Natural Selection before the Origin: Public Reactions …...Naturalists to the Darwin-Wallace Papers (Thomas Boyd, Arthur Hussey, and Henry Baker Tristram) RICHARD ENGLAND St. Michael's

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 EnglandSource: Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 267-290Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4331436 .

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Journal of the History of Biology 30: 267-290, 1997. 267 ? 1997 Kluwer Academic 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)

RICHARD ENGLAND 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 hundred histories: the year, he said, "has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear."1 Of course on July 1 of that year, at a meeting of the Linnean Society, the joint communication of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace described the process of natural selection, 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 publication of the Origin of Species have been called a "curious latent period" during which there was "no" (or at least "astonishingly little") 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, reprinted in the Zoologist, mentioned at the British Association, and commented on in at least three British journals. To consider this response astonishingly little 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-Centenary History of the Linnean Society of London (London: Linnean Society Academic Press, 1988), p. 57. See also J. Gribbin and M. White, Darwin: A Life in Science (New York: Dutton, 1995), p. 210.

2C. F. A. Pantin, "The Darwin-Wallace Centenary 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 Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 423. Most modern biographies of Darwin pass over the interval between the Darwin-Wallace communication and the publication of 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.



268 RICHARD ENGLAND

publication of the Origin. But the natural selection of the Darwin-Wallace papers was not the natural selection of Darwin's best-known work. Certainly the basic process described is the same, but in the Origin natural selection was the driving mechanism behind a radical, evolutionary revision of the phenomena of life. In the Linnean Society papers, it was a process that principally described the relationship between varieties and species; the larger evolutionary implications were only hinted at.

Two paleontologists who noticed the communication, Richard Owen and Samuel Haughton, seem to have appreciated its evolutionary implications, but the gentlemen naturalists who responded to it were more concerned with its relevance to problems of speciation and variation.3 Thomas 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 naturalist to publicly use the new theory of natural selection, applied it to a series of closely related larks, but did not extend his use of the theory beyond the level of species and varieties. These naturalists, like Thomas Bell, did not read the Darwin-Wallace papers as revolutionary texts.

Their reactions must be understood in light of the content of the communication itself, and what they regarded as its zoological context: the question of the difference between varieties and species, rather than that of transmutation. The work of Thomas Vernon Wollaston had focused the attention of British naturalists on this difficult taxonomic problem. Tristram's reactions to the Linnean Society papers, and later to the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, have been interpreted by I. Bernard Cohen as a conversion to natural selection, and a reconversion to orthodoxy. But a close reading of Tristram's early use of natural selection proves that he saw nothing unorthodox about it, since he applied it as an extension of Wollaston's conservative model of the relationship between species and varieties.

The Darwin-Wallace papers were, in the words that Darwin used of his own abstract, "most imperfect." Given their limited presentation of the implications of natural selection, it is hardly astonishing that naturalists did not

3 S. Haughton, "Presidential Address," J. Geol. Soc. Dublin, 8 (1857-60): 151-152; Richard Owen, "Presidential Address," Rep. Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci. (1858), xci-xciii. As I pursue questions of species and variation here, I will not consider the responses of Owen and Haughton; both are mentioned in I. Bemard Cohen, "Three Notes 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.



NATURAL SELECTION BEFORE THE ORIGIN 269

imagine what they foreshadowed. In this paper I explore the context of English naturalists' views on variation in the 1 850s and the imperfection of the Darwin-Wallace papers. These factors underlie both the limited volume and the muted character of the response to the papers, which was interrupted by the publication of the more explicitly radical Origin. After all, the revolution brought about by natural selection came not in 1858, but in 1859.4 Thomas Bell was no fool.

Species, Varieties, and TYansmutation in the 1850s

Recent histories have shown that English natural history societies of the last century tended to be conservative in ideology and methodology. Dominated by gentlemen amateurs, their meetings and journals were filled with papers on systematics, notes on sightings of rare forms in Britain, and long descriptive accounts of the flora and fauna of exotic and domestic locales. These empirical studies were supported by the philosophical dicta proclaimed in addresses, prefaces, and debate: since induction was the only way to do natural history, no empirical observation was useless; and natural theology was the ultimate justification for the close study of nature. "Through Nature to Nature's God" was not only a common epigraph emblazoned on title pages, it was a deep, shared assumption of most gentlemen naturalists.5

In these circles the doctrine of transmutation had 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.6 Just as its proponents - radicals of various stripes - transgressed against social codes, so the doctrine of transmutation transgressed against the philosophical codes of natural history. 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 absurd and dangerous doctrine.

Most conservative naturalists dismissed out of hand the idea that species might transmute into other species. Their job, as they saw it, was to deter- mine just what constituted a species. For gentlemen naturalists this was a

4Indeed, the term "natural selection" appeared only once in Darwin's 1858 abstract. Throughout this paper, I use natural selection as a shorthand to 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 naturalists who responded to the papers. The question of differences between Wallace's and Darwin's early theories is noted below (n. 25); however, neither Darwin, Wallace, nor any of their early readers made much of the difference between their views (see also n. 35).

David Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (London: Penguin, 1976). 6Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).



270 RICHARD ENGLAND

practical, not a metaphysical, problem: they had to decide how to discern and name species among the specimens that flooded into museums, as collectors plundered Nature at home and abroad.7 What constituted a good species, and what was merely a local variety (hardly a new problem to taxonomy), became a common source of dispute and concern among naturalists.8 Species "splitters" insisted that slight differences often marked a distinct species, while species "lumpers" claimed that this approach needlessly multiplied species and confused them with mere varieties. In the 1 850s, however, such squab- bles among conservative taxonomists moved onto the controversial ground of transmutationism, when Thomas Vernon Wollaston (1822-1878) tried to explain how some natural varieties had descended or developed from a parent species.

The idea of descent or development relating different taxonomic levels had been broached in more extreme forms by radical naturalists, but Wollaston commanded the attention of the conservative natural history community because he was one of their own, socially and scientifically: he was a wealthy, Cambridge-educated entomologist whose work followed the canons of induction and natural theological orthodoxy.9 In his comprehensive study of the insects of the Madeira Islands (Insecta Maderensia, 1854), he had noted slight differences between certain island forms of species like Scarithes abbreviatus. In this case, he suggested that these island forms were not distinct species, but varieties that had developed from a common, parent species:

the species in question is an extremely variable one, assuming differences of size according to the altitude at which it lives and differences of sculpture according to the circumstances of the spot on which it is isolated. That such is actually the case, a careful observation of the many minute changes which the insect has undergone in the various islands and altitudes will, I think, prove to a demonstration. For it is impossible to suppose that every rock contains its own species, that is to say, has had a separate creation expressly for itself, a conclusion at which we must assuredly arrive, if small and even constant differences are of necessity specific.

