The development of Darwin's theory : natural history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859 / Dov Ospovat.

  • Ospovat, Dov.
Date:
1995, ©1981
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The development of Darwin's theory : natural history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859 / Dov Ospovat. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Notes to pp. 140-4 from the Eocene and Miocene; Hipparion, and a species of Equm from the Pliocene. Owen also discussed these same fossils in his lectures at the School of Mines in 1857 and again, this time as evidence of descent, in 1868 in his On the Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:791-2, 825. It was in the following year that Huxley happened to be looking critically into the bearing of paleontological facts upon the doctrine of evolution and discovered that the series of horselike fossils provided demonstrative evidence of it {American Addresses, pp. 83-4). 60 Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:789-92; the references to Cuvier are to Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles, i:lvii. 61 And also because of its dissemination through Spencer's evolutionary writings; see above, n. 4. 62 Richard Owen, On the Nature of Limbs, p. 84. 63 I have in mind particularly Owen's delicate position as an employee of the Royal College of Surgeons, to which his letters in the Owen MSS, Royal College of Surgeons, and Owen Collection, British Museum (Natural History) give ample testimony. 64 Richard Owen, Teleology of the Skeleton of Fishes; Limbs, p. 86. 65 See Chapter 1, p. 21. 66 See the perceptive discussion by John H. Brooke, Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds. 67 R. S. S. Baden-Powell, Essays on the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy, . . . pp. 108, 135, 253-8, 261-2, 400-1, among others. 68 Brooke, Brewster-Whewell Debate, pp. 232-33. 69 [Whewell], Plurality of Worlds; pp. 240-7, 253, 270, 274, 371. This of course was an old argument; see Robert Boyle, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 5:423. 70 [Whewell], Plurality of Worlds, pp. 246-7. In discussing the significance of Whewell's position John Brooke, it seems to me, does not consider the possibility that Whewell distinguished between a universal law of develop¬ ment and a law of development established at the time of the creation of life on earth. If he was making such a distinction, it would not be nonsensical to see his essay as 2ir\ú-Vestiges but at the same time, in allowing the possibility of transmutation, proto-Darwinian (Brewster-Whewell Debate, p. 272). 71 See for instance J. Piveteau, Vertebrate Paleontology, p. 447; Todes, Kovalevskii, pp. 120-3, 141. Peter Bowler's much more satisfactory account stresses the significance of the new interpretations of the fossil record before 1859 (Fossils and Progress, esp. pp. 93-115). 72 See especially Owsei Temkin, German Concepts of Ontogeny and History around 1800; see also Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, pp. 33-63; and Lenoir, Generational Factors. On the transition to a historical viewpoint in geology, see W. R. Albury and D. R. Oldroyd, From Renaissance Mineral Studies to Historical Geology, in the Light of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. 73 This also was not an isolated development. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 226-32, 263-79. 259