Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 2, No. 2

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Journalof the Historyof Biology FALL 1969: VOLUME 2, NUMBER 2

Editor: Everett Mendelsohn, Harvard University Assistant Editor: Judith P. Swazey, Harvard University THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS ? Copyright 1969 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

CONTENTS Some Aspects of English Physiology: 1780-1840

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JUNE GOODFIELD-TOULMIN

Essay on Myth and Method in Seventeenth-Century Biological Thought

321

WILLIAM P. D. WIGHTMAN

American Geneticists and the Eugenic Movement: 1905-1935

337

KENNETH M. LUDMERER

Multum in Parvo: Gilbert White of Selborne

363

CHARLES F. MULLETT

Richard Bradley's Understanding of Biological Productivity

391

FRANK N. EGERTON

W. K. Brooks's Role in the History of American Biology

411

DENNIS M. MCCULLOUGH

Essay Review

439

JOSEF BROZEK

The J. H. B. Bookshelf

445

Index to Volume 2

457

Editorial Board: Bentley Glass, State University of New York, Stony Brook; Hebbel E. Hoff, M.D., Baylor University; Ernst Mayr, Harvard University; Everett Mendelsohn, Harvard University; Jane Oppenheimer, Bryn Mawr College. Advisory Editorial Committee: Ennrque Beltran, Mexico; Georges Canguilhem, France; John T. Edsall, M.D., U.S.A.; A. E. Gaissinovitch, U.S.S.R.; Ralph W. Gerard, M. D., U.S.A.; John C. Greene, U.S.A.; Marc Klein, M.D., France; Vladislav Kruta, M.D., Czechoslovakia; Joseph Needham, England; Dickinson W. Richards, M.D., U.S.A.; K. E. Rothschuh, M.D., Germany; Conway Zirkle, U.S.A. JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY is published semiannually in the spring and autumn by the BeLknap Press of Harvard University Press, 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138. Editorial Correspondence and manuscripts should be sent to Professor Everett Mendelsohn, Editor, Journal of the History of Biology, Holyoke Center 838, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138. Subscription correspondence should be addressed to Mrs. W. H. Carpenter, Harvard University Press, 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138. Subscriptions, which are payable in advance, will start with the first issue published after receipt of the order. Please make remittances payable to Harvard University Press. Subscription rates are $7.50 a year in the U.S.; $8.50 in all other countries; $4.50 for a single copy. Journal Design by David Ford

Some Aspectsof English Physiology:1780-1840 JUNE GOODFIELD-TOULMIN Department of Philosophy, College of Human Medicine Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

INTRODUCTION We have long been used in the history of science to seeing how the precise questions men were interested in, and the types of explanation that they were prepared to accept, have changed over the centuries. By now this is almost a truism. Changes of this sort have been most extensively documented within the history of the physical sciences, but the general thesis is equally true in biology, as anyone who has studied the history of the mechanist/ vitalist controversy knows. (It is indeed this very recognition of the changing nature of explanation that caused me initially to distinguish between "descriptive" and "explanatory" vitalists, and between "descriptive" and "explanatory" mechanists.1) And whether one is dealing with biological explanation over a wide span of time, or whether one is examining in more detail a far shorter period in biological history, the same general lesson appears to be true. The first part of this paper discusses an episode from physiology in early nineteenth-century England and will illustrate this point. This was a time of great debate2 over physiological 1. G. J. Goodfield, The Growth of Scientific Physiology (London, 1960). 2. I actually started this investigation as a result of a difference between myself and Dr. Everett Mendelsohn. In a footnote to his book Heat and Life, Dr. Mendelsohn says:-"His [Crawford's] failure to directly enter the philosophical arguments over vitalism should not be misconstrued. Most working biologists remained outside of this discourse." (E. Mendelsohn, Heat and Life, 1964, p. 159n.) This statement is questionable. For example, in the particular discussion with which I am here concerned, which proved to be only one aspect of this issue within physiology at that time, I have counted the number of working scientists in France and England who actually wrote on this matter and noted where they wrote. Both Palmer, editing the works of John Hunter in 1837, and Bostock in his great compendium of contemporary physiology (3rd ed., 1836), devoted considerable footnote space to a discussion of this particular question and listed the names, with bibliographical references, of working physiologists who had

