Naturalists have often been gripped by the passion to possess, to gather
specimens of every known species, to assure a complete collection. No
creature is too small, no insect too lowly, no plant too insignificant. The
seventeenth-century Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi wrote that “Nothing
is sweeter than to know all things”, and accumulated 18,000 specimens in his
private cabinet of curiosities in an effort to do just that.
Alexander Macleay (1767–1848), the Second Secretary of the Linnean Society of
London, was an early-nineteenth-century victim of collecting fever. He led a
busy life as a wine merchant and civil servant, yet still spent every spare
moment collecting. Insects were his particular passion and he accumulated
thousands. Yet he never published a word on entomology or any other branch
of science, apart from a few (unacknowledged) descriptions for a book on
Australian insects. Merely possessing the insects seems to have been enough
to satisfy Macleay; when he became too busy to collect himself, he simply
bought other gentlemen’s collections at auction. By 1814, he was believed to
possess “the most extensive entomological cabinet in Europe”.
If Macleay had no intention of classifying or publishing about his
collections, why did he gather those endless drawers and cabinets of moths
and beetles? The photographs in Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay’s Museum vividly
illustrate the stunning beauty of Macleay’s insect collections, and perhaps
that is enough to explain his passion. Many of the butterflies, for example,
are exquisite in themselves, but even the humblest examples look
extraordinary when arranged into neat rows, with closely related varieties
and species placed alongside one another. At first glance, each insect wing
shades into the next and the whole page seems to ripple with iridescence,
even when the specimens themselves are mostly brown or yellow.
While beauty may have been enough to keep some naturalists collecting,
Macleay’s son William Sharp Macleay (1792–1865) had a more intellectual
interest in his father’s collection. He shared the passion for natural
history, and insects in particular, but William was keen to publish. As soon
as he graduated from Cambridge, he was already planning his first major
publication, a complete revision of the scarab beetles, a genus of which his
father possessed more than 1,800 specimens. However, William was already
pondering the underlying principles that governed classification, searching
for the order that shaped nature itself.
The quest for a truly natural system of classification, one that reflected an
order presumed to exist in nature itself, was a long-held desideratum among
naturalists. However, the many who contributed to the search had widely
different ideas as to what the natural order might be – and how one would
know it if and when it was revealed. For the English naturalist John Ray,
for example, there was not the slightest doubt that the natural system was
God’s design for creation, the benevolent and harmonious order that
reassured humanity of their Creator’s existence and good intentions. William
Macleay shared Ray’s conviction, and as he began to search the drawers of
his father’s collection for a pattern that linked the seemingly endless
diversity, he believed he had caught a glimpse of God’s plan of Creation.
The younger Macleay became convinced that the number five held the key to
nature’s order. The animal kingdom was formed of five classes, each
subdivided into five orders, which in turn were divided into five tribes.
Macleay pictured his system, which he called Quinary or Quinarian, as a
series of interlocking circles, since each group seemed to have links back
to its own beginning. For example, the animals with backbones (vertebrates)
ran from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals, but among the
mammals were the whales, who provided the link between mammals and fish,
thus closing the circle. The individual circles were linked to each other by
unusual or aberrant forms, such as the platypus, which clearly had birdlike
features, while being unmistakably mammalian. The arrangement was, Macleay
argued, so fiendishly complex that it could not be the work of mere human
intelligence, but must reveal the mind of God.
Macleay built his system on what he called analogies and affinities. Some of
the links he claimed to have found now seem strained, at best, but his
system was widely welcomed by his contemporaries, one of whom wrote to
Alexander Macleay to congratulate him “on the eminence to which your son is
fast rising in Entomology”. However, if William’s star was rising, the
family’s fortunes were not. The government’s Board of Transport, where
Alexander had held a well-paid position, had been dissolved in 1817 and no
new position had been offered. Macleay senior used his new-found leisure to
spend ever more money on insects, with predictable results. In 1824, the
family were rescued from impending bankruptcy when Alexander Macleay was
offered the post of colonial secretary of New South Wales. There was
initially no Australian post for William, who went to Cuba instead; but the
rest of the family set sail for Botany Bay, accompanied by 152 male convicts
and thousands of specimens of insects, the nucleus of the Macleay Museum at
the University of Sydney, which still houses one of Australia’s most
extraordinary natural history collections.
