GULICK, JOHN THOMAS

(b. Waimea, Kauai, Sandwich Islands [now Hawaii], 13 March 1832; d. Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii, 14 April 1923)

zoology, evolution.

A noted student of geographical distribution, a systematist, and a participant in late-nineteenth-century debates on evolution theory, Gulick was the third of eight children born to Peter Johnson Gulick, a Presbyterian missionary, and Fanny Hinckley Thomas Gulick. Born in the small native village where Captain Cook had landed fifty-four years earlier, Gulick grew up in modest circumstances. In early childhood he suffered an eye inflammation that left him with deficient sight for the rest of his life. He attended a small mission school year Honolulu, where as of 1846 his studies included Greek, surveying, and natural philosophy as well as reading and spelling. He traveled to Oregon in 1848 to improve his health, joined the gold rush to California, and returned to Hawaii in 1850. Gulick began a journey to the United States in 1853 to continue his education; he graduated from Williams College in 1859 and attended Union The ological Seminary, in New York City, in 1860 and 1861.

Barred from Civil War service because of his poor eyesight, Gulick sailed for Japan in 1862 with the first U.S. minister to that nation, Robert H Pruyn. He became one of the first American missionaries, and one of the first photographers, in that country. Discouraged by official resistance to Christianity, he left Japan for China in 1863. On 3 September 1864 he married Emily De La Cour, an Englishwoman who taught school in Hong Kong. He was ordained a Congregationalist minister on 22 August 1864, and after less than a year of Chinese language study in Peking (now Beijing) moved with his wife to Chang-Kia K’ou (Kalgan), a city of about 75, 000 located 140 miles northwest of Peking. Therigorous climate and living conditions, his own poor health, and the death of his wife forced Gulick to withdraw from this mission in 1875.

In 1876 Gulick was posted to Japan, where he remained as a missionary until his retirement in 1899. Following a second marriage on 31 May 1880 to Frances Amelia Stevens, an American teacher in a missionary school, the couple settled in Osaka; they had a son and a daughter. After his retirement Gulick lived for five years in Oberlin, Ohio, where his children attended college, then moved to Honolulu, where he spent his last years. Although his health was poor all his life, he lived to the age of ninety-one.

Gulick’s scientific avocation was closely associated with his religious vocation and the life circumstances it entailed, His earliest memories were of marine and forest animals near his Hawaiian home, and his intense curiosity about natural objects and appreciation of their beauty found expression in snail collecting and in frequent references to natural history in his boyhood journals. These enthusiasms provoked the first, and to all appearances the only, religious crisis of his long life. The austere and single-minded Calvinism of his upbringing led Gulick to perceive his preoccupation with nature as a diversion from sacred things, and thus a breach of Christian piety. By 1852, however, he was beginning to find release from this tension in the view that study of nature is a means to study God’s character through his works. This attitude, derived from natural theology, stayed with him throughout his long career and was unshaken by his adoption and vigorous advocacy of evolutionary views.

In 1853 Gulick’s youthful interests began to turn to science proper. Having returned from a missionary trip to the Caroline Islands, he suddenly perceived the relative richness in number and variety of the Hawaiian land snail populations. Reading Darwin’s account of the Beagle voyage led him to reflect on the phenomena of island life, and Hugh Miller’s Footprints of the Creator (1874) exposed him to pre-Darwinian evolutionary views. Gulick began close study of the Hawaiian snails, especially the genus Achatinellae, carefully recording all data on their geographical distribution. He emphasized the local centers of production of species and their adaptation to physical environment and to one another.

During his stay in the United States. Gulick participated for the first time in the scientific community, broadened his knowledge of literature (including that of science), and extended his systematic work, using collections he had brought from Hawaii. He met James Dwight Dana at Yale, became a leader of the Williams College Lyceum of Natural History, and presented several papers on the systematics of Achatinellae to the New York Lyceum of Natural History, which elected him to membership. His reading included Tayler Lewis’ The Bible and Science, which argued for a saltationist version of evolution, and Darwin’s Origin of Species.

From the time that Gulick began his missionary activity in 1862 until his retirement in 1899, his religious responsibilities had first claim on his time and energies, and he lived for long periods in relative isolation from the scientific community. He never ceased work on his collections or reflection on the bearing of their interpretation on the problems of evolution, however, and on two occasions—during the years 1871–1873 and 1888–1889—furloughs made possible valuable contacts with the scientific world.

Part of the first of these furloughs was spent in England. Gulick took his collections to the British Museum. Where he made progress in sorting, classifying, and labeling. During a visit to Down (Kent), Darwin encouraged him to write up his interpretations of the data. He presented his results in a talk to the British Association meeting at Brighton, a paper published by the Linnean Society, and a letter to Nature. These works reveal both his commitment to evolution in an essentially Darwinian form and his questioning of the sufficiency of natural selection as defined by Darwin to explain all cases of specific divergence.

