Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Jeffries Wyman, philosophical anatomy, and the scientific reception of Darwin in America

  • Published:
Journal of the History of Biology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810–1888 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 221–228; Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 82–83, 260–261, 282–283; Edward J. Pfeifer, “United States,” in Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), pp. 168–206; Michele Aldrich, “United States: Bibliographical Essay,” in ibid., pp. 207–226. On Agassiz's idealistic philosophy as a barrier to evolution, see also Ernst Mayr, “Agassiz, Darwin and Evolution,” Harvard Lib. Bull., 13 (1959), 165–194.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Obituaries of Wyman include Asa Gray, “Address of Professor A. Gray,” Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 17 (1874–75), 96–124 (also in Amer. J. Sci., 109 (1875), 77–93, 171–177); Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Professor Jeffries Wyman: A Memorial Outline,” Atlantic Monthly, 34 (1847), 611–623; A. S. Packard, “Memoir of Jeffries Wyman, 1814–1874,” N. A. S. Biog. Mem., 2 (1886), 77–126 (with bibliography); Frederic Ward Putnam, “Jeffries Wyman,” Proc. Amer. Acad. Arts Scis., 10 (1874–75), 496–505; Burt G. Wilder, “Sketch of Dr. Jeffries Wyman,” Pop. Sci. Mon., 6 (1874–75), 355–360; S. Weir Mitchell, “The Scientific Life,” Lippincott's Mag., 15 (1875), 352–356; and William James, “Professor Jeffries Wyman,” Harvard Advocate, 18 (1874), 8–9. Recent work on Wyman is summarized in A. Hunter Dupree, “Jeffries Wyman,” Dict. Sci. Biog., 14:532–534.

    Google Scholar 

  3. On Wyman's role in Cambridge and Boston science, see Toby A. Appel, “A Scientific Career in the Age of Character: Jeffries Wyman and Natural History at Harvard,” in Harvard University as Context for Science: Historical Approaches at the End of Three and a Half Centuries, ed. Clark A. Elliott and Margaret W. Rossiter (in preparation).

  4. A. Hunter Dupree, “Jeffries Wyman's Views on Evolution,” Isis, 44 (1953), 243–246, esp. p. 246.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 69–92.

    Google Scholar 

  6. On British morphology, see Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). For philosophical anatomy in France, see Toby A. Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Botany and zoology were, of course, treated in an especially philosophical manner in Germany. But German biology, because it was embedded in German philosophy — particularly in the philosophy of Kant — was not easily translatable into the English and American scientific idiom. The French version of philosophical anatomy was more readily assimilated. Americans and Britons who wished to study medicine or the life sciences flocked to Paris in this period; only later in the century did they go to Germany. Even in the case of Agassiz, initially trained in Germany, the experience in France in 1831–32 was crucial to the development of his idealist theories. On biological philosophy in Germany in this period, see Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982). On Americans in Paris, see Russell M. Jones, “American Doctors in Paris, 1820–1861: A Statistical Profile,” J. Hist. Med., 25 (1970), 143–157.

    Google Scholar 

  8. See Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate.

  9. E. S. Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the Study of Animal Morphology [1916] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 108; Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, pp. 222–230. Dov Ospovat, “Perfect Adaptation and Teleological Explanation: Approaches to the Problem of the History of Life in the Mid-nineteenth Century,” in Studies in History of Biology, ed. William Coleman and Camille Limoges (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), II. 33–56.

    Google Scholar 

  10. John A. Lowell to Wyman, May 15, 1840, Wyman Papers, Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, Boston (hereafter, Wyman Papers); Boston Evening Transcript, January 12, 1841, transcription in Wyman Papers.