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method and physiological explanation, and the debate spilled over into a number of adjacent areas. The early years of the nineteenth century were particularly active for such discussions, especially in London, and the debates which these engendered had wide repercussions both within physiology and more generally. The resultant controversies were to set up ripples of unwelcome effects among the liberals of the time. Firstly, the arguments were closely tied in with the current philosophy.3 Many of the early nineteenth-century physiologists were strongly influenced by David Hume and became caught up in philosophical debates normally associated with such men as Joseph Priestley, Dugald Stewart, David Hartley, Thomas Reid, and Thomas Brown. (This group are a delight to read. They are representative of a particular school of philosophers, many of them Scotsmen, who as Peter Medawar has pointed out "had definite opinions to express and took care to make them fully understood." 4) Physiology became tangled up on the theological side too. The pre-Darwinian battle was fought out in England quite as intensely between 1815 and 1830 as it was to be after 1859. Later in the century the issue was to be one of descent: the possibility that man could have physically evolved from the apes was too difficult to swallow. But even in the earlier years of the century, certain obvious physical similarities between man and the apes resulted in a number of comparisons being made which were highly unwelcome. Many scientists concluded from their morphological and anatomical observations that, for example, the mind of man could be directly correlated with the more complex development of his brain. Those of them interested expressed written opinions on this topic. The list contains many wellknown scientists from France, Germany, and England, as well as a number whose names are not so familiar. Together these add up to over fifty references, and few well-known physiologists are missing. This was discussion within the only one aspect of the physiological-philosophical broad framework of general physiology. I would, therefore, still hold to the statement that I made when reviewing Mendelsohn's book in Isis [56, (1965), 461-465]: "with few exceptions, this was a time of methodological heart-searching for physiologists." 3. For instance, William Lawrence, who will receive extensive discussion in this paper, refers to the following influential book which he had studied carefully: Thomas Brown, Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, 3rd ed., Edinburgh, 1818. Lawrence, moreover, is constantly writing in Humean terms, e.g.," . . . and the constant conjunction of phenomena . . . is the sole ground for affirming a necessary connection between them." W. Lawrence, Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man. Dedicated to Blumenbach (London, 1819), p. 105. 4. P. Medawar, The Art of the Soluble (1967), p. 9.

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Some Aspects of English Physiology both in physiology and anthropology also became involved in problems of "mind" and "soul," and therefore, like Priestley, in questions of materialism, and often most unwillingly found themselves caught up in theological problems. The focus of the theological-scientific debate, however, revolved around the question of the demarcation lines between science and religion.5 Caught up in this debate were men like Thomas Rennell, Vicar of St. Mary's in Cambridge; the Catholic, Foster of Chelmsford, George Nesse, William Grinfield, the physiologist Sir Charles Bell, and perhaps most notably of all, William Lawrence. It was Lawrence who, in his classic and controversial book, wrote: "Animals, too, participate in rational endowment."6 (The second part of this paper deals with these problems). Thirdly, science and scientists were inevitably involved in the political debates of the day. The years between 1800 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 were traumatic ones for England, and the liberals of the time found the going very rough. The poet Robert Southey early made a reputation as a free-thinking, fearless speaker, but drew great scorn upon himself when later he accepted the post of Poet Laureate, became a member of the "Establishment," and one of the most illiberal of the Right-Wing. Many scientists found the atmosphere suffocating and bitter. Lawrence himself, in 1819, after he had drawn reproaches for taking notice of the opinion of the French physiologists, was to observe bitterly that the French seemed "to be considered our natural enemies in science, as well as in politics." It was probably only his decision to give up theoretical physiology and to concentrate totally on his medical practice that prevented him from being forced to follow the example of Joseph Priestley and emigrate to America. This is by way of general background. The era is fascinating for the historian of physiology, and the whole of the interrelations between the work of the physiologists and the philosophers considered in the context of the social and political scene is part of a larger work of which two episodes alone are given here. I. THE VITAL PRINCIPLE AND THE APPEAL TO NEWTON7 In the Edinburgh Review of September 1814 a critique appeared of two recently published lectures by John Abernethy of 5. This point has also been discussed by Oswei Tempkin, "Basic Science, Medicine, and the Romantic Era," Bull. Hist. Med., 36 (1963), 97-129. 6. W. Lawrence, Lecture XI, p. 109. 7. An earlier version of Part I of this paper was first presented to Sir Karl Popper's seminar at London School of Economics in June 1967. It was given in its present form at the History of Science Colloquium at