Gulick pointed out that the Hawaiian Islands possessed a very high number of species of land snails within a small geographical area. These species were almost all found only in the Hawaiian Islands, some in only a part of one island. Most species were confined to a very narrow range, and those found in any given local area were connected by varieties displaying minute gradations of form and color. Given the evidently uniform climate, soil, and other circumstances in which the different species were found, differential fitness as defined by natural selection did not seem a likely explanation for the differences. Gulick concluded that the evolution of the different forms of Hawaiian land snails required two conditions: the division of a given population into two or more noninterbreeding parts (for example, by migration of one part) and strong enough to lead to cumulative divergence over time.

Gulick’s relatively settled living circumstances after his move to Japan in 1876 permitted sustained development of his ideas. In 1887 and 1889 he presented to the Linnean Society of London two long papers, “Divergent Evolution Through Cumulative Segregation” and “Intensive Segregation, or Divergence Through Independent Transformation,” which elaborated and generalized the conclusions of his 1872 papers. The central problem of evolution, he now emphasized, was the explanation of specific divergence. Natural selection, even comprising Darwin’s principle of “advantage of divergence of character,” was not sufficient to split one species into two or more. Gulick argued. Segregation or isolation, the separation of a parent stock intomutually exclusive breeding populations, was also required. Once effected, Gulick maintained, such separation would eventually lead to divergence even in the absence of natural selection. Much of the bulk of the papers was taken up with specification of the various forms of isolation and their effects with or apart from selection.

Gulick’s papers gave new life to a debate already under way among the British Darwinists that centered on George John Romanes’s theory of “physiological selection.” In a paper published in 1886, Romanes had argued for the insufficiency of natural selection and had proposed a supplementary principle that amounted to the spontaneous appearance of mutual infertility between two or more portions of a species population. In Gulick’s scheme Romanes’s physiological selection figured as one possible mode of varietal isolation. Romanes quickly embraced Gulick’s more general formulation, and until his death in 1894 argued for recognition of isolation as an essential component of the evolutionary process. The debates occasioned by the work of Romanes and Gulick were largely responsible for the wide recognition of the problems of specific divergence and of the necessary role played by isolation that was evident among English and American naturalists by the first decade of the twentieth century.

After his retirement Gulick wrote out a larger statement of his evolutionary ideas, Evolution, Racial and Habitudinal (1905). This work incorporated his efforts to apply the mathematical theory of probability to his evolutionary problems and introduced principles for understanding the development of human civilization analogous to, but distinct from, those applicable to biological evolution.

Born in the year of Cuvier’s death, Gulick lived to see—and applaud—the introduction of Mendelism in biology. His career spanned and exemplified first the age of the naturalist explorers, then the period of ambitious and often contentious evolutionary theorizing that marked the decades around 1900. Viewed as a revisionist by some Darwinians, Gulick nevertheless remained loyal to Darwinian natural selection in the face of challenges from de Vries’s mutation theory and other quarters after 1990. His emphasis on isolation as a necessary complement to selection helped open the way for studies that formed part of the synthetic theory of evolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A listing of Gulick’s publications is in Addison Gulick, Evolutionist and Missionary: John Thomas Gulick (Chicago, 1932), 511–514. This work also prints much of Gulick’s correspondence as well as extracts from his journals. His descriptive and systematic efforts are represented by “Descriptions of New Species of Achatinellae.” in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1873), 73–89, written with Edgar A. Smith; and “On the Classification of the Achatinellae,” ibid., 89–91. Early statements on evolution include “On the Variation of Species as Related to Their Geographical Distribution, Illustrated by the Achatinellae,” in Nature, 6 (1872), 222–224; and “On Diversity of Evolution Under One Set of External Conditions,” in Journal of the Linnean Society, Zoology, 11 (1873), 496–505. The most important of Gulick’s later articles are “Divergent Evolution Through Cumulative Segregation, ǀ” ibid., 20 (1888), 189–274; and “Intensive Segregation [or Divergence Through Independent Transformation],” ibid., 23 (1891), 312–380. His final and most comprehensive statement is Evolution, Racial and Habitudinal (Washington, D.C., 1905).

II. Secondary Literature. The principal biographical source is Addison Gulick, Evolutionist and Missionary: John Thomas Gulick (see above). See also Addison Gulick, “John T. Gulick, a Contributor to Evolutionary Though.” in Scientific Monthly, 18 (1924), 83–91; and David Starr Jordan, “John Thomas Gulick, Missionary and Darwinian,” in Science, 58 (1923), 509. Gulick’s connection with George John Romanes and the debates occasioned by both men’s work are discussed in John E. Lesch, “The Role of Isolation in Evolution: George J. Romanes and John T. Gulick,” in Isis, 66 (1975), 483–503.

John E. Lesch