420 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
and taught at Amsterdam until his retirement in 1918, though he remained
professionally active until his death, working from an experimental garden and
laboratory that he built in the remote village of Lunteren.
Through the 1870's, de Vries worked exclusively on problems in mechanical
and chemical physiology. But, in the early 1880's, inspired directly by Darwin, he
began to shift his interests to evolution and heredity. From 1885 to 1887, he
published a series of 19 articles on "improving races of our cultivated plants" for a
Dutch agricultural journal. He first found mutations of Oenothera in 1886, and
worked steadily on his evolutionary views until his major work, Die
Mutationstheorie appeared in two volumes in 1901 and 1903 (the Mendelian
rediscovery only occurred as the book neared completion and could not have
inspired much of de Vries' conceptual apparatus). De Vries credited his
Intracellular Pangenesis of 1889 as the source of his theoretical views on
evolution. By 1890, he had abandoned work in physiology, and he then spent the
rest of his career as a student of evolution and heredity.
From Sachs and his colleagues, de Vries absorbed the leading philosophical
tenets of late 19th century German science, then the envy and model of the
Western world—experimentalism and the mechanical worldview. Throughout his
later career in evolutionary biology, de Vries insisted that his success derived from
his attempt to substitute an active, experimental and quantitative methodology for
the older comparative and descriptive approaches of natural history.
In the frontispiece of his first American book (1905), de Vries shunned
humility and ranked himself, by virtue of his experimentalism, at the pinnacle of
progress in the history of evolutionary studies. (The Mutation Theory did not
appear in English translation until 1909, and these published Berkeley lectures
therefore represent the first extensive account of de Vries' views in English.
Intracellular Pangenesis first appeared in English translation in 1910.) De Vries
wrote:
The origin of species is a natural phenomenon—Lamarck.
The origin of species is an object of inquiry—Darwin.
The origin of species is an object of experimental investigation—de Vries(1905, frontispiece).^
De Vries' rhetorical expression of this theme in his major work (1909a
translation of 1901 German edition) follows an interesting course—self-serving to
be sure, but revealing. Failure to progress in evolutionary studies, he argues, may
be attributed to an antiquated methodology: "We have a doctrine of descent resting
on a morphological foundation. The time has come to erect one on an experimental
basis" (1909a, volume 1, p. 207). (De Vries maintained a generous view of the
experimental domain—for he usually applied the term to the rigorous recording of
well-tracked pedigrees in garden plots, rather than to more classical manipulation
in sterilized buildings under controlled conditions. He wrote (1905, p. 463): "The
exact methods of the laboratory must be used, and in this case the garden is the
laboratory.")
De Vries then extended his argument in two directions from this central