7See Allen, Naturalist in Britain (above, n. 5), pp. 138-144; and Gordon McOuat, "Species, Names, and Things, from Darwin to the Experimentalists," Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1993, pp. 86-89.

8A list of published references to questions of species and variations was sent to Darwin by Leonard Jenyns in April 1858: see F. Burkhardt and S. Smith, eds., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985-91), VII, 73-77 (hereafter cited as CCD). On the importance of the "species problem" in the 1850s for Sir Joseph Hooker and Wallace, see Janet Browne, The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 159-160, 175-176.

9L. M. Cook, "T. Vernon Wollaston and the 'Monstrous Doctrine,' ' Arch. Nat. Hist., 22 (1995), 333-348.



NATURAL SELECTrION BEFORE THE ORIGIN 271

Rejecting this hypothesis as untenable, and as contrary to all experience, we are driven to acknowledge that isolation does in nearly every instance, in the course of time, affect, more or less sensibly, external insect form; ... which being admitted we have at once an intelligible principle whereby to account for modifications innumerable, each of which, when viewed simply as a difference, independently of the species producing it, might have been regarded as sufficient to erect a "species" upon, had the desire for multiplying them overbalanced the love of truth.10

Wollaston's work on these island insects attracted Darwin's attention. He, after all, had noted differences in the fauna of the Galapagos (which Wollaston cited), though he had come to more radical conclusions about the significance of this variation.'1 Darwin drew Wollaston into his inner circle of scientific friends, hoping that he might be persuaded to embrace wider views on transmutation. In the last week of April 1856, Wollaston joined Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker at Darwin's home at Down to talk species. In a second- hand report, Sir Charles Lyell wrote that "they (all four of them) ran a tilt against species farther than I believe that they are deliberately prepared to go. Wollaston least unorthodox. I cannot easily see how they can go so far, and not embrace the whole Lamarckian doctrine."12 How much Darwin spoke of his own views at this meeting is not known, but Wollaston certainly drew the line at Lamarck.

In his book On the Variation of Species (1856), a slim volume dedicated to Darwin, Wollaston outlines possible causes of race-producing variation (these include climate, extreme temperatures, the nature of the soil, and isolation), and illustrates his suggestions with examples from his study of Madeiran insects. Yet he repeatedly asserts that he is dealing with "legitimate variation," "within fixed specific limits." 13 The last pages of the book contain a strong and explicit repudiation of the doctrine of transmutation. Far from being unorthodox about species, Wollaston insisted that his views strengthened rather than weakened the case for their stability:

'0T. V. Wollaston, Insecta Maderensia: Being an Account of the Insects of the Islands of the Madeiran Group (London: Van Voorst, 1854), p. 1 1 (emphasis in the original).

" F. J. Sulloway, "Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend," J. Hist. Biol., 15 (1982), 1-53, describes Darwin's own gradual realization of the significance of the Galapagos fauna to his evolutionary thought.

12Charles Lyell to James Fox Bunbury, April 30, 1856, in K. M. Lyell, Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart. (London: John Murray, 1881), II, 212. "Lamarckian doctrine" refers to J. B. Lamarck's evolutionary theory.

'3T. V. Wollaston, On the Variation of Species, with Especial Reference to the Insecta: Followed by an Inquiry into the Nature of Genera (London: Van Voorst, 1856), p. 35.



272 RICHARD ENGLAND

in suggesting the inquiry ... whether the small shades of difference which have often, because permanent, been at once regarded as specific, may not be sometimes rendered intelligible by a knowledge of the localities in which the creatures have been matured ... I do not necessarily open the door to the disciples of Lamarck, or infringe upon the strict orthodoxy of our zoological creed. On the contrary, indeed, I believe that ... those very hyper-accurate definers who recognize a "species," wheresoever the minutest discrepancy is shadowed forth, will be found to have been the most determined abettors of that dogma, - seeing that their species, if such they be, do most assuredly pass into each other.14

Wollaston defined a species as a community of descent, including varieties that had developed from it by various environmental causes. Yet he insisted that, "whatever the several ranges within which the members of the organic creation are free to vary, we are positively certain that, unless the definition of a species, as involving relationship, be more than a delusion or romance, their circumferences are of necessity real.' 5 Wollaston, while broaching what might be called a limited transmutationism, repudiated the "disciples of Lamarck" and reaffirmed "orthodoxy": species were real, and they varied within limits.

After reading Wollaston's book, Darwin wrote to him, suggesting that he would eventually abandon his arbitrary limits to variation and come to accept the full doctrine of transmutation. He cajoled, "I have heard Unitarianism called a feather-bed to catch a falling Christian; and I think you are now on such a feather bed, but I believe you will fall much lower and lower."'16 Wollaston, however, proved to be quite comfortable on his "feather-bed" of variation within specific limits. In his review of the Origin of Species, he rejected the idea of indefinite variation, and he never did fall in with Darwin's evolutionary views.17

"Some Strangely Heretical Notions": June 7, 1858

While Wollaston's insistence on specific limits disappointed Darwin, some of his colleagues were shocked by his use of development, even at a limited

'4Ibid., p. 190. 15 Ibid., p. 193 (emphasis in the original). 16 Charles Darwin to Thomas Vernon Wollaston, June 6, 1856, in CCD, VI, 134. 17T. V. Wollaston, review of the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, Ann. Mag. Nat.

Hist., 5 (1860), 132-143; reprinted in David Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 126-141. For an excellent discussion of Wollaston's reasons for rejecting transmutationism see Cook, "T. Vernon Wollaston" (above, n. 9).




level. A debate at the Entomological Society illustrates the controversy attending Wollaston's ideas about variation, less than a month before the Darwin-Wallace papers were read. The opponents were two of England's most prominent lepidopterists: Henry Tibbats Stainton (1822-1892), who was also the influential editor of the Entomologists' Weekly Intelligencer; and John Obadiah Westwood (1 805-1893), a founding member of the Entomolog- ical Society, whose work on the classification of insects had recently earned him the Royal Society's medal.'8 On May 3, 1858, Stainton had proposed a name for a new species; Westwood had challenged him, suggesting that the specimen in question was a mere modification of another species "produced by the difference in the food plant" of the two forms.19 Wollaston's views on the difference between species and varieties would soon be aired.

