About the Book
This volume provides the readers with a broad but detailed consideration of a wide array of transmutationist thinkers who published before Darwin. Highlighting some of those whom Darwin later acknowledged as well as number he chose not to, readers are shown that the notion that none of these earlier thinkers offered a well-developed or workable theory of evolution is untenable once we read their own words. Further, we will quickly see that transmutation, or the ‘developmental hypothesis’ as it was also sometimes called, had a wide audience across the period under consideration.
Scholars such as Adrian Desmond have already drawn attention to the political radicals in the London and Edinburgh medical schools who embraced the transmutationist ideas of the French anatomists Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire and the naturalist and zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and the historians John van Wyhe and Roger Cooter have highlighted the materialist naturalism of phrenologists whose work was so amenable to developmentalist thinking. Paul Elliott has drawn our attention to the “Derbyshire Darwinians,” who championed the transmutationist and egalitarian Enlightenment ideas of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather — as well as the extent to which the Derby Philosophical Society was a breeding ground for this kind of thinking. It was here, for instance, that the young radical journalist Herbert Spencer spent many hours in his formative years.
Thus, while Darwin was quietly working away at his big species book, transmutation was being discussed and debated, written about, and advocated across the nation. The book he eventually published in 1859, On the Origin of Species, was thus a contribution to an already very lively, controversial, contested, and ongoing debate. However, Darwin had not intended to published Origin as we know it; it is in fact only what he called a brief abstract of the detailed multi-volume work he had initially had in mind. It was upon receipt of a short essay from the naturalist and collector Alfred Russel Wallace that Darwin was pressed to publish. In this short paper Wallace had quite independently arrived at a theory of species development that was remarkably similar to that which Darwin had been working on for some twenty years.
Table of Contents:
Volume 1. Evolution before Darwin
Caden C. Testa and Piers J. Hale
Acknowledgements
General introduction: “Evolution in Victorian Britain”
Volume 1 introduction: “Mapping Evolutionary Ideas in Britain in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century”
Preface
1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A. A. H.” (London: Edward Moxon, 1850).
Part 1: The Enlightenment
2. Georges Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, “Of the Degeneration of Animals” (1766) reprinted in Buffon’s Natural History containing A Theory of the Earth, A General History of Man, of Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals &c. From the French with notes buy the Translator (London: J.S. Barr, 1792).
3. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its influence on General Virtue and Happiness, (2 vols.) (Dublin: Luke White, 1793).
4. Nicolas de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. Being a Posthumous Work of the Late M. DE CONDORCET (London: J. Johnson, 1795), pp. 370-1
5. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, (London, J. Johnson, 1798), pp. 1, 3–9, 49–54, 110, 111–14.
6. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life, (2 vols.) (Dublin: P. Byrne & W. Jones, 1794), 478, 498–9, 500–9, 519–21.
7. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature. Or, The Origin of Society. A Poem, with Philosophical Notes (London: J. Johnson, 1803), pp.1, 19, 26, 33, 34, 35–7, 153–9.
8. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind (De generis humani), (3rd edn. 1795), in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, edited by Thomas Bendyshe, (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865), pp.188-206.
9. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (tr. Hugh Elliot; London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), pp. 35–40, 44–6, 106–13, 128–9, 169–73.
10. Jean Baptiste Lamarck, “Gall’s System” in Wheeler and Barbour's The Lamarck Manuscripts at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp.133, 134–5.
11. [Lockhart Muirhead], Review of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique, Monthly Review, 55 (August 1811), pp. 473–84, 5 (April 1813), pp. 481– 90.
Part 2. Edinburgh Transmutationists
12. [Albrecht Rengger], “Observations on the Nature and Importance of Geology”, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, (Oct. 1826), pp. 293–302.
13. [André Étienne Daubert de Férussac], “Of the Changes which Life has Experienced on the Globe”, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, (1827), pp. 298–301.
14. [Étienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire (trans. Alexandre Bertand], “For the Continuity of the Animal Kingdom by Means of Generation from the First Ages of the World to the Present Times”, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, (April 1829), pp.152–5. (Translation of Geoffroy’s March 23 1829 paper to the Academie des Sciences, first appeared in The Globe.)
