charles_darwin

50
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
Origin of Species without his conversations and correspondence with
men such as William Tegetmeier (1816–1912) and John Gould
(1804–1881)? No, Darwin would not have had such intimate knowledge
of bees and finches without these men.
There were two other groups of men just as vital to Darwin’s
thinking and writing. These connections are less well known today,
but that fact does not diminish their importance. The first of these connections
included Darwin’s scientific colleagues. In meetings of the
Geological Society of London, the Linnean Society, and the Zoological
Society of London, Darwin met other men interested in the questions
he was asking. Some of these men were conducting scientific research
full time and professionally; others were amateurs in the sense that
they had full-time careers in politics, for example. Sir John Lubbock
(1834–1913), Darwin’s friend and neighbor in Downe, was one of
these amateurs. Their status as scientists was unimportant to Darwin:
he read papers at these meetings of his scientific colleagues, and their
comments and criticisms helped him to hone his ideas.
The fourth group of connections was the largest by far. Perhaps
these men—and virtually all of them were male—can be best described
as correspondents or consultants. Sometimes Darwin wrote letters to
them and they replied. Sometimes he read their articles or books.
Sometimes he found out about their work secondhand. Darwin did not
meet all of these consultants. They were spread all around the world:
in countries such as Australia, India, the United States, and Denmark.
And some of them only lived in their books and articles: they had died
before Darwin began his research. But Darwin referred to their work
frequently: sometimes in passing, simply adding another name to a
point he had already made; sometimes extensively, using the person’s
work to bolster a point he wanted to make.
A careful reading of The Origin of Species reveals just how
indebted Darwin was to his consultants. For example, in the chapter
on hybridism, Chapter VIII, Darwin mentions the German botanist
Karl Friedrich von G€artner (1772–1850) thirty times. Could Darwin
have written this chapter without reference to G€artner’s work on
plant hybrids? Perhaps, but the chapter would be quite different
from the one Darwin actually wrote. To repeat Harriet Martineau’s
point, Darwin had consulted a wealth of material before he wrote
The Origin of Species.
To say that Darwin consulted far and wide seems to prove the
charge that Darwin attempted to refute: he was not an original
thinker, he was simply a synthesizer. But to accuse Darwin of this
is to miss another important feature of The Origin of Species: Darwin’s
own experiments. Darwin’s theory of descent by modification