Darwin’s “Historical Sketch”
An Examination of the ‘Preface’ to the Origin of Species
CURTIS
N. JOHNSON
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I dedicate this work to Albert Johnson, my father, who while alive and also now that he is deceased has inspired my love for Darwin and evolutionary biology. He guided me to Darwin and showed me by instruction and example how to think like a biologist, as far as he could.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
The Preface to Darwin’s Origin of Species: The Curious History of the “Historical Sketch” xiii
1. Darwin’s “Priority”: Baden Powell and A.R. Wallace 1
2. Darwin’s Earliest Sources. Authors to Be “Passed Over”: Buffon, Maillet, Aristotle 30
3. Early Transmutationists: J.B. Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 52
4. W.C. Wells and William Herbert 78
5. Robert Grant and Patrick Matthew
6. Leopold von Buch, C.S Rafinesque, and Samuel Haldeman 126
7. Robert Chambers, J.B.J. d’Omalius d’Halloy, and Henry Freke 153
8. Richard Owen, Part I: Owen Before Origin and his 1860 Review 182
9. Richard Owen, Part II: Owen After Origin
10. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
11. Herbert Spencer and Charles Victor Naudin
12. Heinrich Bronn, Franz Unger, J.W.E. d’Alton, and Lorenz Oken
13. D.A. Godron, J.B.G.N. Bory de Saint Vincent, K.F. Burdach, J.L.M. Poiret, and E.M. Fries 316
14. Alexander Keyserling, Hermann Schaaffhausen, and Henri Lecoq 342
15. Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer
Epilogue: T.H. Huxley and J.D. Hooker
Preface
When Darwin’s Origin of Species first appeared in published form, in late November 1859, it consisted of a brief (six-page) introduction and 14 additional chapters, running to almost 500 pages. This was the first time his full-fledged theory in all its detail appeared in print, with supporting documentation and evidence. It was an immediate sensation, establishing Darwin as a scientific superstar and sparking off debates of sundry kinds that continue unabated to this day.
One debate that has attracted more attention than most over the years concerns Darwin’s sources for his theory. Few people dispute that Darwin’s theory, considered in full, was his own immaculate brainchild, his own original discovery. Most people also agree, however, that the theory did not grow out of thin air. Darwin was engaged from an early time in his scientific career in ongoing discussions with many other scientists and naturalists. Some of these conversations were direct—face-to-face meetings or personal letters—and others were discussions he had with himself, so to speak: his marginal notes to books he read, his own personal notebooks, a diary, and other forms of self-conversing. From all of this material we see clearly that Darwin’s thoughts were influenced and shaped by the views of many others. In that sense, he was not working alone. He was contributing to a broad culture of scientific discourse, drawing as necessary from others, adding his own insights where appropriate.
Yet missing from the first edition of the Origin was a systematic register of his intellectual debts. The book had, as we would say today, no “acknowledgments” page. That was a deficiency that was quickly brought to Darwin’s attention almost as soon as the book hit the bookstores. Darwin knew he would need to take steps immediately to remedy the deficiency. To that end, he assembled—somewhat in haste—a “Preface” to Origin, making sure future editions would include it at the beginning of the volume. This document, 11 pages in all, is where Darwin set out the contributions of his “predecessors” to the species problem, whether they had actually influenced his own thinking or not.
In short time, this brief “Preface” came to be called, in shorthand, the Historical Sketch. It is the first part of Darwin’s magnum opus that any modern reader of Origin will come across. Because of its brevity, perhaps, it has not attracted a great deal of attention, certainly among casual readers who just want to read the magical words of the Origin itself, but also among Darwin scholars. In it, Darwin cited some 35 authorities by the final edition. In the compass of 11 pages, that does not allow much room for any single author. True to expectation,
most entries give one, perhaps two, short paragraphs to each authority. Yet, these are the 35 Darwin himself identified as most deserving of inclusion in identifying his predecessors, and in indicating how they contributed to the solution of the “mystery of mysteries,” the origin of new species on this planet, his own special topic.
The work presented here takes on the Sketch, with the attention a major contribution in the history of science deserves. People may quarrel with some of Darwin’s choices about whom to include in or exclude from the Sketch, or even with the significance of the Sketch itself as an important historical document. And in truth, some of Darwin’s choices do seem curious. Several authorities one might have expected to be mentioned in the Sketch are not in it—figures such as Charles Lyell, Benjamin Carpenter, Edward Blyth, F. Cuvier, T.R. Malthus, to name only a few. Other figures who are included in the Sketch—Henry Freke, C.S. Rafinesque, B. de Maillet, and others—are so obscure, and were even in Darwin’s day, or so seemingly irrelevant to the project Darwin had set for himself, that they have been mostly forgotten by science. Many of them hang on in the scientific literature for no other reason than that Darwin included them in the Sketch. Moreover, the Sketch in its entirety is so brief that one might conclude Darwin did not take it too seriously himself. We have been advised by a number of more recent authorities to look elsewhere for Darwin’s true predecessors.