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the Royal College of Surgeons.8 Like many of the reviews published in the journals of that day, it was anonymous. It was perhaps that very anonymity which enabled the reviewer, like other writers of his time, to indulge in particularly penetrating turns of phrase. The review in question has this opening paragraph: We profess to think very highly of all Mr. Abernethy's contributions to the science of surgery; but really these Lectures appear to us exceedingly deficient, both in sound reasoning and good taste; and we have very much overrated the physiological proficiency of the learned body to whom they were originally addressed, if there are not many among them who felt themselves somewhat scandalized by the instruction they conveyed. They are a collection of bad arguments, in defense of one of the most untenable speculations in physiology; interspersed with not a little bombast about genius, and electricity, and Sir Isaac Newton.9 Though one has continually to remember the magisterial authority of Newton in English science, it comes as something of a surprise to see his name here, most especially in connection with a book by a man whose concem was with physiology and the practice of medicine and surgery. But when one examines both the origin of the physiological "speculation" in questionthe doctrine of the vital principle-and the arguments used for and against it, surprise tums out to be misplaced. Not only does one find extraordinarily close analogies between the form of this physiological speculation and the form of Newton's theory of gravitation, but one is in the midst of an ironic situation, in which the adherents of the theory and its opponents both appealed to the example of the great Sir Isaac himself-as they justify their variously interpreted and misinterpreted hin-to positions. There are several reasons why the doctrine was put forward in such a specific form at that time and why it was taken seriously at all. One reason relates to the definitions of matter which were then being taken as axiomatic. The legacy of the sevenHarvard University in February 1968. Part II of this paper was given as a lecture at the Rockefeller University in March 1966, and subsequently printed in The Rockefeller Review (October 1966). It has been amended for this printing. My thanks are due to the Librarians of the Royal College of Medicine, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal College of Physicians in London, England, for their help and assistance during the work on the manuscripts. 8. The Edinburgh Review, (1814), Article VI, pp. 384-398 (Anonymous). 9. Ibid., p. 384.

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Some Aspects of English Physiology teenth century had left its mark, and most people had quite clear ideas of what matter is and therefore what a mechanical explanation should be. All genuinely physical processes were explicable in mechanistic terms, and authentic processes involved only transfers of energy or momentum, by the contact, or collision, of those "solid, impenetrable particles" of which Newton spoke in the Opticks. There were no independent fields of force, no action at a distance, no patterns of organization. What was "matter"? Earlier in the century Hartley had written as follows: "Matter is a mere passive Thing, of whose very Essence it is, to be endued with a Vis Inertiae; for this Vis Inertiae presents itself immediately in all our observations and experiments upon it, and is inseparable from it, even in idea." 10 And later he says: "I see clearly and acknowledge readily, that matter and motion, however subtly divided, or reasoned upon, yield nothing more than matter and motion." 11 Hartley, of course, was a philosopher and a theoretical psychologist. But let us look also at a medical man-a practicing doctor in Manchester-who will serve as a good example of what the average intelligent person was thinking and believed. On February 7, 1787, John Ferriar delivered a paper to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, called "Observations Concerning the Vital Principle." We shall be returning to Ferriar, but here for the moment let us notice that he states that this doctrine was put forward as a hypothesis "because of a persuasion, generally agreed, that Matter is totally inert and insusceptible of sensitive life by an organization." 12 Given these generally accepted ideas, it was inevitable that the properties of living things should create difficulties. An exhaustive, mechanical explanation had no room for self-propelled matter, self-regulating matter, or for thinking matter. How could a machine calculate, assess, think? 13 These restrictive definitions of matter and of mechanism paid off brilliantly in physical theory, but the price was paid by physiology. Moreover, by the end of the eighteenth century the physical sciences had added yet another difficult paradox for physiologists. The success of the new chemistry, if anything, intensified the physiological problem by intensifying the distinction between the inanimate 10. D. Hartley, Observations on Man (1749),

pt. II, chap. 1, Proposition

6. 11. D. Hartley, Observations, pt. I. Conclusion. 12. J. Ferriar, "Observations concerning the Vital Principle," Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 3 (1790), 223. 13. For a comprehensive discussion of this point see S. E. Toulmin, "Neurosciences and Human Understanding," In Neurosciences: A Study Program. Rockefeller University Press (1968), pp. 822-832.

