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Evolution Before Darwin is the first major study of what was probably the most important centre or pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought in the British Isles. It sheds new light on the genesis and development of one of the most important scientific theories in the history of western thought.
It was long believed that evolutionary theories received an almost universally cold reception in British natural history circles in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, a relatively recently serious doubt has been cast on this assumption. This book shows that Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s was witness to a ferment of radical new ideas on the natural world, including speculation on the origin and evolution of life, at just the time when Charles Darwin was a student in the city. Those who were students in Edinburgh at the time could have hardly avoided coming into contact with these new ideas.
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Edinburgh’s university and medical schools in the early nineteenth century
The legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment
The University of Edinburgh at the beginning of the nineteenth century
The University of Edinburgh’s medical school
Edinburgh’s extra-mural anatomy schools
Chapter 3: Natural History in Edinburgh, 1779–1832
Natural history in Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century
Robert Jameson and the chair of natural history
Comparative anatomy at the extra-mural medical schools
Natural history, scientific and medical societies
Natural history and science journals
Chapter 4: Geology and evolution
The Wernerian model of earth history
Wernerians and Huttonians in Edinburgh
The story of life as a tale of progressive development
Wernerian geology and transformism
Werner, Lamarck and Geoffroy in Edinburgh
Chapter 5: Edinburgh and Paris
Contemporary transformism in France: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Lamarck in Scotland
The impact of Geoffroy’s theories in Edinburgh
Chapter 6: The legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’
The eclipse of transformism in Edinburgh
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Transmutation without progress: Robert Knox and Hewett Cottrell Watson
The legacy of Darwin’s Edinburgh years
Chapter 7: Conclusion
Bibliography
Unpublished primary sources
Published primary sources
Secondary sources
Dr Bill Jenkins is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of History at the University of St Andrews, working on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust entitled After the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, c.1790-c.1843. Jenkins received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and published several papers in key journals, including the Journal of the History of Biology, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies and British Journal for the History of Science.
"A well-written and very interesting read and an important contribution to the historiography of (British) evolutionism."
– Koen B. Tanghe, University of Gent, Journal of the History of Biology