An outraged Stainton came to the following meeting on June 7 with a paper "On the Persistence of Species," in which he attacked the idea that differences in food could produce new species:

Some strangely heretical notions were breached at the last meeting.... Species somewhat similar feeding on closely allied plants were suggested as probable variations caused by the difference of food . . . and thus each genus might be assumed to consist of only a single species varying according to its food and other circumstances.

Hence species are not; they were merely phantoms of the brain of the naturalist.20

For Stainton, species were, of course, real, albeit only discemible by naturalists with a real knowledge of the specimens and groups in question; views like Westwood's involved the denial not only of species, but also of the competence of the naturalists who named them. The idea was not only absurd, but also dangerous, and Stainton "should not have recurred to the subject but for the number of young entomologists . . . on some of whom the idea of gradual developments .. . might have most injurious effects, were it not effectually exploded."2'

Westwood retorted that Stainton had far from exploded the idea, and appealed to the authority of Wollaston's work, "since the publication of which a great change had taken place in the minds, especially of German naturalists, as to the specific rank of many supposed species of Carabideous insects, which were now sunk into local sub-species". An admission of subspecies, or

'8Both Stainton and Westwood were sufficiently well regarded to gamer entries in the Dictionary of National Biography.

19"Report of the Proceedings of the Entomological Society," Zoologist, 16 (1858), 6115. 20Ibid., p. 6153. 21 Ibid., p. 6154.



274 RICHARD ENGLAND

local varieties, did not entail a denial of the reality of species, however. West- wood claimed that "it was quite necessary to register these permanent or even transitory sub-species, but far more philosophical to endeavour to discover the centre, so to speak, from which they radiated."22 He was denying not, the reality of species, but Stainton's competence in mislabeling a mere variety as a new species. The recorded comments of other naturalists present show that they sided with Stainton, and his view of the absolute fixity of species. He concluded the argument by claiming that Westwood's position "went fully the length of maintaining the development theory."23

Wollaston's work was suspect because it broached the possibility that permanent forms, viewed by some as good species, might be derived varieties rather than independent creations. To men like Stainton, this meant simply that some species changed into other species: the dangerous doctrine of transmutation! Wollaston's defense, that this variation was limited to specific boundaries and therefore "legitimate," meant nothing to those "splitters" who saw good species where "lumpers" saw only varieties. But Wollaston and his supporters did not consider themselves transmutationists; varieties may well have been developed, but good species were created. Only eleven days before Darwin first saw Wallace's essay "On the Tendency of Species to Depart indefinitely from the Original Type," Wollaston's much more conservative work on variation had already divided gentlemen naturalists.

The Darwin-Wallace Communication: Naturalists' Reactions

On June 18, 1858, Darwin was stunned to discover that Wallace's essay outlined a mechanism of evolution very similar to that which he had been developing for twenty years. He wrote to Lyell the same day, lamenting the "striking co-incidence" and the smashing of his hopes of originality and priority.24 His fears were only partly justified, thanks to the maneuvers of Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who arranged for a joint reading of abstracts from Darwin's papers and Wallace's essay before the Linnean Society on July 1.

Much has been made of the doubtful honor of this rush for priority, and still more of the exact similarities and dissimilarities between Darwin's and

22 Ibid.

23Ibid., p. 6155. A later commentator on this debate, F. 0. Morris, publicly supported Westwood over Stainton, and denied that the theory of variation within species led to transmutationism. Morris was one of Darwin's fiercest critics in the 1 860s, but he makes no mention of the Darwin-Wallace communication when discussing variation within species in "Species and Varieties," Naturalist, 8 (1858), 234-235.

24 Darwin to Lyell, June 18, 1858, in F. Darwin, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1898), I, 473.




Wallace's views.25 The effect of the joint communication on its first hearers and readers has been less generally studied. If the Darwin-Wallace papers were revolutionary in content, why was there not a corresponding reaction? I will argue that the papers were not revolutionary: they presented a view of speciation and variation that could be assimilated into ongoing debates among orthodox naturalists, and did not successfully communicate their radical implications. Most historians have assumed that the papers did get their evolutionary message across, and have referred to the recollections of two men at the meeting, George Bentham and Joseph Hooker, as printed in Darwin's Life and Letters.26

George Bentham, vice-president of the Linnean society, withdrew his lengthy paper on British flora from the July 1 meeting to make room for the last-minute addition sponsored by Lyell and Hooker. In his paper he had planned to make several comments on the fixity of species, but on hear- ing the joint communication, he recalled, "I felt bound to defer mine for reconsideration."27 Bentham has been called "quick-witted" in realizing that the fixity of species was no longer a tenable theory, given the strength of Darwin's and Wallace's views.28

Recently, however, Peter Stevens has shown that Bentham did not change his views on species fixity so promptly: having been bumped off the agenda of the July meeting, he simply delivered his lengthy paper (including an unchanged discussion of species) at meetings in November 1858 and February 1859. Bentham apparently forgot this when he was asked for his recollections of the meeting for Darwin's Life and Letters. Stevens concludes that "the idea that Bentham was so disconcerted by the ideas in the Darwin/Wallace contributions that he immediately decided not to read a paper in which he assumed the fixity of species is yet another myth surrounding Darwin's ideas

25 See, e.g., Barbara Beddall, "Wallace, Darwin, and the Theory of Natural Selection,"J. Hist. Biol., I (1968), 261-323; Brackman, Delicate Arrangement (above, n. 3); Malcolm J. Kottler, "Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: Two Decades of Debate over Natural Selection," in Kohn, Darwinian Heritage (above, n. 3), pp. 367-432; Peter Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 42-45; CCD, VII, xvi-xvii.

26 Hooker's reminiscences are the main source for John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A New Life (London: Norton, 1990), pp. 331-332; Clark, Survival of Charles Darwin (above, n. 2), pp. 108-109; and Peter Brent, Charles Darwin: A Man of Enlarged Curiosity (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 415-416. Bentham's recollections are cited in Brackman, Delicate Arrangement, p. 72; and in A. Desmond and J. Moore, Darwin (New York: Time-Warner, 1992), p. 470.

27 F. Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (above, n. 24), II, 88. 28 Bracman, Delicate Arrangement, p. 72.



276 RICHARD ENGLAND

and their reception."29 Only after the Origin was published did Bentham realize how much he would have to change his views.

