WATSON, HEWETT COTTRELL

(b. Park, Hill, Firbeck, Yorkshire, England, 9 May 1804; d. Thames Ditton, Surrey, England, 27 July 1881), phytogeography, evolution, phrenology.

Watson was one of ten children born to Holland Watson and Harriett Powell Watson. His father, a magistrate for Cheshire County, planned a military career for his son. While still a youngster, however, Watson crushed his right knee during a game of cricket; he then became destined for the law. It is probable that his limp had a strong influence upon the development of his personality, which was conspicuously hostile.

A small inheritance at the age of twenty-one freed Watson from the necessity of earning a living, and he promptly abandoned his apprenticeship in law in order to collect plants and to study phrenology. The latter interest led him to Edinburgh, where he became intimate with the brothers George and Andrew Combe, and where he studied medicine from 1828 to 1832. Although he won honors as an outstanding student, Watson never took the examinations for a medical degree. There is some evidence that he had a breakdown in either his physical or his mental health.

In 1833 Watson purchased a house at Thames Ditton, near London, where he lived for the rest of his life with a housekeeper. He never married and never held a job, except for one term as a botany instructor in 1837 at the Liverpool School of Medicine. In 1842 William Hooker persuaded him to collect plants for five months in the Azores, which was the only time he ever left Britain.

In his early twenties Watson already had a good knowledge of the geography of British plants, and in 1832 he began publishing both articles on the influence of environmental factors upon the distribution of species and a series of guidebooks to their distribution. This was a promising, though not unusual, start to a career in botany.

At the same time, however, Watson was active in the phrenology movement, and by 1836 phrenology had become his major interest. In that year he published Statistics of Phrenology, Being a Sketch of the Progress and Present State of That Science in the British Isles. This book does not contain an application of statistics to phrenological questions; rather, it contains a report on the extent of phrenological activity in Britain. It has been more valuable to historians of phrenology than it was for advancing the movement.

In 1837 Watson purchased the Phrenological Journal from the Combes and edited it for three years, hoping to raise the standards of phrenological investigation to the level of a critical science. In this he failed, for two reasons. First, phrenology had developed neither an adequate methodology nor an adequate standard of verification. Merely improving individual phrenological papers was not coming to grips with the fundamental problem. Second, Watson was so blunt and critical in his editorial comments that he succeeded only in arousing the anger of the majority of the journal’s readers and contributors. He recognized his failure, concluded that phrenology would never rise to the level of critical science, and in 1840 returned to the study of botany, to which he devoted the remainder of his life.

Watson came to believe in the transformation of species by 1834; and he first defended the idea in a polemical tract, An Examination of Mr. Scott’s Attack Upon Mr. Combe’s “Constitution of Man” (1836). His ideas on the subject were Lamarckian; and although he had aggressively helped to advance phrenological theory, his contributions to evolution were almost devoid of theoretical innovation. Watson agreed with Charles Lyell’s judgment that Lamarck had not proved his case, but remained convinced that it could be proved. His subsequent phytogeographical research was motivated in part by a desire to collect evidence that would demonstrate the transformation of species.

Watson published some of his own evidence (1845) in a series of four articles written as a review and a reaction to Robert Chambers’ anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). After revealing the inadequacy of Chambers’ knowledge of botany, he went on to present evidence that could stand up to criticism. First, he felt that the paleontological evidence was important; but since this was beyond the scope of his own studies, he did not discuss it. Confining himself to botanical evidence. Watson documented the difficulty of distinguishing the separate species of Salix, Mentha, Rosa, Rubus, and Saxifraga by citing the divergent estimates of the number of British species of these genera from six manuals on British plants. Other evidence he considered important was the ease with which new varieties could be grown from cultivated species of Pelargonium, Erica, Rosa, Fuchsia, Calceolaria, Dahlia, and the pansy. He then pointed to the prevailing confusion among botanists concerning whether domestic fruits and grains were separate species or only varieties of the same species. Watson’s next type of evidence was the existence in nature of “species being tied together (so to speak) by a series of intermediate forms.” From his own observations he described clusters from a dozen such genera.

Watson’s examples of evolution in action—both from his articles of 1845 and from his Cybele Britannica—impressed Charles Darwin, who drew upon them to good advantage in chapter 2 of The Origin of Species.

Although he was innovative in many minor ways, Watson’s isolation from and contempt for his colleagues may have caused him to fall into a rut in his research. Both his phrenological and phytogeographical investigations were correlational in methodology. He never conducted any extensive experiments. In phytogeography he followed Humboldt’s example of constructing numerous correlations between environmental factors and distributional patterns. The results, he hoped, would lead to a new understanding of both phytogeography and evolution.

When he read The Origin of Species, Watson realized that Darwin had found what he had unsuccessfully sought—a convincing causal explanation of evolution. He immediately wrote to Darwin, “You are the greatest revolutionist in natural history of this century, if not of all centuries,” In his later years, however, he became disturbed by Darwin’s inability to explain the origin of variations; and he became less certain of the magnitude of Darwin’s achievement.

Watson’s own work after 1859 was devoted to increasing the accuracy of knowledge of the distribution of British plants, and he helped make the British flora the best-known in the world. The Botanical Society of the British Isles has acknowledged the importance of his contributions by naming its journal Watsonia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Watson’s articles on phrenology appeared in Phrenological Journal (1829-1840) and can be located in the index of each volume. His articles on botany are listed (but neither completely nor entirely accurately) in the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers, VI , 280–281; VII , 1202. There is a list of his botany books in the account by Boulger (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. Besides George S. Boulger, in Dictionary of National Biography, XX, 918–920, there are two useful biographical sketches of Watson. The first, anonymous but obviously autobiographical, contains the only known portrait of him as a young man: see Naturalist, 4 (1839), 264–269. The other is John G. Baker, “In Memory of Hewett Cottrell Watson,” in Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, 19 (1881), 257–265, with portrait of Watson in old age: reprinted without portrait in Watson’s Topographical Botany, 2nd ed. (London, 1883). The details of Watson’s life and work can, however, be obtained from the more than 300 letters he wrote that are preserved in British libraries. He burned the letters written to him.

There are no detailed discussions of Watson’s contributions to science. For indications of Darwin’s use of Watson’s knowledge, see the dozen letters from Watson in the Darwin MSS, Cambridge University Library, and R. C. Stauffer, ed., Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection, Being the Second Part of His Big Species Book Written From 1856 to 1858 (Cambridge, 1975), see index. For the background of his work in phrenology, see his own Statistics of Phrenology: David Armand De Giustino, “Phrenology in Britain, 1815-1855: A Study of George Combe and His Circle” (Ph.D. diss. Univ. of Wisconsin. 1969); and Charles Gibbon, The Life of George Combe, Author of “The Constitution of Man,” 2 vols. (London, 1878). There are ample testimonies in the British botanical literature to the importance of Watson’s work. One recent discussion is J. E. Dandy, Watsonian Vice-Counties of Great Britain (London, 1969).

Frank N. Egerton III