Middle-Class Victorian Men and Women Collect, Identify, and Preserve Plant and Animal Species, Broadening Human Knowledge of the Natural World and Transforming Biology into a Mature Science

Overview

In the nineteenth century the science of biology, including botany and zoology, was just beginning to mature while astronomy, physics, and math were already established sciences. Victorian members of the middle class were affluent and interested in learning about the natural world. They had leisure time to attend lectures, visit museums, and collect specimens of plants, insects, animals, and fossils. Many of these enthusiasts provided specimens for naturalists and added to scientific knowledge and understanding of the natural world in a material way. By the end of the century, enthusiasm for amateur scientific enterprise waned as the increasing complexity of science and the need for professional training and expertise to keep up with advances in these disciplines overwhelmed the formally inexperienced.

Background

The natural world has been observed and commented on since Aristotle. Species and types of plants and animals were recognized, but classification went no farther than obvious divisions. Each natural historian drew and arranged specimens his or her own way. Understanding of the enormous varieties of organisms in the natural world could not become a science until an orderly system of classification and identification was devised. Thousands of species were collected and described, but all was confusion.

Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) recognized the need for order and created a system based on groups of species and subspecies. The tenth version of his Systema Naturae, published in 1758, classified mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish in two groups—vertebrates (with backbones) and invertebrates (without backbones). Plants were divided into parts and arranged according to sexual characteristics, identified by a binomial formula of two Latin names designating genus and species. Linnaeus also devised the Latin name Homo sapiens (wise man) for humans. Although this system has been revised, refined, changed, and augmented since its original appearance, it is still essentially the one in use today.

England and other European nations had been exploring the rest of the world for 200 years with an eye to exploiting its commerce. On board each ship was a naturalist whose task it was to collect examples of plants and animals wherever the ship went and an artist to draw accurate images of the curious and fantastic life in the four corners of the earth. When the ships returned home in the 1800s, these images were published and became popular with a new audience.

This audience was made up of a new middle class who gained importance in early nineteenthcentury Europe. Victorian society is defined as middle-class Europeans and Americans who lived when Queen Victoria (1819-1901) ruled England from 1837 to 1901. It was made up of men of wealth and their families. These men created, exploited, and were expanding a new industrial world. They included shipbuilders, factory owners, architects, builders, insurance company operators, and bankers who owned the means of industrial production and supported businesses employing thousands of people. They also profited handsomely from their investments.

This was a time of rapid change in Western society. New inventions made life easier and required industrialization. Victory over disease brought a population explosion, which led to urbanization. Workers were needed in factories, steel mills, mines, and to build bridges and railroads. They moved into cities, which became crowded slums. However, the standard of living of the middle class rose as did their education, and they had ample leisure time to pursue their interests.

Impact

Collecting, arranging, theorizing, and discussing the natural world became a popular activity engaged in by men and women with the leisure time to pursue intellectual activities. Many had no goal other than to satisfy their personal interest and desire for self-improvement. Attending public lectures and visiting museums augmented this interest. Museums, an old idea for preserving scientific and antiquarian accumulations, usually located in private homes, were opened to the public. The first public museum was the Ashmoleon in Oxford, England, begun in 1683. The British Museum opened in 1759 and the American Museum of Natural History in 1869. Museums became popular places to visit and learn. Hundreds of thousands of specimens of plants, flowers, animals, insects, and fossils were gathered, prepared for display, and studied by amateur naturalists. Printed explanatory cards enabled visitors to understand what they were seeing and derive pleasure from the visit.

The importance of the activities of these middle-class seekers after knowledge and diversion was threefold. First and foremost, their collections and discoveries added to the body of knowledge of the natural world, though this was not necessarily the goal of the enthusiast. Current knowledge of plants, animals, and insects was augmented by new specimens and insights.

Second, to collect specimens with discrimination, a natural historian, professional or amateur, had to know what to look for. This helped popularize the importance of and need for education, recognized as fundamental for self-fulfillment and for individual contributions to society.

