Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

SCIENCEalarming development: the actual discovery of those fossils of prehistoricman whose possibility had been hotly denied.* But scientificconservatism was still able to reject this horrifying prospect on thegrounds of inadequate proof, until the discovery of Neanderthal manin 1856.It had now to be accepted (a) that the causes now in operation had inthe course of time transformed the earth from its original state to thepresent, (b) that this had taken a vastly longer time than any calculablefrom the Scriptures and (c) that the succession of geological stratarevealed a succession of evolving forms of animals, and thereforeimplied biological evolution. Significantly enough, those who acceptedthis most readily, and indeed showed the greatest interest in theproblem of evolution were the self-confident Radical laymen of theBritish middle classes (always excepting the egregious Dr Andrew Ure,best known for his hymns of praise to the factory system). The scientistswere slow to accept science. This is less surprising when we recall thatgeology was the only science in this period gentlemanly enough (perhapsbecause it was practised outdoors, preferably on expensive'geological tours') to be seriously pursued in the Universities of Oxfordand Cambridge.Biological evolution, however, still lagged. Not until well after thedefeat of the 1848 revolutions was this explosive subject once againtackled; and even then Charles Darwin handled it with considerablecaution and ambiguity, not to say disingenuousness. Even the parallelexploration of evolution through embryology temporarily petered out.Here too early German speculative natural philosophers like JohannMeckel of Halle (1781-1833) had suggested that during its growth theembryo of an organism recapitulated the evolution of its species. Butthis 'biogenetic law', though at first supported by men like Rathke,who discovered that the embryos of birds pass through a stage whenthey have gill-slits (1829), was rejected by the formidable Von Baer ofKoenigsberg and St Petersburg—experimental physiology seems tohave had a marked attraction for workers in the Slavonic and Balticareasf—and this line of thought was not revived until the coming ofDarwinism.Meanwhile evolutionary theories had made striking progress in thestudy of society. Yet we must not exaggerate this progress. The periodof the dual revolution belongs to the prehistory of all social sciences* His AntiquUis celtiques et anfediluvienncs was not published until 1846. In fact severalhuman fossils had been discovered from time to time, but lay either unrecognized or simplyforgotten in the corners of provincial museums.t Rathke taught at Dorpat (Tartu) in Estonia, Pander at Riga, the great Czech physiologistPurkinje opened the first physiological research laboratory in Breslau in 1830.289