The Zoologist/4th series, vol 1 (1897)/Issue 673/From Buffon to Darwin

by Thomas Roscoe Rede Stebbing

 

FROM BUFFON TO DARWIN.

By the Rev. T.R.R. Stebbing, M.A., F.R.S., F.L.S.

[The Author has favoured us with the following revised report of his Presidential Address to the First Congress of the South-Eastern Union of Scientific Societies, held at Tunbridge Wells in May last.—Ed.]

 

The Societies which have joined our Union are almost exclusively Natural History Societies. They are quite friendly to philosophy and literature, to mathematics and chemistry, to agriculture and political economy, to astronomy and the use of the globes, but they find their own more special and serious employment in zoology, botany, and geology. Towards these branches of knowledge the attitude of the public mind has changed in an extraordinary manner during the last hundred and fifty years. Fully to explain how this change has been brought about would require a volume—such a volume as Sir John Lubbock, or Sir Archibald Geikie, or Mr. Lecky might produce with fascinating effect. My intention to-day is only to recall briefly to your memories some of the more striking factors in the revolution.

In the forefront may be set a certain number of men whose work has had the distinctive quality of sooner or later exciting enthusiasm.

Of the French naturalist Buffon it has been said that "the warmth of his style and the brilliancy of his imagination are inimitable." In these days we are inclined to cavil when too much of the imaginative element is introduced into descriptive zoology, but Buffon had knowledge as well as brilliance, and was able by this combination to win the attention of Christendom to his accounts of the animal kingdom. Evidence direct and indirect of his merit and importance may be drawn from two very different sources. The direct is found in the circumstance that the famous French school of zoologists in the first half of this century called their encyclopædic history of animals 'Suites à Buffon.' They were content to describe it as a continuation of what Buffon had begun. The indirect evidence may be taken from our own Oliver Goldsmith, of all English authors perhaps at once the most vain and the most delightful. He himself wrote a Natural History, though he can scarcely disguise his contempt for naturalists. He confesses that at first he had thought of translating the credulous Pliny, and of adding his own precious comments to make the work amusing, treating, as he says, what he then conceived to be an idle subject in an idle manner. But Buffon's 'History of Quadrupeds' appeared, and Goldsmith bowed to the authority of a master mind.

The same year that gave Buffon to France gave to Sweden Linnæus. His name, like Shakespeare's, is one of the few so perfectly familiar everywhere, so universally renowned and cherished, that the owner of it seems to belong to every land as much as to his actual birthplace. He taught the world that Nature has a system. He took all naturalists for his pupils, and taught them how to speak. He taught them, I mean, how to name the objects of their study. He did in this respect for science what the inventors of money did for trade and commerce. He bade us designate each species by a couple of words instead of by a descriptive paragraph. By thus making simple and easy what before was complicated and cumbrous, he for the first time made possible a thorough discussion of all plants and animals, and threw open the study to mankind at large. Moreover, he took for his pupils men of special devotion, Kalm and Hasselquist and Forskal and many others, and sent them travelling over the world to observe its treasures. He made an orderly record of all the natural history objects discovered by all men everywhere. He gave, in short, by his example and by his teaching, by what he himself did and by what he induced others to do, such an impetus to our science as no one man had ever given it before.

The name of James Hutton is far less dazzling, by far less widely celebrated, than that of Linnæus; but it has been shown by those competent to judge that Hutton's services to science were of the order which can truly be described as epoch-making. His 'Theory of the Earth' upset many ancient opinions as deeply rooted as mountain chains, as widely spread as the main oceans. Contrary to the apparent evidence of men's senses, he maintained that the crust of the globe is a great piece of machinery perpetually at work. When you travel between Tunbridge Wells and London, you know that the train on the railway is kept going under the influence of fire and water. But before Hutton men little realized that the everlasting hills and seas with barriers supposed to be impassable were likewise under the influence of fire and water repeatedly exchanging places. When Hutton put forward the truth, there were few at first to believe it.

