HUXLEY AT WORK
Huxley at Work With the Scientific Correspondence of T. H. Huxley and the Rev. Dr George Gordon of Birnie, near Elgin MICHAEL COLLIE Emeritus Professor of English at York University, Toronto M MACMILLAN PRESS
Michael Collie 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1991 Published by MACMILLAN PROFESSIONAL AND ACADEMIC LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Collie, Michael Huxley at work: with the scientific correspondence of T. H. Huxley and the Rev. Dr George Gordon of Birnie, near Elgin. I. Title 560.92 ISBN 978-1-349-11113-8 ISBN 978-1-349-11111-4 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11111-4
Contents Acknowledgements List of Plates Part One: Huxley's Palaeontology in Scotland 1 Huxley the Public Figure 2 The Land of the Cakes 3 The Intellectual Life of Elgin 4 The Hours of the Chisel 5 Huxley and his Juliet Notes to Part One Part Two: The Correspondence Appendix I Appendix II Appendix III Appendix IV Appendix V Appendix VI Index vi vii viii 1 3 12 26 35 69 87 93 142 145 147 148 151 155 157 v
Acknowledgements I am most grateful for the assistance I have received during the writing of the book, from Jean Archibald, Special Collections, University of Edinburgh Library; Mr and Mrs Cowie, the Manse, Birnie; Jenny Hurst, Geological Survey, Keyworth; Dr David Iredale, Moray District Record Office; Colin McClaren, Archivist and Keeper of Manuscripts, University of Aberdeen; Mrs. Jacqueline Martin; Photographic Services of York University; Dr. Michael Benton; Wei Ping Lu; Ian Morrison, the Falconer Museum, Forres; Sinclair Ross; and Mrs June Mead. My special thanks are due to Jennifer McLaughlin for her friendly encouragement during the whole period of the writing of the book; Christine Sangster for her unfailing assistance and guidance with the papers and specimens in the Elgin Museum, and for helpful reading of the final typescript; and Mr Ewan Gordon for allowing me to publish the Huxley and Gordon letters in his possession. In a survey of well over a hundred research libraries in the United States and Britain I have been greatly helped by archivists, librarians and curators of manuscripts whose expert and courteous assistance it is now a pleasure to acknowledge. vi
List of Plates 1. A modem geological map of the Elgin District. The colour coding, showing different rock types, indicates the stratigraphical complexity Gordon and contemporary visiting geologists failed to observe from the surface. (Reproduced by kind permission of The Geological Survey). 2. Section of the 1876 Ordnance Survey Sheet 95, as revised in 1896, showing the Elgin area. Despite the revision, this map does not differ in essential details from the map in Anderson's Guide to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1851). 3. Geological sketch of the District of Elginshire, by George Gordon. This map was drawn at Huxley's request to indicate the location of the fossil finds referred to in Huxley's Monographs. 4. T. H. Huxley in 1857. 5. (a) Teeth and (b) scuter of Stagonolepsis.These were among the first of the Elgin fossils examined by Huxley, and carry the identification marker referred to in the correspondence. The fossils are now in the Elgin Museum (ref. 1978.563.5a and 1978.562.6 respectively). 6. The type specimen of Hyperodapeilon gordoni, from the Elgin Museum (ref. 1978.56b). 7. Skeletal reconstruction of Hyperodapeilon gordoni, by Dr. Michael Benton. (Reproduced by kind permission from The Triassic Reptile Hyperodapeilonjrom Elgin, Benton, 1983). 8. The cliffs at Coversea, referred to in the early correspondence. vii
A few years ago I became aware of that substantial archive of documents in the Elgin Museum that represents the life work of George Gordon, notably in the fields of geology, palaeontology, archaeology and local history. During the course of his long residence in Moray as Minister at Birnie, a few miles from Elgin, he corresponded with many of the leading scientists of the mid-victorian period, including James Nicol, Sir John Lubbock, Darwin, Sir Roderick Murchison and T. H. Huxley. Usually Gordon retained drafts of the letters he wrote. Consequently the Elgin Museum contains, not only thirty four previously unpublished letters from Huxley to Gordon, but also drafts of twenty five letters from Gordon to Huxley in Gordon's hand. The correspondence between Huxley and Gordon, which is not social but exclusively scientific, concerns the unexpected discovery of reptilian fossils and footprints on the south shore of the Moray Firth, and the step by step interpretation of them during the twenty year period between 1858 and 1878. Suddenly Huxley had in his hands the fossil remains of what turned out to be formerly unknown extinct reptiles - a marvellously challenging research opportunity. How could it be that in the remote district of Moray, so many hundreds of miles north of London, there had once existed reptiles of the kind Victorians associated with jungles and deserts? Was it really true that, where the town of Elgin now stood, there had once lived twelve foot long creatures with scales like those of a crocodile and long tails (Stagonolepis) and smaller, squatter creatures with beaks and powerful hind legs (Hyperodapedon), and that these were reptiles that became extinct before the era of the dinosaur? Had Britain really been so different