1 Oscar Wilde, 'The Critic as Artist', The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G.F. Maine, p. 979. This dialogue first appeared in 1891.
2 Yves Delage, L'Heredite et les grands problemes de la biologie generale, 2nd edn, p. 439.
3 Quoted in Emanuel Radl, The History of Biological Theories, trans. E.J. Hatfield, p. 388.
4 In a letter to Hooker of 4 September 1861: Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, Vol. 1, p. 227.
5 For two discussions of the date by which Darwin had privately arrived at pangenesis, see 'Geoffrey West', Charles Darwin: The Fragmentary Man, p. 264 (which argues for a date as early as 1840-1), and Gerald L. Geison, 'Darwin and heredity: the evolution of his hypothesis of pangenesis', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 24 (October 1969), p. 380 (which argues for May 1865).
6 Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 288.
7 Peter J. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin: The Years of Controversy. 'The Origin of Species' and Its Critics, 1850-1882, p. 20.
8 These short quotations are all taken from William Bateson's Mendel's Principles of Heredity:A Defence, p.v.
9 These three quotations are from 'Heredity and variation in modern lights', which was Bateson's contribution to A.C. Seward (ed.), Darwin and Modern Science: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of Charles Darwin. . . , pp. 88-9.
10 Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psycho-analyst, p. 118.
11 Garrett Hardin uses this epithet in Nature and Man's Fate.
12 Conway Zirkle, Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene, p. 190, speaks of the Transactions as 'a worthy but relatively obscure periodical'. The accusation of fraud is reported, and supported, by Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad, pp. 55 et passim.
13 Elizabeth B. Gasking, 'Why
was Mendel's work ignored?', Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.
20 (January 1959), pp. 60,
83. She mentions also that, pace
Zirkle, the Transactions circulated among 120 universities.
14 Hardin, Nature and Man's Fate, p. 127, expresses surprise at this, and puts it down to his condescending attitude. But as late as 1903 the second edition of Delage's L'Heredite fails to mention Mendel, either. Such omissions are probably other examples of the same deep-seated incomprehension that the natural selection hypothesis had to struggle against. In both situations there was a sudden irregularity or discontinuity in the rapidly expanding mosaic of biological assumption.
15 On this same question Julian Huxley, 'The emergence of Darwinism', Journal of the Linnean Society of London, vol. 44 (July 1958), makes the puzzling comment that if Darwin had known of Mendel's work he would not have regarded that as important for evolutionary theory because 'a premature attempt at generalising Mendelian principles would merely have weakened the central Darwinian principle of gradual slow change' (p. 11). To which the sceptic might reply: it would have more than weakened; it would have made reconstruction urgent. And what is a 'premature attempt'? What significant, lasting advance was made in the study of variation between 1865 and 1900? The neglect of Mendel generated a great deal of confusion and little else. Huxley comes close to saying that whenever a discovery is made - or remade - that is the 'right' time.
16 In a letter to LyeIl: Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin and A.C. Seward, Vol. 2, pp. 339-40.
17 Letter to Charles Darwin of 11 May 1872. Like most of the primary Butler material this is printed in Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler Author of 'Erewhon' (1835-1902): A Memoir (cited hereafter as Memoir), Vol. 1, p. 157.
18 Collected Essays, vol. 2 (XIX). Unless noted otherwise, all Butler quotations are from the Shrewsbury Edition, ed. H.F. Jones and A.T. Bartholomew. The roman numerals identify the volume number of this collected edition.
19 Letter of 6 November 1891: Memoir, Vol. 2, p. 116. In the same letter Butler condemns Weismannism in the tone, not of a participant in, but an onlooker at a debate. He never mentions Weismann again and, according to Jones, probably failed to carry through a resolution to read Bateson's important Materials for the Study of Variation (1894). See Memoir, Vol. 2, p. 97.
20 From a note (1901) to a letter dated 15 January 1876: ibid., Vol. 1, p. 233.
21 'Cellarius', 'Darwin among the Machines', First Year in Canterbury Settlement (I), p. 210. First printed in the Christchurch Press of 13 June 1863.
22 'Lucubratio Ebria', First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1), p. 219. Written in England, this was sent to the Christchurch Press and appeared on 29 July 1869.
23 Luck, or Cunning? (VIII), p. 97. Strictly, the liver, not the stomach, is the body's 'purse' since it stores nutrients for rapid conversion into energy. Glycogenolysis was discovered much earlier in the century.
24 Erewhon (11), pp. xv-xvi.
25 The letter is dated 25 November 1877. Life and Habit was published only nine days later, which accounts for the note of urgency. Butler believed that the summary of his own development which it contained was so important that he made a special copy. See Memoir, Vol. 1, pp. 257-60. Certainly the letter is a psychological curiosity and has frequently been mentioned as such.
26 Life and Habit (IV), p. 70.
27 ibid., p. 111.
