charles_darwin
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The Origin of Species<br />
(1776–1847) wrote books on the natural history of horses, dogs, and<br />
pigs in 1834, 1845, and 1847, but he left untouched the question of<br />
a unifying theory connecting all species. That was the difficult task<br />
Darwin undertook in The Origin of Species.<br />
Again, Darwin was not the first to consider a grand theory of<br />
nature. Leaving aside famous philosophical works dating back to<br />
Aristotle’s Physics, in the nineteenth century, there was Chambers’s<br />
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. There were also lesserknown<br />
and much less controversial works. Charles Hamilton Smith<br />
(1776–1859), author of several books in a series entitled The Naturalist’s<br />
Library, wrote The Natural History of the Human Species, its<br />
Typical Forms, Primaeval Distribution, Filiations, and Migrations<br />
(1848). William Martin (1798–1864), another author of several natural<br />
history books, wrote A General Introduction to the Natural History<br />
of Mammiferous Animals, with a Particular View of the Physical History<br />
of Man, and the More Closely Allied Genera of the Order of Quadrumana,<br />
or Monkeys (1849). Both of these books were progressivist:<br />
they attempted to demonstrate that humans were at the top of the<br />
scale of organic beings.<br />
Darwin took the opposite approach in The Origin of Species.<br />
The differences between species and the variations of species did not<br />
prove that one species was superior to another; rather, variation was<br />
evidence of the process of evolution at work. Variation was linked to<br />
common origins not necessarily to a scale of being.<br />
The first points Darwin makes in the opening chapters of The<br />
Origin of Species are about the individual characteristics of animals<br />
and plants. Given the debate about origins, Darwin had to explain<br />
the differences between the species and their varieties. Were the differences<br />
permanent, part of a preestablished order, or was nature in<br />
a constant state of change? If there was continual change, how was<br />
this change produced? Was the change (that is, the mutation) passed<br />
on to other members of a species and could the mutation lead to<br />
transmutation?<br />
By the end of the fifth of fourteen chapters, Darwin had<br />
answered these questions. The title of Chapter VI, ‘‘Difficulties on<br />
Theory,’’ is the clue. In Chapter VI, Darwin dealt with the ‘‘crowd of<br />
difficulties’’ that he thought a reader of The Origin of Species would<br />
have. 23 Darwin’s primary concern was to prove that mutation occurs<br />
in organic life and that this fact was significant to understanding the<br />
origin of species: he believed he had already accomplished this by<br />
the beginning of Chapter VI.<br />
The structure of the argument Darwin used to prove his theory<br />
was significant. In Chapter I, ‘‘Variation Under Domestication,’’<br />
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