then, more than two hundred million years ago, that land-based reptiles could flourish in it? For a while, there was turmoil and perplexity. In the School of Mines in Jermyn Street in London, Huxley was well-placed to conduct the research needed to decipher, analyse, describe and place the fossil remains of these previously unknown creatures. In Huxley's mind, this research, which for the most part he conducted at a distance, had a direct bearing on some of the questions which concerned him most, including the as yet ill-defined relationship of geology and palaeontology. This was partly because the established work habits of descriptive geologists had not previously been challenged by the quite independent findings of a palaeontologist. His correspondence with George Gordon on this subject therefore relates to one of the most important aspects of his professional career. viii
ix As soon as it had been decided that the letters discovered in Elgin were worthy of publication both because they had a direct bearing on the course of Huxley's career and on the development of palaeontology in Britain, it became important to know whether any other letters of Huxley's or Gordon's had survived elsewhere that either concerned reptilian fossils specifically or the Moray Firth generally. All the Scottish University libraries have been visited for this purpose, as have the National Library of Scotland, the National Trust of Scotland and the Scottish Record Office. In England, a thorough search was conducted in the libraries of institutions with which Huxley was associated: the British Library, the Royal Society of London, the Geological Society, the Royal Institution and elsewhere. Only in the libraries of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, at Keyworth, and Imperial College in London were other autograph letters discovered. In North America, enquiries have been made at all the libraries that are members of the American Association of Research Libraries, as well as other great collections throughout the United States. Although American libraries have rich holdings of autograph material relating to Huxley'S scientific work, there is nothing that relates specifically either to George Gordon or to palaeontological research in Moray, except for a single letter in the library of the American Philosophical Society. The correspondence being presented here is therefore self-contained. It tells the story of a great Victorian puzzle - were there really reptilian fossils in the Old Red Sandstone of the Moray basin? - while historically it also represents the steady progress towards scientific understanding that is illustrated by the publications of both men. For Huxley, the reconstruction of extinct reptiles from fossil fragments was a triumph in itself, the more so because it brought him to a view of evolution that incorporated evidence of the kind he respected. In the organisation of this book there are two parts, which complement one another. It would have been possible to have utilised Huxley's letters in a narrative that absorbed excerpts from them in a conventional manner, but for several reasons this strategy was rejected. In the first place, to present the correspondence intact, unaltered, verbatim in Part Two permits a clear focus on a geological and palaeontological puzzle that for mid-victorians was unique to Elgin. It was a puzzle which eventually commanded the attention of all the principal geologists of the day, including Roderick Impey Murchison, Charles Lyell, Adam Sedgwick and Archibald Geikie. While the interests of most of these people were geological, Huxley entered the arena exclusively as a palaeontologist. Because the work necessarily proceeded by fits and starts, anyone reading this book needs to keep in mind that the Huxley-Gordon correspondence can be seen in retrospect to have concerned (at least for Huxley) only three sets of reptilian fossil remains:
x those of Stagonolepis, Telerpeton and Hyperodapedon. As far as Elgin was concerned Huxley did not allow himself to be interested in anything other than these three creatures. The title Huxley at Work refers strictly to what he did towards the identification, description and analysis of the remains of these reptiles, and to the publications that resulted from his research. There is only one exception to this - his brief remarks on a fourth reptile which he called Dasygnathus longidens. But these brief remarks do not refer to actual research. Whether Huxley's work on fossil finds in the Elgin region might have been more extensive is difficult to determine. Suffice it to say for the moment that he concentrated exclusively on the three sets of fossil remains named above. His correspondence with Gordon concerns only these reptiles and, if letters passed between them on other subjects, they have not been preserved. A second reason for the book's strategy concerns George Gordon, and Gordon's special relationship with Huxley. Gordon was a minister of the Church of Scotland, Huxley a convinced agnostic. When Huxley visited Moray (which he only did twice), he stayed in the Gordon Arms in Elgin, not at the Manse at Birnie. Nonetheless they managed to work together for a number of years in a reasonably harmonious manner. During the course of this co-operation, Gordon was by no means subservient to Huxley. He knew the region well, cared about