Thirdly, the popularity of natural history helped create professional biologists by extending current knowledge. Many professional biologists began as amateur naturalists. Because of the enormous varieties of plants, animals, insects, and fossils, naturalists began to focus on a single species or variety of organism.

Those who collected, especially botanical species, did so for their own edification and not for the advancement of a particular science. They often belonged to networks of collectors who contributed to magazines and journals in which they wrote up their discoveries. Naturalists like Asa Gray (1810-1888), American professor of natural history at Harvard, encouraged amateurs to collect in their own geographical area and to send specimens to him. He was also generous in helping to identify species for them and occasionally paid them to collect species he wanted.

Natural historians—American, English, and European—appreciated the work of prolific, accurate, amateur collectors from various countries. Such amateurs often worked on an equal footing with the professionals and some became illustrious scientists, others knowledgeable enough to write texts on botany or zoology for general consumption.

The case of Captain Charles Scammon, a whaling captain, serves as an example. Zoologists studied whales for centuries, but were limited to specimens of bones only. Whalers saw cetaceans alive and breathing. Captain Scammon, who whaled off the west coast of the United States, was untrained in science but recognized the California Gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) as a new species unknown to the biological world. In 1876 his Marine Mammals of the West Coast of North America contained the first published drawing and description of the physical properties of the species. He was also one of the first naturalists to note behavior, routes of migration, and food sources of the subject of his study.

The discovery and collection of fossils was another area where amateurs contributed to knowledge of the natural world. In 1822 the first recorded dinosaur was discovered in a backyard in Sussex, England, by Gideon Mantell (1790-1852). Later more were found in Oxford and soon specimens were being found all over the world. Richard Owen (1804-1892) wrote a basic treatise on the new fossils in 1841 and coined the name dinosaur. Plant fossils had been known since the Greeks, but in the nineteenth century they were shown to be prints of living plants. In 1856 the first early human, Neanderthal Man, was discovered in a cave by a German quarry man. It was reported in print in 1863 just as controversy over evolution arose.

In 1859 one of the most famous of amateur naturalists, Charles Darwin (1809-1882), turned biological knowledge on its head with his book On the Origin of Species, which contained his famous ideas about evolution. Based on observations during a voyage around the world in 1830-35, ideas from his grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), and philosophical and geological works by Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), Charles Lyell (1797-1875), and others, Darwin's treatise stunned the world. His work was of enormous importance to biology and to man's understanding of himself and his world, and its impact on society and educated men and women cannot be understated.

Some people applauded, some objected in utter indignation, but people noticed Darwin's work. The educated Victorian who had been collecting and studying the natural world for years was able to understand this new idea. Many protested, many vilified the writer, but they could comprehend it. Some began to study particular plants or animals in order to refute or corroborate the Darwin's ideas. The age of the earth was also pushed back because of the startling discovery of Neanderthal Man, as well as older fossils. Evolution required ages to work and that was now seen as possible. Religious objections were vocal and vitriolic, but did not stop advances in biology.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century emphasis was on observation, collecting, and classifying, and the word "biology" was just beginning to be used. By the end of the century the focus was on creating experiments, theoretical deductions, and was turning for answers to microscopic structures of organisms. Science had also begun to unseat orthodox theology as the principal source of explanation of the natural world and its workings. Biology had acquired a huge body of knowledge, a system of classification, and a theoretical model that allowed practitioners to interpret and manipulate knowledge. The Victorians had played a large part in propelling biology into a modern science.

LYNDALL LANDAUER

Further Reading

Darwin, Charles. Descent of Man. New York: American Home Library, 1902.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of the Species. London: Ward, Lock, 1910.

Ewan, Joseph. A Short History of Botany in the United States. New York: Hafner, 1969.

Heyck, T. W. The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. London: Croom Helm, 1982.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962.

Keeney, Elizabeth. The Botanizers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990-91.

Singer, Charles. A History of Biology. 1931. Reprint, London and New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959.