More frequently cited is Hooker's memory of the meeting. Recalling the event of twenty-four years before, he wrote that

the interest excited was intense, but the subject too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists before armouring. It was talked over after the meeting with "bated breath": Lyell's approval, and perhaps in a small way mine, as his lieutenant in the affair, rather overawed the Fellows, who would otherwise have flown out against the doctrine. We had, too, the advantage of being familiar with the authors and their theme.30

Perhaps the audience did understand the significance of the papers, then? J. W. T. Moody has suggested that Hooker, looking back over the tumultuous and eventful history of Darwinism, "no doubt embellished his reflection upon the meeting."31 Moody, noting the length of the meeting, suggests that "the sheer volume of contributions practically buried the Darwin-Wallace papers. The fellows were not so much stunned by the new ideas as they were overwhelmed by the amount of information loaded upon them at the meeting. Much of the Darwin-Wallace concept of natural selection went over their heads."32

It is difficult to dismiss Hooker's account, though he may have embellished the memory, and Moody's scenario may seem plausible. But there is another possible reason lurking behind the silence of the audience: the Darwin- Wallace communication did not really explain why natural selection was exciting. This is not to deny the importance of the ideas it contained, or the novelty of the message, but neither Darwin's nor Wallace's contribution did much more than outline a hypothetical mechanism for describing how varieties, or new species, could arise from an original type.33 Historians have compared the details of the Darwin and Wallace papers in an attempt to discover just how similar or dissimilar their ideas were, but have given little consideration to the impression that the papers made on their readers.

29p. F. Stevens, "George Bentham and the DarwinlWallace papers of 1858: More Myths Surrounding the Origin and Acceptance of Evolutionary Ideas," Linnean, 11: 2 (1995), 16.

30F. Darwin, Life and Letters and Charles Darwin (above, n. 24), 1, 482. The full text of the letter is given in L. Huxley, The Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (London: Murray, 1918), II, 300.

31 J. W. T. Moody, "The Reading of the Darwin and Wallace Papers: An Historical 'Non- Events,' "J. Soc. Bibliog. Nat. Hist., 5 (1971), 474.

32 Ibid., p. 475. Since the Darwin-Wallace papers were read at the beginning of the meeting, it seems unlikely that the members of the Linnean Society would have failed to absorb their message simply because many other papers were read after them.

33 See H. Lewis McKinney, Wallace and Natural Selection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 143, for a possible explanation of why both Darwin and Wallace emphasized the mechanism of change, and did "not discuss the case for evolution."



NATURAL SELECrION BEFORE THE ORIGIN 277

The mechanism that we now know as natural selection was described clearly enough, but its wider implications were given only a brief mention.

Darwin's papers consisted of an extract from his 1844 sketch on species (read by Hooker in the same year) and an abstract of his theory of natural selection, sent to Asa Gray on September 5, 1857. These papers were chosen for the Linnean Society meeting because two reputable naturalists could vouch for their authenticity, thereby establishing Darwin's priority over Wallace in the ideas they presented. The extract from the 1844 essay outlines the basic elements of the mechanism of natural selection; the abstract sent to Gray amplifies this description, and explicitly claims that this process can produce not merely varieties but also new species. The abstract concludes with an image of evolutionary history now well known, that of a branching tree:

This I believe to be the origin of the classification or arrangement of all organic beings at all times. These always seem to branch and sub-branch like a tree from a common trunk; the flourishing twigs destroying the less vigorous, - the dead and lost branches rudely representing lost genera and families.34

Wallace's essay also dwells on the processes of struggle and variation that produce new varieties and species; his claim for the power of natural selection to produce new species is made somewhat more explicitly than Darwin's.35 But, like Darwin, Wallace mentions the deeper historical meaning of this process only briefly at the end of his essay:

This progression by minute steps in different directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is to be believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct and habits which they exhibit.36

To biologists and historians familiar with the Origin these sentences clearly express the idea that natural selection is being invoked to explain the structure and arrangement of all organic nature. But at the Linnean Society, and in

34 This iS the version probably read at the Linnean Society, as cited in CCD, VII, 509 (emphasis in the original). Some small changes were made for the version printed in the Journal of the Linnean Society.

35 This probably because Darwin's contribution was assembled more quickly than Wallace's - not because Wallace was making substantially different claims, as Brackman argues in Delicate Arrangement (above, n. 3), pp. 74-75. Other differences between Wallace's and Darwin's views are discussed in the works cited in n. 25, above.

36 Alfred Russel Wallace, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type," Zool. J. Linn. Soc., 3 (1858), 62.



278 RICHARD ENGLAND

its Proceedings, these unsupported claims closed two papers that offered imaginary examples of a natural process that produced new species and varieties. As Darwin's abstract concluded: "This sketch is most imperfect; but in so short a space I cannot do better. Your imagination must fill up very wide blanks."37 The naturalists who heard and read the Darwin-Wallace papers did not understand the revolutionary importance the authors attached to the processes described because the sketches were indeed "imperfect." For this hard-core inductivist audience, imagination had no place in science. The mechanism was clearly and carefully explained, but its wider effects were so baldly stated that the naturalists who did publicly notice the communication simply did not imagine that they could be taken seriously.

Two little-noticed reactions suggest how conservative naturalists interpreted the Darwin-Wallace papers. Edward Newman, the editor of the Zoologist, was sufficiently impressed by the papers to reprint them in his journal, a typically descriptive, staid publication. The brief comments of Thomas Boyd and Arthur Hussey followed in the same journal in 1859.38 Both made criticisms that were to become common in early reviews of the Origin: the mechanism of natural selection was too speculative, and the authors assumed too much in supposing that variation might be both unlim- ited and beneficial. Interestingly, neither of these critics felt that the wider implications of natural selection were worth taking seriously.

Arthur Hussey opens by noting that Darwin's papers "seem to extend the operation of his theory into a period resembling geological epochs, which carries us at once into the region of conjecture, - a "barren ground," upon the boundaries of which I have no inclination to wander."39 Accordingly, Hussey criticizes only the mechanism of natural selection as a process producing species and varieties. Boyd likewise criticizes natural selection on this level, and closes his brief review with a dismissal of its possible implications. Considering Wallace's last sentence (cited above), Boyd confesses that he is

quite at a loss to know what meaning to attach to it.... Does he mean that by the tendency to vary we may explain all the differences that obtain between different varieties of the same species, or between different species of the same genus, or between different genera of the same order;

37 Charles Darwin, "Abstract of a Letter from C. Darwin Esq., to Prof. Asa Gray, U.S., dated Down, September 5th, 1857," Zool. J. Linn. Soc., 3 (1959), 53.

