The red notebook of Charles Darwin / edited, with an introduction and notes by Sandra Herbert.
- Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882.
- Date:
- 1980
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: The red notebook of Charles Darwin / edited, with an introduction and notes by Sandra Herbert. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![INTRODUCTION 7 entry on page 129 of the Red Notebook must have been written after the end of January 1837. How long after can best be determined by considering the context in which Darwin's remarks on the Macrauchenia were made. To do so it is necessary to consider Darwin's remarks on species in the second part of the Red Notebook as a unit. The whole run of entries on species in the second part of the Red Notebook is important for the hmited purpose of dating specific passages, such as those referring to the Macrauchenia. It is also essential for the larger purpose of establishing a date for Darwin's arrival at a belief in the mutability of species. On this last point it should be stated that while Darwin's observations during the Beagle voyage were fundamental to his work on evolution, his notes from the voyage do not reveal him to have been an evolutionist. He was at the stage of asking basic questions.® It should also be stated that there has previously been no fully satisfying evidence to document Darwin's own claim that he began to form his views on the species question in 'about' March 1837.® Undoubtedly the chief significance of the Red Notebook is that it provides such evidence. In the Red Notebook are found explicit indications that Darwin was ready to assert the possibility that ... one species does change into another... (Red Note¬ book, p. 130). Equally important, Darwin's remarks on the species question in the second part of the notebook are sufficiently extended to allow one to characterize his position in some detail. Darwin's remarks on species in the second part of the notebook are directed towards three general topics: the geographical distribution of species, a comparison between the distribution of species through time and through space, and the gener¬ ation of individuals and species. The central theoretical notion to emerge with respect to geographical distribution is that of the 'representation of species' (p. 130), or what Darwin referred to in his autobiography as 'the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southwards over the [South American] Conti¬ nent. . From this notion Darwin drew the tentative conclusion that such rep¬ resentative species as (to take his example) the two South American rheas had descended from a common parent (p. 153e). It is important to point out that in drawing this conclusion, Darwin chose to avoid a Lamarckian understanding of the bounding of species.® For Lamarck, species graded indistinguishably into one another. In contrast, Darwin perceived differences between even the most closely related species, a perception captured by his notion of representative species and confirmed by the judgements of taxonomic authorities.® The word he employed to describe this situation was 'inosculation', a medical term referring to the joining of one blood vessel to another. Because he saw species inosculating rather than grading into one another, Darwin believed at the time he wrote this entry that species change, or transmutation, must be produced 'at one blow' (p. 217), or 'per saltum' (p. 130). Transmutation and representative species aside, however, there are other statements in the notebook which bear on Darwin's more general understanding of the identity of species as correlated with geographical location and range. One such passage argues that 'new creations' of species are independent of the size of the land area inhabited by the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18032783_0022.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
