Species

136 Species

knowledge of the complete type requires knowing all these and how they relate to
external circumstances. There is a higher essence, as it were, in the type. Finally,
while species are real things, they are not comprehensively covered in any “material
or immaterial existence”—in modern parlance, they are types, not tokens,^97 and spe-
cies are both invariant and variant. In short, Dana sees species as the schematic of a
developmental cycle and the ways in which it may be perturbed by the environment.

Richard Owen on the Unity of Types

Richard Owen, who introduced many of the ideas of the ideal morphologists into
British thought, did not address the question of species directly, so far as I can tell. In
his Hunter Lectures of 1843, reissued in a revised edition in 1855, entitled Lectures
on the comparative anatomy and physiology of the invertebrate animals,^98 Owen
addressed the question of overall types in terms derived from Cuvier’s embranch-
ments, but treated species as unanalyzed units of classification.^99 He was not opposed
at this time to species transmutation, although he treats it more as a formal possibil-
ity than as an actuality, and so he contributes little to the topic at hand.
Owen, as is widely known, first clearly expressed the distinction between homo-
logue and analogue in the Glossary to his 1843 Lectures,^100 and further distinguished
special, general, and serial homology, respectively, the correspondence of a part in
one animal with a part in another, of a part in a particular animal (that is, of a species)
to a fundamental or general higher type, and the repetition of a part within a particu-
lar animal or type.^101 Organic forms, he thought, were due to a mutual antagonism
of two principles, one of which brought about a vegetative repetition of structure,
and the other which shapes the living thing to its function, a teleological principle.^102
He allowed that species were formed through time, and that there was a naturalis-
tic cause based on these principles, “the secret counsels of the organizing forces,”
as he expressed it in the Archetype.^103 Earlier, Owen discussed how species have
changed in their meaning since the times in which Linnaeus’ and Cuvier’s defini-
tions were accepted:

I apprehend that few naturalists now-a-days, in describing and proposing a name for

what they call ‘a new species,’ use that term to signify what was meant by it twenty or

thirty years ago, that is, an originally distinct creation, maintaining its primitive dis-

tinction by obstructive generative peculiarities. The proposer of the new species now

intends to state no more than he actually knows; as for example, that the differences in

which he founds the specific character are constant in individuals of both sexes, so far

(^97) Not that modernthe type–token distinction was made by C. S. Peirce [1885; see §§35–37
in Wollheim 1968 for a full discussion of this distinction] only a few decades after Dana wrote.
Intriguingly, Peirce’s distinction was between icons, indices, and tokens, and he referred to tokens as
replicas of symbols [Hookway 1985, 130f].
(^98) Owen 1843.
(^99) Owen 1855.
(^100) Owen 1843.
(^101) Russell 1982, 108f.
(^102) Russell 1982, 111; cf. Amundson 2005, 88-93.
(^103) Owen 1848; see the discussion in Amundson 2005, chapter 4.