  11. Wyman took courses in zoology from Achille Valenciennes, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Constant Duméril, Victor Audouin, and Henri Milne-Edwards; in botany, from Adolphe Brongniart, C. F. B. de Mirbel, and Adrien de Jussieu; in comparative anatomy, from E. R. A. Serres and Henri de Blainville; in geology, from P. L. A. Cordier; in physiology, from François Achille Longet and Pierre Flourens; and in embryology, from Victor Coste. See George E. Gifford, ed., “An American in Paris, 1841–1842: Four Letters from Jeffries Wyman,” J. Hist. Med., 22 (1967), 274–285, esp. pp. 276–277, 282; this article reprints four letters from Wyman to David Humphries Storer. On Longet and Coste, see Jeffries Wyman to Morrill Wyman, January 14, 1841 [1842], Wyman Papers, and Wyman to Henry P. Bowditch, February 9, 1869, Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, Boston.

  12. Wyman to David H. Storer, August 31, 1841, in Gifford, “An American in Paris,” p. 277.

  13. Wyman to John Collins Warren, December 30, 1841, Warren Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

  14. Wyman to Storer, August 31, 1841, and May 27, 1842, in Gifford, “An American in Paris,” pp. 277, 278, 284.

  15. Wyman to Rufus Wyman, June 15, 1842, Wyman Papers. Wyman recalled that Owen had given him the keys to the cases. He wrote to Owen in 1870: “I felt then & have never ceased to feel what an incentive to study such a reception was & if there is any regret come with it, it is only the one that advantages so freely offered have not been followed with better results for science in return” (Wyman to Richard Owen, August 10, 1870, Owen Letters, 27:258, British Museum [Natural History], London).

  16. Correspondence with Owen can be found in the Wyman Papers; in the Owen Letters, 27:238a-259, British Museum (Natural History), London; in the Royal College of Surgeons Library, London; and in Wyman's manuscript volume on the gorilla cited in n. 17 below. Another early source of Wyman's philosophical anatomy was William B. Carpenter, whose textbooks Wyman regularly used in his courses.

  17. Thomas Savage and Jeffries Wyman, “Notice of the External Characters and Habits of Troglodytes Gorilla, a New Species of Orang from the Gaboon River. Osteology of the Same,” Boston J. Nat. Hist., 5 (1845–47), 417–443. Wyman left a manuscript volume of documents, “Observations on the Structure of the Chimpanzee & Gorilla, with Letters Relating to their History ... ,” Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. On the fossil hoax, see Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 2 (1845–48), 65–68. On Wyman's part in determining fossil quadrupeds of the Carboniferous period, see John William Dawson, Air-breathers of the Coal Period: A Descriptive Account of the Remains of Land Animals Found in the Coal Formations of Nova Scotia (Montreal: Dawson, Brothers, 1863), pp. 19, 40, 46, 52. The quadruped was named Dendrerpeton acadianum, Wyman and Owen; another fragment, part of a reptile, examined by Wyman was called Hylonomus wymani.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classification [1857 and 1859], ed. Edward Lurie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).

    Google Scholar 

  19. Wyman's intellectual debt to Owen has been previously noted by William Coleman in The Interpretation of Animal Form: Essays by Jeffries Wyman, Carl Gegenbaur, E. Ray Lankester, Henri Lacaze Duthiers, William His and H. Newell Martin, 1868–1888 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967), pp. xvii-xviii.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Jeffries Wyman, “Description of a ‘Blind Fish,’ from a Cave in Kentucky,” Amer. J. Sci., 45, (1843), 94–96; idem, “On the Eye and the Organ of Hearing in the Blind Fishes (Amblyopsis spelaeus, Dekay) of the Mammoth Cave,” Amer. J. Sci., 68 (1854), 258–261, quotation on p. 260.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Jeffries Wyman, “Anatomy of the Nervous System of Rana Pipiens,” Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1853), article 4, paginated separately, esp. pp. 9–10, 40–42; Joseph Moore, “Dr. Wyman's Lectures at Harvard,” c. 1860, Moore Papers, Lilly Library, Earlham College, Richmond, Ind. (hereafter, Joseph Moore lecture notes).

