Natural History:

We begin with an overview of natual history, then move to the development of “modern” geology, and afterwards to comparative anatomy and vertebrate paleontology, from which we move to the species problem, and finally to Charles Robert Darwin.

Towards the Darwinian Revolution:

• Important precondition:
• rational cosmogony
• Needs:
• vast sense of time
• breaking of fixity and stability in organic history or    emphasis on development, change.

Order:

• Linnaeus [1707-1778]; [possibly Cuvier's [1769-1832] Regne Animale, 1817,  -- "nommer, classer, décrire"]
• binomal classification; fixity of species; stability;
• change only within narrowly prescribed limits
• The species marks the limits of organic change

Cause:

• deMaillet [1656-1738] (1740? Telliamed, mt. top shells; (Voltaire on fossil fish on mt. peaks)
• Buffon [1707-1788] (1749ff- l'histoire naturelle)
• Maupertuis [1698-1759] (1745; monogenist origin of life,1751)
• Robinet[1735-1820] (1761-68, progressionism)
• Bonnet [1720-1793] (1770 catastrophism)

Chain of Being concept  [plenum; continuity]
        Sometimes "Scala Naturae," the Ladder of Nature
 

Change and development: from fixity to mutability

• J.B. Lamarck [1744-1829] 1802, 1809 Vegetable Physiology inheritance of acquired characteristics irritability, volition, environmentally induced organic change
• Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802] 1794-96? Zoonomia
• Botanizing Craze, late 18th century

Naturphilosophie.

• The German Romantics and the search for archetypal forms -- focus on embyology and development, on "coming to be."
• Goethe, Oken, Schilling.
• Preformation vs. epigenesis.

hierarchy: discrete (Cuvier) :: chain (of being): continuous (Lamarck)
artifical - natural
structure (Linnaeus) - process (Buffon)
[[static - dynamic]]  [[order [Kepler] - cause/explanation [Newton] ]]
 

The three keys to developmentalism/evolutionism [Eiseley]:

• Paleontology
• The ladder into the Past
• Precondition:  Rational Geology
• Comparative Anatomy
• Homologies and Analogies in Forms of Life - A Snapshot of the Present
• Embryology
• A Link between the ladder and the snapshot Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny"
• [Error, from which Truth emerges]

Geology:

Nicolaus Steno [1638-86]

3 Laws of Geology - 1669, De Solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis Prodromus
[Danish; anatomist, esp. ductless glands.  Much work in Paris.    Abandons science for religion, ca.1673]

New Order: Taxonomy

3 basic types of rock: sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic
[Giovanni Arduino [1714-1795]: primary, secondary, tertiary, 1760]

Then Cause:
 

• Vulcanism
• Jean Etienne Guettard [1715-1786] and Volcanism:  Auvergne.  Volcani vicus.  Puy-de-Dome.  1751 Startling extent of extinct volcanoes.
• Heat the principal force in shaping the earth
• Neptunism
• Abraham Gottlob Werner [1749-1818]
• Freiburg mining region.  U. Leipzig Lecturer 1775-1815.
• field trips, laboratory teaching, world center for geological education
• 1787, Kurze Klassifikation und Beschreibung der verschiedenen Bergsarten [Short Classification and Description of different Mountain Types]
• Primary, Secondary, Floetz  - classification of rocks
• All rock originated from the ocean, as sedimentation or crystallization.
• the problem of Basalt, overlain by obviously sedimentary strata
• the problem of what happened to all that water
• Meanwhile, Desmarest [1725-1815] i.d.'s the columnar basalt of the Auvergne as Igneous (and others around the world - e. g. the New Jersey Palisades)
• Controversy - Vulcanists vs. Neptunists
• Fought by partisans and pupils, not by principals
• Werner's students leave Freiburg's surroundings, and become convinced of complexity
• Uniformitarianism [But originally treated as renewed Vulcanism]
• James Hutton, [1726-1797] New theory of the Earth, 2 vols.1795 first read 1785. then published in Transactions Edinburgh Royal Society1788
• Concurrent: Outfielder (Lawyer; MD 1749; farming 1754-1768)
• "No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end"
• Heat an important agency -- Glen Tilt, and other unconformities to confirm; igneous intrusions, and stratigraphical unconformity in the field illustrate geological cycle.
• Criticized by Kirwan, et al, for religious implications as well as on scientific grounds.
• Experimental confirmation of some of ideas by Lord John Playfair [1748-1819], prof. math and natural philosophy at Univ. of Edinburgh, in 1802, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth.
• Catastrophism
• Georges Cuvier [1769-1832] 1795 Musée d'Histoire Naturelle; 1799 Prof. Natural History, College de France; 1802, Prof. Nat. Hist., Jardin des Plantes
• Magician of the Charnel House
• Principle of Correlation of Parts
• Great work on Fossil Fishes, 1812, 4 vols.
• Comparative Vertebrate Paleontology; Comp. Anat.
• Paris Basin: series of successive catastrophes
• Tracing the Paris Basin (with Alexandre Brongniart [1770-1847] first classification of the Tertiary formations; index fossils, 1808, Journal des Mines)
• Re: Index Fossils: William Smith [1769-1839], surveyor, canal building, by 1791 the idea of index fossils although published later1799) - the key to the puzzle - and his geological map of England, 1815.  First Wollaston Medal of Royal Geological Society, 1831. "The Father of British Geology" [contemp w. Amos Eaton]
• "fossils" as once living: late 1600s, ff.
• Mammoths frozen with last meal in stomach: catastrophe
• Branching development: 4 great classes
• Religious implications