After a few years in Cuba, William Macleay returned to London to become a
significant figure in the natural history world. Among those he befriended
was the young Charles Darwin, who was initially quite interested in
Macleay’s Quinary system. William joined his family in Sydney in 1838, but
his father’s financial position had not improved and the son was forced to
take control of the family’s finances, selling many of their possessions,
including his father’s 4,000 books on natural history.
Alexander responded by cutting his son out of his will, to punish him for his
“rapacious ungrateful unnatural and cruel conduct”. There was some
reconciliation before the father died in 1848, but not enough to persuade
him to amend his will. Since William had bought the mortgage on his parents’
house, in an effort to reduce their financial burdens, the will made little
difference and the house and the insects ended up in the younger Macleay’s
possession. His collections and reputation ensured that any visiting
naturalist would call on him. When HMS Erebus and its sister ship the Terror
arrived in Sydney harbour during a much-needed break in their four-year
exploration of the Antarctic, the Erebus’s assistant surgeon, the young
Joseph Hooker, called on Macleay and wrote fondly of the “smell of camphor
and specimens, so well known at home”. Hooker also came from a scientific
family; his father was about to leave the botanical Chair at Glasgow
University to become the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a
position Joseph would eventually inherit, becoming one of Britain’s most
powerful and influential naturalists.
While Hooker sailed home to a successful scientific career, Macleay stayed in
Sydney, increasingly isolated from the world of European science. His
Quinarian system was now out of fashion, and even he renounced it
eventually. He lived long enough to see the publication of the Origin of
Species. Although he was no longer a conventional Christian, Macleay’s faith
in a God of some description was undiminished and he felt unable to accept
Darwin’s theory. “Nevertheless”, he confided to a friend, “Darwin is an old
friend of mine and I feel grateful for his work, and hope it will make
people attend to such matters.”
Robin Stacey and Ashley Hay provide a detailed and readable account of the
Macleay family, their passions and their collections. The text has been kept
comparatively brief to allow generous space for the extraordinary images
that follow it. It will whet its readers’ appetites, leaving them eager to
know more about the culture of natural history that shaped the Macleays and
their collections.
Writers on the history of natural history sometimes share the naturalist’s
desire to collect; no fact is irrelevant, no detail can be omitted, and no
naturalist is too unimportant to deserve a biography. A case in point is
Barbara and Richard Mearns’s John Kirk Townsend, a large, beautifully
produced and meticulously researched biography of a man who even the authors
acknowledge was “a good ornithologist, but not a great one”. Such claim to
posterity’s attention as he possesses is that he collected birds and mammals
for John James Audubon, one of natural history’s great entrepreneurs, whose
mammoth Birds of America was built on a combination of Audubon’s artistic
skill and the (often inadequately rewarded or acknowledged) labours of men
like Townsend.
Townsend made numerous journeys across the United States, during which he
collected specimens of its wildlife. The quality of those specimens was
exceptional, and many are preserved in museums today. Barbara and Richard
Mearns seem to have tracked down every one and photographed it (many of the
pictures are published here). However, readers will need to be pretty
passionate about early-nineteenth-century American ornithology if they are
to remain interested throughout this book’s 389 pages. One can see why the
authors had to publish it themselves; I only hope there are enough
enthusiasts out there to make it worth their while.
If your interest in the history of ornithology isn’t quite specialized enough
to justify buying John Kirk Townsend, then Peter Bircham’s History of
Ornithology – the latest addition to the long-established Collins New
Naturalist Library – may be what you're looking for. The series has been
going for over sixty years and, among many other valuable services, it
effectively chronicles the shifts in naturalists’ concerns as collecting has
given way to conservation and cameras have replaced the shotguns, nets and
collecting bags that earlier generations of naturalists found essential.