    Google Scholar 

  22. Jeffries Wyman, “Observations on the Development of the ‘Surinam toad’ (Pipa Americana)” Amer. J. Sci., 67 (1854), 369–374, esp. pp. 372–373. See also Jeffries Wyman, “On Some Unusual Modes of Gestation,” Amer. J. Sci. 77 (1859), 5–13. Packard pointed out the evolutionary implications of Wyman's revelations of rudimentary and useless organs (“Memoir of Jeffries Wyman,” pp. 92–93). The notion that limbs were developed separately from the vertebral column was discussed further by Wyman in “On Symmetry and Homology in Limbs” (below, n. 63).

    Google Scholar 

  23. Proc. Amer. Acad. Arts Scis., 3 (1852–57), 35–36; Wyman, “Rana Pipiens.” An important memoir on “arrests of development” written after 1860 is Jeffries Wyman, “Observations on the Development of Raia Batis,” Mem. Amer. Acad. Arts Scis., 9 (1867–73), 31–44.

  24. Proc. Amer. Acad. Arts Scis., 4 (1857–60), 17; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex [1871], 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), II, 16, 17.

  25. Joseph Moore lecture notes.

  26. Jeffries Wyman, “Description of a Double Foetus,” Boston Med. Surg. J., 74, (1866), 169–176.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Joseph Moore lecture notes, “11 th Lecture.”

  28. Augustin-Pyramusde Candolle, Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (Paris: Déterville, 1813), esp. pp. 77–123;, Alphonse de Candolle, Mémoires et souvenirs de Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle (Geneva: J. Cherbuliez, 1862); Peter F. Stevens, “Haiiy and A.-P. de Candolle: Crystallography, Botanical Systematics, and Comparative Morphology, 1780–1840,” J. Hist. Biol., 17 (1984), 49–82.

    Google Scholar 

  29. A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810–1888 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 40.

    Google Scholar 

  30. A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810–1888 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 52–55.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Asa Gray, The Botanical Text-Book, An Introduction to Scientific Botany, Both Structural and Systematic, For Colleges, Schools, and Private Students, 3rd ed. (New York: George P. Putnam, 1850), pp. 230–241; quotations on pp. 230, 237–238, 240.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Louis Agassiz, Address Delivered on the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander von Humboldt, under the Auspices of the Boston Society of Natural History (Boston: Boston Soceity of Natural History, 1869), pp. 42–43; Lurie, Louis Agassiz, p. 65.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Louis Agassiz, Recherches sur les poissons fossiles, 5 vols. (Neuchâtel: Petitpierre, 1833–43), esp. vol. I.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classification [1857 and 1859], ed. Edward Lurie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 21–22, 87–88, 152; quotation on p. 11. On the classification of radiates, see Mary P. Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life: Issues in Nineteenth-Century Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

    Google Scholar 

  35. Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classification [1957 and 1859], ed. Edward Lurie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), quotation on p. 137.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Asa Gray, Gray's Botanical Text-Book, 6th ed., vol. I, Structural Botany (New York: American Book Company, 1879), pp. 163–209, esp. pp. 176–177.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Asa Gray, Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism, ed. A. Hunter Dupree (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 99–100.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Wyman to Richard Owen, June 1863, Owen Letters, 27:254, British Museum (Natural History), London.

  39. Mary P. Winsor, “Louis Agassiz and the Species Question,” in Studies in History of Biology, ed. William Coleman and Camille Limoges (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), III, 89–117; quotation on p. 112.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Wyman to Charles Eliot Norton, January 11, 1860, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Norton annotated the letter in 1883: “I had the first copy of the ‘Origin of Species’ that came to Boston, & after reading it, before it was reprinted, lent it to Jeffries Wyman.” See also Jane Whitehill, ed., Letters of Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton, 1855–1865 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 42–43; and Dupree, “Wyman's Views on Evolution,” p. 243.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Asa Gray to Charles Darwin, January 5, 1860, Darwin Papers, Cambridge University, Cambridge; Darwin to Gray, January 28, 1860, Gray Papers, Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. I am grateful to the Darwin Letters project for Wyman references in Darwin's correspondence.

