PRE-BUFFONIAN EVOLUTION, AND SOME GERMAN WRITERS.
Let us now proceed to the fuller development of the foregoing sketch.
"Undoubtedly," says Isidore Geoffroy, "from the most ancient times many
philosophers have imagined vaguely that one species can be transformed
into another. This doctrine seems to have been adopted by the Ionian
school from the sixth century before our era.... Undoubtedly also the
same opinion reappeared on several occasions in the middle ages, and in
modern times; it is to be found in some of the hermetic books, where the
transmutation of animal and vegetable species, and that of metals, are
treated as complementary to one another. In modern times we again find
it alluded to by some philosophers, and especially by Bacon, whose
boldness is on this point extreme. Admitting it as 'incontestable that
plants sometimes degenerate so far as to become plants of another
species,' Bacon did not hesitate to try and put his theory into
practice. He tried, in 1635, to give 'the rules' for the art of changing
'plants of one species into those of another.'"
This must be an error. Bacon died in 1626. The passage of Bacon referred
to is in 'Nat. Hist.,' Cent. vi. ("Experiments in consort touching the
degenerating of plants, and the transmutation of them one into
another"), and is as follows:--
"518. This rule is certain, that plants for want of culture degenerate
to be baser in the same kind; and sometimes so far as to change into
another kind. 1. The standing long and not being removed maketh them
degenerate. 2. Drought unless the earth, of itself, be moist doth the
like. 3. So doth removing into worse earth, or forbearing to compost the
earth; as we see that water mint turneth into field mint, and the
colewort into rape by neglect, &c."
"525. It is certain that in very steril years corn sown will grow to
another kind:--
'Grandia saepe quibus mandavimus hordea sulcis,
Infelix lolium, et steriles dominantur avenae.'
And generally it is a rule that plants that are brought forth for
culture, as corn, will sooner change into other species, than those that
come of themselves; for that culture giveth but an adventitious nature,
which is more easily put off."
Changed conditions, according to Bacon (though he does not use these
words), appear to be "the first rule for the transmutation of plants."
"But how much value," continues M. Geoffroy, "ought to be attached to
such prophetic glimpses, when they were neither led up to, nor justified
by any serious study? They are conjectures only, which, while bearing
evidence to the boldness or rashness of those who hazarded them, remain
almost without effect upon the advance of science. Bacon excepted, they
hardly deserve to be remembered. As for De Maillet, who makes birds
spring from flying fishes, reptiles from creeping fishes, and men from
tritons, his dreams, taken in part from Anaximander, should have their
place not in the history of science, but in that of the aberrations of
the human mind."[33]
A far more forcible and pregnant passage, however, is the following,
from Sir Walter Raleigh's 'History of the World,' which Mr. Garnett has
been good enough to point out to me:--
"For mine owne opinion I find no difference but only in magnitude
between the Cat of Europe, and the Ounce of India; and even those dogges
which are become wild in Hispagniola, with which the Spaniards used to
devour the naked Indians, are now changed to Wolves, and begin to
destroy the breed of their Cattell, and doe often times teare asunder
their owne children. The common crow and rooke of India is full of red
feathers in the droun'd and low islands of Caribana, and the blackbird
and thrush hath his feathers mixt with black and carnation in the north
parts of Virginia. The Dog-fish of England is the Sharke of the South
Ocean. For if colour or magnitude made a difference of Species, then
were the Negroes, which wee call the Blacke-Mores, _non animalia
rationalia_, not Men but some kind of strange Beasts, and so the giants
of the South America should be of another kind than the people of this
part of the World. We also see it dayly that the nature of fruits are
changed by transplantation."[34]
For information concerning the earliest German writers on evolution, I
turn to Professor Haeckel's 'History of Creation,' and find Goethe's
name to head the list. I do not gather, however, that Goethe added much
to the ideas which Buffon had already made sufficiently familiar.