To overlook the Sketch, however, would be a mistake, if one is to take the full measure of Darwin’s contribution to biological thought. Yes, it raises a number of puzzles. But the attempt to resolve them is itself an enterprise in scientific discovery. As is true with many of Darwin’s private reflections, many of which have been made available to a general reading audience only in the last few decades, the Sketch helps us fill in some blanks about the genesis of Darwin’s ideas. Above all, it helps us see how Darwin positioned his own theory in the broader context of contemporary scientific thought. It thus sheds important light on what Darwin regarded as original in his theory, and what he regarded as derivative. It gives us insights into the aspects of his theory he found to be most important and helps us to discriminate more sharply between essential features and ancillary ones. It gives us a unique picture of Darwin’s reading habits, how he recorded his encounters with the scientific literature of his day, and his method of retrieving information for later use long after his earliest contact with it. If Darwinism is “whatever Darwin thought it was,” one cannot do much better than by beginning with a look at his Sketch.
The Preface to Darwin’s Origin of Species
The Curious History of the “Historical Sketch”
Any modern reader of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species will almost surely encounter, before getting into the “one long argument” of the book, his Historical Sketch, which has appeared in one version or another as a preface to every authorized edition of Origin ever published after the second English edition in 1860.1 The purpose of the Sketch was to give a brief history of opinion about the species question as a prelude to Darwin’s own independent contribution to the subject. But its provenance is somewhat obscure. Some things are known about its production, such as when it first appeared and what changes were made to it between its first appearance in 1860 and its final form, for the fourth English edition, in 1866.2 But how it evolved in Darwin’s mind, why he wrote it at all, and what he thought he was accomplishing by prefacing it to Origin remain questions that have not been carefully addressed in the scholarly literature on Darwin.3
In what follows I will suggest that an adequate answer to why Darwin wrote the Sketch depends on a satisfactory understanding of how and when the Sketch came to be, and so I focus mainly on private correspondence between Darwin and several of his closest friends between 1856 and 1860. The private side of Darwin’s thinking about a historical preface is much more illuminating about these questions than what may be gathered from his published work. It should be noted, however, that the addition of a historical survey to a major scientific work in mid-19th century Europe would not be unusual and perhaps would even be expected, in view of prevailing conventions in science writing. Historical prefaces to such works were commonplace, if not universal.4 Perhaps the best example of this strategy in setting the stage for a major new proposal in science is Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the first four chapters of which treat the history of opinion in geology as a preface to his own original contributions. Lyell in fact came in time to call his historical survey a Historical Sketch, beginning with the third edition (1834; cf. n. 1). Darwin was intimately familiar with this work, especially volume I in which the historical survey appears, as it accompanied him throughout his voyage on the Beagle. But Lyell’s was certainly not the only work in this mold. The practice was fairly common, and new contributors especially may have been expected to follow it. In that regard Darwin, in writing his
own Historical Sketch, may be seen simply to be doing what any good scientist would do, and about which, therefore, nothing more need be said.5
Yet, in the case of Darwin more does need to be said. For one thing, Darwin was, by his own admission, not a historian and not very much inclined toward historical studies. He understood himself to be what he in fact was, a naturalist. To add a historical survey would, he confessed in 1860, have strained him beyond endurance and ability.6 In addition, it is likely that Darwin was not as familiar with the historical evolution of his subject as, say, Lyell was of his.7 While he knew enough as early as 1838 to be fairly certain that he had a theory of his own, he was uncertain enough about how to make a convincing public case for it that he postponed the commencement of writing it up for the public until 1856, when he was finally persuaded to do so by Charles Lyell.
At the same time, however, Darwin should have felt a strong incentive to produce a history of the subject as a preface to his own work. His great desire was not only to bring forward a powerful new theory about the origin of species in nature, but to establish his own priority and originality in finding it.8 How better to do so than to preface his work with an account of previous authors who had maintained descent with modification but had missed the crucial insight of natural selection as the mechanism by which favorable variations are preserved and modified into new species and less favorable ones ruthlessly destroyed?
