nor by any of the naturalistswho respondedto the papers.The question of differences between Wallace'sand Darwin'searly theories