Professor Haeckel does not seem to be aware of Buffon's work, and quotes
Goethe as making an original discovery when he writes, in the year
1796:--"Thus much then we have gained, that we may assert without
hesitation that all the more perfect organic natures, such as fishes,
amphibious animals, birds, mammals, and man at the head of the last,
were all formed upon one original type, which only varies more or less
in parts which were none the less permanent, and still daily changes and
modifies its form by propagation."[35] But these, as we shall see, are
almost Buffon's own words--words too that Buffon insisted on for many
years. Again Professor Haeckel quotes Goethe as writing in the year
1807:--
"If we consider plants and animals in their most imperfect condition,
they can hardly be distinguished." This, however, had long been insisted
upon by Bonnet and Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the first of whom was a
naturalist of world-wide fame, while the 'Zoonomia' of Dr. Darwin had
been translated into German between the years 1795 and 1797, and could
hardly have been unknown to Goethe in 1807, who continues: "But this
much we may say, that the creatures which by degrees emerge as plants
and animals out of a common phase where they are barely distinguishable,
arrive at perfection in two opposite directions, so that the plant in
the end reaches its highest glory in the tree, which is immovable and
stiff, the animal in man who possesses the greatest elasticity and
freedom." Professor Haeckel considers this to be a remarkable passage,
but I do not think it should cause its author to rank among the founders
of the evolution theory, though he may justly claim to have been one of
the first to adopt it. Goethe's anatomical researches appear to have
been more important, but I cannot find that he insisted on any new
principle, or grasped any unfamiliar conception, which had not been long
since grasped and widely promulgated by Buffon and by Dr. Erasmus
Darwin.
Treviranus (1776-1837), whom Professor Haeckel places second to Goethe,
is clearly a disciple of Buffon, and uses the word "degeneration" in the
same sense as Buffon used it many years earlier, that is to say, as
"descent with modification," without any reference to whether the
offspring was, as Buffon says, "perfectionne ou degrade." He cannot
claim, any more than Goethe, to rank as a principal figure in the
history of evolution.
Of Oken, Professor Haeckel says that his 'Naturphilosophie,' which
appeared in 1809--in the same year, that is to say, as the 'Philosophie
Zoologique' of Lamarck--was "the nearest approach to the natural theory
of descent, newly established by Mr. Charles Darwin," of any work that
appeared in the first decade of our century. But I do not detect any
important difference of principle between his system and that of Dr.
Erasmus Darwin, among whose disciples he should be reckoned.
"We now turn," says Professor Haeckel after referring to a few more
German writers who adopted a belief in evolution, "from the German to
the French nature-philosophers who have likewise held the theory of
descent, since the beginning of this century. At their head stands Jean
Lamarck, who occupies the first place next to Darwin and Goethe in the
history of the doctrine of Filiation."[36] This is rather a surprising
assertion, but I will leave the reader of the present volume to assign
the value which should be attached to it.
Professor Haeckel devotes ten lines to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who he
declares "expresses views very similar to those of Goethe and Lamarck,
without, however, _then_ knowing anything about these two men;" which is
all the more strange inasmuch as Dr. Darwin preceded them, and was a
good deal better known to them, probably, than they to him; but it is
plain Professor Haeckel has no acquaintance with the 'Zoonomia' of Dr.
Erasmus Darwin. From all, then, that I am able to collect, I conclude
that I shall best convey to the reader an idea of the different phases
which the theory of descent with modification has gone through, by
confining his attention almost entirely to Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin,
Lamarck, and Mr. Charles Darwin.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] 'Hist. Nat. Gen.,' vol. ii. p. 385, 1859.
[34] 'History of the World,' bk. i. ch. vii. Sec. 9 ('Athenaeum,' March 27,
1875).
[35] 'History of Creation,' vol. i. p. 91.
[36] 'History of Creation,' bk. i. ch. iii. (H. S. King, 1876).