EVOLUTION AND THE SPECULATORS.
Henry Fairfield Osborn, noted evolutionist and paleontologist,
divides the evolutionists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
into three groups--the natural philosophers, the speculative writers,
and the great naturalists.
The speculative writers were a heterogenous group of men, partly
philosophers, partly naturalists, and partly of various other
professions. They were, in the main, untrained in accurate,
inductive, scientific investigation, and depended upon the Greeks
for most of their theory. They differed from the philosophers, some
of whom we have already studied, in that their ideas were boldly
advanced without any support of observation, or the slightest regard
for scientific methods. Some of them were, for their day, immensely
popular writers, and their trashy books, filled with myriads of
impossible “facts,” undoubtedly did a great deal to block the
progress of true evolutionary studies. Just as the public today does
not distinguish between the would-be orator who talks of the “facts”
of natural selection, and the true evolutionist, and ridicules both,
so the public the eighteenth century linked the speculators with the
sincere, hard-working naturalists, and declared the ideas of both to
be foolish and blasphemous.
One of the most amusing of the speculators was Claude Duret, mayor
of a small French town. In his “Histoire Admirable des Plantes,”
published in 1609, he described and illustrated a tree which he said
was rare in France, but “frequently observed in Scotland[6].” From
this tree, as pictured by the mayor, leaves are falling; on one side
they reach water, and are slowly transformed into fishes; upon the
other they strike dry land and change themselves into birds. Fathers
Bonnami and Kircher were lovers of the same kind of natural history;
the latter describes orchids which give birth to birds and tiny men.
Other writers of the time described and figured such creatures as
centaurs, sea-serpents, ship-swallowing devil-fish, unicorns, and so
on, solemnly assuring the readers that they had seen, and sometimes
even killed these creatures[7]. And all of this nonsense was greedily
read and believed by people who refused to admit that one species
might, in the course of thousands of years, change into something
distinguishably different from the original form! One wonders if
there has been a greater paradox in the world than a public which
denied the existence of links between one species and another, yet
believed in centaurs which were half man and half horse. Is it any
wonder that, amid such an environment, science was almost stifled,
and philosophy was largely a matter of deduction and imagination?