38Thomas Boyd, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties," Zoologist, 17 (1859), 6357-6359; Arthur Hussey, "The Tendency of Species to Form Varieties," ibid., pp. 6474- 6475. I have been unable to locate any biographical infornation about or publications by these naturalists, apart from other minor notices in the Zoologist. Their responses have been very briefly noticed (as "negative") in Hull, Darwin and His Critics (above, n. 17), pp. 227-228; and Hussey has been cited in Clark, Survival of Charles Darwin (above, n. 2), p. 109.

39 Hussey, "Tendency of Species to Form Varieties," p. 6474.




or, further still, that we may trace back all organic life, as we see it now, to some unknown root in the far-off geological ages, some sponge or polype, or vitalized cell, from which everything has since sprung. The words I have quoted will bear this construction, and if the tendency to vary were a law of indefinite variation, it might carry out this idea; but being what it is, simply a tendency, it seems to me that painting such an ideal picture on the subject is like Science sitting down at the feet of Imagination.40

While Darwin made a plea for imagination, these naturalists were unable to respond: imagination was alien to their zoological creed of empiricism and induction. These early reactions of minor gentlemen naturalists show that they believed strongly in the reality of species. Given that some of their contemporaries could not accept even the closely limited variation of Wollaston's theory, it is not "astonishing" that they were simply unable to consider unsupported claims for the explanatory power of indefinite variation.

While the Darwin-Wallace papers contained a good description of a mechanism for generating new species and varieties, this was only the tip of the natural selection iceberg. Wallace's essay was a preliminary sketch. Darwin's papers were prepared and presented hurriedly: of first importance was the question of priority. A fuller description of the importance of natural selection, and a more widespread reaction, were yet to come. As Darwin worked at the Origin he expressed no surprise that the Linnean Society papers had caused so little stir.41

However, the critical reaction of Hussey and Boyd is not the best evidence that the Darwin-Wallace papers failed to communicate the revolutionary implications of natural selection. For that we must go to the first "posi- tive" response, the sympathetic application of "natural means of selection" in an ornithological study by Tristram.

Tristram: Hero or Traitor?

In the October 1859 issue of the Ibis, the Reverend Henry Baker Tristram published an article "On the Omithology of Northern Africa."42 This work, the result of two winters spent in Algeria, was typical of its class: the report of an energetic amateur naturalist on the fauna or flora of some relatively exotic locale, with a list of species sighted and their locations, the occasional

4 Boyd, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties," p. 6359. 41 See CCD, vol. VII. The only reaction Darwin notices in his correspondence is that of

Samuel Haughton (see n. 3). 42 H. B. Tristram, "On the Ornithology of Northern Africa," Ibis, 1 (1859-60), 415-435.



280 RICHARD ENGLAND

claim of a new species discovered, and, of course, quibbles with the reports of earlier workers. Tristram's article would have been forgotten by historians had they not noticed that in it he applied the theory of natural selection to explain variations in the plumage and structure of a series of desert larks, a month before the Origin was published.

Edward Poulton (1 856-1943), an Oxford neo-Darwinist and early historian of evolution, praised Tristram in Charles Darwin and the Theory of Natural Selection (1896): "one distinguished naturalist publicly accepted the theory of natural selection before the publication of the "Origin of Species," and therefore as the direct result of Darwin's and Wallace's joint paper. This great distinction belongs to Canon Tristram."43 When we read the relevant passages of Tristram's ornithological report, it is easy to see why Poulton was impressed:

Writing with a series of about 100 Larks of various species from the Sahara before me, I cannot help feeling convinced of the truth of the views set forth by Messrs. Darwin and Wallace in their communications to the Linnean Society, to which my friend Mr. A. Newton last year directed my attention, "On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties, and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by natural means of selection." It is hardly possible, I should think, to illustrate this theory better than by the Larks and Chats of North Africa.

In all these birds we trace gradual modifications of coloration and anatomical structure, deflecting by very gentle gradations from the ordi- nary type; but when we take the extremes, presenting most marked differences.44

Tristram suggests that these differences "have a very direct bearing on the ease or difficulty with which the animal contrives to maintain its existence."45 He proceeds to consider the necessity of protective coloration for desert animals:

without exception, the upper plumage of every bird ... and also the fur of all small mammals, and the skin of all the Snakes and Lizards is of one isabelline or sand colour.... There are individual varieties in depth of hue among all creatures. In the struggle for life which we know to be going on among all species, a very slight change for the better, such as improved means of escaping from its natural enemies (which would be

43 Edward Poulton, Charles Darwin and the Theory of Natural Selection (London: Cassell, 1896), p. 92. Tristram was made an honorary canon of Durham Cathedral in 1870, and a residentiary canon in 1873.

44Tristram, "Ornithology of Northem Africa" (above, n. 42), p. 429. Ibid., pp. 429-430.



NATURAL SELECTFION BEFORE THE ORIGIN 281

the effect of an alteration from a conspicuous colour to one resembling the hue of the surrounding objects), would give the variety that possessed it a decided advantage over the typical or other forms of the species. Now in all creatures, from Man downwards, we find a tendency to transmit individual varieties or peculiarities to the descendants. A peculiarity either of colour or form soon becomes hereditary when there are no counteracting causes, either from change of climate, or admixture of other blood. Suppose this transmitted peculiarity to continue for some generations, especially when manifest advantages arise from its possession, and the variety becomes not only a race, with its variations still more strongly imprinted upon it, but it becomes the typical form of that country.46

Tristram's simple illustration of this might have come out of a neo-Darwinian textbook:

To apply the theory to the case of the Sahara. If the Algerian Desert were colonized by a few pairs of Crested Larks, - putting aside the ascertained fact of the tendency of an arid, hot climate to bleach all dark colours, - we know that the probability is, that one or two pairs would be likely of a darker complexion than the others. These, and such of their offspring as most resembled them, would become more liable to capture by their natural enemies, hawks and carnivorous beasts. The lighter coloured ones would enjoy more or less immunity from such attacks. Let this stage of things continue for a few hundred years, and the dark-coloured individuals would be exterminated, the light coloured remain and inhabit the land. This process, aided by the above-mentioned tendency of the climate to blanch the coloration still more, would in a few centuries produce the Galerida abyssinica as the typical form. And it must be noted, that between it and the European G. cristata there is no distinction but that of colour.47

Tristram also explains the difference between the short-billed Galerida isabellina and the long-billed G. arenicola by appealing to natural selection: the former, seeking food in its rocky habitat, needs "strength rather than length"; whereas the latter, seeking food in the deep sand of the desert, "derives a great advantage" from its longer bill.48 Referring to the effects of differing plumage and bill-size, Tristram reflects:

Here are only two causes enumerated which might serve to create as it were a new species from an old one, yet they are perfectly natural causes,