Moreover, several of Darwin’s earliest critics after Origin first appeared in 1859 had faulted him for failing to show continuities between his work and those of his predecessors who, like Lamarck and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, had maintained some version or another of descent with modification.9 It would not be surprising that Darwin would have wished to set the record straight about his own contribution and originality. And yet, the first edition of Origin omits any such discussion. Was Darwin merely shy, and only provoked into writing the historical introduction under the pressure of his earliest critics’ suggestions that his theory was not original? This seems to be the accepted view among modern historians who have addressed the issue.10 But a deeper look suggests that Darwin had in fact prepared at least much of the Historical Sketch well before Origin first appeared. It is this claim (and the resolution of some particular puzzles that follow from it) that I attempt to substantiate in what follows.
Shortly after Origin originally appeared in November 1859, Darwin received a letter from Baden Powell, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford (1827–1860), apparently suggesting (from what may be inferred from Darwin’s response—the Powell letter unfortunately has not been found)—that Darwin’s “theory” had been at minimum anticipated well prior to Darwin’s publication, and perhaps, more strongly, that Darwin had been scooped altogether, by Powell and perhaps by others. In the first letter of response to Powell, Darwin asserts that not even the “most ignorant [educated person]” could possibly suppose that he “meant to
arrogate to myself the origination of the doctrine that species had not been independently created,” and that “if I have taken anything from you, I assure you it has been unconsciously”—words that sound very much as though directed to someone who had suggested some unacknowledged borrowing. “To the best of my belief,” he insists, “I have acknowledged with pleasure all the chief facts and generalizations I have borrowed” (Correspondence of Charles Darwin, CCD, 18 January 1860, to Powell. Letter 2654).
Darwin’s apparent concern with his own priority in establishing the theory of modification of species by means of natural selection was nothing new. Darwin evinced concern about his originality even before he had fleshed out the important details of the natural selection theory. One finds a notebook reminder in the second transmutation notebook (C-267), written in 1838, before the encounter with Malthus, to “read Aristotle to see whether any my views very ancient?” (Barrett et al. 1987, p. 325. The Barrett edition of the notebooks is hereafter referred to as CDN). Other entries in the Notebooks from 1837 and 1838 show clearly that Darwin regarded some theory as “my theory,” different from those of previous transmutationists’ (e.g., B 214: “my theory very different from Lamarck’s,” in CDN p. 224 and note 214-1). The phrase “my theory,” often contrasting Darwin’s theory with someone else’s, occurs repeatedly throughout the Notebooks. In 1856 and again in 1858, when worries started to surface among Darwin’s inner circle, especially Lyell, that someone else might beat Darwin to the punch in publishing a new theory on the origin of species, Darwin again expressed concern that he did not wish to have “his doctrines” published first by someone else. Darwin’s anxieties reached a higher pitch when Wallace’s manuscript appeared in mid-1858, at which time Darwin complained to Lyell (June 18, 1858) that “my originality has been smashed” (CCD, 18 June [1858], to Lyell, and notes 2–3. Letter 2285). Although he felt inner conflict about caring at all for priority (see following note) there is little doubt that he in fact did care a great deal, as he confessed in a letter to Hooker on July 13, 1858: “I always thought it very possible that I might be forestalled, but I fancied that I had grand enough soul not to care; but I found myself mistaken and punished” (CCD, 13 [July 1858], to Hooker. Letter 2306).11
But it was A.R. Wallace’s announcement that he had hit upon a similar theory to Darwin’s that prompted Darwin to set aside the completion of the “big species book” and to concentrate instead on bringing out quickly a shorter “abstract” that would become the Origin.
As it turned out, Darwin’s priority to Wallace was finally settled by the revelation that Darwin had already in 1844 written out an “Essay” describing his theory and had also sent a short, written account of his views to Asa Gray in September 1857, before he had heard about Wallace’s work. But the episode with Wallace does demonstrate that the issue of priority was one that weighed on Darwin’s
mind, and also on those of his friends who were aware of the “race” with Wallace and who urged Darwin to move forward quickly with publication.