it, and was prepared to spend many hours attempting to satisfy Huxley's research needs, as well as his own. Though mistaken on some important points, he stuck to the task of finding and interpreting fossil remains as best he could. He was a thoughtful, generous, energetic amateur scientist and the correspondence celebrates this. There is a third reason for preserving the correspondence intact and for reproducing the letters in their entirety. Generally speaking the complete texts of Huxley's letters, whether social or scientific, important or unimportant, are not at present available either to the scholar or the general reader. Of course, many of the letters in the archive of Imperial College were used by Leonard Huxley in his biography, but it was no part of his purpose to assess the archive from a bibliographical or editorial point of view. Neither the accuracy of the transcriptions nor the scope of Leonard Huxley's approach have been seriously tested. Excerpts from different letters have appeared elsewhere, usually without any discussion of provenance or textual accuracy. There is no edition of Huxley's correspondence. The recent survey of research libraries has shown that there are many more autograph letters from Huxley in other collections than are listed in standard manuscript guides. It is difficult to see the point of further scholarly work on Huxley until these letters have been collected, edited and published, since they contain a mine of as yet unused information, while taking them into account,
xi on the other hand, might challengingly modify our overall view of an important nineteenth-century scientist. It is thus in the context of Huxley studies as a whole that a proper editing of the Huxley-Gordon letters was preferred. Before a word of this book was written, questions were quite reasonably asked about the appropriateness of the title - Huxley at Work. The title is intended to emphasise the fact that the book's purpose is to throw light on what Huxley actually did. In other words an analysis of how he conducted his work as a palaeontologist took precedence over an analysis of his publications, though these are discussed in some detail. His words are interesting enough, but can one get behind the words? The correspondence, messy and incomplete though it is, helps one to do this. No claim is being made for the intrinsic intellectual or literary merit of a single letter, though some are extremely interesting. Rather the letters, together with the annotation of them, are presented as a means of access to T. H. Huxley's mind. His mind did not work in quite the way that many people have assumed it worked. Finally there is the question of terminology. Any writer of this type of book probably wants to satisfy both the specialist and the general reader. Such at least is the case here. For the sake of clarity, there has been some sacrifice of specialist terminology, with the attendant risk that some sections may seem terminologically naive to the expert. This risk will have been worth taking, however, if the general reader can see the book as a contribution to the history of nineteenth-century science, a contribution which both attempts to show an important figure in a clear light and to provide some indication of what early palaeontological work in Britain was actually like. Huxley became a palaeontologist at a time when the discipline was in its infancy. The earliest Oxford English Dictionary definition of the term is from Charles Lyell's Elements of Geology (1838) where it is said to mean 'The study of extinct organized beings; that department of geology that treats of fossil animals and plants'. Huxley was not what is now often called a palaeobotanist; he never studied fossil plants. Nor was he a field geologist. In as far as this book, however, concerns the very beginning of the systematic study of vertebrate fossils in Britain, it is not too much to claim Huxley as one of the country's first palaeontologists. Incidentally, the spelling of the word seems of little consequence, though many may prefer the modern 'paleontology'. In this book, Huxley's own normal spelling of the word has been preferred. In a wonderful old house called Les Merceries in the Charente, a house filled (until the recent regrettable death of its owner) with works of art of great originality, I once saw a life-size representation in wood (from a single block) of two figures in seventeenth-century French court dress, the woman's right hand just resting lightly on the man's left arm. There
xii was space between them, but the genius of the sculptor had captured the closeness of their relationship. Thomas Hardy refers to this space at the beginning of The Mayor of Casterbridge. A man and woman are walking apart down a country lane, but by their manner it can be seen that, though they walk apart, they are man and wife. Someone once told me that, when she entered a bar to keep an appointment with two friends, a man and a woman, she perceived instantly, as she threaded through the crowd, that there existed an intimate relationship between them, even though their manner was formal and there was a decorous space between them. These three instances are metaphors for the intimate relationship that exists between Part I and Part II of Huxley at Work. Though they can be read separately, they are designed to remain together.