We saw in the previous section how the idea of an ancient earth was firmly established among most of the formally- and the self-educated classes long before 1859. Yet the development of naturalistic geology from the seventeenth century to the Victorian age had not fundamentally challenged the biblical idea of the uniqueness of the human race; rather, humanity was seen as the crowning glory in an ancient planet.
On the other hand, it is false to assume that before Charles Darwin no one had seriously considered evolution – or, under its older name, “transmutationism”. Quite the contrary, in fact: by the time Darwin published Origin in 1859, naturalistic species-change ideas had been discussed for almost two centuries. Indeed, on page 291 of his 1668 “Earthquake Discourse”, Robert Hooke not only speaks of extinction but says “that ’tis not unlikely also but that there may be divers new kinds [of living creatures] now, which have not been from the beginning”. An opinion he repeats in other places. And let us not forget that these “Discourses” were first delivered to Royal Society meetings with clerical FRSs in his audience. Of course, Hooke was not proposing any biological mechanism for this change – just noting the stratigraphic appearance of new forms, whether divinely or naturally created. Yet as he makes clear elsewhere in his “Discourses”, every classically educated gentleman was familiar with the notion of species change from Greek mythology, though that, admittedly, was not the same thing as science.
I would, however, be cautious about reading too much evolution into Hooke’s remarks on fossils and species change. For Hooke was a physicist by instinct, not a natural historian, and was primarily interested in the physics of earth-forming processes, and not so much in living creatures themselves.
All of these ideas and speculations about geology, fossils, and species, moreover, would have been readily available to John and Charles Wesley when they were undergraduates at Oxford. For Hooke, let us remember, like the Wesleys, had been a Christ Church man, and a copy of his Posthumous Works (1705), containing the “Earthquake Discourses”, has been in the Christ Church library for nearly 300 years (yes, I have checked) – not to mention copies in the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries!
Yet let us not lose sight of the fact, as noted in Chapter 2, that comparative anatomists had been aware since classical times that human and higher-animal bodies shared an enormous number of structural and functional features. Indeed, the Scottish nobleman Lord Monboddo, whom Dr Samuel Johnson encountered when visiting Scotland in 1773, was well known for his opinion that humans were related to monkeys, and there seems to have been jokes doing the rounds about men with tails. But the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion in the eighteenth century, geological timescales apart, was that species were fixed. And that view, on its highest authority, derived not from the Bible, but from scientific botany and natural history. For the great Swedish botanist and medical doctor Carl von Linnaeus, of Uppsala University, argued from the best available evidences that while species were incredibly diverse, they seemed to be fixed, although he was puzzled by certain hybrid varieties. And from around 1780 to 1850, every medical student in Europe and America would have known Linnaeus’s works on botanical classification, for botany was fundamental to pharmacy.
The first published scientific, albeit speculative, discussion about species change, however, came out between 1794 and 1796, for over those years Dr Erasmus Darwin, FRS, an eminent physician and naturalist of Lichfield, Staffordshire, published the poem entitled Zoonomia. And Dr Erasmus Darwin was none other than Charles Darwin’s grandfather! In this treatise, written in poetic verse, Dr Erasmus discussed the merging of plants under environmental pressures to produce new forms, or species, inspired in part by his knowledge of plant speciation, and in part by his professional interest in hereditary diseases. For what exactly was it that passed down through the generations to make plants, animals, and humans the beings that they were? Indeed, heredity and the transmission of characteristics was fascinating the doctors of this time, as it would later fascinate Charles Darwin. Why, for instance, earlier naturalists had asked, did the offspring of performing animals in circuses find it easier to learn tricks than ordinary animals? Were they just quicker at learning, or did they inherit something from their parents? And what is the cause of biological variation, in so far as offspring never replicate their parents exactly? In On the Origin of Species chapter 1, Darwin even cites a prominent scientific divine for substantiation of this biological point, for in 1822, and then especially in 1837, the subsequent Very Revd Dean of Manchester, William Herbert, had reported that “horticultural experiments have established, beyond the possibility of refutation, that botanical species are only a higher and more permanent class of varieties”: an opinion which he also extended to animals. So there were even deans of the Church of England conducting experiments into species change, were there?
And in the year that Charles Darwin was born, 1809, the French anatomist and zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published his Philosophie Zoologique, which, along with his other writings, proposed the first biological mechanism to explain species variation and transmutation. Could it be that useful traits acquired by the parent stock were passed on to the offspring – the “inheritance of acquired characteristics”, as it came to be known? Sadly, we have allowed Lamarck’s brilliant researches and biological insights – incorrect as they are now known to be – to be entirely swamped in a focused obsession with Darwin as the only worthwhile evolutionary scientist.