Darwin did not have unalloyed enthusiasm for winning this race at any cost. If it could be won only by appearing greedy and acting dishonorably he would not do it. In a letter to Lyell on June 25, 1858, after receipt of Wallace's paper, he wrote: “I should be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so. But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably . . . I would far rather burn my whole book than that he [viz., Wallace] or any man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit [by being concerned about priority]” (CCD, [25 June 1858], to Lyell. Letter 2294). In late June (June 29, 1858) Darwin lamented to Hooker that “it [viz., claiming priority over Wallace] is too late. . . . It is miserable in me to care at all about priority” (CCD, [29 June 1858], to Hooker. Letter 2298). On July 5, 1858 Darwin again (to Hooker) expresses “shame” that Hooker and Lyell, in insisting upon presenting Darwin’s views alongside those of Wallace at the Linnaean Society meeting of July 1 “should have lost time on a mere point of priority” (CCD, 5 July [1858], to Hooker. Letter 2303). It is worth noting that Wallace never did challenge Darwin on the point of priority for discovering natural selection, and in fact later in life, both in public and private, went further than perhaps was necessary to give Darwin the lion’s share of credit for discovering and articulating the theory. (See Wallace 1905, v. 1 p. 374; and Janet Browne’s discussion with additional references, 2002, pp. 139–40, 317.)
Powell’s letter, whatever it said, must have struck a chord with Darwin, because within a month he had produced his Historical Sketch for Origin, the stated purpose of which was to give a brief account of “the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species,” particularly with a view toward reviewing opinions of those naturalists who had preceded Darwin in maintaining some version or another of the thesis that “species undergo modification.”12 But how the Historical Sketch and Darwin’s response to Powell—two letters, actually, sent on the same day, January 18, 1860—are related raises an interesting question. What is obvious is that the two “sketches”—that outlined in the letter to Powell and that which became the Historical Sketch—are remarkably similar in content and even at times in precise wording. This fact raises at least the possibility that Darwin in composing one, drew directly from the other. Based on the dating of the letters to Powell (January 18, 1860) and the completion of the sketch (February 8 or 9, 1860—see below), it would seem that the letter preceded the Historical Sketch and in fact that Powell’s letter provoked, or helped provoke, Darwin’s desire to produce that document.13
That conclusion, however, is undermined by Darwin’s second letter to Powell, in which he now recalls having already written a Preface to the larger work, one in which he had in fact included a mention of Powell’s earlier writing. Thus,
the evidence about the relation between the Historical Sketch and the letters to Baden Powell is ambiguous and somewhat confusing. We should explore this further because the right account will have further implications for what Darwin was trying to achieve in his Historical Sketch.14
As to the Historical Sketch, it first appeared in the first German edition in April 1860, then shortly thereafter in the first authorized US edition (Appleton & Co.) in May 1860 (several unauthorized printings of Origin, based on the first English edition, had come out in the United States earlier in 1860 from Appleton prior to this edition, without the Historical Sketch). But from Darwin’s correspondence we can identify the actual date of completion of the Historical Sketch, at least in its first published form, with some precision. The first letter to Baden Powell (January 18, 1860) explicitly states that Darwin had decided against writing a historical survey of his subject for the original edition of Origin due to ill health:
My health was so poor, whilst I wrote the Book, that I was unwilling to add in the least to my labour; therefore I attempted no history of the subject; nor do I think that I was bound to do so. (CCD, 18 January [1860], to Baden Powell. Letter 2654)
The second letter, sent on the same day, changes that picture dramatically. Darwin continues to maintain his disinclination, based on the difficulty of the task, to write a historical survey of other authors who had maintained some version of descent with modification prior to Darwin’s published views. But now he also adds that he had in fact some time earlier already begun to compose a “Preface” to the larger work (viz., the “big species book,” published in 1975 under the editorship of R.C. Stauffer as Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection) that was intended to discuss previous authors and that in this Preface he had acknowledged the work of Powell himself. In a postscript to the second letter to Powell, Darwin wrote:
I have just bethought me of a Preface which I wrote to my larger work, before I broke down & was persuaded to write the now published Abstract [i.e., Origin]. In this Preface I find the following passage, which on my honour I had as completely forgotten as if I had never written it. “The ‘Philosophy of Creation’ has lately been treated in an admirable manner by the Revd. Baden Powell in his Essay &c &c 1855. Nothing can be more striking than the manner in which he shows that the introduction of new species is ‘a regular and not a casual phenomenon,’ or as Sir John Herschel expresses it ‘a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process.’ ” (CCD, 18 January 1860, to Baden Powell. Letter 2655)
Now, there is a question about how to interpret this information. The statement, “a Preface which I wrote to my larger work,” the only mention by Darwin, incidentally, that I have been able to trace anywhere to a “Preface” matching this description (with one small exception discussed below), suggests that Darwin had already composed something resembling the Historical Sketch as early as 1856 when he started the “big species book.” (R.C. Stauffer points out that the very first entry for the preserved ms. of the “big species book” is folio 16, and surmises, plausibly, that the preceding 15 folios formed Darwin’s “Preface” alluded to in the postscript to Powell’s letter cited above [in Stauffer p. 22]. The editors of the CCD state that this “Preface has not been preserved” [v. 8, p. 41, n. 4], and Stauffer also claims not to have found any further trace of the document.) But if such a document did exist, when was it written, and what did it say?
