The C. Warren Irvin, Jr., Collection
of Charles Darwin and Darwiniana


After Darwin

Darwinismus in Germany
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel,1834-1919.
2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1879.

The German morphologist Ernst Haeckel was among Darwin's most energetic disciples, visiting Darwin at Down House and promoting Darwinismus in the German universities. The comparative table displayed here, showing embryo development in eight parallel species, extends Darwin's own simpler comparison of dog and human embryos in his Descent of Man, to support Haeckel's slogan that "ontogeny [the development of the individual embryo] recapitulates phylogeny [the evolution of animal species from lower to higher forms]."

Darwinism and the South Carolina professors, 1
James Woodrow, 1828-1907.
Evolution: an address delivered May 7th, 1884, before the Alumni Association of the Columbia Theological Seminary.
Columbia, S.C.: Printed at the Presbyterian Publishing House, 1884.

Woodrow, a Heidelberg Ph.D. who later became President of South Carolina College, was asked to deliver this address before the seminary alumni and trustees because of rumours he had been teaching Darwinism. Subsequently the Presbytery staged a full heresy trial that left its own paper trail of charge and countercharge. The address itself, however, says relatively little about the scientific issues of evolution, focusing instead upon its religious interpretation and meaning.

The question of hereditable characteristics
Sir Francis Galton, 1822-1911.
Natural inheritance.
London and New York: Macmillan, 1889.

Darwin's younger cousin, Francis Galton, had like Darwin himself abandoned the study of medicine for a life of travel and research. Galton had been a strong early supporter of Darwin's species theory, soon focusing his attention of the question of hereditable characteristics, mainly through statistical surveys. Some of Galton's enthusiasms--the role of heredity in the achievements of successive generations of Darwins, for example--now look quaint, and others-- eugenicism--politically less progressive than they once seemed. Nonetheless, from the questions Galton posed developed the twentieth century interest in what would later be called genetics.

Darwinism and the South Carolina professors, 2
Joseph LeConte, 1823-1901.
Evolution; its nature, its evidences, and its relation to religious thought.
2nd ed., rev. New York: D. Appleton, 1892.

Joseph LeConte and his brother John had been science professors at South Carolina in the immediate post-Civil war period, before moving to the University of California where John became president and Joseph, a chemist and geologist, a professor. In the main part of this short book, Joseph LeConte outlines evolutionary theory, striving to keep later questions about such topics as the mechanism of genetic mutation in proportion by comparison to the broad scientific agreement over Darwin's general theory.

Darwinian theory and the development of genetics
William Bateson, 1861-1926.
London, New York: Macmillan, 1894.

In his earlier work, as in this book, the young Cambridge geneticist William Bateson argued that Darwin's theories of variation within species explained less about species development than did the observable instances of sharp discontinuity. By 1900, Bateson rediscovered and translated Mendel's pioneer work on plant hybridization, naming the new discipline genetics.

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