  42. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (New York: Mentor, 1958), p. 35.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Gray to Darwin, January 23, 1860; Wyman to Darwin, September 1860, Darwin papers, Cambridge University, Cambridge. Darwin's letters to Wyman, preserved in the Wyman Papers, have been published in A. Hunter Dupree, ed., “Some Letters from Charles Darwin to Jeffries Wyman,” Isis, 42 (1951), 104–110.

  44. Ralph Dexter, “Some Anatomy and Zoology Lectures by Jeffries Wyman, M.D. (1856–1861),” unpublished paper presented before the American Society of Zoologists, December 1983, abstract in Amer. Zool., 23 (1983): 907. I am grateful to Dr. Dexter for a transcript of manuscript lecture notes in his possession taken by Adelaide Edmands for F. W. Putnam. Wyman's teaching with respect to evolution is also noted in Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club, 1855–1870 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), pp. 422–423; E. W. Emerson attended Wyman's lectures as a student at Harvard in the 1860s.

  45. Jeffries Wyman, review of Richard Owen, Monograph on the Aye-aye, Amer. J. Sci., 86 (1863), 294–299.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Wyman to Darwin, January 11, 1866, Darwin Papers, Cambridge University; Jeffries Wyman, “Notes on the Cells of the Bee,” Proc. Amer. Acad. Arts Scis.7 (1868), 68–83, esp. pp. 82–83; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, facsimile edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 224–235; Darwin, Origin (6th ed.), p. 244.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Jeffries Wyman, “Experiments on the Formation of Infusoria in Boiled Solutions of Organic Matter, Enclosed in Hermetically Sealed Vessels, and Supplied with Pure Air,” Amer. J. Sci., 84 (1862), 79–87; idem, “Observations and Experiments on Living Organisms in Heated Water,” Amer. J. Sci., 94 (1867), 152–169. See also Raymond N. Doetsch, “Early American Experiments on Spontaneous Generation, by Jeffries Wyman (1814–1874),” J. Hist. Med., 17 (1962), 326–332.

    Google Scholar 

  48. For Wyman's early response to spontaneous generation, see Boston Evening Transcript, December 3, 1840 (report of Lowell Lectures), transcript in the Wyman Papers; and Jeffries Wyman, review of J. Müller, Elements of Physiology, No. Amer. Rev., 56 (1843), 336–363, esp. pp. 339–351.

  49. Wyman to Burt G. Wilder, March 1, 1863 filed as March 1, 1865], Wilder Papers, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (hereafter, Wilder Papers). See also Gerald L. Geison, “Louis Pasteur,” Dict. Sci. Biog., 10:350–416, esp. pp. 366–372.

  50. Félix Pouchet to Wyman, January 23, 1864, Wyman Papers (filed under Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Rouen).

  51. Wyman to Joseph Henry, March 7, 1863, RU 26, Office of the Secretary, 1863–79, Box 14, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.

  52. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Jeffries Wyman,” National Cyclopedia of American Biography, II, 254–255, esp. p. 255.

  53. Wyman to Henry Charlton Bastian, October 21, 1870, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia. Bastian saw Wyman's results as tending in the same direction as his own, and encouraged him to continue. “Your name carries great weight with it,” he wrote (Henry Charlton Bastian to Wyman, November 11, 1870, Wyman Papers).

  54. Jeffries Wyman, “Fresh-water Shell Mounds of the St. John's River, Florida,” Mem. Peabody Acad. Sci., vol. I, no. 4 (Salem: Peabody Academy of Science, 1875); Jeffries Wyman, ‘Primitive Man,’ Amer. Nat., 10 (1876), 278–282. The letter accompanying the deed of gift recommended that “in the event of the discovery in America of human remains and implements of an earlier geological period than the present, especial attention be given to their study and their comparison with those found in other countries” (Reports of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in connection with Harvard University, vol. I, 1868–1876 [Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1876], pp. 13, 26). The presumption of evolution behind the founding of the Peabody Museum was pointed out to me by Joy Harvey.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Richard Owen, Monograph on the Aye-aye (Chiromys madagascariensis, Cuvier) (London: Taylor and Francis, 1863).