It is difficult to know because of the extreme paucity of evidence. One tantalizing clue does show up, however, in the correspondence, in a letter Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell on July 5, 1856. Recall that Lyell in early May 1856, worrying about Darwin’s ability to claim priority for his ideas, had urged Darwin to set aside further research on the species question in favor of bringing his views to publication as soon as possible (CCD, 1–2 May 1856, from Lyell, letter 1862; and May 3 [1856], to Lyell, letter 1866). At first Darwin was very hesitant to take this advice, but after consulting with Hooker in May he decided to go ahead with the writing. In the July 5 letter to Lyell, Darwin acknowledged his gratitude to Lyell for the suggestion, then gave a small hint that the work would be preceded, not with a full-fledged historical survey, but with some acknowledgments to his predecessors:
I am delighted that I may say [i.e., when my book comes out] (with absolute truth) that my essay [viz., the Species Book] is published at your suggestion. . . . I shall not attempt a history of the subject, but in one page devoted to two or three leading and opposed authorities, I had already, after a few remarks on the Principles [i.e., Lyell’s Principles of Geology], ventured on the words— “and with a degree of almost prophetic caution which must excite the admiration &c &c.” (CCD, 5 [July 1860], letter 2860, emphasis in the original)
Although the matter is somewhat obscure, what appears to have happened is that when Lyell first urged Darwin to publish on the species question in April and May 1856, Darwin reacted with surprise and great uncertainty. As he said to Lyell in early May, to write a short work on the subject “goes against my prejudices.” He added, “To give a fair sketch [i.e., a short essay] would be absolutely impossible, for every proposition requires such an array of facts” (CCD, v. 6, p. 100). Yet he was sufficiently struck by the suggestion that he consulted with Hooker, making much the same point to him:
If I publish anything it must be a very thin & little volume, giving a sketch of my views & difficulties; but it is really dreadfully unphilosophical to give a resume, without exact references, of an unpublished work. . . . It will be simply impossible for me to give exact references. . . . Eheu, eheu, I believe I shd sneer at anyone else doing this, & my only comfort is, that I truly never dreamed of it, ’till Lyell suggested it, & seems deliberately to think it advisable. (CCD, 9 May 1856, to Hooker, letter 1870; see also CCD, 11 May 1856, letter 1874)15
That was Darwin’s state of mind in May. But by July something had changed. In a letter to Lyell on July 5, as we have seen, Darwin had resolved to undertake publication but had decided to make it a larger work, preceded by a short historical preface. The work, he hopes, “will not need so much apology as I at first thought; for I have resolved to make it nearly as complete as my present materials allow” (CCD, 5 July [1856], to Lyell. Letter 1917). In other words, by this time he had decided to undertake the “big species book,” a plan that he faithfully pursued until it was derailed by the appearance of the Wallace manuscript in mid-1858. But even in the earliest stages Darwin had made two decisions respecting a history of the subject: the first, that he would not write any comprehensive history for the big book; and the second, that he would write—in fact already had written—a very short preface that was devoted to “two or three leading and opposed authorities [on the subject of species],” including Lyell himself. Is it possible that one of the other “leading authorities” Darwin had mentioned was Baden Powell?16 In any case, the July 5, 1856, letter to Lyell does seem to show that as early as that date Darwin had produced the core idea for a historical sketch, with some amount of text that would later blossom into the Historical Sketch.
How, then, do we explain Darwin’s statement to Baden Powell and others in early 1860 that he had not written a history of the subject? The evidence is somewhat puzzling and deserves a careful look.
