History is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the material and intellectual conditions of man; it inquires into the causes of those changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the life and mind of mankind.

The prevailing view among historians of science holds that Charles Darwin became a convinced transmutationist only in the early spring of 1837, after his Beagle collections had been examined by expert British naturalists. With respect to the fossil vertebrate evidence, some historians believe that Darwin was incapable of seeing or understanding the transmutationist implications of his specimens without the help of Richard Owen. There is ample evidence, however, that he clearly recognized the similarities between several of the fossil vertebrates he (...) collected and some of the extant fauna of South America before he returned to Britain. These comparisons, recorded in his correspondence, his diary and his notebooks during the voyage, were instances of a phenomenon that he later called the “law of the succession of types.” Moreover, on the Beagle, he was following a geological research agenda outlined in the second volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which implies that paleontological data alone could provide an insight into the laws which govern the appearance of new species. Since Darwin claims in On the Origin of Species that fossil vertebrate succession was one of the key lines of evidence that led him to question the fixity of species, it seems certain that he was seriously contemplating transmutation during the Beagle voyage. If so, historians of science need to reconsider both the role of Britain’s expert naturalists and the importance of the fossil vertebrate evidence in the development of Darwin’s ideas on transmutation. (shrink)

Research programmes are sets of problems preferred on epistemic grounds and including preferred heuristics for inquiry. Charles Lyell's research programme for biogeograpy includes the problem of explaining the distribution of species constrained by laws governing locomotion and containment of species. Included in the programme are laws governing the supernatural introduction of replacement species. Wallace and Darwin derected arguments against the putative intelligibility of this aspect of Lyell's programme before discovering natural selection, and their defence, at this time of natural laws (...) governing the introduction of new species is interesting as a defence of a noval programme of research, not a defence of a proposed theroy. These arguments are presented and an epistemological foundation is offered for them. 1 The author is indebted to a referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. (shrink)

This is a theoretical paper. A little theory goes a long way in history, for me; but it is good to collect as much as is feasible in one paper, so that gaps and inconsistencies can be noticed. I use ‘theory’ in the definite sense of a set of hypothetical statements such that deductions can be made and compared with data, facts, or generalizations obtained in some other way than as derivation from theory. Deductions need not always be rigorous, and (...) there may be two or more ‘solutions’ obtainable, of which the scientist may choose one and discard the rest . I am ignoring the differences between propositions, demonstrations, problems, and the like. Actually there must always be several statements, including rules of procedure, in the set; but often many are assumed and only the new or controversial one is stated as ‘the’ hypothesis of Mr X. (shrink)

The theoretical system Lyell presented in 1830 was composed of three requirements or principles: 1) the Uniformity Principle which states that past geological events must be explained by the same causes now in operation; 2) the Uniformity of Rate Principle which states that geological laws operate with the same force as at present; 3) the Steady-state Principle which states that the earth does not undergo any directional change. The three principles form a single thesis called uniformitarianism which has been repeatedly (...) questioned and which has been reputed to be unable to face the competing directional synthesis based on the theory of the earth's cooling down. As a result, the significance of Lyell's system has been reduced to a simple actualism which admits the validity of the only Uniformity Principle. I believe that the only way to understand Lyell's role in the history of science is to maintain the unity of his synthesis. To show the Newtonian roots of this synthesis I will compare Lyell's principles and Newton's Rules of Reasoning. I will conclude with an analysis of the methodological function of principles in Lyell's scientific endeavour. (shrink)

The view that religious orthodoxy stifled geological progress has had many distinguished exponents, one of the earliest being Georges Cuvier. To Cuvier, however, efforts to combine Genesis with geology ended before the middle of the eighteenth century, and opened the way not for progress but for wild speculation. We may admire the genius of Leibniz and Buffon, he declared, but this should not lead us to confuse system-building with geology as ‘une science positive’. While Cuvier's younger contemporary, Charles Lyell, agreed (...) that ‘extravagant systems’ had retarded progress, he insisted that ‘scriptural authority’ had had a similar effect until late in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

If we look at Isis as an archive of research articles representing ways in which historians have written about science over the past century, then one changing practice can be found in discussions of the usefulness of metaphors in the history of the sciences. During the first half of Isis’s history, metaphors were represented in stable categories: image studies, scientific analogies, diffusion, and individual scientists associated with metaphor. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, tools drawn from sociology, feminism, and the (...) history of literature, among others, created new discussions about how metaphors might be used. More recently, useful hybrids have further diversified the ways in which metaphors are discussed. Throughout the history of Isis, the usefulness of metaphors has been renegotiated in ways that suggest a periodization of metaphoric use and access to alternative histories of the sciences. (shrink)