Before Hutton died, William Smith was at work. No Linnæus has yet arisen to regulate the naming of human beings. Therefore this William Smith has to be distinguished from others of the same name in an unscientific and roundabout manner. By one of the singular genealogical expressions which are used to confer honour, he is known as "The Father of English Geology." He became the parent of this giant offspring when he was as yet little more than a boy, by discovering the laws of stratification. He made it clear that the layers of the stratified rocks could not have all been formed at once, that the sequence in position of upper and lower implied a sequence in age of newer and older. If in housebuilding it would be difficult for a man to begin with the attics and the roof, and afterwards to lay the foundation and construct the ground-floor, it would be equally difficult for Nature, after laying down one stratum upon the ocean-bed, to deposit a newer one, not on the top of the older, but underneath it. William Smith showed, moreover, that the relics of life are not distributed hap-hazard through the water-formed rocks, but that over large areas there is a definite relation between the age of a stratum and the character of its fossils, from which it follows that, at least within those areas, at different ages of the rocks there have been differing sets of living organisms. In this respect the strata must not be compared with our houses, for an old Elizabethan mansion may shelter a family of the Victorian age, and the same ancient abbey enshrine the bones of warriors and poets of many successive periods; but in an old Silurian stratum you will never find Cretaceous or Miocene fossils.

Born in the very same year with William Smith, but in a different rank of life, was the illustrious Cuvier, Georges Chrétien Léopold Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier. Goldsmith somewhere speaks of the public as "that miscellaneous being, at variance within itself, from the differing influences of pride, prejudice, and incapacity." The genius of Cuvier was able to inspire this "miscellaneous being" with an interest in the science of comparative anatomy. Few minds could fail to be struck and powerfully impressed by the wonderful principle of correlation, which enables the skilful anatomist from a small portion of an organism ideally to reconstruct the whole fabric; from a fossil tooth, to explain the shape, the food, the habits of an animal that had never been seen by the eye of any mortal man. Round Cuvier gathered a great band of scientific workers, and in his own special subject he remains the monumental standard of comparison by which other men's abilities are estimated.

A colloquial but expressive phrase describes a dull boy by saying that "he will never set the Thames on fire." In the estimate of his friends apparently Charles Darwin was a dull boy. He ended by setting not only the Thames on fire, but the whole world ablaze, with the light and heat that his speculations kindled. What Linnæus had been to the latter half of the eighteenth century, that was Darwin to the latter half of the nineteenth. The artificial classification of Linnæus is discarded by botanists. Every specialist can in his own subject point out errors committed by Linnæus. And yet the glory of the man remains untarnished. Natural History of the modern era began with him. He is the founder of it. In like manner the fame of Darwin will not suffer diminution, if some of those whom he has sent wandering through the thousand avenues of research find something to correct in his arguments or to modify in his theories. Biology of the modern era began with him. He is the founder of it.

Whether any of these illustrious men personally deserved credit is a pleasing subject ever open to debate. Original ideas always run two risks, first of being condemned as mischievous novelties, and then of being stigmatized as shameless plagiarisms. The ancients have constantly been convicted of stealing our best jokes, and they have evidently tried to rub the gloss off some of our finest scientific discoveries by rather too plainly speaking of them before they were made. Therefore, while extolling the men who seem to have been most signally effective in raising natural science out of obscurity into prominence, we may readily own that minds and ideas, like species, are no result of abrupt creation, but the product of a long process of evolution. These men were as seeds that had lighted upon a fertile soil. The age was ripe for them. We shall not be unmindful of the brilliant company of their peers, a long procession extending from the past into the present, a glorious muster-roll, including such men as Harvey and Redi, Ray and Réaumur, Pallas and Humboldt, Savigny and Lamarck, De Candolle and Milne-Edwards, Playfair and Barrande, Sedgwick and Lyell, Owen and Huxley, with others too numerous now to mention, all of whom have passed away, but have obligingly left for our benefit inheritors of their inexhaustible industry, their skill in controversy, their lucidity of style, their penetrating insight, and other enlivening gifts of genius.

Auxiliary to the wits of the naturalists, and giving the modern period a substantial advantage over earlier ages, there have been a series of triumphs won by other men's wits, for other purposes and in other domains. Carry back your minds to the almost unthinkable time when printing was unknown, when as yet there was no post office and no freedom of the press, when paper was costly, and when men had to do their travelling without steamers and without railways. You will see that under those conditions naturalists were almost as helpless as monkeys, elephants, dogs, and other sagacious animals which are kept at a low level of civilization because their means of communicating and keeping on record bright and improving ideas are so extremely imperfect.

