Conclusion
Historians are now generally agreed that the Darwinian recognition and institutionalization of the polygenist position was more than merely nominal.194 Wallace, Vogt, and Huxley had led the way, and we may add Galton (1869) to the list of those leading Darwinians who incorporated a good deal of polygenist thinking into their interpretions of human history and racial differences.195 Eventually “Mr. Darwin himself,” as Hunt had suggested he might, consolidated the Darwinian endorsement of many features of polygenism. Darwin's Descent of Man was published in the same year that the Anthropological Institute was founded, and it was no coincidence that it was broadly congruent with Knoxian/ Anthropological race science. Recent scholarship has stressed the derivative character of the Descent, and Darwin's views on race were clearly influenced by the earlier interpretations of the abovecited Darwinians.196
However, although the Descent was written in the light of the anthropological struggles of the 1860s, it is essential to acknowledge its origins in Darwin's notebooks of the late 1830s and early 1840s. A good deal of the congruence between Darwinian and Knoxian conceptions of race may be traced back to these early notebook constructions. As these document, Darwin, like Knox, brought to his very earliest conceptions of human evolution a “commitment to the idea of human races as discrete biological units with distinct moral and mental traits.”197 The young Darwin had been concerned with the same sorts of questions on racial biological and cultural differences that preoccupied Knox around the same time, and he was committed to as ruthless a naturalism. Apart from their individual and independent debts to Quetelet's “moral statistics,” both Darwin and Knox drew heavily on the general themes of struggle and adaptation in the contemporary “common context” of biological and social thought.198 Given their common context, the broad general similarities between the Knoxian laws of race antagonism and subordination and the Darwinian struggle for existence between races need occasion no strained historical explanation of direct influence.199
Nevertheless, in more explicit ways, the Descent does show the conflation of Knoxian/Anthropological and Darwinian racial views, and Darwin located his discussion of these issues squarely within the dispute “of late years” between polygenists and monogenists.200 His mature views on race were shaped by the contemporaneous confrontations and negotiations between the Darwinians and the Anthropologicals. It is within this context that the minor historical puzzle of Darwin's failure to acknowledge Knox's “generic descent” may be explained. Apart from the difficulties of integration and interpretation of his scattered theoretical writings, Knox, through his adoption by Hunt and the Anthropologicals, became identified with anti-Darwinism and therefore with antievolutionism.201 Moreover, Knox, the disreputable and marginal “savage radical” and lately resurrected and equally unsavory “Anthropological,” was hardly an acceptable “precursor.” Yet, paradoxically, it was via the antithetical medium of the Anthropological platform that Knox's race science made an indirect and unacknowledged, but lasting, impact on the Darwinian anthropological model.
In the Descent, Darwin argued that racial traits arose very early in the prehistory of man, were not biologically adaptive, and were therefore relatively fixed in character. By viewing race formation as a distant and closed episode of human history, Darwin endorsed the Knoxian categories of race as fixed and unalterable types. Although he thought it irrelevant whether human races were called species or subspecies, he conceded more to the Knoxian view than Huxley by granting that a naturalist confronted for the first time by specimens of Negro and European man “might feel himself fully justified in ranking the races of man as distinct species.”202 Consistent with the Knoxian interpretation, struggle, competition, and survival occurred between racial units rather than between individuals and, in Darwin's view, accounted for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and the inevitable triumph of the more intellectual and moral races over the lower and more degraded ones.
Darwin was as insistent as Knox on the biological basis of intellectual and moral differences, and, through his tendency to reduce social and cultural differences to biology, he maintained the essential Knoxian/Anthropological link between race and culture.203 For above all, the Descent did much more than offer a naturalistic explanation of human evolution: it proffered social interpretation, justification, and prescription, and its timely appearance gave a powerful boost to the “moralizing naturalism” of Huxley and Galton, and to Spencer's “Social Darwinism.”204 We may draw a straight line from Knox's “moral anatomy,” through Hunt's “anthropology,” and on to “Social Darwinism” and the “social surgeons” of the eugenics movement.
