Species

The Nineteenth Century, a Period of Change 137

as observation has reached; and that they are not due to domestication or to artificially

superinduced external circumstances, or to any outward influence within his cogni-

zance; that the species is wild, or is such as it appears by nature.^104

Owen here treats species as taxonomic objects, with the underlying implication

that they are constant due to natural causal powers. The generative “peculiarities”

are not ignored or forgotten when the creation part of the definition has been aban-

doned, and the naturalizing of species is evident. However, it is also noteworthy given

Owen’s later reputation that in his Presidential Address to the British Association for

the Advancement of Science in 1858, Owen not only reports Darwin’s and Wallace’s

views on speciation by natural selection, but he goes on to say:

No doubt the type-form of any species is that which is best adapted to the conditions

under which such species at the time exists; and so long as those conditions remain

unchanged, so long will the type remain; all varieties departing therefrom being in

the same ratio less adapted to the environing conditions of existence. But, if those

conditions change, then the variety of the species at an antecedent date and state of

things will become the type-form of the species at a later date, and in an altered state

of things.^105

Owen’s initial reaction to Darwin and Wallace, untainted by Huxley’s rhetoric,
was thus fairly positive. Of special note is that Owen refers to the “type-form” of the
species in a way that makes it clear that he is not referring to essences.
Ronald Amundson has argued that for the period, species were never types, as
types were something that united species under larger classificatory ranks.^106 Indeed,
Amundson denies that species ever were types, a point Owen, among others, shows
is not correct. As many have noted, there is a distinction between Platonic forms and
Aristotelian species, and the Aristotelian form could be varied from the standard
type. Naturalists of a Platonic bent prior to Darwin, such as Agassiz, saw species as
types from which individuals could deviate. The concept of “degeneration,” which
Amundson discusses, indicates that individuals were able to improperly instantiate
the specific norm, as well as species as units being able to improperly or variably
instantiate the generic essence.^107 So long as types are not identified with unvarying
essences, it is not true that species could not be types. But if, as Amundson seems to
do in his sect 4.2, types (here, morphological types as abstractions) and essences are
identified, with Mayr, then there are no specific types.
That said, it is apparent both that types are almost always through this period
treated as large-scale (supraspecific) types and that the ideal morphologists in the
tradition of Goethe and Oken did not generally discuss species, either as biological
realities or as an abstract concept, as they were more concerned with the higher types
that gave a Unity of Type between species and genera.^108

(^104) Owen 1835, quoted in Huxley 1906, 303.
(^105) Quoted in Basalla et al. 1970, 329.
(^106) Amundson 2005, 81.
(^107) Amundson 2005, 36, 40.
(^108) Russell 1982, Nyhart 1995.