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Victorian Scientific Naturalism
Community, Identity, Continuity
By Gowan Dawson, Bernard Lightman The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-10964-0
CHAPTER 1
"The Great O. versus the Jermyn St. Pet": Huxley, Falconer, and Owen on Paleontological Method GOWAN DAWSON
His health irreparably damaged by long exposure to the tropical climate of northern India, Hugh Falconer retired from his post as superintendent of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Calcutta in the spring of 1855 and journeyed back to Britain by the overland route. During the long voyage he passed through the Crimean peninsula just as the yearlong siege of Sebastopol reached its critical juncture, with British, French, and Turkish troops launching their last and most sustained bombardment of the Russian fortifications. A year earlier the Spectator had observed that the rationale of the initial attack was that "if we would overthrow the power [of the Russian empire], we must sweep away its foundations," while in October, a month after the siege's bloody conclusion, the Edinburgh Review proclaimed that "to attack Sebastopol was ... to assail the stronghold of Russia in the East." Back in London at the end of 1855, where newspaper coverage of the war was still transfixing public attention, Falconer soon encountered a no less "remarkable" verbal onslaught in which, like the besieged ramparts of Sebastopol, the "very foundations of palæontology, as they have hitherto been understood, are assailed." This ferocious "attack on Cuvier and his followers" was launched in February 1856, the very month when peace was being negotiated at the Congress of Paris, by a "man of science, of recognized standing, [who] assails generally admitted principles and established reputations" and whose bellicose manner was, Falconer considered, such "as to require some notice." Although regularly bedridden and with a "constitutional aversion from the hispid walks of controversy," the veteran of Sebastopol felt compelled to single-handedly defend the besieged foundations of Cuvierian paleontology.
Despite its timing, the onslaught that prompted Falconer's concern in fact only rarely resorted to the pugnacious militaristic rhetoric that was still dominating the press, though leavened by criticism of the bungling aristocratic high command, in the early months of 1856. The triumphant assertion that "Cuvier himself ... surrenders his own principle" of "physiological correlation" was the most conspicuous exception to its generally unmartial tone. The infallibility of the celebrated axiom in which each element of an animal is presumed to correspond mutually with all the others and thus any part, even just a single disarticulated bone, necessarily indicates the configuration of the integrated whole had been given up, it was implied, in the same way as Russia, as the Times reported, was just then enduring the "surrender of ... part of her territory" in Paris. The author of this otherwise carefully worded attack, the printed form of which, as Falconer noted, was signed and "authenticated with his initials," had nevertheless displayed a zealous enthusiasm for military matters only months earlier when writing for the anonymous Westminster Review. There he had expressed his "taste for ordnance of all kinds, sea fights, Minié rifles, and Crimea expeditions," as well as revealing a detailed knowledge of the tactics by which the "allied armies [in] their siege operations [at] the south side of Sebastopol" could have secured "a coup-de-main ... without serious loss to the assailants." This aficionado of siege warfare even identified himself, again in the pages of the Westminster, with the "youthful vigour" of the ongoing Islamic insurgency against the imperialistic "Greco-Russian Czar-worship, misnamed Christianity," in the Caucasus.
The unsigned author was Thomas Henry Huxley, who, as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy at the start of the war, had only narrowly avoided active service in the Crimea, all the while insisting that "nobody can accuse me of an objection to facing the Rooshians." The image of naturalistic science as engaged in perpetual warfare against a corrupt orthodox theology that Huxley continued to hone throughout his long career—the famous "military metaphor"—was one that had its origins in the real battlefields of the mid-1850s. The metaphorical conjunction of science and militarism, however, was certainly not exclusive to Huxley, and was, in any case, a decidedly reciprocal interchange. The very paleontological principles on which Huxley turned the ersatz guns of his military metaphor had themselves been invoked metaphorically by the Crimean conflict's new breed of war correspondents reporting from the front line, with William Howard Russell of the Times proposing after the end of the Sebastopol siege:
If Cuvier ... could reconstitute the whole structure of some antediluvian animal from the mere glance at some joint or fragment of bone, it is sufficient for us to examine the emaciated body and empty havresac of any one of the wretched Russian soldiers.... From this we can infer fairly enough the condition to which the empire has been reduced.
Back on the home front, moreover, it was Falconer, with the artillery fire of Sebastopol still ringing in his ears, who interpreted Huxley's lecture at the Royal Institution in explicitly martial terms, even noting the speaker's quasimilitaristic title as "an officer on the palæontological staff of the Museum of Economic Geology." It is evident that Huxley's opponents were equally willing to apply the language of warfare to scientific controversies during this period, and, unlike the self-proclaimed "Prophet-Warrior," to do it under their own names.