The Darwinians did not, of course, we their tendency to naturalize existing economic and social relations to Knox or Hunt and the Anthropologicals—they were simply reflecting the same general intellectual trend that had affected Knox and the Anthropologicals as well. And in the larger context, the forces that had created a climate receptive to Knox's racism had intensified: in the seventies, the need to justify white imperialism and class and racial inequalities was greater than ever. Scientific racism no longer appeared an aberration but the very essence of the scientific study of man, taking on a newfound respectability in the “new” evolutionary anthropology. But in more specific ways, through the struggle between the Darwinians and Anthropologicals for scientific and ideological hegemony, Knox's “moral anatomy” was institutionalized and perpetuated in late Victorian scientific racism. In the process, the delicate balance that Knox had maintained between his radicalism and his racism was outweighed by conservative institutional and social needs, and his “moral anatomy” was retooled — first by Hunt, and then by the Darwinians — to fit those needs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Lambert A. J. Quetelet, “Preface” to A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, trans. Robert Knox (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1842), p. viii.
See Evelleen Richards, “The German Romantic Concept of Embryonic Repetition and Its Role in Evolutionary Theory in England up to 1859,” Ph.D. diss. University of New South Wales, 1976, chap. 6; Adrian Desmond, “Robert E. Grant: The Social Predicament of a Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” J. Hist. Biol., 17 (1984), 189–223; L. S. Jacyna, “John Goodsir and the Making of Cellular Reality,” J. Hist. Biol., 16 (1983), 75–99; Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology (Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 31–55.
Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 377. See also Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), pp. 99–101; J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 124, 130; George W. Stocking, “What's in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837–71),” Man, 6 (1971), 374; Michael D. Biddiss, “Myths of the Blood: European Racist Ideology 1850–1945,” Patterns of Prejudice, 9, no. 4 (1975), 11–19; Ronald Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science: The Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s,” Vict. Stud., 22 (1978), 51–70; Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 41–46.
Baden Powell, Essays on the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy, the Unity of Worlds, and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Longmans, 1855), p. 395.
Darwin's omission of Knox is all the more curious in that Powell's work (cited by Darwin) contained an extract from one of Knox's works in demonstration of his “transmutationism” (ibid., pp. 399–400). Moreover, Darwin had read this very work of Knox's, for he cited it in The Descent of Man, 2nd. ed. (London: John Murray, 1889), pp. 17, 21, nn. Both these citations refer to Knox's Great Artists and Great Anatomists (London: John van Voorst, 1852), and there is a further reference to Knox's The Races of Men: A Fragment (London: Henry Renshaw, 1850) in a footnote: Darwin, Descent, p. 168. From the details given in these references, Darwin evidently read both works with some care. Both works, as I shall demonstrate, contain numerous statements consistent with Darwin's requirement of his “anticipators” that they believe[d] “existing forms of life have descended by true generation from pre-existing forms” (Charles Darwin, “A Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species,” in The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text, ed. Morse Peckham [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959], p. 59.)
Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” p. 159; also idem, “Robert E. Grant's Later Views on Organic Development: The Swiney Lectures on ‘Palaeozoology’ 1853–1857,” Arch. Nat. Hist., 11 (1984), 397.
Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology, (Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 50–51.
Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 377–381; Harris, Rise of Anthropological Theory, pp. 99–100; Stepan, Idea of Race, chaps. 2 and 3.
Michael D. Biddiss, “The Politics of Anatomy: Dr. Robert Knox and Victorian Racism,” Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., 69 (1976), 245–250.
Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist”; idem, “Grant's Later Views”; Adrian Desmond, “Richard Owen's Reaction to Transmutation in the 1830's,” Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 18 (1985), 25–50; idem, Interpreting the Origin of Mammals: New Appoaches to the History of Palaeontology,” J. Linn. Soc. (Zool.), 82 (1984), 7–16; idem, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850–1875 (London: Blond and Briggs, 1982).
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. viii-ix; Isobel Rae, Knox the Anatomist (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), pp. 106, 142–146. Biographical detail on Knox is taken from these sources and from G. T. Bettany, “Robert Knox,” in Dict. Nat. Biog. (London: Smith Elder, 1892), 31: 331–333. Lonsdale's biography remains the best source on Knox's life and work. Rae's account suffers from its almost exclusive focus on the Burke and Hare affair and from poor comprehension of Knox's biology and anthropology.