    Google Scholar 

  56. Wyman, review of Owen, Monograph on the Aye-aye; Wyman to Owen, June 1863 (see above, n. 38).

  57. Wyman to Burt G. Wilder, May 30, 1871, Wilder Papers.

  58. Gray, “Address,” p. 123 (see above, n. 2). See also Wyman to Burt G. Wilder, May 30, 1871, Wilder Papers.

  59. Dupree, “Wyman's Views on Evolution” (see above, n. 4); Wyman to Owen, June 1863.

  60. Wyman, review of Owen Monograph on the Aye-aye, quotation on p. 299; Wyman to Owen, June 1863.

  61. The terms “homogeneous” and “heterogeneous” were used by von Baer, and by such British followers as Martin Barry, William B. Carpenter, and Herbert Spencer. On von Baer's critique of recapitulation and Agassiz's persistent belief in the theory, see Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 52–68. On Owen and von Baer, see Dov Ospovat, “the Influence of Karl Ernst von Baer's Embryology, 1828–1859: A Reappraisal in Light of Richard Owen's and William B. Carpenter's “Paleontological Application of ‘von Baer's Law,’” J. Hist. Biol., 9 (1976), 1–28. In his later years, Wyman appears to have elaborated his views in his courses; he told Wilder in 1871 that he was giving “a few lectures on Embryology & its bearings on evolution in general” (Wyman to Burt G. Wilder, May 30, 1871, Wilder Papers).

    Google Scholar 

  62. Richard Owen, On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London: John van Voorst, 1848); idem, On the Nature of Limbs (London: John van Voorst, 1849).

    Google Scholar 

  63. Jeffries Wyman, “On Symmetry and Homology in Limbs,” Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 11, (1866–68), 246–278, quotation on p. 252; reprinted in Coleman, Interpretation of Animal Form, pp. 3–35. Wyman briefly touched upon the subject of fore-and-hind symmetry at a meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History in June 1860; see Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 7 (1859–61), 317. He was urged by Wilder and others to publish his ideas in full. See also Wyman, “Description of a Double Foetus.”

    Google Scholar 

  64. Wyman, “Symmetry and Homology in Limbs,” quotations on pp. 258, 278. Ruse suggested that after Darwin most scientists “sloughed off” Owen's archetype theory; Wyman is someone who did not (Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979], p. 228). Wyman's analogy of the action of the polar force to the pattern of iron filings produced by a bar magnet was probably suggested to him by his teacher of embryology, Victor Coste; see E. Faure-Fremiet, “La création de la chaire d'embryogénie comparée au Collège de France,” in Le Collège de France (1530–1930) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1932), pp. 193–207, esp. p. 196.

  65. Burt G. Wilder, “On Morphology and Teleology, Especially in the Limbs of Mammalia,” Mem. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 1 (1866–69), 46–80; idem, “Intermembral Homologies,” Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 14 (1870–71), 154–339, 399–420 (Wilder includes a full bibliography of European works dealing with serial homologies of limbs, pp. 410–420); Elliot Coues, “Antero-posterior Symmetry, with Special Reference to the Muscles of the Limbs,” N. Y. Med. Rec., (1868), 149–152, 193–195, 222–224, 272–274, 297–299, 370–372, 390–391, 438–440; idem, “The Osteology and Myology of Didelphys virginiana. With an Appendix on the Brain by Jeffries Wyman,” Mem. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 2 (1872), 41–154.

    Google Scholar 

  66. Non-Darwinian views of evolution, including those of Agassiz's students, have recently been explored and categorized by Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). See also Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, pp. 91–96.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 21228, Catonsville, Maryland, USA

    Toby A. Appel

Authors
  1. Toby A. Appel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Appel, T.A. Jeffries Wyman, philosophical anatomy, and the scientific reception of Darwin in America. J Hist Biol 21, 69–94 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00125794

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00125794

Search

Navigation