On January 17, 1860, Asa Gray, who was negotiating on Darwin’s behalf the publication by Appleton & Co. of the first authorized US edition of Origin, wrote to Darwin urging him to “send at once any corrections you are making for your 2nd ed.” as well as a “preface a few words—to identify it as your ed.” (emphases in the original; Gray was not yet aware that the second English edition with corrections had already been published on January 7). Despite some apparent opinion to the contrary, Gray’s letter seems clearly not to be a request for the Historical Sketch, since he is very clear that the desired preface is to be a few words only and is to serve the purpose not of treating the history of the subject but only to identify the first authorized US edition as Darwin’s edition, so as to secure a copyright against other unauthorized editions (CCD, [17 January 1860], from Asa Gray. Letter 2563).17 Then, on January 28, Darwin wrote to Gray saying that, on the strong advice of Charles Lyell and others, he
had decided against making any substantial changes to Origin for the US edition, save a few corrections “of small importance, or rather of equal brevity [to those already made for the second English edition].” He then adds that he does “intend to write a short Preface with brief history of the subject.” He further says that he will undertake this work, “as they [viz., the corrections and the Preface] must some day be done & I will send them you in a short time” (CCD, 28 January 1860, to Gray. Letter 2665). One plainly infers from this letter that Darwin has not yet composed much if any of the Historical Sketch, but that he is about to do so.
The next we hear about the Historical Sketch comes in a letter from Darwin to his close friend J.D. Hooker, sent on January 31, 1860:
My dear Hooker
I have resolved to publish a little sketch of the progress of opinion on the change of species. . . . Asa Gray, I believe, is going to get a 2nd Edit. of my Book, & I want to send this little preface over to him soon. (CCD, [31 January 1860], to Hooker.
Letter 2671)
In this letter Darwin also asks Hooker to send a copy of “one sentence” to him from a work by Charles Victor Naudin in which that author had much earlier (1852) brought forward in publication a theory that bore some similarity to Darwin’s idea that species “are formed in an analogous manner as varieties are under cultivation” (ibid., note 2). The sentence in question was in fact included in the Historical Sketch, showing again Darwin’s concern to address the issue of his own priority in a preface to later editions of Origin 18
The following day, February 1, 1860, Darwin sent another letter to Gray, including an enclosure that showed some corrections that Darwin wished to have included in the US edition. He also announced that “I will send in a fortnight a Preface giving a short History of opinion on origin of species” (CCD, 1 February 1860, to Gray. Letter 2676.). The impression continues to be that Darwin had not yet written, or at any rate completed, the Historical Sketch, but that he anticipated completing it within a fortnight, or two weeks.
Yet on the very next day, February 2, 1860, Darwin gave a very different impression, in a letter to Herbert Spencer. In it he repeated the explanation that poor health kept him from providing a historical introduction to the first edition to Origin, but that now he has repaired that deficiency:
I was so much out of health when I was writing my Book, that I grudged every hour of labour, & therefore gave no sort of history of progress of opinion. I have now written a Preface for the foreign Editions and for any future English Edit (shd there be one) in which I give a very brief sketch, & have with much pleasure
alluded to your excellent essay on Development in your general Essays. (CCD, 2 February 1860, to Herbert Spencer. Letter 2680)
The letter does go on to suggest that Darwin is still putting the finishing touches on the Sketch, because he asks Spencer if he may in the Sketch represent his (Spencer’s) views on psychological development as being generally in tune with Darwin’s transmutationist theory. (The editors of Darwin’s correspondence surmise that Spencer must have assented to this, for Darwin’s suggested phrasing does appear in the Historical Sketch as in the letter to Spencer: CCD, 2 February 1860, to Herbert Spencer, n. 9. Letter 2680.) But the letter also seems to show that by this time, early February, the Sketch was all but complete.
Any doubt on that score is removed in Darwin’s letter to Gray of February 8 or 9, 1860. In this letter Darwin announced that he is now sending “my short Historical Preface & one page more of corrections” (CCD, [8 or 9 February 1860], to Gray. Letter 2701). The date of this letter is uncertain, but the editors of the correspondence have surmised February 8 or 9 by referring to a letter sent by Darwin to Hooker on February 8 in which he tells Hooker that he has just completed his Sketch (CCD, 8 February [1860], to Hooker, and n. 1. Letter 2689).
Putting together these pieces, one may construct the following account of the history of the Historical Sketch. Darwin’s second letter to Baden Powell indicates that Darwin had contemplated, indeed begun and perhaps made significant headway on, a historical introduction as early as 1856, no later than mid1858. This indication receives additional support from the fact that the first 15 folio pages of the “big species book,” appearing before the table of contents, are missing, but belong in a position in that book exactly corresponding to the place the Historical Sketch eventually came to occupy in Origin. On the other hand, Darwin was clearly not ready or willing to attach any sort of Historical Sketch to the first edition of Origin, telling both Powell and Spencer in early 1860 that poor health had prevented him from writing any such document. The letters to Gray in late January and early February 1860 seem to confirm this latter reading, since in the earlier letters he is “intending” to write the Sketch, and not until February 8 or 9 has he put it in a sufficiently complete form to send to Gray for the first authorized US edition. The question is, plainly, did he, or did he not, have a Historical Sketch in reasonably complete form when the first English edition of Origin went to press in November 1859?
