“I would sooner die than give up”: Huxley and Darwin's deep disagreement

Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with John Stuart Mill's rejection of William Whewell's sympathy for Linnaeus. The naturalists William Sharp Macleay, Hugh Strickland, and George Waterhouse worked to distinguish two kinds of relationship, affinity and analogy. Darwin believed that his theory could explain the difference. Richard Owen introduced the distinction between homology and analogy to anatomists, but the word homology did not enter Darwin's vocabulary until 1848, when he used the morphological concept of archetype in his work on Cirripedia. Huxley dropped the word archetype when Richard Owen linked it to Plato's ideal forms, replacing it with common plan. When Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species that the word plan gives no explanation, he may have had Huxley in mind. Darwin's preposterous story in the Origin about a bear giving birth to a kangaroo, which he dropped in the second edition, was in fact aimed at Huxley.

The art of classification: Brian Houghton Hodgson and the “Zoology of Nipal” (Patron's review)

Brian Houghton Hodgson's “Zoology of Nipal” is one of the great “what ifs” of nineteenth-century natural history. The product of over 20 years' research, incorporating thousands of pages of notes and drawings that detailed many species new to European science, it was intended to be the standard work on Himalayan animals. However, it was never published, and Hodgson gave up his zoological studies after 1859. Based on research at the Zoological Society of London, which holds eight albums of Hodgson's drawings, this paper explores and analyses the scientific and institutional factors that shaped Hodgson's work on Himalayan fauna. It sets Hodgson in the context of colonial natural history, demonstrating that he was able to keep up-to-date with the fierce debates that transformed zoology in London's scientific institutions. In particular, Hodgson's admiration for the Quinarian ideas of William Sharp Macleay, Nicholas Aylward Vigors and William Swainson is identified as key to his own attempts to classify Himalayan animals, supported by an analysis of the form and content of his collections of zoological illustrations. As well as seeking to broaden our understanding of Hodgson himself, this review seeks to demonstrate the potential of zoological imagery to throw a new light on pre-Darwinian natural history, a complex field with considerable scope for further study.