This, of course, was a more defensive version of the metaphorical juxtaposition of science and war. However, while discussions of the so-called military metaphor in nineteenth-century science have tended to emphasize its relation only to hostile offensive tactics (Adrian Desmond, for instance, depicts Huxley "shouldering his .45 to shoot over the ranks of obstructive Anglicans"), when it first began to be employed in the mid-1850s, there was considerable interest in, as well as great admiration for, the defensive strategies adopted by both sides in the Crimea. As James J. Reid has observed, the "Crimean War was mostly a defensive war in which aggressive forward movements had limited aims. This defensive-minded strategy ... originated in the post-Napoleonic perception of balance of powers that sought to avoid conquests and far-ranging military campaigns." In September 1855 the Crystal Palace in Sydenham opened a Crimean Court with a scale model of Sebastopol showing the impregnable earthen ramparts built by the Russians according to the defensive principles outlined in A Proposed New System of Fortification (1849) by James Fergusson. "Mr. Fergusson's model," as the official guidebook explained, demonstrated the "great principle of his system" in "arming the ramparts and ... flanking defences," and was something that at "the present moment the visitors will be particularly interested with." The extensive grounds of the Crystal Palace also featured gigantic brick-and-mortar models of extinct creatures modeled by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the guidance of Richard Owen, whose astonishing "ability to reproduce accurate models of the entire structure and correct proportions of extinct animals from the discovery of a single bone" had, as Hawkins effusively acknowledged, made the tableau of prehistoric life possible. The upholders of the paleontological principles celebrated in these three-dimensional models on the same site as Fergusson's Crimean Court now felt the need—utilizing a more defensive version of the military metaphor—to publicly render the foundations of their Cuvierian methods of reconstruction no less unassailable from concerted attacks.
Huxley's lecture, delivered on 15 February 1856 only hours after dispatches reporting the final destruction of the Sebastopol docks were received by the War Department, was one of the Royal Institution's weekly Friday Evening Discourses, which attracted large, fashionable audiences made up of the institution's members and their guests. The subject seemed calculated to interest men of science while at the same time not perturbing the fashionable ladies among Huxley's auditors. He was simply to "set forth ... an estimate of the science of Natural History" as a means of instilling "knowledge," "power," and "discipline." The opening discussion of natural history as a form of knowledge, however, soon afforded Huxley a reason to adopt a less conciliatory tone, especially when he turned to the "works of Paley and the natural theologians," who had discerned evidence of a "utilitarian adaptation to benevolent purpose" throughout the natural world. In his Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) William Paley had reconciled Christian ethics with those of utilitarianism, and Huxley now attributed a similar emphasis on pragmatic expediency and end-directed teleology to his argument from design in Natural Theology (1802).
Despite the evident teachings of recent investigations of nature, the natural theological "principle of adaptation of means to ends" continued to be trumpeted, even "in the writings of men of deservedly high authority," as the "great instrument of research in natural history." Huxley traced this over hyped "doctrine to its fountain head," finding that it was "primarily put forth by Cuvier." The only viable means of explaining this, he went on, was to conclude that this "prince of modern naturalists ... did not himself understand the methods by which he arrived at his great results," and that his "master-mind misconceived its own processes." This might, as the thirty-year-old who was still yet to publish any paleontological papers of his own acknowledged to the scientific grandees of the Royal Institution, seem "not a little presumptuous." But if all the "arguments be justly reasoned out" without regard to celebrity or patronage, then it would be recognized, Huxley insisted, that "it is correct." Huxley risked the justifiable charge of impudence in front of such an august audience because it was on the basis of the doctrine of adaptation to purpose that it had been "handed down from book to book, that all Cuvier's restorations of extinct animals were effected by means of the principle of the physiological correlation of organs." This, as Huxley knew well, was also the method deployed in the famous paleontological reconstructions from just fragmentary remains—celebrated at the Crystal Palace—of the "British Cuvier," Owen, whose once-supportive relationship with Huxley had grown increasingly rancorous over the previous three years (and who, Huxley quipped, "stands in exactly the same relation to the French [Cuvier] as British brandy to cognac").