15. Robert Knox, “Inquiry into the Origin and Characteristic Difference of the Native Races inhabiting the Extra-Tropical part of Southern Africa”, Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society, v.5, (Edinburgh: 1824), pp. 206–19.
16. Robert Knox, “Contributions to the Philosophy of Zoology with Special Reference to the Natural History of Man”, The Lancet, July 14th 1855, pp.24–6.
17. [John Gordon], “The Doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim”, Edinburgh Review 25 (June 1815), pp. 227–29, 247-54, 268.
18. George Combe, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects (Edinburgh: John Anderson, & London: Longman & Co., 1828), pp.143, 145–56, 160, 164–6.
Part 3. The Developmental Hypothesis in Mid-Victorian Britain
19. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Vol. 2. (London, John Murray, 1832), pp. 1–19, 20–21.
20. W. B. Carpenter, Principles of General and Comparative Physiology, Intended as an Introduction to the Study of Human Physiology and as a Study Guide to the Pursuit of Natural History (London: John Churchill, 1839), pp. x, 129–39, 414–24, 463–4.
21. “Carpenter’s Principles of General and Comparative Physiology”, Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 53 (1840), pp. 213–28.
22. [Charles Southwell & William Chilton], “Theory of Regular Gradation”, Oracle of Reason, 2 vols. (1842–3), vol 1, pp. 5-6, Vol. 2, pp. 5–7, 21–3, 219–21, 229–30, 253–4, 279–80, 308–9, 318–19, 325, 332–4, 340–2, 347–8, 378–9.
23. [Robert Chambers] Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill,1844); (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1887), pp. 145–65, 174, 176–7.
24. Herbert Spencer, “The Developmental Hypothesis”, The Leader, (March 1852), pp. 280–1.
25. Herbert Spencer, “A Theory of Population, Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility”, Westminster Review, 57 (1852), pp. 9–10, 12–13, 22, 23–7, 30–5.
26. Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause”, The Westminster Review, 67 (April 1857), pp. 445–85.
27. Baden Powell, Essay 3, “On the Philosophy of Creation”, Essays in the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy, The Unity of Worlds, and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Longman, Green, Brown, & Longmans, 1855), pp. 329–30, 337, 342–3, 349–51, 369–72, 376–7, 380, 391, 392–5, 398–402, 404–5, 408–18, 424.
28. Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species”, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 16 (September 1855), 16, pp.184–96.
29. Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, (August 1858), pp. 53–62.
Part 4. The Historical Sketch
30. Charles Darwin, “An Historical Sketch,” in On the Origin of Species by means of natural Selection, or, the preservation of the favoured races in the struggle for life 6th ed. (London: John Murray, 1872).
31. P. Matthew, “Nature’s Law of Selection”, Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (7 April 1860), pp. 312-3.
32. William Charles Wells, Two Essays: upon a single vision with two eyes, the other on dew, including appendix, An account of a female of the white race of mankind, part of whose skin resembles that of a negro, with some observations on the cause of the differences in colour and form between the white and negro races of man(Constable, London. 1818), pp. 431–8.
33. William Herbert, “On the Production of Hybrid Vegetables; With the Results of Many Experiments Made in the Investigation of the Subject. In a Letter to the Secretary”, Transactions of the Horticultural Society, 4 (1822), pp. 15–22, 47.
34. William Herbert, Amaryllidaceae (London: J. Ridgeway, 1837), p.19–20, 337–40.
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Piers J. Hale is a scholar of nineteenth-century science, with a specialisation in the history of the social and cultural implications of evolution. In his book Political Descent. Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (2014), Hale provided a broad overview of the political and moral implications that nineteenth-century Britons took the idea of evolution to have.
Caden C. Testa is a senior graduate student in the history of science and is editorial assistant to the bibliographer of the History of Science Society. He is a scholar of the history of evolutionary ideas with a specialization in Lamarck’s transformist philosophy.
