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4

The Nineteenth Century,

a Period of Change

The ordinary naturalist is not sufficiently aware that when dogmatizing on

what species are, he is grappling with the whole question of the organic world

& its connection with the time past & with Man; that in involves the ques-

tion of Man & his relation to the brutes, of instinct, intelligence & reason, of

Creation, transmutation & progressive improvement or development. Each set

of geological questions & of ethnological & zoo. & botan. are parts of the great

problem which is always assuming a new aspect.

Charles Lyell^1

Nineteenth-Century Logic

Early in the nineteenth century, in 1826, Archbishop Richard Whately published an
influential text on logic, The Elements of Logic,^2 which is credited as reviving the
study of logic in English-speaking countries. In this book, Whately describes species
as essences, as heads of predicables, and as that of which genera are parts (and not
species being parts of genera, since the genus partakes of the essence, or definition,
of the species^3 ). But he also notes that this sense of “species” is quite distinct from
the sense in which naturalists use it of “organized beings,” for they are real things,
“unalterable and independent of our thoughts”:

... if anyone utters such a proposition as... “Argus was a mastiff,” to what head

of Predicables would such a Predicate be referred? Surely our logical principles

would lead us to answer, that it is the Species; since it could hardly be called an

Accident, and is manifestly no other Predicable. And yet every Naturalist would

at once pronounce that Mastiff, is no distinct Species, but is only a variety of the

Species Dog....

(^1) 11 February 1857 [Wilson 1970, 164]. Listed as 1851 in the printed version, but this is out of sequence,
and certainly a typographical error. I am deeply indebted to Mike Dunford for drawing my attention
to this comment of Lyell’s (and noting the date typo), the cited note of Agassiz’s, James Dana’s paper,
and for his conversations with me on the period covered by the “uniformitarian” and “catastrophism”
debates in geology. As geology was not, at that time, held to be isolated from any other kind of natural
history, Lyell felt, as did Darwin, that the issues raised in the one field (geology) had implications for
issues in the other (naturalism). Mike’s help has been immense here.
(^2) W hately 1826, my edition being the ninth 1875 edition. Initially Whately’s book was an extensive
article printed as the 1823 volume of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana [W hately 1823].
(^3) Elements, Bk II, ch. 5 §3, 85.