Historical Science

Critical history, recognizing that the past was genuinely different, came to fruition in Germany, notably with Johann Herder, at the beginning of the century. Cuvier, working on fossils from the quarries of Montmartre, reconstructed past creatures amid great excitement, sorting out different animals from the usually disjointed bones, and recognizing that there were a series of distinct faunas beneath Paris. He inferred that there must have been a series of catastrophes separating the different strata, with the mammoth found quick-frozen in Siberia as a victim of such an event. Charles Lyell in England challenged this view in 1830–3, with his Principles of Geology: An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation . Instead of catastrophes, he required ordinary forces over tens or hundreds of million of years. His teacher in Oxford, William Buckland, who had upheld the reality of Noah’s Flood, was convinced; and in his geological Bridgewater Treatise of 1836 he conveyed the sweep of geological time with a frontispiece over a metre long when folded out. Pre- biblical time did not worry Buckland, his theologian friend Edward Pusey or Adam Sedgwick, his opposite number at Cambridge: but they discerned progress over time, as fish gave way to reptiles, and they to mammals, seeing in this God’s providence as the world was prepared for mankind, with a cool climate to be moderated by ingenious use of coal, wood and iron. Lyell rejected evolutionary theory in Lamarck’s version; but his refutation made it known, and it filled the notorious and very successful anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844, written by the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers and used by Alfred Tennyson who coined the famous phrase ‘Nature red in tooth and claw.’ For Lyell, past time was cyclic rather than progressive; the dinosaurs might come back again under suitable conditions; and there was no real and irreversible historical change, nothing really new under the sun.

For Darwin his disciple, it was different. Returning from his voyage on HMS Beagle,

he worked out the idea that organisms had developed through natural selection in Thomas Malthus’s ‘struggle for existence’, which generated HERBERT SPENCER’s ‘survival of the fittest’. Lorenz Oken and other Germans had followed Goethe in seeing behind the common plan of homologies an ideal being realized through time, but there was no credible mechanism for evolution—a word Darwin avoided in On the Origin of Species,

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1859, because it had overtones of progress. His process was open-ended, and organisms might go up or down in the world: the barnacles upon which he became an authority were cousins of the shrimps and lobsters, who had very successfully adopted the lifestyle of the much humbler limpet. His was a great synthesis, bringing together Linnaeus’s taxonomy, Humboldt’s biogeography, Cuvier’s palaeontology and the experience of stockbreeders and pigeon-fanciers. Although there were many gaps, pointed out by scientists like Richard Owen (the first superintendent of the Natural History Museum in London, who had earlier reconstructed the moa from a single bone) as well as by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, those armed with Darwin’s theory could go beyond descriptive science and explain why creatures were the way they were. This might seem a just-so story, not rigorously testable, but history is not like physics, where experiment isolates one cause, but a messy business, unpredictable in detail, of multiple causes and conditions. Resisted at first especially in France, evolutionary theory had generally prevailed by the time Darwin died in 1882; and in anthropology, and even astronomy and chemistry, evolution was the magic word. But the austere and open-ended theory of Darwin and his ally ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE was rejected by most contemporaries in favour of a more progressive and Lamarckian view.

Historical Science