Work of astonishing accuracy has no doubt often been done by lovers of nature with very simple apparatus, but the modern student will not disown his indebtedness to the perfection of modern appliances, and especially to the improvements in the microscope. These, or rather those who devise them, have progressively been making research more easy, more fruitful, more attractive. The wonder of the thing appeals not only to the man with a purpose, but to the man without one, and in the exaltation of science the concurrence of the idle, the leisurely, the contemplative, is not to be despised. From the law court and the camp, from the ledger and the counting house, men turn sometimes for amusement's sake to Natural History. They find it a delightful and absorbing pastime. That in itself is something. But, though the original motive may have been "to treat an idle subject in an idle manner," the original motive will often be outgrown. In the use of the microscope one thing is very likely to happen. A curious sensation of shame will steal over an observer when he becomes conscious that what is really ridiculously small is not the animal or plant which he is handling, but his own knowledge of its functions and powers and organization. This very feeling, however, will give him an assurance that he has an endowment for life in things strange and beautiful to be observed and studied. Nature is prodigal, and in the hope of rearing a couple of sprats will produce five thousand eggs, and more than half a million for a couple of flounders. We need not then be surprised if many hundreds or thousands of observers are used up in unproductive labour or self-amusement for every true light of science that shines upon a generation. Yet the laborious accumulation of knowledge by very humble workers may ultimately be of service to mankind. Thus Gilbert White of Selborne not improbably traces the extirpation of leprosy from this part of the globe to the improved knowledge and therewith the greatly extended use of vegetables. So happy a result could never have been foreseen by the botanists who trifled away their unremembered lives in studying kales and carrots and "sweet smallage."

It is commonly supposed that the advance of science has been greatly hindered by the persistent and often recurring opposition of theologians. That may be true of the middle ages, but of the last century and our own it is extremely doubtful. The new views on the age of the earth, on the antiquity of man, on the transmutation of species, severally in their turn aroused, it is true, the most violent hostility. The evidence adduced crashed in among accepted beliefs like the bomb of a nihilist. Denunciation and ridicule were freely employed against the new opinions. The "conspiracy of silence" was adopted wherever it could be made effective. The social discouragements, which we all more or less unconsciously apply to those whose opinions we dislike, were no doubt brought to bear as remorselessly as ever upon the happiness and prosperity of many outspoken geologists and evolutionists. But the very fierceness of the controversies helped to arouse attention and keep it awake. Besides, the age was an age in which freedom had found her voice, and the country in which the controversy began was the sworn lover of freedom. Hence it came about that Geology, the science which deals not in warm life and lovely colours, but in mud and stones and bones and old refuse, obtained a predominance and a publicity which it could not otherwise easily have secured. Persons of candid mind would naturally wish to hear both sides of an exciting question. Persons of pre-occupied mind would still sometimes wish to see for themselves what nonsense the geologists were writing. Of course it was foolish of them, for if a man has made up what he calls his mind he ought never to hear the other side. But anyhow, through wisdom or through folly, by degrees the light of truth was enabled to penetrate some of the darkest corners of prejudice, and the process still continues.

For truth to win any lasting and valuable victory, it is essential that contradictory opinions should be brought face to face. Facts so opposed that they cannot be true together should be confronted one with another, and the antagonism of each to each made manifest and expressly declared. Now, the men of science, with rare exceptions, make no claim from the scientific point of view to know what goes on in Heaven or in Hades; but, as I understand the matter, they are modestly certain that our globe has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years; that within the human period the whole of its surface has never been submerged at once; that no human being ever lived to the age of nine hundred years; that the human species began quite otherwise than with an abruptly created pair; that no woman was ever formed of a rib taken from the side of a man; that no serpent ever spoke with human voice to tempt a woman, or for any other purpose; that no warrior, however noble or sacred his cause, ever stayed for a single instant the cosmical motion of earth, or moon, or sun; that the rainbow has exhibited the colours of the solar spectrum to living eyes capable of perceiving them in absolute independence of any terrestrial inundation, past or future; and that the diversity of human languages, due to causes still in operation, has been the result of gradual divergence, not of any sudden supernatural intervention. But again, as I understand the matter, a large body of our pastors and masters, of men who have a prescriptive right and a splendid vantage-ground for teaching morality and religion, deny in these respects what the men of science affirm, and affirm what they deny, or else they ignore the matter, or else they are ignorant of the points in dispute and take no interest in them. But the fact is that no one can stop the revolution of the earth by simply saying that it does not move, and no teacher can influence his disciples if in his argument he pre-supposes as accepted and impregnable truth what they, rightly or wrongly, regard as incredible legends.

