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Environment and Ecology in the Long Nineteenth-Century
Mark Frost, Mark Frost
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Environment and Ecology in the Long Nineteenth-Century
Mark Frost, Mark Frost
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This first volume includes scientific sources that were foundational in the professionalization of science and in the development and dissemination of scientific thinking as it moved towards evolutionary thought, including emerging ideas in biology, botany, zoology, anatomy, natural theology, and geology. The volume is comprised of specialist and popular science, and because science was becoming increasingly internationalised, particularly significant and influential overseas sources have been included. The volume includes extracts from works by Rev. Gilbert White, Baron Cuvier, William Paley, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Rev. William Buckland, Charles Waterton, Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, Louis Agassiz, Roderick Murchison, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Sedgwick, Hugh Miller, Patrick Mathew, Robert Chambers, John Ruskin, and Philip Gosse.
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
DOI: 10.4324/9780429355653-1
This volume uses key works to trace the emergence or development of a range of major scientific fields in the seven decades prior to Darwinâs Origin of Species. It is arranged in sections that gather some of the most important scientific interventions of the period, as well as other minor but valuable sources. Many of these works were seminal in their day but are difficult to access now, while others were relatively obscure at the time but significant in their overall contribution to their particular field. The aim of the various sections is to demonstrate the ways in which:
- scientific engagements became more professional and more materialistic, in ways that reflect a growing crisis in Natural Theological attitudes;
- environment became a major focus in a staggering number of ways, spawning discrete and important new fields of enquiry, as well as interdisciplinary methods;
- conservationist, environmentalist, and proto-ecological ideas gather energy during this period.
Volume II, covering the same period, will examine popularisations of science as well as cultural, social, and political engagements with environment. Volumes I and II exist in a state of dialogue, and readers are advised to cross-reference between them. In some cases, topics covered in Volume I from a scientific perspective are then treated from a popular perspective in the second and subsequent volumes, while some sections are unique to particular volumes, reflecting predominant preoccupations of particular periods. The Headnotes included at the start of each section of this volume are designed to provide readers with a detailed guide to key issues, as well as of environmental contexts of the period. This Introduction aims simply to provide a brief overview of contents and of the logic behind the volume.
Part 1 (Precursors) offers some coverage of important interventions in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century natural science. While it is impossible to provide adequate coverage of this enormously influential period, its significance to what follows in the long nineteenth century is worthy of exploration and contextualisation. Accordingly, I have included key works on those areas of investigation that would in time cohere as distinct disciplines (geology, botany, zoology) as well as examples of early conservationist thought, travel writing, and imperialist perspectives on environment. The authors included are amongst the key contributors to their respective fields, and the section illustrates that the long nineteenth century reflected continuities and discontinuities with what came before.
Part 1 anticipates the concerns of Part 2 (Natural Theology and the Great Chain of Being), chosen to open the coverage of the long nineteenth century because of the status of Natural Theology as the orthodoxy of natural historians prior to the 1850s. The key claim of Natural Theology (that evidence of Godâs wisdom and design are traceable in the natural world) is explored and articulated from various angles, via key works (including William Paleyâs Natural Theology and two extracts from The Bridgewater Treatises) and a range of other texts, some of which modify or query the Natural Theological project or demonstrate the increasing strains placed upon it by ongoing scientific discoveries. In 1834, in an extract included in this section, Adam Sedgwick could write with confidence that:
All nature is but the manifestation of a supreme intelligence, and to no being but him, to whom is given the faculty of reason, can this truth be known. By this faculty he comes the lord of created beings, and finds all matter, organic and inorganic, subservient to his happiness, and working together for his good.(On the Studies of the University)
One should note the permission given here by the assumptions of Natural Theology: that the non-human is âsubservientâ to Homo sapiens and designed for our benefit, but it is more broadly indicative of the vision of divine environmental harmony which Natural Theology conjured. The two extracts (Philip Gosse, Hugh Miller) indicate that by the 1850s, Sedgwickâs confidence was not so widely shared: the project of Natural Theology had become beleaguered by the onward march of materialist science in ways that anticipated the grand division between religious and secular perspectives that greeted the emergence of Charles Darwinâs Origin of Species at the end of that decade.
Part 3 (Geology) follows because it was established in this period as a major science and because its discoveries and debates were key to the vicissitudes of Natural Theology. The development of the modern earth sciences are traced, first via their roots in James Hutton, Baron Cuvier, and William Smith, and then through their manifestations in the heyday of Victorian geology via works by major figures (William Buckland, Roderick Murchison, and Charles Lyell). The emergence of distinct fields of stratigraphy and palaeontology are important aspects, and the contributions (and difficulties) of female geologists, including Mary Anning and Etheldred Benett, are considered alongside the work of pioneers such as Gideon Mantell. The section closes with two extracts from the 1850s that illustrate the closing phase of a key issue running through many of the works included here: the increasingly fraught relationship between science and scripture as it played out in debates about the earthâs prehistory and the concept of âdeep timeâ and began to query the centrality of humankind in the cosmos.
