The British Journal for the History of Science http://journals.cambridge.org/BJH Additional services for The British Journal for the History of Science: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here A Question of Properly Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed Evelleen Richards The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 20 / Issue 02 / April 1987, pp 129 ­ 171 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087400023724, Published online: 05 January 2009 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0007087400023724 How to cite this article: Evelleen Richards (1987). A Question of Properly Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed. The British Journal for the History of Science, 20, pp 129­171 doi:10.1017/ S0007087400023724 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BJH, IP address: 150.135.114.171 on 29 May 2013 BJHS, 1987,20,129-171 A Question of Properly Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed EVELLEEN RICHARDS* 'Questions of science,' remarked Goethe, 'are very frequently career questions. A single discovery may make a man famous and lay the foundations of his fortunes as a citizen... Every newly observed phenomenon is a discovery, every discovery is property. Touch a man's property and his passions are immediately aroused.' Conversations with Eckerman, 21 December 1823.' Upon my life I am so sorry for Owen; he will be so d--d savage; for credit given to any other man, I strongly suspect, is in his eyes so much credit robbed from him. Science is so narrow a field, it is clear there ought to be only one cock of the walk. Darwin to Huxley, 28 December 1859.2 When Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the anonymous evolutionary work which caused such a furore in mid-Victorian England, was published towards the close of 1844, Richard Owen, by then well-entrenched as the 'British Cuvier', received a comple- mentary copy and addressed a letter to the author.3 This letter and how it should be interpreted have recently become the subject of historical debate, and diis paper is directed at resolving the controversy. The question of Owen's attitude to the Vestiges argument is central to the larger historical problem of the views of this leading British morphologist and palaeontologist on the contentious issue of the 'secondary causes' of species. Owen wrote so little directly on this subject prior to 1858, that the letter in question, together with his two letters of 1848 to the rationalist publisher John Chapman,4 and the controversial conclusion to his On the Nature of Limbs (1849),5 constitute the major evidence that Owen in this period subscribed to a naturalistic theory of organic change. On the basis of this evidence, historians of biology have generally concurred with Owen's biographer grandson that Owen had a 'certain leaning towards 1 Quoted by E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, London, 1973, p. 336. 2 Cited in A. Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875, London, 1982, p. 60. 3 Published in Rev. R. Owen, The Life of Richard Owen, 2 vols, London, 1894, Vol. 1, pp. 249-252. The location of the original letter is unknown. 4 Ibid., pp. 309—311. Desmond has identified Owen's correspondent as Chapman, op. cit. (2), pp. 29, 210 (note 27). 5 R. Owen, On the Nature of Limbs, London, 1849, pp. 85-86. * Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Wollongong, P.O. Box 1144, (Northfields Avenue), Wollongong, N.S.W. 2500, Australia. 1 should like to thank John Brooke, Adrian Desmond, James Secord and John Schuster for their criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper; and the following institutions and libraries for permission to study manuscript material: The British Library, British Museum (Natural History), Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Ray Society. 130 Evelleen Richards the theories enunciated by Robert Chambers [the Vestiges' author]',6 but that his 'official' anti-transmutationist stance of the 1840s did not permit full public expression of his own views.7 As Ruse most recently summed up this historical consensus: Owen in the 1840s was 'moving down a path not completely dissimilar from that followed by Chambers', and he 'tried to have matters two ways, praising Vestiges to its author and condemning it to its critics'.8 However, a recent analysis by John Hedley Brooke has fragmented this consensus and made Owen's equivocation over evolution problematic.9 Brooke offered a 'more cynical' interpretation of Owen's Vestiges letter as the private attack on Vestiges that Owen declined to mount publicly, arguing on a number of grounds that Owen's letter should be construed as a 'deft rebuke' to Chambers, rather than its 'straightforward' conventional historical interpretation as one of 'mild encouragement'. Brooke has