28 Alfred Russel Wallace, 'Organisation and intelligence', Nature, vol. 19 (27 March 1879), p. 480 (partly a review of Life and Habit). Wallace was the only Darwinian to give Butler any permanent credit and he attracted Romanes' ire for so doing.
29 Bateson, 'Heredity and variation in Modern Lights', p. 88 n. He goes on to call Butler 'the most brilliant and by far the most interesting of Darwin's opponents'; and, although he continues by giving the palm to Weismann for having finally disposed of Lamarckism in its crudest form, he works hard at the same time at presenting Butlerism as an impressive antecedent of Weismann's germ plasm theory.
30 Clara Stillman, Samuel Butler: A Mid-Victorian Modern, pp. 161-3. Her impressive list includes Vines, Henslow, Cunningham, Hertvig, Delage, Hyatt, Cope and Packard.
31 These extraordinarily excessive claims are made by: Claude Bissell, 'A study of The Way of All Flesh', in Herbert Davis, William C. DeVane and Robert Cecil Bald (eds), Nineteenth Century Studies, p. 288; by Philip Henderson, Samuel Butler: The Incarnate Bachelor, pp. 123, 154; and by Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, revised 2nd edn, p. 111. Barzun goes on to claim that 'Unconscious Memory, for example, was a suggestion very much akin to the renascent interest in genetics'. But genetics whose conceptual framework did not even exist before 1905 at the earliest - far from being akin to Butlerism was deliberately built up on an empirico-mathematical basis to oppose the retreat of Edwardian biology into metaphysics. Asserting that this bifurcation existed does not of course require us to judge between the usefulness of the two methodologies: only to recognise (as Barzun does not) that they were present.
32 It is difficult to date this oddity precisely, but it was certainly current and fairly respectable by 1876. Darwin introduced it to Romanes in that year. See Ethel Romanes, Life and Letters of George John Romanes, new edn, pp. 49-50.
33 Edward Clodd, Memories, p. 260. The same legal language recurs in 'The deadlock in Darwinism' (XIX) where the sole criterion for truth presented is 'what a reasonably intelligent and disinterested jury will believe' (p. 43).
34 Life and Habit (IV), pp. 245, 247. However, these boasts are significantly restricted to the first book. In the later 'evolution' books, Butler took himself and his theories more seriously.
35 ibid., pp. 2, 249.
36 Lee E. Holt, Samuel Butler, p. 61.
37 'The deadlock in Darwinism' (XIX), p. 56.
38 Weismann's most mature handling of the inheritance problem is to be found in his The Evolution Theory, published in German in 1902 and translated by J. Arthur and Margaret Thomson in 1904. The 'germinal selection' hypothesis is explained at length (Vol. 2, pp. 119-22) but the many inconsistencies with his earlier position are allowed to stand, presumably because Weismann could not resolve them.
39 The Romanes analyses mentioned are: 'Weismann's theory of heredity', Contemporary Review, vol. 57 (May 1890), pp. 686-99; An Examination of Weismannism; and the posthumously published Post-Damvinian Questions: Heredity and Utility, which is the second volume of Darwin, and after Darwin. An Exposition of the Darwintan Theory. . . This treatise is a much expanded version of two courses of lectures given between 1888 and 1890. Post-Darwinian Questions was probably completed in Romanes' last year, 1894. The final sentence of the Examination (1893) runs in part: 'I intend to deal with this question [i.e. of Lamarckian inheritance] hereafter as a question per se' (p. 171). And no less than five chapters out of the ten of Post-Darwintan Questions are devoted to this topic.
40 Their relations from Romanes' side were defined by his wife Ethel as 'unbroken friendship, marked. . .by absolute worship, reverence, and affection' (Life and Letters, p. 13). This may sound excessive, but not when one reads Romanes' threnody 'Charles Darwin: A Memorial Poem' of which about one-quarter is printed in the Selection from the Poems by T.H. Warren. It is an imitation of Tennyson's 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington'.
41 Letter to his wife of 19 March 1893: Life and Letters, p. 300. In the Examination there is the same note: 'in those passages,' comments Romanes, pointing out some inconsistencies with a certain gloomy relish, 'Weismann is annihilating his own theory, root and branch' (p. 111).
42 Post-Darwinian Questions, p. 12. Not to be outdone, Robert Mackintosh five years later proposed 'hyper-Darwinism' as a suitable label for Weismann's school. See his discussion in From Comte to Benjamin Kidd: The Appeal to Biology, or Evolution for Human Guidance, p. 238.
43 Herbert Graham Cannon, Lamarck and Modern Genetics, p. 38.
44 Alfred Russel Wallace, 'Human progress: past and future', Arena, vol. 5 (January 1892), p. 156.
45 George Bernard Shaw, 'Back to Methuselah', Prefaces, p. 503.