New ways of thinking, centred around the idea that it was necessary to study animals as functioning wholes existing within, dependent upon, and interacting with their immediate environments, emerged strongly within the discipline that forms the focus of Part 4 (Comparative Anatomy). While anatomy may not seem an obvious candidate as an environmental science, it was precisely these new concepts, arising from the work of Baron Cuvier but developed by Richard Owen and Louis Agassiz, that made it a crucial area for the emergence of new concepts of environment. That these increasingly materialistic accounts of animal life and environmental relationships would also provide support for evolutionary thinking in subsequent decades is a particular irony given the status of Cuvier, Owen, and Agassiz as Natural Theologians. This section also intersects with the previous one because of the focus of some extracts on the application of anatomical analysis to palaeontology.
Part 5 (Botany) turns to a significant, long-established field of natural science, doing so in ways that reflect the wide-ranging aspects of plant study in the period and tracing a gradual move from more informal (and often cultural) engagements with flora to the establishment of a highly professional discipline centred on morphology and taxonomy. Debates about classification systems and about the role of plant science (in the wider economy, agriculture, culture, and society) are addressed in various ways, while the extracts also inadvertently provide alarming evidence of declines in flora since the nineteenth century. As well as featuring major botanists (James Sowerby, Gilbert White, Sir William Jackson Hooker, John Lindley, Darwin, and Joseph Dalton Hooker), the section also turns to significant but often-overlooked contributions (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Luxford, Anna Russell) and to those who approached botany from an aesthetic angle (John Ruskin) or from a purely economic and exploitative angle (Thomas Ewbank). The significance of botany as a key nineteenth-century environmental science is underlined in its national, European, and global aspects.
Part 6 (Zoology) turns to another well-established natural science of the period but is somewhat shorter because of a strong focus on this topic in Volume II. Covering a range of sub-fields (entomology, ornithology, microscopic life), the focus is again national and global, turning to localised British studies as well as accounts of international exploration. The status of animals and their treatment provides one issue, but this section also explores the impacts of comparative anatomy in shaping the ways in which animals began to be conceptualised in ways that co-existed uncomfortably with Natural Theological modes and began to demand new ways of conceptualising environments as complex, dynamic, functioning wholes.
Part 7 (âNew Worldâ Environments and Scientific Exploration) overlaps substantially with the previous two sections, given the focus in places on flora and fauna, but the key element here is the manner in which European science intensified its project to globalise knowledge by exploring ânewâ environments. This section, comprising a range of major and less familiar accounts of global scientific travel, underlines the ways in which science interacted with the imperialist project, sometimes reflecting and endorsing it and sometimes resisting or challenging its impulses. The section focuses on the formation of new knowledge but also on the ways in which the various travellers engaged with the peoples and environments that they encountered.
There is inevitably a strong overlap between Part 7 and Part 8 (Demographics, Geography, and Biogeography), particularly as some of the works in both sections are travel literature. The establishment of geography and biogeography as powerful fields in this period was, on one level, concomitant with the broader European imperial project â a process of gaining command over lands, people, and knowledge â but, on another, a spur to new ways of thinking that often ran in different directions, sometimes spurring critiques of the disproportionate and damaging impacts of humanity on environments. Given the rootedness of ecology in geography and biogeography, this section reflects the complexities of these sciences. Alexander von Humboldtâs enormous contributions in this area are reflected in Parts 7 and 8, as are those of Darwin, W.J. Hooker and J.D. Hooker, and John Gould, but both sections also feature less well-known but extremely fascinating contributions from less prestigious or now more obscure writers (Carl Thunberg, Charles Waterton, George Gardner, Thomas Thomson). The related issue of demographics is largely represented by Thomas Malthusâs enormously influential Essay on Population (1798).
Part 9 (Evolutionary Thought Before Origin of Species) is in many ways a culmination of many threads traced in previous sections â the re-conceptualisation of the relationship between organisms and environment in particular â but also the significance of the geological concept of âdeep timeâ and a growing understanding of the dynamic âeconomy of natureâ (the harmonious and balanced state of environmental systems unafflicted by human activity) â as well as being the most significant contribution to the environmental sciences in the period. While the post-Origin history of evolutionary thought is traced in Volume III, this section traces its roots, going back to early work by Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, moving forward through some significant contributions to proto-evolutionary thought, and culminating with the announcement of the theory of evolution by natural selection by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858.