However, there have been few volumes dealing with the history of natural
history itself. Bircham’s book is a rare and valuable exception. Everyone
who contributed substantially to British ornithology in the past thousand
years (the book begins with the Norman Conquest) is mentioned here, as are
the societies they founded, the journals they wrote for and edited, and the
species they collected, named and loved. Such comprehensiveness means that
there is little space to examine any one figure in detail, with the result
that the book does at times feel like a catalogue of ornithologists and
birds, rather than an analytical history. Nor is there much attempt to
relate the ideas and activities of the bird world to those of the other
sciences, much less to wider social and cultural concerns. This is very much
a history of ornithology for ornithologists, but they will find it
fascinating, detailed and clearly written.
By contrast, The Great Naturalists, edited by Robert Huxley, ranges across the
whole of natural history and goes even further back in time, to the
classical world and the origins of the study of nature. It is organized as a
series of biographies, emphasizing those people who supposedly made major
contributions, marked an epoch, or moved the study of nature forward.
Huxley, as well as some of his contributors, seem to assume that the
unconscious goal of history’s great naturalists was to found modern biology,
in all its impersonal objectivity and accuracy.
Consider for example Philippe Taquet’s account of Georges Cuvier, which, like
the other biographies in the volume, is clearly written, factually accurate,
nicely illustrated and full of engaging little details of Cuvier’s life.
Taquet tries to give a flavour of the scientific world in which Cuvier came
of age by noting that while the young Cuvier was still an unknown tutor in
Normandy, “Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu proposed his new system of
classification for plants . . . one which reflected the reality of nature”.
While all scientific endeavours could justly claim to be attempts to reflect
“the reality of nature”, as Macleay’s Quinarian system illustrates, the
routes by which science approaches this goal are often circuitous.
In the case of de Jussieu, while he did indeed aim to make his system
“natural”, an undistorted image of nature itself, his classification was
shaped by his preconceptions about what a natural system might look like. As
Peter Stevens has shown (Development of Biological Systematics, 1994), de
Jussieu was certain that there could be no gaps in nature, a conviction that
can be traced back to the ancient world, but which was revived in the
Enlightenment when it was often expressed as the idea that there could be no
breaks in the Great Chain of Being, and thus no extinction of species. The
certainty that nature was a plenum, that every space in the scale of nature
was occupied, shaped de Jussieu’s confidence that there must be seamless
continuity between the “natural” families of plants. That search for
continuity led him to abandon the attempt to find the single essential
character that would define a species and to look instead for a whole range
of related characters that would reveal the natural relationships between
species. In doing so, de Jussieu shifted classification away from the idea
that nature contained discrete categories each characterized by a
distinctive essence.
Denis Lamy describes de Jussieu’s achievements in The Great Naturalists,
noting that the majority of the natural families he named are still in use.
The more complex but fluid categories de Jussieu produced are regarded by
modern classifiers as an advance on the earlier concepts, because they are
compatible with modern evolutionary thinking. Modern taxonomists define the
“naturalness” of a classificatory group in terms of common descent from a
single ancestral group, but that idea played no part in de Jussieu’s
thinking. For biologists who are reinterpreting de Jussieu’s ideas to fit
modern evolutionary thinking, the Chain of Being and the concept of a plenum
become embarrassing, which is perhaps why they are not mentioned by Lamy.
(And for Taquet the Chain of Being is merely one of the old, incorrect
notions that Cuvier rejected.) From a modern biologist’s perspective, that
may not matter, but it is unhelpful if we are trying to make sense of the
past.
Taquet does try to convey a sense of Cuvier’s historical context by describing
the political upheavals of the period: “As Cuvier dissected and studied flat
fishes in Caen, on 14 July 1789 the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille
prison. The Revolution soon swept across the whole of France, and disorder,
food scarcities and the years of the Terror interrupted Cuvier’s studies”.