Yet by the 1820s, and in the wake of a growing body of discoveries, many scientists were expressing qualms about species fixity. Dr Robert Edmund Grant of Edinburgh, for instance, who between 1825 and 1827 would exert a profound influence on the student Charles Darwin, was one of them. Grant was fascinated by primitive invertebrates: marine creatures such as jellyfish, with no skeleton and only the most rudimentary form of nervous system. Yet they thrived in their simple lifestyles, and seemed to have relatives in the ancient geological record. Why, though, if the world had been moulded by vast global catastrophes wiping out all creatures, to be followed by God restocking the planet with a new, more advanced special creation, had these rudimentary organisms survived? Perhaps geological catastrophes were relatively local, and species survived, varied, and changed depending on circumstances?
And in an anatomical and biological context, German “Naturphilosophie” scientists, such as Lorenz Oken, asked about the nature of life forces. Many were fascinated by “recapitulation biology”, or the theory that lower life forms often had features that were “recapitulated” or developed in higher ones, as though an unbroken lineage connected them. Foetuses especially were subjected to scrutiny. Was it not remarkable, for example, that frogs, mice, cats, monkeys, and humans all seemed to go through similar embryological stages? Could it be that all were driven by the same “life force” and that whether a creature was destined to be a frog or a human somehow depended upon a continuing developmental process? Did frogs then stop developing earlier than humans? By 1844, there was no shortage in the literature of research and speculation by scientists and philosophers about the nature of life, and organic development. They were connected to geology, zoology, embryology, early organic chemistry, and even astronomy – for did not the newly discovered ice ages, sunspot cycle, ultraviolet and infrared radiation, and cyclical changes in the terrestrial magnetic field all indicate that the earth’s surface was being bombarded with both internal and external “energy” that might perhaps affect foetuses? And I specify 1844, because that is when the first “transmutationist” bombshell hit the English-speaking, then the European, popular press. And it so alarmed the 35-year-old Darwin that he put his own maturing evolutionary ideas on the back burner.
The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was the bombshell. Published anonymously in Edinburgh, it was the literary sensation of the year. For its author, the Scottish publisher and widely read scientific “amateur” Robert Chambers, no doubt sensed that it would be a bestseller long before he even sent his manuscript to the family printing factory.
Written in the accessible style of a seasoned journalist, Vestiges caused an uproar. Its anonymity further fanned the flames, as a whole array of eminent public men with known scientific tastes, including Prince Albert and even Charles Darwin, were suggested in the newspapers as the possible author. And drawing on his science editor’s extensive knowledge of contemporary British and European publications across a gamut of sciences, this, in a nutshell, is what Chambers said. (1) Could not life on earth have originated in an oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen chemical “soup”, activated by electricity? (2) Could not the resulting primitive life forms have been gradually modified by natural forces? (3) Are living forms the products of countless natural-forces-induced foetal changes, taking us, over vast ages, from microscopic blobs (the function of cells as biological agents was not properly understood until after 1858) to modern creatures? (4) And have the oceans, continents, and their animal populations come about not by catastrophes, but by endless, gentle “causes now in operation” forces? And by implication, who knows what will happen in the countless millennia that lie ahead?
On the other hand, Chambers was not denying that there had been an original act of creation, nor was he denying that God had set the whole thing in motion; rather, he was developing a naturalism that had been implicit in Western science since Galileo and the natural theology of the early Royal Society. Did not God work through his great laws and “secondary causes”?
Of course, many clergymen reviled the book. Yet the greater fury came from the scientific reviewers. Perhaps they were horrified to see their patient and meticulous researches given such an alarming and radical twist. And, heresy of heresies, the book was written in a style which, as the Cambridge clerical geologist the Revd Professor Adam Sedgwick fulminated, enabled it to be easily read by servants and innocent young ladies! Deeply corrupting, in fact! On the other hand, it says something for the sheer pluralism and freedom of early Victorian society that many others laughed and thoroughly enjoyed the fulminations. The newly founded Punch, for instance, saw good, humorous copy in Vestiges.
So once again, when we encounter the po-faced secularists’ tale that when On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, an innocent, churchgoing, subservient Victorian populace went into fibrillations of horror, hysterically reached for their smelling salts, and clutched their Bibles to their hearts, we know that we are dealing with anti-historical atheist mythology. For several decades of geology, a geologically educated elite, popular geology, biblical criticism, French positivism in English translation, and learned articles on recent biological ideas in the “quality” newspapers and review journals had well prepared the people of 1859 to see Darwin’s work in its proper social, cultural, and intellectual context.