46 Ibid., p. 430. 47Ibid., pp. 430-431. 4 Ibid., p. 431.



282 RICHARD ENGLAND

and such as, I think, must have occurred, and are possibly occurring still. We know so little of the causes which in the majority of cases make species rare or common, that there may be hundreds of others at work, some even more powerful than these, which go to perpetuate and eliminate certain forms "according to natural means of selection." But even these superficial causes appear sufficient to explain the marked features of the Desert races which frequently approach so very closely the typical form, and yet possess such invariably distinctive characteristics, that naturalists seem agreed to elevate them to the rank of species.49

Tristram's use of natural selection, then, seems a keen appreciation of the Darwin-Wallace papers compared with the rather hostile responses of other authors. Poulton noted that Tristram also expressed a belief in special creation, but he refused to see this as a real difference between Tristram and Darwin; he hailed Tristram's paragraphs as "a most complete acceptance of natural selection, at the same time affording excellent examples of its operation."50 Poulton promoted Tristram's claim to fame in his history of natural selection, in presidential addresses to the British Association, and in his Encyclopwdia Britannica (1 1 th ed.) article on Charles Darwin. In Poulton's writings Tristram is presented as a hero, the only naturalist to properly understand natural selection before the Origin was published.

I. Bernard Cohen has recently challenged Poulton's account, suggesting that Tristram was only briefly "converted" to the acceptance of natural selection, and that he was "reconverted" to orthodoxy during the famous debate between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860. Drawing on letters cited in A. F. R. Wollaston's Life of Alfred Newton (1921), Cohen notes that Tristram was outraged by the debate: "Like the clergyman he was, rather than scientist, he saw the new doctrine of evolution as 'one blind plunge into the gulph of atheism and coarsest materialism.' -51 Cohen's interpretation was anticipated by Frederick Burkhardt and David Allen, both of whom have suggested that Tristram retreated from his early acceptance of natural selection for theological reasons.52 For Cohen, the tale of Tristram's conversion to the acceptance of natural selection and his rapid reconversion at

49Ibid., pp. 431-432. 50Poulton cites the last paragraph of the Origin: 'There is a grandeur in this view of life,

with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one" (Poulton, Charles Darwin [above, n. 43], p. 94). Tristran's rather different view of special creation is described below.

51 Cohen, "Three Notes" (above, n. 3), pp. 597-598. 52 F. Burkhardt, "England and Scotland: The Learned Societies," The Comparative Recep-

tion of Darwinism, ed. T. Glick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), p. 52n65; Allen, Naturalist in Britain (above, n. 5), p. 178. See also Clark, Survival of Charles Darwin (above, n. 2), pp. 109-1 10.




the Huxley-Wilberforce debate provides "a striking illustration of the power of the received opinion or current orthodoxy to inhibit the acceptance of the new idea of Darwinian evolution by natural selection."53

Cohen's account has been cited by Adrian Desmond in his biography of Huxley (1994). Here Tristram is pictured as a parson driven back into the trenches of orthodoxy by a blast from Huxley's "Whitworth gun," evolution.54 Cohen concludes that at the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, Tristram "then and there became an anti-Darwinian and remained so for the rest of his life": in effect, a traitor to the Darwinian cause.55 He was not, Cohen says, "a staunch and foremost advocate of Darwinism . .. the impression that is given by Poulton."56

Poulton's and Cohen's visions of Tristram are black and white: anti- Darwinian, or Darwinian. Neither historian, however, considers the zoological context of Tristram's work, or his later studies as a naturalist. Both assume that his use of natural selection entailed a greater acceptance of Darwin's ideas than is justified by the available evidence. A consideration of Tristram's interest in natural history, and a close reading of his article, show that while he accepted, rather than rejected, "natural means of selection," he, like the early critics Hussey and Boyd, treated it as a process acting on species and varieties, and ignored the wider implications of the mechanism. His position was more ambiguous than histories dealing in Darwinism and anti-Darwinism commonly allow.

Tristram Revised

Tristram was bom in Northumberland, educated in classics at Oxford, and became, like his father before him, an evangelical rural vicar. Respiratory illness drove him to seek warmer climes in 1847, and it was as a naval chaplain in Bermuda that he first took up natural history, particularly the collecting of shells and birds.57 In 1849 he returned to England as the rector of

53 Cohen, "Three Notes," p. 598. 54 Adrian Desmond, Huxley: The Devil's Disciple (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), pp. 283,

41 8n26. s5I. Bemard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1985), p. 290. 56 Cohen, "Three Notes" (above, n. 3), p. 597. 57 This biography is drawn from F. S. Bodenheimer, "Canon Henry Baker Tristram of Durham

(1822-1906)," Durham Univ. J., 49 (1957), 94-97; idem, "Canon H. B. Tristram (1822-1906): A Preliminary Bibliography, Obituaries and Other Biographical Notes," Proc. Univ. Durham Phil. Soc. (1957), 12-22; and Tristram's obituary in Proc. Roy. Soc. London, ser. B, 80 (1908), xlii-xliv. For a more comprehensive treatment of Tristram's scientific work see R. A. Baker, "'The Great Gun of Durham' - Canon Henry Baker Tristram, F.R.S. (1822-1906): An Outline



284 RICHARD ENGLAND

Castle Eden, Durham, continuing his work in natural history, and occasionally sending off brief notes to joumals like the Zoologist. In the winters of 1855- 56 and 1856-57 his "weak chest" again compelled him to leave England, and he twice visited Algeria. During his lengthy expeditions to the borders of French colonial territory, Tristram collected and observed enough to provide material for his Ibis article and his first book of popular natural history, The Great Sahara (1860).58 His early work in natural history, like that of most gentlemen naturalists, betrays no interest in questions of transmutation.

In 1859 Tristram was elected president of the Tyneside Naturalists' Field Club, one of England's first natural history societies. In the same year, he was among the founders of the British Omithological Union, with such naturalists as Alfred Newton, Osbert Salvin, and Philip Lutley Sclater; he was also among the first contributors to its journal, the Ibis.