The answer would seem to be, yes and no. Unless he was simply fabricating something to soothe Powell’s evident concerns about priority, which in view of any plausible portrait of Darwin is not credible, he did have at least part of a historical survey of opinion in some state of written form before he turned in 1858 from the “big species book” to the Abstract that became Origin. This is confirmed by his letter of 3 May 1856 to Lyell in which he briefly mentioned a
The Preface to Darwin’s Origin of Species
“history of subject . . . , one page devoted to leading and opposed authorities” (CCD, 3 May 1856, to Lyell. Letter 1866). It is impossible to know whether the “one page” of 1856 had expanded into something longer by 1859. Although 15 folio ms. pages are missing from the beginning of the “species book” manuscript, there is no way to know whether and how much of this space was filled with writing, or even strictly speaking, whether any of it was filled. The letters to Powell, Spencer, and Gray written in late 1859 and early 1860 shed only a little light on this subject because in none of them did Darwin chart in any detail the progress of the Historical Sketch, only that he “intended” to write one in early January and that he finished writing it in early February. All these comments are compatible with the idea that he had prepared at least part of a historical survey much earlier (including a reference to Powell’s 1855 work), but that it was not sufficiently complete, in his opinion, for it to be included in the first edition of Origin.
In view of this reconstruction, we may now return to consider the first letter to Baden Powell, sent on January 18, 1860. I observed earlier that this letter tracks so closely with the Historical Sketch that one is almost certainly indebted to the other for its contents. This contention is supported not only by the similarity in the list of names mentioned in the letter and the people discussed in the Sketch, but also by some of the wording. Let me give two instances:
I. Letter to Powell:
Had I alluded to those authors who have maintained, with more or less ability, that species have not been specially created, I should have felt myself bound to have given some account of all; namely, passing over the ancients, [I should have had to give some account of] Buffon (?) Lamarck . . . [etc.]. (CCD, 18 January 1860, to Powell. Letter 2654)
Historical Sketch, first version:
The great majority of naturalists have believed that species were immutable productions and have been separately created. . . . A few [others] believe, on the other hand, that species undergo modification. . . . Passing over authors from the classical period to that of Buffon with whose writings I am not familiar, Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions excited much attention on this subject. (Reprinted in CCD, v. 8, pp. 572–76)
II. Letter to Powell:
(by the way his [viz., Lamarck’s] erroneous views were curiously anticipated by my Grandfather [Erasmus Darwin]) . . .
Historical Sketch, first version:
It is curious how largely my grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the erroneous grounds of opinion, and the views of Lamarck, in his “Zoonomia” (vol. I, p. 500–510), published in 1794.
Some of the phrasing here suggests strongly direct copying or borrowing: “specially/separately created”; “passing over ancient/classical [authors]”; “erroneous views”; “curious anticipation.” But to rule out the possibility that the words from the letter were permanently suspended in Darwin’s mind, and descended independently first into the Powell letter and then into the Sketch (or the reverse), it is worth taking note of the list of authors Darwin thinks fit to mention in the two documents.19 I reproduce them here side by side to permit a close comparison. (It should be noted that Darwin added additional authors to subsequent editions of Origin as he became familiar with them. The first version of the Sketch would show his thinking on this subject up to late January 1860.)
