A History of Evolution/Chapter 3

by Carroll Lane Fenton

CHAPTER III.

EVOLUTION AND THE SPECULATORS.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, noted evolutionist and paleontologist, divides the evolutionists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into three groups—the natural philosophers, the speculative writers, and the great naturalists.

The speculative writers were a heterogenous group of men, partly philosophers, partly naturalists, and partly of various other professions. They were, in the main, untrained in accurate, inductive, scientific investigation, and depended upon the Greeks for most of their theory. They differed from the philosophers, some of whom we have already studied, in that their ideas were boldly advanced without any support of observation, or the slightest regard for scientific methods. Some of them were, for their day, immensely popular writers, and their trashy books, filled with myriads of impossible "facts," undoubtedly did a great deal to block the progress of true evolutionary studies. Just as the public today does not distinguish between the would-be orator who talks of the "facts" of natural selection, and the true evolutionist, and ridicules both, so the public the eighteenth century linked the speculators with the sincere, hard-working naturalists, and declared the ideas of both to be foolish and blasphemous.

One of the most amusing of the speculators was Claude Duret, mayor of a small French town. In his "Histoire Admirable des Plantes," published in 1609, he described and illustrated a tree which he said was rare in France, but "frequently observed in Scotland^[1]." From this tree, as pictured by the mayor, leaves are falling; on one side they reach water, and are slowly transformed into fishes; upon the other they strike dry land and change themselves into birds. Fathers Bonnami and Kircher were lovers of the same kind of natural history; the latter describes orchids which give birth to birds and tiny men. Other writers of the time described and figured such creatures as centaurs, sea-serpents, ship-swallowing devil-fish, unicorns, and so on, solemnly assuring the readers that they had seen, and sometimes even killed these creatures^[2]. And all of this nonsense was greedily read and believed by people who refused to admit that one species might, in the course of thousands of years, change into something distinguishably different from the original form! One wonders if there has been a greater paradox in the world than a public which denied the existence of links between one species and another, yet believed in centaurs which were half man and half horse. Is it any wonder that, amid such an environment, science was almost stifled, and philosophy was largely a matter of deduction and imagination?

1. Osborn, on whose writings most of this chapter is based, comments that Scotland was "a country which the Mayor evidently considered so remote that his observation would probably not be gainsaid." This important fact, that the faker could not be contradicted, probably was responsible for many of the absurdities published. However, when we examine the general state of knowledge at that time, we are forced to admit that this is not the whole explanation. Without much question, many of these writers were at least partly serious, and actually believed the impossible tales which they printed, just as they believed they had seen witches and ghosts.
2. The "Scientific Monthly" contains an interesting article on the history of scientific illustration, showing many of the remarkable pictures to be found in early works.