It was Tristram's friend Newton who suggested to him the possible application of natural selection to the desert larks. Having seen Tristram's collection, Newton read the newly published Linnean Society papers in August 1858. In a letter to Tristram a few days thereafter, he suggested that natural selection could explain the variation in plumage and bill-size in Tristram's series of larks.59 Newton, recalling his own reaction to the Darwin-Wallace papers in an 1888 article on "The Early Days of Darwinism," described how he applied it to varieties of desert larks; however, as he remembered it, this application of natural selection did not seem to him to touch on its real meaning:

But it may be said that, after all, such difficulties as I had now found so easily solved were of a kind almost contemptible and beneath the notice of all but a "species-monger." The new theory of Natural Selection might serve perfectly well to explain how one variety or even race could pass into another; it might even serve to establish a Transmutation of Species, on a low view of species; but was it capable of doing more than this? And especially could the process of almost invisible steps ... be attended by such momentous results and end in producing effects so stupendous as those which we now-a-days express by the word Evolution?60

Newton believed that the wider implications of natural selection were indeed justified, but he did not make his support public until after the Origin was

of His Life, Collections, and Contributions to Natural History," Arch. Nat. Hist., 23 (1996), 327-341.

58Henry Baker Tristram, The Great Sahara (London: John Murray, 1860; repr. Darf Publishers, 1985).

59Alexander F. R. Wollaston, Life of Alfred Newton (London: John Murray, 1921), pp. 1 5- 117.

60A. Newton, "The Early Days of Darwinism," Macmillan's Mag., 57 (1888), 246.




published. Indeed, he may not have mentioned his views on the "stupendous" power of natural selection to his friend Tristram. All that appears in Tristram's article is an application of natural selection to a problem, in Newton's words, "beneath the notice of all but a 'species-monger."'

The mention of the Darwin-Wallace papers comes in Tristram's description of the eighty-eighth bird species he noticed in Northern Africa, a new species that he named Certhilauda salvini after his friend Salvin, though he was "aware that it may be termed a local race more properly than a species."61 He compared C. salvini's measurements with those of its nearest relative, C. desertorum, noted the differences in their localities, and cited the authority of an independent observer who agreed "that there were two species, i.e. as species are now made."62 Having alluded to the problem of how naturalists "made" species, Tristram launched into his passage on the series of varying larks cited above. His application of natural selection shows that he accurately understood the process. His conclusions show that he is used it only at the level of varieties and species:

I cannot but hope that ere long ornithologists will systematically recognize, what is already admitted in a great degree by conchologists, the clear distinction between species and race. I do not see any difficulty in taking as the true definition of a species all the individuals who may reasonably be presumed to have a common origin, though among them there may exist races differing from one another, even in a considerable degree.63

In this last sentence both Tristram's debt to Wollaston, and his distance from Darwin and Wallace, are clear. Tristram, like Wollaston, considers species to be real, static entities that include a number of derived varieties. Natural selection is one of the possible causes that produce these varieties. While Tristram clearly understood the mechanism of natural selection, he did not imagine that Darwin and Wallace intended it to be more than a contribution to debates about varieties and species. In applying the mechanism of natural selection he did not consider himself to be supporting a revolution in natural history.

In the last paragraph of his discussion of natural selection, Tristram defends the idea of the direct divine creation of species:

I do not mean for a moment to imply ... that we are to presume to limit Creative Power so far as to endeavour to explain the growth of species universally by the development of individual peculiarities.... But whilst

61 Tristram, "Ornithology of Northern Africa" (above, n. 42), p. 428. 62 Ibid., p. 429.

63Ibid., pp. 431-432.



286 RICHARD ENGLAND

it is contrary alike to sound philosophy and to Christian faith to doubt the creation of many species by the simple exercise of Almighty volition, still, knowing that God ordinarily works by natural means, it might be the presumption of an unnecessary miracle to assume a distinct and separate origin for many of those which we term species. We may speculate on the question for a life-time; this conclusion alone so far is certain, - that every peculiarity or difference in the living inhabitants of each country is admirably adapted by the wisdom of their beneficent Creator for the support and preservation of species.64

Tristram's view that creation by miracle is sometimes an unnecessary hypothesis seems to echo Wollaston's opinion about the insects of the Madeiran islands. Tristram does not differentiate, as Wollaston does, between created species and derived varieties, describing both as "species" - but this indicates only Tristram's looseness of terminology (or, as Newton might put it, his "low view of species"), not an intentional break with the spirit of Wollaston's work. He would have reason to regret this carelessness on the publication of the Origin.

In this conclusion, we can see just how far Tristram is from the thinking of Darwin and Wallace on the implications of natural selection. In the Origin, Darwin would ridicule the doctrine of special creations, and suggest that natural causes act universally. Certainly the popular natural theology that Tristram appeals to in the above passage would soon be subverted, if not destroyed, by Darwin and Darwinism.

The Darwin-Wallace papers concentrated on the mechanism of natural selection: once this was accepted and understood fully, the wider implications would be apparent. But for naturalists like Tristram, the main interest of the papers was the principle that could explain how the slight differences between closely related forms might have come about. Tristram's use of natural selection was not an acceptance of a "doctrine of transmutation," but an attempt, like Wollaston's, to understand the relationship between varieties and species, and to strike against the "species-mongers" who confused them. Tristram's use of natural selection, like the early criticisms of his colleagues, shows that it could be read, from the limited Darwin-Wallace papers, as a mechanism that complemented Wollaston's zoologically orthodox theory of the derivation of varieties from species.

64Ibid., pp. 432-433.



NATURAL SELEC1ION BEFORE THE ORIGIN 287

Tristram on Darwin and the Origin

If Tristram's first use of natural selection was not a "conversion" to Darwin's unorthodox views, his subsequent reaction at the Huxley-Wilberforce debate cannot have been a "reconversion" to orthodoxy. In any event, it was not his first reaction to the ideas contained in the Origin. Three months before the meeting of the British Association in Oxford, Tristram gave his first presidential address to the Tyneside Field Naturalist's Society, in which he carefully reviewed Darwin's volume.65 After briefly describing natural selection, he identified the difference between Darwin's application of the mechanism and his own early response to the Darwin-Wallace papers:

I feel tempted to say a few words on this, especially, as before the publication of Mr. Darwin's work, I had expressed this opinion in a paper published in the Ibis, as to many species of birds which I should rather call local varieties. But Mr. Darwin maintains that the distinction between species and varieties is an arbitrary one; and he challenges his opponents to say wherein the difference consists. That many naturalists ... have needlessly multiplied species, I freely own; and moreover that we frequently apply the term species, for convenience sake, to fonns which, at the same time, we are perfectly well aware are in reality only varieties. But yet I humbly conceive that the distinction may be a very real one, though we may not always be able to draw the line.66

Tristram regretted the "convenient" use his Ibis article had made of the term "species" to indicate what Wollaston and other conservative naturalists would have called "varieties. "67 He went on to criticize Darwin's species skepticism, his assumption of vast amounts of time, and his interpretation of the fossil record. He concluded that "in the present state of science" it was impossible to treat Darwin's theory "as proved or provable."68 His review of the Origin closed with a consideration of the relations between science and religion:

65 Henry Baker Tristram, "President's Address," Trans. Tyneside Nat. Field Club, 4 (1858- 60), 218-228. Darwin had not noted Tristram's reference to natural selection in the Ibis, but mentions his review of the Origin in a letter to Lyell, CCD, VIII, 170.