While this veers a little close to bathos, more importantly, it misses the
significant positive impact that the French Revolution had on Cuvier’s
career. He arrived in Paris in 1795 and by the end of the year had been
elected to the Institut de France; by 1803 he was Permanent Secretary of its
First Class. As Dorinda Outram has shown (Georges Cuvier, 1984), this
astonishingly rapid rise to power was a direct result of the Revolution. The
purging of the ancien régime scientific world created openings for Cuvier,
not least because existing patronage networks had been disrupted, which
produced the odd situation where protégés were in short supply; young men
like Cuvier were a commodity much in demand by those seeking to establish or
re-establish themselves as patrons after the Revolution. In Taquet’s
account, Cuvier’s rise resulted from “an excellent reputation as a
naturalist”, together with “talent” and “ambition” – again, all indisputably
true, but it’s an account that leaves Cuvier curiously adrift from his
historical context.
The problem with The Great Naturalists is not the quality of the scholarship
or the writing, both of which are often very high. Sandra Knapp’s piece on
Lamarck, for example, demolishes persistent myths and gives a good sense of
his intellectual context. Sachiko Kusukawa’s chapter on Konrad Gessner and
Brian Ogilvie’s on Leonhart Fuchs are also excellent. Nevertheless, the
volume as a whole is rather less than the sum of its parts, and I suspect
that the underlying problem was the decision to organize it into biographies
in the first place. The individual biographies are too short, partly because
of the number of pictures, which are used merely as illustrations (almost
nothing of any substance is said about most of them) and so contribute
little to the book. Moreover, the space devoted to each naturalist seems
arbitrary: Charles Lyell gets three pages of text; by comparison, Mary
Anning gets five. Without disparaging Anning’s importance, Lyell had rather
more impact on both his contemporaries and successors. The selection of
naturalists included seems similarly arbitrary: Asa Gray was an interesting
figure, but to include him at the expense of Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley
seems a curious choice. Yet, if the aim were to re-examine comparatively
neglected figures, it is hard to justify including Darwin (and giving him
the most space).
However, the bigger problem with The Great Naturalists is that the separate
biographies have the effect of isolating figures from one another and from
their historical contexts. Ultimately, it is unclear who the intended
readership might be: the book is not glossy enough for a coffee table, not
comprehensive enough to introduce newcomers to the topic, and certainly not
substantial enough to satisfy readers with some prior knowledge of the
subject.
Natural history has become an increasingly rich topic for historians in recent
years, who have studied an ever greater variety of its institutions,
disciplines and practitioners across many countries and periods. As the
study has grown, it has become increasingly clear that biographies of
individuals are rarely the most successful way to explore the diverse
cultures of natural history. Natural history has always been a sociable
business: when joint field trips and herbarium sessions were impossible,
letters and exchanges of specimens provided the vital links. Books dealing
with individual naturalists rarely give a sense of these entangled webs, the
contacts that have always made the world of natural history work.
Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay
MUSEUM
The Macleays, their collections and the search for order
188pp. Cambridge University Press. £45. (US $85).
978 0 521 87453 3
Barbara and Richard Mearns
JOHN KIRK TOWNSEND
Collector of Audubon’s Western birds and mammals
389pp. Dumfries: Mearnsbooks. £48.
978 0 95567 390 0
Peter Bircham
A HISTORY OF ORNITHOLOGY
482pp. HarperCollins. £45 (paperback, £25); US $85.95 (paperback, $47.95).
978 0 00 719969 3
Robert Huxley, editor
THE GREAT NATURALISTS
304pp. Thames and Hudson. £24.95 (US $39.95).
978 0 500 25139 3
Jim Endersby lectures in History at the University of Sussex. He is the
author of A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology, 2007, and Imperial Nature:
Joseph Dalton Hooker and the practices of Victorian science, 2008. He has
recently edited a new edition of The Origin of Species, to be published in
2009.
