Evolution Social and Organic

by Arthur M. Lewis

This great advance was by no means far-fetched; it is simply an application of the double naming everywhere in use, as in the case of Tom Smith, Fred Smith, James Smith, in which Smith is used to denote the general or family name and Fred or Tom the particular or personal. In the application of this system to species, Linnaeus reversed the order as we do when we enter the names of persons on an alphabetical list, as Smith, Fred and Smith, James. As illustrations we will take the two cases, one from the animal and one from the plant world, selected by Haeckel for the same purpose. The generic name for cat is Felis. The common cat is Felis domestica; the wildcat, Felis catus; the panther, Felis pardus; the jaguar, Felis onca; the tiger, Felis tigris; the lion, Felis leo. All these second names are the names of the six species of the one genus—Felis. As an example in botany take the genus pine. According to Linnaeus the pine is Pinus abies; the fir, Pinus picea; the larch, Pinus larix; the Italian pine, Pinus pinea; the Siberian stone pine Pinus cembra; the knee timber, Pinus mughus; the common pine, Pinus silvestris. The seven second names apply to the seven species of the genus Pinus.

But this is not all. Besides grouping the species into genera, Linnaeus classified certain genera as belonging to the same “order.” Again he arranged these “orders” in “classes,” all these classes belonged to one of the two great “kingdoms,” vegetable and animal.

Not only was all this of great practical value but its theoretical influence has been incalculable. Linnaeus never saw, and probably would not have dared to proclaim if he had, that the resemblances which made his grouping possible, indicated a relationship based on descent from common ancestors. This was left for men of greater penetration and courage living in a less theological age. Prelates who smiled on the obscene debaucheries of Louis the XV. had Linnaeus’ writings prohibited from papal states, because they proved the existence of sex in plants.

Linnaeus not only proved sex in plants but made it the foundation of his classification. He also reminds us that plants were known to be of both sexes by oriental people in early days. Living as they did on the fruit of the date-palms they found it necessary to plant male trees among the females. Their enemies in war time struck a terrible blow when they cut down the male trees, thereby reducing them to famine. Sometimes the inhabitants themselves destroyed the male trees during impending invasion, so that the enemy should find no sustenance in their country; a war measure similar to that of Russians who burned Moscow in the face of Napoleon.

In the same year that Sweden produced Linnaeus, France gave birth to Buffon. Rich and independent, he chose to devote a long life to the study of natural history. He had remarkable powers of research and displayed genius in presenting the results of his investigation. But alas! he had less courage than Linnaeus and he lived nearer that terrible enemy of eighteenth century science, the theological department of the University of Paris—the dreaded Sorbonne.

As long as he confined himself to the mere description of animals he was a pet of the church, which seems to have pleased him, but when he began to draw evolutionary conclusions of real philosophical import and value, the Sorbonne at once opened its batteries. On these occasions Buffon’s retreat was prompt and unprotesting. It might be remembered as some mitigation of his cowardice that while the reign of the stake and faggot did not extend into the 18th century and there was no danger of the fate of the fearless Bruno, yet so strong was religious bigotry even in this period that Rousseau was hunted out of France, his books burned by the public executioner, and Diderot went to jail. “Hardly a single man of letters of that time escaped arbitrary imprisonment,” says John Morley in his “Rousseau.”

This was all very repugnant to the pride and vanity of Buffon and led him to adopt a style of writing much in vogue a century earlier when the theological hand was heavy as death. This method was to put forward the new idea as a heresy or a mere fancy, explain it, and then proceed with great show of earnestness to demolish it in favor of the orthodox view. This method succeeded admirably until it broke through the thick skulls of religious bigots that the case presented for the “heresy” was more convincing than the pretended reply.

A fine example of this appears in the fourth volume of Buffon’s “Natural History.” “If we once admit” says he, “that the ass belongs to the horse family, and that it only differs from it because it has been modified, we may likewise say that the monkey is of the same family as man, that it is a modified man, that man and the monkey have had a common origin like the horse and ass, that each family has had but a single source, and even that all the animals have come from a single animal, which in the succession of ages has produced, while perfecting and modifying itself, all the races of other animals.... If it were known that in the animals there had been, I do not say several species, but a single one which had been produced by modification from another species; if it were true that the ass is only a modified horse, there would be no limit to the power of nature, and we would not be wrong in supposing that from a single being she has known how to derive, with time, all the other organized beings.”

There is no such clear statement of the evolutionary theory in the “System of Nature” of Linnaeus, and if Buffon had proclaimed these views as his own and courageously defended them, he would have made his name the greatest of the 18th century, and clothed himself with immortality. But the stuff of martyrs did not enter into his composition, and the very next passage to the one above, translated reads—“But no! It is certain from revelation that all animals have alike been favored with the grace of an act of direct creation, and that the first pair of every species issued fully formed from the hands of the creator.”

When the Sorbonne thought it was being fooled it compelled Buffon to recant publicly and have his recantation printed. In that recantation he announced, “I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses.”