subsequently extended his analysis to argue that Owen's sympathetic references to a continuity of secondary causes should be taken in a theological rather than a scientific context, and should not be construed as evidence of Owen's positive commitment to evolution.10 Brooke's iconoclasm has created difficulties for those historians who continue to insist on Owen's pre-1858 commitment to a naturalistic theory of organic descent. For example, Ospovat in 1976 asserted that Owen believed early on in the production of new species by natural causes, probably in the form of 'saltatory descent from pre-existing species'.11 But, by 1981, on the basis of Brooke's revision, Ospovat modified this to a more cautiously worded description of Owen's early, views as 'protoevolutionary'.12 It is significant, however, that in a footnote, Ospovat indicated some difference of opinion with Brooke: Owen himself took [his palaeontology and morphology] to be evidence of descent, though not of transmutation... John H. Brooke, in discussing Owen's views, seems not to have considered the possibility of such a distinction .. .13 6 Rev. R. Owen, op. cit. (3), p. 255. 7 R.M. MacLeod, 'Evolutionism and Richard Owen, 1830-1868: an episode in Darwin's Century', Isis, (1965), 56, pp. 259—280, p. 261; M.J.S. Hodge, 'The universal gestation of nature: Chambers' Vestiges and Explanations', Journal of the History of Biology, {1972),S,pp. 127-151, pp. 133-134; M.J.S. Rudwick, Tfce Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, London, 1972, p. 207; P.J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Palaeontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century, N.Y., 1976, p. 93; D. Ospovat, 'The influence of K.E. von Baer's embryology, 1828-1859: a reappraisal in light of Richard Owen's and William B. Carpenter's palaeontological application of "von Baer's law"', Journal of the History of Biology, (1976), 9, pp. 1-28; D. Ospovat, 'Perfect adaptation and teleological explanation: approaches to the problem of the history of life in the mid-nineteenth century', Studies in the History of Biology, (1978), 2, pp. 33 —56; M. Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, Chicago and London, 1979, pp. 124,125,127,144,228. 8 Ibid. Ruse seems not to have known of Brooke's reassessment at the time of writing. See Note 9. 9 J.H. Brooke, 'Richard Owen, William Whewell and the Vestiges', British Journal for the History of Science, (1977), 10, pp. 132-145. 10 J.H. Brooke, 'The natural theology of the geologists: some theological strata'. In: L.J. Jordanova and R.S. Porter (eds), Images of the Earth: Essays in the Environmental Sciences, Chalfont St Giles, 1979, pp. 39-64, p. 41. 11 D. Ospovat, 1976, op. cit. (7), p. 22. 12 D. Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology and Natural Selection, 1838-1859, Cambridge, 1981, p. 138. 13 Ibid., p. 285. Property Rights 131 Again, Desmond, taking Brooke's revision into account in his assessment of Owen's reaction to Vestiges, interpreted Owen's position as anti-transmutationist (on the basis of Owen's prior attacks on the transmutationism of his social and professional rival, Robert Edmond Grant of University College). However, Desmond did dissent from Brooke's conclusion of Owen's 'blanket condemnation' of die Vestiges argument: Owen might have lamented the mistakes, hated the transmutation, and even doubted aspects of Chambers' theodicy; yet he was in total agreement on the need for uniformity, and on its correct Providential interpretation.l4 Desmond went on to argue that Owen was quite sincere in his assertion to Chambers of the need for the 'best naturalists' (meaning himself) to seek out the 'secondary causes' of the production of new species. Desmond coupled this widi Owen's 1848 claim to Chapman that he could, if pressed, come up with half a dozen such natural causes (including transmutation), and concluded that Owen himself at that stage favoured an explanation for the introduction of a new species via a process of descent akin to alternation of generations (a phenomenon that Owen had studied intensively in the 1840s, and which he termed 'metagenesis').'5 It is my intention in this paper to push the interpretations of Ospovat, Ruse and Desmond further in an attempt to clarify Owen's early (and later) views on the 'second- ary causes' of species. To this end, I shall argue, by refrence to Owen's correspondence and papers, that his letter to Chambers cannot sustain the interpretation of a private attack on Vestiges; that far from being subtly ironic or destructive in intent, Owen's purpose in writing to Chambers was to indicate his own long-term interest in and superior understanding of certain major themes of Vestiges, and, in particular, to claim priority for the embryological basis of Chambers' central mechanism of species change- 'the idea and diagram of page 212'.