Recently there has been considerable revaluation of the development of natural sciences in the early nineteenth century, dealing among other things with the works and ideas of Charles Lyell. The task of interpreting Lyell in balanced terms is extremely complex because his activities covered many fields of research, and because his views have been unwarrantably distorted in order to make him the precursor of various modern scientific positions. Martin Rudwick in particular has contributed several papers relating to Lyell's Principles of (...) geology, and has repeatedly stressed the need for a comprehensive evaluation of Lyell's scientific proposals, and of his position in the culture of his time. In the present paper I hope to contribute to the reassessment of Lyell's work by concentrating on his discussion of transformism, which constituted the central theme of the second volume of the Principles of geology: the very length of Lyell's detailed and critical analysis of Lamarck's theories reveals the importance he attributed to the question of transformism in the contemporary natural sciences. (shrink)

In the half century following Cook's entry into the Pacific in 1769, few tropical phenomena excited more attention than coral islands and the corals which evidently built them. In the eighteenth century corals occupied a critical position in the Great Chain of Being. Sometimes interpreted as animals, sometimes as plants, they built large topographic structures of limestone, and thus spanned the gap between the organic and inorganic worlds. ‘The strata which they form are at once living and fossil; we can (...) see them in the act of production, and the mountains grow up to the day before us, new parts of our own earth.’ Towards the end of the century, after Peyssonnel had conclusively shown that corals were animals—variously designated as worms, insects, or molluscous worms—this bridging significance was transferred to the coral islands, new areas of land emerging from the ocean and newly colonized by plants and animals, as an analogue of the primeval earth. This creative process served for some to counterbalance the Huttonian vision of universal degradation: ‘Whatever destroying tendencies … exist on the earth, these renovating powers compensate for them’. (shrink)

Early in 1826, at the age of 28, Charles Lyell began writing the first of a series of articles for J. G. Lockhart, the new editor of theQuarterly review. These articles gave him his first opportunity to express to the educated public his views on the state of science in general, and of geology in particular, in English society. According to the convention of theQuarterly, each article was nominally a review of one or more recently published works, but like other (...) reviewers Lyell clearly chose them as ‘pegs’ on which to hang his own arguments. In content, the articles form a kind of ‘gradualistic’ series, rather like his own later interpretations of geological phenomena. At one end of the series (though published third) was an essay on the place of science in general in English university education. Another article (the first to appear in print) focused on some of the English institutions specifically devoted to science. Here there was a hint that the need for reform in the place of science in English society was not unrelated to a similar need for reform in Lyell's chosen branch of science. The next article enlarged on this hint by examining the publications of the Geological Society of London, on which Lyell had recently served as Secretary. This essay expressed for the first time in a general context Lyell's characteristic emphasis on the need for actualistic comparison between present and past. Finally, what he needed to complete the series was an article in which he could show in detail the positive explanatory advantages of following this method in geology. The ‘peg’ which he chose for this purpose was a single work, George Poulett Scrope'sMemoir on the geology of central France. (shrink)

In the second volume of the Principles of geology Lyell had occasion to speak of G. B. Brocchi, ‘whose untimely death in Egypt’, he said, ‘is deplored by all who have the progress of geology at heart’. Whatever he understood to be the debt of other geologists to that Italian fossil conchologist, Lyell himself owed him much for providing scientific data and interpretations integrated in his own geological synthesis, but especially for furnishing the escutcheon of the third chapter in the (...) review of the history of geology which Lyell appended as a late but enthusiastic embellishment to the Principles of geology. The ‘Discorso sui progressi dello studio della conchiologia fossile in Italia’, an eighty-page essay on the history of his subject, was contained in the first volume of Brocchi's Conchiologia fossile subappennina and afforded Lyell succinct notices on Italian geologists from the sixteenth century to his own time, as well as cues for the introduction of other non-Italian sources. (shrink)

Lyell's performance as a historian was both fruitful and remarkable. He wrote well; his style was lucid; and he wrote with conviction and authority. In his history of geology we find none of the usual historians’ dodges. No ‘one of the first’, no ‘probablies’, no ‘it would seem that way’. Lyell did not have to resort to such ruses, because he wrote about the truth—the truth, that is, as he saw it. Most of his statements of fact are not incorrect. (...) But in selecting his facts, he left out anything that did not suit his purpose. Other historians of the geological sciences have pointed out the polemical nature of Lyell's history in general. My investigation is limited to a single chapter of his history, Chapter IV of thePrinciples, and to his treatment of Werner. (shrink)

This essay examines the relation of Darwin's orchids book to a central persuasive flaw in theOrigin: Its inability to give variation sufficient “presence” to break the hold of “design” in the mind of the reader. Darwin characterized the orchids book as “a flank movement on the enemy”; this essay identifies the “enemy” as Paley's natural theology and the “flank” as thetopoi, maxims, and habits of perception that led Darwin's colleagues and contemporaries to see design in nature. Moreover, this essay examines (...) three aspects of rhetorical timing pertinent toOrchids - time askairos, time as adequate duration, and time as transformation - and then relates those features to Robert Cox's Heideggerian logic of repetition, disavowal, and transcendence. The essay concludes with implications of the tactical and temporal aspects of Darwin's reasoning for understanding both the logic of science and of Darwin as a rhetorical artist. (shrink)