List in first letter to Baden Powell, January 18 1860
The ancients [that he will pass over]
Buffon [with a question mark after his name]
Lamarck
My Grandfather [Erasmus Darwin]
[Etienne] Geoffry [sic] St. Hilaire
Isidore [Geoffroy St. Hilaire]
Naudin
Keyserling
An American (name this minute forgotten), [remembered in second letter as Haldeman]
Vestiges of Creation [i.e., Robert Chambers]
Some Germans
Herbert Spencer
Yourself [i.e., Baden Powell]
Preface to First American Edition February 8 1860
Authors of the classical period [to be passed over]
Demaillet and Buffon [to be passed over]
Lamarck
Erasmus Darwin [mentioned in a footnote as one who anticipated “the erroneous views” of Lamarck]
Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire (based on his “Life” written by his son Isidore
Geoffroy Saint Hilaire)
Rev. W. Herbert
Prof. Haldeman
Vestiges of Creation [Robert Chambers]
M.J. d’Omalius d’Halloy
Isidore Geoffroy Saint Hilaire
Mr. Herbert Spencer
M. Naudin (with a footnote entry to “M. Lecoq, another French botanist”)
Count Keyserling
Baden Powell
Alfred Russell Wallace
Huxley
Hooker
How, then, do the lists compare? We note, first, that every single author identified either by name or in some other way in the Powell letter shows up in the Historical Sketch, and, with a couple of exceptions described below, in precisely the same relative position in which he appears in the letter to Powell. The Historical Sketch does contain more names: 18 (or 19 counting the footnote) as compared with 13 in the letter, if we include the classical authors as one and “Demaillet and Buffon” as one. (I attempt to account for this discrepancy later.) But the overlap between the two lists, including the similarity of wording about special creation, the treatments of the ancients, Buffon, and Erasmus Darwin (noted earlier), and the order in which names appear, again gives credence to the thought that Darwin was borrowing from one document in composing the other. In other words, despite statements to the contrary made to his friends in early 1860 that he had not composed a historical sketch for the species book, the two letters to Powell, for different reasons, suggest strongly that he had.
If that is so, how much more can we learn about this now lost “Preface” from examining the two lists in greater detail? From the second letter to Powell one learns only that the Sketch was either partially or completely written but was not at hand (or even in memory) when Darwin wrote the first letter to him. But the first letter to Powell shows, first of all, that the list at the time Darwin wrote the letter, is both shorter (by four or five authors) and more abbreviated, in terms of the amount of discussion Darwin gives to each author. (The names added to the Historical Sketch but not in the letter are Demaillet [passed over], d’Omalius d’Halloy, Lecoq [mentioned in a short footnote], Wallace, Huxley, and Hooker.) Indeed, in the letter Darwin for the most part merely lists names, with no commentary (with the exception of the sentence about Erasmus Darwin anticipating Lamarck).
The Sketch, by contrast, devotes some amount of commentary to each author, ranging in length from a short paragraph to a full page, depending evidently upon how significant Darwin regarded the contribution of the author to be.
None of this is surprising in itself. In a letter one would expect a mere listing, in a Sketch, well, a sketch! But, putting the letter side by side with the sketch does strongly suggest that much of the Sketch was composed by the time Darwin received Powell’s letter, and that he was simply recalling it, even if unconsciously, when he wrote his letter to Powell. Or, to state it the other way around, it would not be likely for Darwin to create a Sketch, intended to serve as a formal preface to his masterpiece (with the assured huge reading audience) based upon a private, hastily crafted note of correspondence to a man he did not know well.
This interpretation, that Darwin had already completed much of the sketch by the time Origin first appeared, has the further advantage of comporting well with Darwin’s second letter to Powell, in which he states explicitly that he had already included Powell among those authors treated in the “Preface” that he had started to prepare for the “big species book” but had set aside along with the book itself for the sake of producing quickly an Abstract (which came to be Origin). The passage from that “Preface” that he duplicates in the letter (regarding Powell’s 1855 book) is just that, an almost exact duplicate, word for word, and included in quotation marks, giving the strongest possible impression that Darwin was transcribing in the letter from an already existing document. From this it seems a strong likelihood that Darwin, in composing his letter to Powell, merely summarized what was already written out as the “Preface” to the big book. Indeed, from the second letter to Powell one might be so bold as to infer what the now lost “Preface” looked like: something much like the Historical Sketch sent to Gray on February 8 or 9, 1860, with four or five other authors added to the latter based on reading or recollections of Darwin between the time he wrote to Powell and when he wrote to Gray (i.e., just under three weeks).20
Attractive as this reconstruction is, it leaves some puzzling questions. One has to do with the relative positioning of names in the two sketches: they are somewhat different. Specifically, Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Naudin, and Keyserling, appear earlier, relative to other authors, in the letter than in the Sketch, whereas Herbert Spencer appears later. If the Sketch had already been largely written out when Darwin wrote to Powell and Darwin was merely replicating it, how might we account for this? The easiest way out would be simply to say that Darwin, in drawing from subconscious memory, misrecalled the exact positioning of some names when he wrote the letter. But since he was right in his recollection of the great majority of authors treated and in other details of wording and sentiment (described above), we might wish to consider alternate hypotheses before settling on that one.
The positioning of Isidore in the letter, right after Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire (his father) is easy enough to explain. In discussing Etienne, Darwin drew, as he says in the Sketch, on the “Life” of Etienne composed by the son. In the letter, it would have been natural for Darwin to put these two men together in a single