Spencer's early developmentalism was shaped by transcendental thought. His “Synthetic Philosophy” (from about 1851 on) was an attempt to apply a formula of evolution, centered on von Baer's embryological law of increasing divergence, to every kind of phenomenon throughout the universe, including biology, ethics, sociology, politics, and art. He subsequently gave this a Darwinian gloss, and extrapolated his Social Darwinism from it. See J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 179–227; Robert M. Young, “The Development of Herbert Spencer's Concept of Evolution,” Actes du XIe Cong. Internat. Hist. Sci., 2 (1967), 273–278; Georges Canguilhem et al., “Du développement à l'évolution au XIXe siècle,” Thales, 11 (1960), 25–29.
James A. Ross and Hugh W. Y. Taylor, “Robert Knox's Catalogue,” J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 10 (1955) 269–276.
A. S. Currie, “Robert Knox, Anatomist Scientist and Martyr,” Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., 26 (1933), 39–46; John. D. Comrie, History of Scottish Medicine (London: Balliere, Tyndall and Cox, 1932), II, 502 ff.; this is also the burden of the account in Rae, Knox.
Knox, Great Artists, pp. 141–142.
Ibid., pp. 19, 73, 104, 111–112; Lonsdale, Life, pp. 17, 18, 21.
Geoffroy's morphology (which emphasized serial development, recapitulation, transformism, and unity of composition, and was founded on the sovereignty of material laws), was directed against Cuvier and aimed at the young medical reformers and republicans of Paris, and it appealed equally to visiting British radicals like Knox and Grant. See Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Toby Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Knox, Great Artists, pp. 73, 211–212; Robert Knox, “Contributions to the Philosophy of Zoology, with Special Reference to the Natural History of Man,” Lancet (July 14, 1855), 24–26. Knox's pupils included John Goodsir, Edward Forbes, and possibly Richard Owen (Rehbock, Philosophical Anatomists, pp. 56–114). Both Knox and Rehbock overlook the contributions of Robert Grant as teacher and disseminator of transcendental anatomy — but, as Desmond had demonstrated in his studies of Grant, he was probably as influential as Knox in this respect; see above, n. 10.
Notably Étienne Geoffroy St.-Hilaire, “Of the Continuity of the Animal Kingdom by Means of Generation, from the First Ages of the World to the Present Times,” Edinburgh New Phil. J., 7 (1829), 152–155; idem, “On the Philosophy of Nature,” ibid., 8 (1830), 152–154.
Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” pp. 199–200.
By the time of the Burke and Hare affair, Knox had two-thirds of the whole Edinburgh medical school in his classrooms, and Lonsdale gives a vivid and partisan account of the machinations of Knox's “jealous rivals”: Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 81–91, 113–114, 130, 190–193. According to Knox, by 1841 the chairs of the university had “fallen much below the income of a steady-going retail grocery or bakery,” and between 1838 and 1841 the number of medical students had declined from 556 to 356. Knox attributed this decline to three causes: “the overloading of the curriculum, the absence from the University of all men of originality and of European reputation, and the baneful effects of a monopoly exercised by the University, whose sure result, like all other monopolies, is first to ruin itself and afterwards its neighbours” (ibid., pp. 261–264, 196). For an analysis of the traditional laissez-faire and entrepreneurial nature of the university teaching, see J. B. Morrell, “Science and Scottish University Reform: Edinburgh in 1826,” Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 6 (1972), 39–56.
Even Lonsdale found inexcusable Knox's plagiarism of some anatomical discoveries by his former pupil and partner John Reid in 1840, and their public controversy further diminished Knox's Edinburgh reputation. By 1842, as the final humiliation, Knox was unable to get up a class in his own anatomy school. See Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 219–220, 257; letters from John Reid to William Sharpey, October 18, 1840; December 15, 1842, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Library, MS 69099; C. H. Creswell, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh: Historical Notes from 1505–1905 (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1926), pp. 77–84, 240–250; Rae, Knox, pp. 105–126.
Robert Knox, “Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord Provost and Town Council of Edinburgh,” July 6, 1837, p. 6; “Second Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord Provost and Town-Council of Edinburgh,” July 15, 1837 (Archives, Royal College of Surgeons, London, Tr. 1160 [17 and 18]). Knox was widely suspected of being the author of the highly critical pamphlet An Examination into the Causes of the Declining Reputation of the Medical Faculty of the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Burgess, 1834), and from its tone and contents this seems quite likely; see Rae, Knox, p. 117. Note also Knox's comments in his preface to the second edition of his translation of Cloquet: Robert Knox, A System of Human Anatomy: On the Basis of the “Traité d'Anatomie Descriptive” of M. H. Cloquet, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1831), p. vii; and see “An Hitherto Unpublished Letter by Dr. Robert Knox,” Glasgow Med. J., 100 (1923), 5. Knox's role in Edinburgh institutional politics and medical reform warrants closer examination than this study can provide.
