The red notebook of Charles Darwin / edited, with an introduction and notes by Sandra Herbert.

  • Charles Darwin
Date:
1980
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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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    12 SANDRA HERBERT Although the final word on the fossil mammals came from Richard Owen in both cases, Darwin's dependence on professional judgement is more obvious in the case of the Macrauchenia, for, unlike the glyptodon-armadillo relationship, Darwin had not formed any judgement of his own on the specimen before learning Owen's opinion. Professional judgement was equally important to Darwin's second insight respecting species on Galapagos archipelago.^® In a key passage in his Ornitho¬ logical Notes, written before specialists had examined his collection, Darwin recorded his suspicion that the various Galápagos mockingbirds were only varieties since they differed very slightly from one another and filled the same place in Nature The phrase only varieties is significant in this context since naturalists traditionally used the term 'variety' to indicate groups which had been subject to some departure from type. When John Gould declared that the mockingbirds comprised three good species, Darwin could the more easily believe that the stability of Species had been undermined. Further, Darwin was then free to consider geographical isolation as a vehicle for species change. John Gould's recognition of a species-level distinction between the two rheas was a similar case; it invited the speculations on pages 127 and 130 of the Red Notebook. Without Gould's judgements Darwin could not have proceeded as he did, and, conversely, everything Darwin later did referred back in some way to these early professional opinions for support. Indeed in his formal presentation of his Beagle material Darwin took pains to emphasize that professional judgement must be relied on. Speaking of the Galápagos mockingbirds in particular he wrote: I may observe, that [if] some naturalists may be inclined to attribute these differences to local varieties. . . then the experience of all the best ornithologists must be given up, and whole genera must be blended into species.^® The significance of a March 1837 date for the origin of Darwin's new views on species thus derives from his reception at that time of the views of recognized zoologists with respect to key specimens from his collection. In itself this is logical enough since for Darwin to attempt an answer to the species question he had first to understand what his colleagues meant by a species in relation to his own collections. We can now return to consider the notebook as a whole. As already mentioned, Darwin opened the notebook in May or June 1836. From internal evidence, namely the reference on page 143e to the 20 April 1837 issue of the Athenceum and the reference on page 178 to the subject matter of conversations Darwin was having with Robert Brown in April and May 1837, the inference can be drawn that the notebook was completed by May 1837 at the earliest. More cautiously one might wish to set the closing date at June 1837. In either case the Red Notebook was in use for something like a year. Clearly it was an important year, spanning the closing months of the voyage and the first eight or nine months back in England. It was also a year of transition, the change from one way of life to another being reflected in the pages of