66Tristram, "President's Address," p. 220. 67 Tristram expressed doubts that Galerida abyssinica, G. isabellina, and G. arenicola were

good species in a letter to the Ibis, 3 (1861), 414-415. Modern ornithologists agree; these species are now classified as subspecies of Galerida cristata. R. Meinertzhagen has claimed that "crested larks have proved a source of trinomial effusion almost arnounting to a jest in the ornithological world" (cited in S. Keith, E. K. Urban, and C. H. Fry, The Birds of Africa (London and New York: Academic Press, 1992), IV, 100- 101).

68Tristram, "President's Address," p. 225.



288 RICHARD ENGLAND

we may rest calmly assured, that however the now vexed question of the origin of species ultimately be decided by science, all proved facts will be found, like their predecessors, in perfect accordance with Scrip- ture... . Let us then push on - let us not shrink from investigating nature in her most recondite arcana - let us state our difficulties in the broadest, frankest manner. God's revealed, and His natural truth, can never be at variance: it is scientifically unphilosophical, it is theologically mischie- vous to imagine so.69

Despite the above-stated opinion, elsewhere in the same review Tristram does claim that science cannot explain human "moral, intellectual, or spiritual faculties," as these are within the province of revelation.70

This sentiment casts light on Tristram's strong private reaction to the famous British Association debate between Huxley and Wilberforce. The exchange of one-liners that raised their impromptu discussion of Darwin's theory to historiographical preeminence was about the ape origin of man.71 Tristram's reaction to the debate may have been a reaction to the wider implications of natural selection, which he had not seen in the Darwin-Wallace papers. In a letter to Newton, Tristram reviled "the argument of noise and sneers by which they put down S. Oxon and everyone who did not subscribe to the God Darwin and his prophet Huxley."72 This response might be attributed to the "episcophagous" quality of Huxley's defense of Darwin, as well as to Tristram's objections to the natural evolution of man.

However, it is an exaggeration to assert that Tristram was an anti-Darwinian for the rest of his life. Throughout his subsequent work in natural history he commented on evolutionary theory; three examples suffice to show that he was more moderate and ambiguous in his views than Cohen has supposed.73

69 Ibid., pp. 227-228. 70Ibid., p. 226. 71 The actual lines were not recorded at the time, and later accounts varied widely: see J.

Vernon Jensen, "Return to the Wilberforce-Huxley Debate," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 21 (1988), 161-179.

72Tristram to Newton, July 31, 1860, in Wollaston, Life of Alfred Newton (above, n. 59), pp. 121-122.

73 In addition to these three examples, Tristram's comments on the history and distribution of life include Henry Baker Tristram, "Recent Geographical and Histonrcal Progress in Zoology," Contemp. Rev., 2 (1866), 108-109, 119-125; idem, "On the Geographical and Geological Relations of the Flora and Fauna of Palestine," Proc. Roy. Soc., London, 16 (1867-68), 316- 319; idem, review of R. Owen's Palwontology, Contemp. Rev., 12 (1869), 132-133; idem, "The Polar Origin of Life Considered in Its Bearing on the Distribution and Migration of Birds," Ibis, 5th ser., 5-6 (1887-88), 204-206, 236-242; idem, "On the Peculiarities of the Avifauna of the Canary Islands," Rep. Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci. (1889), 616; idem, "President's Address," Trans. Nat. Hist. Soc. Northumb. Durh. Newc., 11 (1890-94), 30-31; idem, "President's Address," ibid., 13 (1894-99), 412.




First, at a British Association meeting in 1868 Tristram responded to the Rev. Francis Orpen Morris's paper "On the Difficulties of Darwinism." Morris, a Yorkshire parson naturalist, could not believe that anyone could be taken in by Darwinian nonsense. Wallace answered Morris, and was followed by Tristram, anxious to show a different attitude among men of the cloth. Tristram said that he "thought it best to make a compromise between the extremes of the Darwinians and the religious party."74

Two years later, reviewing Wallace's Contributions to the Theory ofNatural Selection (1 870) in the Contemporary Review, Tristram greeted the placement of man "triumphantly above the operation of ... natural selection": Wallace, to Darwin's dismay, could not see how certain human mental and physical characteristics could have evolved, and had to propose a supernatural agen- cy to explain them; Tristram expressed his belief in the divine creation of man, and credited Wallace's work with enabling naturalists "to retain this belief among with a frank and cordial acceptance of the theory of natural selection."75

Finally, in 1893 Tristram was president of the biological section of the British Association. In his address he cited his own early application of natural selection before the publication of the Origin, and referred to Darwin as "our great master."76 Perhaps this may explain why Poulton, writing his history three years later, did not refer to Tristram as an anti-Darwinist.

Conclusion

When Thomas Bell claimed that there had been no revolutionary discoveries made in 1858, he was quite right - at least as far as the gentlemen naturalists were concerned. In the one case in which the process presented in the Darwin-Wallace papers was publicly accepted, it was absorbed into a more conservative discussion about the proper definition of species and varieties. The few lines at the end of the Darwin-Wallace papers that proclaim to us their evolutionary implications and revolutionary significance, were understood by gentlemen naturalists to be imaginative speculation that was not worth considering. After all, they could not agree on the significance of Wollaston's attempted revision of species, which was based on a very limited concep- tion of variation; they could not imagine that the implications of indefinite variation should be taken seriously. Wollaston's work on the Variation of

74Athenceum, September 19, 1868, p. 373. 75H. B. Tristram, review of Contribution to the Theory of Natural Selection, by A. R. Wallace,

Contemp. Rev., 15 (1870), 310-311. 76 H. B. Tristram, "Presidential Address to Section D," Rep. Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci. (1893), 797.



290 RICHARD ENGLAND

Species provided the framework for Tristram's pioneering application of natural selection. Tristram was not "reconverted" to zoological orthodoxy on the publication of the Origin, or at the Huxley-Wilberforce debate: in accepting natural selection before November 1859, he had never left it.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor M. P. Winsor, Professor Alexander Baker, Charlotte deVries, and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments on this paper. While researching and writing I was supported by a University of Toronto Open fellowship.



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