If even opposition has promoted the knowledge of nature, much more must the innumerable societies established expressly for its promotion have been efficacious. The growing appreciation of science led to their being founded. Their foundation has led to an ever-extending growth in the appreciation of science. Much the same may be said of periodical scientific literature, although that is a subject almost too mountainous, too labyrinthine to enter upon just now. So, too, it is impossible here to make more than a passing allusion to the celebrated Marine Biological Station at Naples, established five and twenty years ago by Dr. Anton Dohrn, with results, direct and indirect, of far-reaching value. For my immediate purpose it may suffice to speak of the British Association. It was founded, as most of you know, in 1831. It is a missionary organization, a peripatetic school of philosophers. While most societies are like ordinary vegetables, rooted to the soil, this has the superior characteristic of an animal, as being capable of free movement. It can flit from Aberdeen to Oxford, from Glasgow to Plymouth, and from Plymouth to Dublin. It can wing its way from Liverpool to Toronto, from Toronto to Bristol, and then leaving "The Queen of the West," pitch its camp, as we confidently expect, the year after next, in Dover. It has brought the wonders and surprises of advancing knowledge to men's own doors. It beats the drum outside their windows, so that they cannot altogether shut their ears to the music. The reception of it entails upon the hospitable town an astonishing amount of trouble and expense. Nevertheless the welcome it receives is not only everywhere extremely cordial, but the pleasant sight is witnessed of rival towns or cities competing for the honour of giving it entertainment. What this parent association does on an imperial scale, our Union hopes to do for a limited area, not by inopportune mimicry, but by judicious following of a great example.

That the British Association is broken up into sections, designated by letters of the alphabet, from A to K, is due to the enormous extension of modern science, which makes division of labour a matter not of choice but of necessity. Each section is an association in itself. Each is fully, and sometimes more than fully, occupied with its committees and reports, and papers and discussions and recommendations. Our own energetic honorary secretary, Dr. Abbott, has printed on the back of your tickets a list of thirteen departments of scientific investigation in which he invites you to take an active part for the benefit of our Union and Congress. He does not pretend that the list is exhaustive, and in fact he does not mention either Bryology or Embryology or Bryozoology; he has omitted Mycology and Malacology and Carcinology; he has steered clear of Morphology and Physiology and Seismology, of Zoogeography and Phytogeography and Crystallography; he says nothing about plankton or nekton or benthos, and he saves his credit, as I must do mine, by alluding to all the rest as "allied subjects." This at least is patent, that of subjects there is no dearth, but no one can any longer hope to be a specialist in all of them or in many. To know everything about something or something about everything is becoming increasingly difficult. Every one recognises the intellectual danger of extreme specializing, of working too exclusively in a single groove, but the modern hermit no longer sighs for—

"The hairy gown and mossy cell,
Where [he] may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heaven doth shew
And every herb that sips the dew."

Thoroughgoing astronomy by night and thoroughgoing botany by day are no longer so readily combined as they may have been in Milton's time. The force of circumstances is making it ever less and less easy to induce the man who is investigating the properties of helium or studying the corona of the sun to sympathise with the other man who is carrying on researches into the genealogy of a centipede or the domestic economy of a cockroach.

Nevertheless, through the marvellous unity of Nature—that unrivalled argument for the oneness of a Divine Author of it—there seem to be no branches of knowledge so remote and unconnected that they cannot upon occasion benignantly illumine each the other. Therefore a Congress like ours aims at bringing together men engaged on different lines of research, that from time to time and in a measure all may understand what all are doing. It aims also at bringing together men pursuing the same line, that they may learn from one another the best methods and the best results. It aims at bringing together those who are willing to learn, that the men of long practice and mature counsel may explain to the inexperienced, and to beginners full of youthful vigour and energy, what is worth observing and how to observe it. The object of our Union is to win for science such benefits as are found to accrue in manufactures from division of labour, and in trade, commerce, and finance from co-operation. We think that the good work which is being done by numerous local societies in isolation will be better done if they are brought into sympathetic contact and join hand to hand in unselfish brotherhood.

The present Union is not the first of its kind. In this world, as we know it, nothing ever is the first of its kind. To ourselves there is this advantage, that we can explain our hopes and purposes by reference to valuable work already done elsewhere. For instance, the important and long-established Yorkshire Naturalists' Union, besides having monthly summer excursions, and an annual congress and an annual subscription, issues transactions, publishes a monthly journal, and maintains a library. It is divided into sections, with their several presidents and secretaries, and it has a great many committees of research, of research connected with the great county from which it is named. Mutatis mutandis, the sort of work which we hope to do may be inferred from the list of these Yorkshire committees—the boulder committee, the coast erosion committee, the fossil flora committee, the geological photographs committee, the marine zoology committee, the micro-zoology and micro-botany committee, the wild birds'-eggs committee, and the mycological committee. Another suggestive indication may be borrowed from the proposal for a photographic survey of Devon, made to the Devonshire Association by Mr. C.E. Robinson. He says: "The subjects for inclusion in the survey might comprise the following:—

"Churches, monuments, tombs, castles, old houses, bridges, streets, ruins, historic documents, coins, paintings, carvings, very old people.