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and the animate. By 1800 men knew, more or less, by what criteria one should judge a pure chemical substance. It could be measured, weighed and contained; it reacted and it was ponderable. Clearly, it did not breathe, it did not eat, it did not reproduce, it did not evince irritability. In this way, even the new chemistry set the seal of inactivity upon matter and material substances. Physiologists might have been tempted, as indeed some were, to leave the question of the differences between living and nonliving things at a safe descriptive level. Or, they could have recognized at a level of observation, and later admitted as a matter of theory, a total difference between the behavior of organisms and the behavior of inorganic substances, and so have paved the way for explanations of a totally different type. The French physiologist Bichat and the French chemist Chaptal are obvious examples.14 But other physiologists saw a paradox and admitted a difficulty. These men realized that chemical substances made up the body of living organisms, and were convinced by the experiments which demonstrated that chemical processes went on inside living organisms. They clearly saw the necessity of chemical explanation as an important adjunct to physiological theory and method. Their recognition of the importance of chemical studies to physiological understanding is shown by the fact that in 1802/3 a society was formed in London for this very study: The Society for the Promotion of Animal Chemistry. It flourished, and many eminent men were members, including both Sir Humphrey Davy and his brother, Dr. John least, it Davy. The Society had considerable influence-not sponsored Liebig's famous lectures on the subject, and the majority of the physiological papers communicated to the Royal Society for the years 1800 to approximately 1815 were first read at meetings of the Society for the Promotion of Animal Chemistry. Sir Benjamin Brodie's only experiments with a bearing on theoretical biology were all communicated to this society first,'5 and many men whom we arbitrarily might want to label as vitalists (as Brodie was so labeled by Claude Bernard'6) belonged to the society from the very beginning. But since there were features about organisms which undoubtedly were unique, these scientists were faced with a genuine theoretical and meth14. M. F. X. Bichat, Anatomie generale appliqu6e a la physiologie et m6decine (Paris, 1801); J. A. Chaptal (1791), Elements of Chemistry, trans. W. Nicholson (London, 1791), esp. p. 279. 15. See G. J. Goodfield, "Benjamin Brodie," in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (in press). 16. C. Bernard, Legons sUT la chaleur animale, Paris (1876), p. 290.

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Some Aspects of English Physiology odological problems. They tried to avoid either reducing organisms totally to "machines" or uplifting them to a unique and mysterious category of beings. Their problem can be very simply stated. There are obvious differences, both of behavior and properties, between living and nonliving things. This we perceive. We know at the same time that chemical substances make up the animal body and chemical processes are going on inside it. So the question became: how can we at one and the same time allow for these observable differences, and yet in our theoretical explanation take cognizance of the role of chemical processes within organisms? For whatever category of explanation these men opted for, they felt that they did have to do justice to the phenomena in question as they observed them. In trying to resolve the paradox, there was one particular observation to which men pointed as crucial evidence of the fundamental difference between the living and the inorganic worlds. This related to the oxidizing effect of the atmosphere. A living organism, although it was made of the same chemical substances as non-living things, and although it did have chemical processes going on inside, yet when alive apparently had the capacity to resist the destructive effect of oxygen. When dead, it behaved like an ordinary chemical system and was decomposed very rapidly. As a result of this observation, their questions took a precise form. What else, besides common chemical matter, does the organism possess when alive which it apparently loses when dead? Wherein and in what lies this particular property-this capacity to resist the decomposing effects of ordinary atmospheric oxygen? Notice the form of the question, because it dictated the form of the answer. Admittedly, even in the early nineteenth century there were some physiologists who criticized the form of the question-William Lawrence was one of these -but nevertheless it was the dominant one in England at this time. The theory of the vital principle was one answer to this question. This principle was thought of as an active power, superadded to matter, which was independent both of mind and of material substances. In various guises the doctrine had a long history as John Ferriar himself showed in 1787, but it took a very precise form in the early years of the nineteenth century. It was not a doctrine of a vital "force" or "substance," but specifically of a "principle"; and, as a matter of history, turned out to be theoretically unrewarding. But to study it is interesting both because (as I have indicated) the debates it engendered spilled over into neighboring areas and because the patterns of