The final section (Agricultural Science and Land Management) is somewhat distinct from the others, but it is also amongst the most important, given the enormous impacts of agriculture on biodiversity, climate change, habitat loss, and other environmental crises. Although it is hardly the case that most of the work included in this section can be described as science, the various extracts reflect the gradual emergence of a recognisably more scientific approach to the land. Many of the extracts focus on the practical work of farmers, suggestions for âimprovementâ of agriculture, and accounts of the state of agricultural land in the period. These are contextualised in terms of what they reveal about human attitudes to the land and of the broader logic of human sovereignty over environment that they largely articulate.
The Headnotes that follow offer some contextual overviews of the condition of environments in the period and the pressures placed upon them from various directions, so it is unnecessary to replicate that coverage here. More broadly, though, this volume is about offering some sense of the enormous productivity of the natural sciences in the period, the growth or establishment of disciplines, and the ways in which science both followed and transformed attitudes to the natural world. The Volume I extracts also demonstrate the complexity of scientific engagements in the period, sometimes articulating, supporting, and enabling instrumental and exploitative approaches to the non-human but also, in their quest for knowledge, opening up new avenues and possibilities. That one of the important destinations of science in the nineteenth century was the establishment of ecology, a science that rapidly generated a wider field of social, cultural, and political engagement, is a subject taken up in more detail from Volume II onwards.
Part 1PRECURSORS
Precursors
The selections offered here of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work provide some indication, however inadequate, of environmental engagements and representations before the long nineteenth century. To some extent, the period 1780â1920 represents a distinctive era in the development of new attitudes to nature, science, and culture, but at the same time, it is impossible to trace a definitive break from its precursors. While there are many ways in which the extracts in this section differ from those that follow, there are also significant continuities: Michel Foucaultâs reading of scientific history as a series of discrete âepistemesâ in his otherwise astonishing The Order of Things is not borne out by close examination of sources.
While it was possible to devote this section to works of the earlier period that exemplify starkly âunscientificâ approaches to nature, our task â to contextual-ise the works covered in the anthologyâs first two volumes â is most effectively achieved by tracing some of their earlier foundations. These extracts have been chosen, then, to demonstrate a) a growing zeal to engage with the natural world in ways that involve empirical information gathering, organisation, and analysis; b) evidence of conservationist or environmentalist thought; and c) the establishment of Natural Theology, a philosophical method of enquiry that confidently attempted to ally a rational methodology to Christian faith and to demonstrate that the existence, benign purpose, and active creativity of God were achievable by investigating the natura codex (or book of nature).
Tracing Natural Theologyâs early roots is helpful because the relationship between science and religion slowly became a key point of tension in the European natural sciences. John Ray is included here as the most significant early contributor, but most of the writers in this section broadly share his approach, though it is worth noting that the extracts by Robert Hooke and Georges Buffon already begin to exemplify the lurking danger that attempting to prove Godâs design by direct investigation of âHis worksâ might lead to findings disruptive of a religious cosmogony. Because Natural Theology continued to play a significant role in early nineteenth-century science, Part 2 of this volume is devoted to its closer examination.
Part 1 also demonstrates that environmentalist or conservationist consciousness significantly pre-dates the nineteenth century and nods to its longer history. Readers seeking detailed exploration of the earlier, global roots of environmentalism can turn to Richard H. Groveâs Green Imperialism (1995) and Donald Worsterâs Natureâs Economy (1994). It should also be noted that while the extracts in this section are focused on Europe, one must acknowledge the enormous prior contributions of Classical, Mesopotamian, Indian, and Islamic scholarship. The importance of these predecessors is often obscured within histories of Enlightenment science, and while it lies beyond the remit of the current volumes (and the expertise of its editor) to do full justice to these cultural contexts, the anthology as a whole will seek a decidedly more global coverage of the long nineteenth century than is often the case, and to explore the varied, complex intersections of European imperialism with global environments. While there is, in the broadest sense, an imperialist element to most of the extracts included in this section â insofar as they rest on assumptions about the right to achieve mastery over environments, peoples, and knowledge â Emmerich de Vattelâs Law of Nations (1760) has been included as one of the most direct statements of imperial intent in these contexts. European imperialism also meant the formation of a body of scientific knowledge and a proliferation of specimen collections resulting from global voyages and expeditionary travel. The expansion of âNew Worldâ travel in the long nineteenth century, including many scientific expeditions, forms the subject of Part 7 of this volume.
It would be tempting to begin a selection of precursor texts with Francis Baconâs Novum Organum (1620), sometimes seen as the founding t...