Huxley impugned the inductive abilities of Cuvier and Owen, asserting that the ostensibly infallible law of physiological correlation, the unerring veracity of which afforded crucial evidence of the harmonious design of organic structures, was in reality based on prosaic empirical observations of customary correspondences and had nothing to do with genius or any other purportedly preternatural capabilities. Assumptions about the absolute necessity of such correspondences were made on the basis of authority, both scientific and religious, and not reason or logic. Although Huxley did not mention it directly, his audience would have been aware that the same unquestioning obedience to rank and authority was, at that very moment, being widely blamed for the dreadful administrative failures of the patrician and nepotistic civil service during the Crimean conflict, most notably by Charles Dickens in his satirical serial novel Little Dorrit (1855–57).
This particular paleontological dispute, which raged throughout 1856 and into the following year, is not unknown to historians of Victorian science, but it has never before received detailed consideration and thus its crucial importance in the emergence of scientific naturalism, during the crisis of authority in the mid-1850s precipitated by the aristocratic mismanagement of the Crimean War, has been overlooked. In the dispute, Huxley received invaluable support from other young naturalists similarly seeking to make a remunerative career in science, including Joseph Dalton Hooker and Herbert Spencer, as well as from a reclusive contemporary of Owen's who had long harbored a clandestine theory of species change that was no less naturalistic and contrary to conventional conceptions of divine design than Huxley's attitude to paleontological method. The spring of 1856 was precisely the moment at which Charles Darwin began revealing elements of his theory of natural selection to a carefully chosen group of potentially sympathetic naturalists, and, as this chapter will argue, Huxley's ferocious and exactly contemporaneous paleontological dispute, initially with Falconer and then with Owen, helped forge a crucial sense of solidarity among those who would soon emerge as the principal advocates of On the Origin of Species (1859) and whom historians have grouped together as the spokesmen of the nascent doctrines of scientific naturalism. While the scientific naturalists have generally been assumed to constitute a relatively cohesive group, little attention has hitherto been paid to the factors—mutual enemies as much as shared intellectual commitments, as well as informal ties like friendship, domestic visits, humor, and gossip—that helped them establish a cogent sense of community in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Falconer v. Huxley
Huxley's vehement attack on Cuvier immediately posed a delicate problem for Darwin and Hooker, who, in May 1856, abandoned an attempt to get their headstrong new friend elected to the Athenæum because of concerns that Owen would sway the club's committee against him. Darwin fearfully imagined Owen with "a red face, dreadful smile & slow & gentle voice" asking "what Mr Huxley has done, deserving this honour; I only know that he differs from, & disputes the authority of Cuvier ... as of no weight at all." But in reality it was instead Falconer whom Darwin "found ... very indignant at the manner in which Huxley treated Cuvier in his R. Inn Lecture." Significantly, for Darwin and Hooker, Falconer had been "a mutual friend so dear to us both" for almost a decade before either had even met Huxley, with Falconer having stayed at Darwin's home at Downe in the mid-1840s during an earlier period of leave from India. At this time Darwin regarded him as one of the "most rising naturalists in England" and continually found it "wonderful how much heterogeneous information he has about all sorts of things." Falconer's particular area of expertise was prehistoric proboscideans, and his return to India in 1848 was, Darwin lamented, a "grievous loss to palæontology." Hooker, who himself journeyed to India a year later, confirmed Darwin's worst fears with the news that a fever contracted during the "hot season" had left Falconer incapable of "doing any thing in Science." Although he later regained his "health & spirits," even growing "fat & look[ing] far better than he did in England," paleontology generally had to take second place to his paid "pursuits as Botanist horticulturalist & Landscape Gardener" at Calcutta's Royal Botanic Gardens.
Darwin was evidently anxious to renew the acquaintance when the once more ailing Falconer came back from Calcutta—via Sebastopol—for the last time in late 1855, telling Hooker in April of the following year, "Has Falconer appeared in [the] world yet; if so & you know his address, I wish you would let me have it." Hooker had already been in touch with his fellow veteran of the subcontinent's stifling climate, and passed on his new address in Piccadilly with the proviso that Falconer had "vow[ed]" he would "not go anywhere." Refusing to be put off, Darwin pleaded with Falconer that "I do so want to see you," and implored him to "be a good man & cast your resolutions to the dogs" by coming to stay once more at Downe along with "Hooker and one or two others." Ironically, one of those other guests at the proposed weekend party was to be Huxley, who had been invited to Downe for the very first time. Falconer, even without knowing the identity of the rest of the company, held to his resolution, and when Darwin finally did meet his erstwhile friend again a month later in May, he must have soon realized that the planned introduction of Falconer to Huxley would have been unexpectedly incendiary.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Victorian Scientific Naturalism by Gowan Dawson, Bernard Lightman. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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