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argument enabled both its proponents and its opponents to appeal to the magisterial example set by Newton. The issue occupied a central place in English physiological and medical thought from approximately 1780 until 1830. In 1829, and again in 1836, we find elegant and important criticisms of the doctrine in two works: John Prichard's Review of the Doctrine of the Vital Principle (1829), and John Bostock's Elements of General Physiology (3rd ed., 1836). After 1836, references to the doctrine die away. I said that the doctrine was unfruitful, and some people recognized this from the beginning. Indeed, some physiologists took up positions which were almost exact analogues of those taken by Cuvier and Magendie. But their moves in the direction of a more "French-type" physiology were always blocked, since they called forth responses from critics in a form which consistently shifted the issue away from physiology and toward philosophy and theology (see Part II). Before examining the doctrine in detail let us reiterate that the evidence for the existence of the vital principle was the fact that the organism possessed the power to counteract the destructive effects of the atmosphere, and the justification for an explanation of this type lay within the framework of the selfimposed axiom of matter which had been introduced by physicists and accepted by physiologists. Admittedly it could have been argued, and it was argued, that the explanation need not be sought by appeal to the presence of any particular principle added to common matter, but lay rather in the very organization inherent in the living things. This view was, on the whole, rejected for two reasons. Many people-among them, John Hunterl7-felt that postulating a special organization of chemical matter would itself prove an insufficient explanation. And they justified their belief by pointing to the early embryonic stages of the chick egg. Clearly, it was quite easy to distinguish a live hen's egg from a dead one, for one only had to wait a few days, and the difference would be smelt. Yet in both cases there was no visible organization. A live hen's egg, even if not fertilized, looked just the same as a dead hen's egg, visible organization being seen only several days after fertilization had taken place. But, in any case, even if one did grant that living properties arose as a result solely of a peculiar type of organization, this only took the question back one step further. For in that 17. J. Hunter, "Lectures on the Principles of Surgery," delivered in 17861787, in The Works of John Hunter, edited with notes by J. Palmer (London, 1837), vol. I. Discussion of this relevant problem is in chap. 2 of vol. I. See also "A Treatise on the Blood," 1793, Works, vol. III, especially footnote, pp. 120-121.

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Some Aspects of English Physiology case, one had to ask, "In what does this special organization consist?" and, "Why should such an organization give rise to a particular set of vital properties?" (Even in contemporary biology, it is essential for us to answer: "How is it, at the quantum-level, that the structure of the DNA molecule gives rise to a molecule that can replicate?" And it is not the least of the many merits of the Crick-Watson hypothesis of DNA structure that it suggests immediately why this can happen.) The doctrine of the vital principle assumed a definite character and a magisterial authority in the early years of the nineteenth century as a result of the work of John Hunter. Hunter was one of the most important of English doctors and contributed a great amount of detailed anatomical work to English medicine. His influence was pervasive, and he was regarded within London and within the medical world generally with the greatest admiration and respect, his styles of thought and methods of procedure leaving an enduring mark in the schools. In comparison with his anatomical and surgical writings, Hunter wrote very little about the phenomena of life, and where he did write, the material is scattered in the context of his medical lectures. Nor was he distinguished for his clarity. But he was clearly very much concerned with the problem, and he had profound impact on the direction of medical thought. Hunter argued that one could not account for living phenomena except on the supposition that life resulted from the addition of a simple principle to ordinary matter. The principle was distinct from mind as manifested in man, as well as from the physical matter that was the study of physicists and chemists. It was the very presence and absence of this principle which resulted in the presence or absence of life. To take but one example: "Animal and vegetable substances differ from common matter in having a power superadded, totally different from any other known property of matter, out of which arise various new properties."18 Another analogy brings us directly into contact with Newton: "The living principle, then, is the immediate cause of action in every part; it is therefore essential to every part, and is as much a property of it as gravity is of every particle of matter composing the whole." 19 Notice here the structure of the appeal to the Newtonian example. There were many debates in Newton's time about the causes and the mechanism of gravity. But Newton died in 1727. By the time Hunter wrote the above passage (1786), scientists had more or less despaired of finding a mechanism for gravita18. J. Hunter, Works, I, 214.

19. Ibid., p. 223.

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tional action. Gravity was therefore considered an intrinsic property of matter-Hartley earlier referred to it as another "