Species

The Nineteenth Century, a Period of Change 139

Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away.”^112 It is hard not to
see Gosse’s obduracy as a desperate attempt to maintain the fixity of species even
in the face of Buffon’s hybridization experiments, which had had a partial success,
but in fact there was considerable blindness to variation, as the Agassiz example
shows. Another instance involves a student of Agassiz, Stimpson, who, when find-
ing intermediate forms of a mollusk he could not decide to place in one species
or another,

... after he had studied it for a long time, put his heel upon it and grind[ing] it to pow-

der, remarking, “That’s the proper way to serve a damned transitional form.^113

The religious opponents of materialism and evolution, of course, continued to assert

fixism and essentialism.^114

Charles Lyell: Species Are Fixed and Real

More significantly, for our later story, are the earlier views of Charles Lyell. It is well-
known Darwin who received the second volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology^115
on the voyage of the Beagle,^116 which contained the discussion of Lamarck’s views,
a “book-long refutation of Lamarck,” as Desmond and Moore called it.^117 Lyell pre-
sented the now-standard fixist view of species; as Kottler put it:

Lamarck and Lyell agreed that the ‘reality’ of species implied their constancy. The

words ‘real’ and ‘permanent’ were synonymous with respect to species in nature. Thus

while Lamarck, the transmutationist, contended species were not real, Lyell, the fixist,

argued they were.^118

In this volume, Lyell concludes his discussion of Lamarck and Linnaeus, and spe-

cies in general, at the end of chapter IV with this:

For the reasons, therefore, detailed in this and the two preceding chapters, we draw the

following inferences, in regard to the reality of species in nature.

First, That there is a capacity in all species to accommodate themselves, to a certain

extent, to a change of external circumstances, this extent varying greatly according to

the species.

2dly. When the change of situation which they can endure is great, it is usually

attended by some modifications of the form, colour, size, structure, or other particu-

lars; but the mutations thus superinduced are governed by constant laws, and the capa-

bility of so varying forms part of the permanent specific character.

(^112) Gosse 1970, 68. Gosse fils was fairly angry with his father, and so may have exaggerated the reaction
to his father’s book. See Ross 1977 for discussion.
(^113) Simpson 1925, 178f, quoting Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, another student of Agassiz who ended up
less disposed to fixist accounts, from Shaler and Shaler 1909, 129.
(^114) For example, Goodsi r 1868.
(^115) Lyell 1832.
(^116) Kottler 1978, 276–278.
(^117) Desmond and Moore 1991, 131.
(^118) Kottler 1978, 277.