the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
had attempted to identify, describe, and classify
all the known species of plants and animals. But
these natural historians accepted the idea that
each species was created by God and had retained
a specific, immutable structure from the beginning
of time. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
however, scores of botanists, zoologists, and natu-
ral philosophers in western and central Europe and
in the United States, buoyed by a liberal political
and social atmosphere, were occupied with com-
prehending how changes in species occurred and
were attempting to understand the relationships
among organisms, and between organisms and
their environments.
In England, in 1858, the Linnean Society of
London published papers by Alfred Russel Wallace
and Charles Darwin on the theory of natural selec-
tion. The two men had independently developed
the same theory—Wallace, based on his eight years
of travel through the Malay archipelago, and Dar-
win, based on his around-the-globe voyage on the
H.M.S Beagle, during which he spent more than
four years doing studies along the coast and the
nearby interior of South America, sailed through
the Galapagos archipelago, and visited Tahiti and
New Zealand. A year after presenting his theory
to the Linnean Society, Darwin published The
Origin of Species, a book that produced contro-
versy on both sides of the Atlantic and sparked the
imagination of the public as well as the scientific
community. In the United States, in 1864, George
Perkins Marsh published his monumental Man
and Nature [see Document 43], the first wide-
ranging, scholarly study of how human actions
affect the natural world around them. In Moravia
in 1865, Gregor Mendel wrote his laws concern-
ing the inheritance of physical characteristics (but
they remained unknown outside of Moravia until
the twentieth century), and in Germany in 1866,
Ernst Haeckel published his Generelle Morpholo-
gie der Organismen, in which he coined the term
ecology, defining it as “the comprehensive sci-
ence of the relationships of the organism to the
environment.”5 Then, in 1871, Darwin published
The Descent of Man [see Document 49], which
theorized that humans are part of the natural sys-
tem and not a unique creation, separate from allTo encourage the settlement of the West, Con-
gress passed legislation that enabled settlers to
buy land cheaply [see Document 42] and have easy
access to land with mineral deposits [see Docu-
ment 51] and grazing lands. Low purchase prices
and—if the lands were to remain in the public
domain—leasing fees became the norm. Vast tracts
of land were turned over to the railroad companies
as inducements for building additional railroads,
and the railroad companies advertised in both
Europe and the eastern part of the United States
for new settlers to make the westward journey. The
expansion of railroads, mining operations, grain
fields, and factories was financed by bank loans;
when this growth proved too rapid for the country
to absorb, many banks failed, resulting in the panic
of 1873.
The panic prompted some national soul
searching and a questioning of federal policy.
Reformers, including the social economist Henry
George, attacked national land policies as enor-
mous giveaways designed to enrich speculators
and powerful real estate, industrial, mining, and
ranching interests. In place of prevailing practices,
George advocated a national land development
policy that would take into account the public
well-being and the interests of ordinary people
[see Document 53].
Although the growth of the railroads had
proved a boon to the expansion of the country and
the development of industry, it posed an unfore-
seen threat to the nation’s health. The danger first
became evident during the yellow fever epidemic of
1879, which began in Memphis and quickly spread
to nearby states as already-infected people traveled
by rail to escape the plague. A National Board of
Health was formed by Congress to help prevent the
further spread of the disease and to study sanitation
in Memphis.4
Scientific Innovation
During the late nineteenth century, enormous
changes were taking place in science as well as
industry. Building on a foundation laid down by
John Ray [see Document 15] and Carl Linnaeus
in the first half of the eighteenth century, natu-
ralists working in both Europe and America in
The Origins of Environmental Activism, 1840–1889 39