"Celebrated trees, loggan stones, rocks, caves, geological sections.

"Effects of lightning, storms, floods, landslips, earthquakes, &c.

"Rare birds, beasts, fishes, plants, and fossils, remains of pre-historic men and animals."

The work pleading to be done is, in fact, so overwhelmingly extensive that it may be refreshing to hear of some work pleading to be not done. For fostering a love of natural history, the ideal method long practised was to encourage young people, and beginners in general, to make collections of eggs and birds, of butterflies and beetles, of flowers and fossils. It still remains absolutely essential that a student should have materials for his study. But the enormous increase in the number of collectors, often having only a commercial or other quite unscientific object in view, has made it necessary for the lovers of nature to protest loudly against rapacity and ravage. Of some butterflies it has been lately said that "their extinction will only be checked by the extinction of 'the mere collector' and the dealer who supplies him." As for eggs and birds, that zeal for rare specimens which, in a former age, would have qualified a man to be president of a learned society, is now more likely to subject him to prosecutions and penalties. That is, perhaps, for us the necessary way of forming a healthy public opinion, just as our ancestors thought that scourge and gibbet, rack and faggot, must be freely used to keep the social machine in order. Of course I know that revenge is sweet, and that it is delectable to bring others round to our way of thinking under compulsion. Still our Union will be content to produce the effect rather in a different manner, by spreading knowledge, by showing that it is for the common benefit and general happiness not to have the fauna and flora of the district devastated, and by gradually persuading the spirit of the age that things rare and strange and beautiful, when open to all, should be under the protection of all, and should be appropriated only for legitimate use, and not sacrificed to greediness or vanity.

One other point must be mentioned, which concerns the literature of science. Professor Flinders Petrie lately used a memorable expression, that this age is drunk with writing. Anyone who has tried to light a fire will know that when too much paper is used in the kindling, the flame is extinguished by its own smoke. From these metaphors you may understand the risk to which scientific truth is exposed of being disabled and smothered by the multitude of its exponents. Observations must be recorded. Writers can only attain efficiency by reiterated efforts. But it is not necessary that every beginner's essays, every crude attempt at research, every uncompleted investigation, every reproduction of the obvious and the commonplace, should be printed and published. Those who are engaged in bibliography, classification, and monographic work of every kind, however free they may be from critical cynicism, cannot close their eyes to the difference of merit in the writers whose works they are obliged to examine. The difference often ranges from supreme excellence to detestable badness. By publishing what is old as though it were new; by incomplete, inaccurate, confused and misleading descriptions of what is really new; by hypotheses based on easily avoidable ignorance, authors win themselves no honour, and they grievously trouble science. Those, too, do an injury to themselves and their neighbours who, out of carelessness, or out of self-will, or out of superfluous modesty, use irregular, unrecognised, and obscure means of publication for discoveries that are valuable and good.

Our Union will have justified its existence if it can persuade its members and all who come within the sphere of its influence to put mischief and destructiveness out of countenance, to discourage the diffusion of useless knowledge, to bring loyal effort and arduous exertion in the service of truth into prominence and the full light of day.

More I shall forbear to tell you anent the wisdom and the profit of all that we wish to do and to do not; remembering how even the eager and enquiring Queen of Sheba, on her visit to the Hebrew Linnæus, was so tired out with all that she heard and saw that there was no more spirit in her. Only to timid and hesitating beginners I may venture to say one concluding word. Believe me, that ever as you pursue your path through the fairyland of science, and become more and more acquainted with the riches and splendour of the scene, you will more and more be convinced that the fame of it has not exceeded the reality, that at your outsetting the half was not told you. If you feel that ignorance and superstition cannot be the proper pillars to uphold the welfare of the world and support the throne of God, if you agree with the Swedish Linnæus that without knowledge of the Universe, so far as it lies within our ken, neither filial reverence nor due gratitude can be intelligently offered to its author, you will see that Nature is given as the dominant instructor of mankind, you will think of its students as nobles round a king, and will be disposed to say to their sovereign as the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon, "Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants which stand continually before thee and hear thy wisdom." It is open to all men to join their company and to share their felicity.