• The forces at work on the earth today are identical in kind and intensity with those which have worked in the past.
• Charles Lyell [1797-1875]
• Lyell at Oxford, Exeter College, classics major,1814-1819;  attends lectures of Wm Buckland [1784-1856], prof. geology,  tours, 1817, Europe 1818; 1823 Secretary of Geological Society, 1826 FRS; nat hist; 1828 with Murchison in Auvergne; names Plio (new and old), Mio, and Eo- Cene shells.
• 1831, 32, and 34: Lyell's Principles of Geology The Uniformitarian Bible.  3 vols 12th and last edition, posthumous, 1875.
• Marine fossils and conservative England
• A knock against the strong, and even the weak, programmes in STS, vis a vis Lyell and Cuvier.
• Royal Geological Society, 1807 -- specialization intrudes
• Implications:
• Vast age of earth
• Species have changed and developed
• Species have become extinct
• challenges "perfection" of original Design (for Cuvier: extinction via inundation)

We have a history of the earth, with which life, via fossils, is intimately connected.
Then: the working out of the "geological column", from William Smith through Sedgwick/Murchison/Lyell.

Meanwhile: the development of ideas about life's history:

Here, an alternate route in the history of ideas, is to trace the development of paleontology and anthropology, with emphasis on working out the implications of the fossil record for the history and development of life on earth, together with speculations about race generated by early investigations in what we would now call primatology.   This route is the one we take with John Greene’s The Death of Adam.  For that route, consult the Greene reading guide.  Greene, too, leaves us with the elements of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection all having been proposed at least once by 1800, but not having been synthesized into one coherent and effective whole by any one individual [except Patrick Matthew, 1831].

The Minor Evolutionists -- Development is in the air.

• William Wells
• 1813, Royal Society, "An Account of a White Female. . . ", reprinted appended to An Essay on Dew, 1818.
• Edward Blyth
• Natural selection; possibly not indefinite and unlimited organic change through time.
• J. Stanley Grimes (1807-1903)
• Phreno-Geology . . evolution of the brain
• Patrick Matthew (1790-1864)
• 1831 On Naval Timber and Arboriculture.  Complete acknowledgement of anticipation of evolution by natural selection is given by   Darwin in later editions of Origin.
• Robert Chambers (1802-71)
• 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously.  Sensational and made evolution fashionable.  Organic evolution a reality.  A "revised progressionism with Lamarckian and Huttonian elements."

Family background, childhood; education.
Beagle, serendipity; scientist forged
Galapagos and problem of origin of species
1837f Notebooks
1842 sketch; 1844 mss
1855 Wallace's Law
June 18, 1858, Wallace to Darwin
July 1, 1858 Linnean Society
November, 1859 Origin of Species