Knox, “Letter to the Lord Provost,” p. 6.
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 261–264; Knox, p. 121.
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 264.
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 149.
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 257. Note also the “Publishers' Notice,” Quetelet, Treatise on Man.
Knox, “Translator's Appendix,” in Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, trans. Robert Knox (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1842), p. 119. In 1837 Knox had included Quetelet's statistics in a paper on the diurnal changes in the pulse, and he devoted a portion of his “Appendix” to this same topic: ibid., pp. 119–122; and Robert Knox, “Physiological Observations on the Relations of the Heart, and on its Diurnal Revolution and Excitability,” in R. Knox, Memoirs, Chiefly Anatomical and Physiological, Read at Various Times to the Royal Society in Edinburgh, the Medico-Chirurgical, and other Societies (Edinburgh: P. Rickard, 1837), pp. 1–19.
[Robert Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844), pp. 328–332. See also Milton Millhauser, Just before Darwin: Robert Chambers and Vestiges (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). On Quetelet and his influence on British science and social thought, see John T. Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteeth Century (New York: Dover Publications, 1965), II, 577–587; Burrow, Evolution and Society, pp. 108, 253; Sylvan S. Schweber, “The Origin of the Origin Revisited,” J. Hist. Biol., 10 (1977), 284–293; Solomon Diamond, “Introduction,” in Quetelet, Treatise on Man, Facsimile Reproduction of the English Translation of 1842 (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimile and Reprints, 1969), pp. v–xii.
“The Late Dr. Knox,” Med. Times Gaz. (December 27, 1862), p. 684; Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” p. 198.
Knox, Races of Men, p. 27. The influence of transcendental conceptions on Chambers's “development hypothesis” is well established, and the links between Chambers and Knox warrant closer investigation. See M. J. S. Hodge, “The Universal Gestation of Nature: Chambers' Vestiges and Explanations,” J. Hist. Biol., 5 (1972), 127–151.
It is unlikely, for all his anatomical ability, that Knox would have been taken into partnership by Barclay in the first instance, had he made his radical materialism public. Barclay was intolerant of “sceptics” and a devout teleologist; see John Barclay, Introductory Lectures to a Course of Anatomy (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1827), pp. 126–132. Lonsdale makes the point that up until the time of the Burke and Hare repercussions, Knox devoted himself to science and kept aloof even from institutional politics: Lonsdale, Life, p. 91.
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 3.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862), p. 546; Knox, Great Artists, pp. 75–76.
Knox, Race of Men (1862), passim.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862), p. 552.
[Robert, Knox], The Greatest of our Social Evils: Prostitution, as it now exists in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: An Enquiry into its Cause and Means of Reformation, based on Statistical Documents, by A Physician (London: H. Bailliere, 1857), pp. 142, 197. Lonsdale attributed this work to Knox (Life, pp. 370–371), and the bracketed portions are undoubtedly his. Note the Quetelet influence on the title and the contents. Typically, Knox thought that the majority of women were forced to prostitution by unemployment and want, but that the tendency to licentiousness was innate in the female character, notably the French! (Prostitution, pp. 49–50).
[Robert, Knox], The Greatest of our Social Evils: Prostitution, as it now exists in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: An Enquiry into its Cause and Means of Reformation, based on Statistical Documents, by A Physician (London: H. Bailliere, 1857), p. 56.
Robert, Knox, Observations upon a “Report by the Select Committee on Salmon Fisheries, Scotland: together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index” (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1837), pp. 7–8; idem, Fish and Fishing in the Lone Glens of Scotland (London: G. Routledge, 1854), p. 68.
[Robert Knox], “The Sanatory Movement,” Empire, September 1, 1855, p. 633; see also [Robert Knox], “A Plea for the Thames,” ibid., August 25, 1855, p. 617; [Robert Knox], “The Jobs of the Sanatory Reformers,” ibid., September 8, 1855, pp. 648–649. Lonsdale attributed these leaders to Knox (Life, p. 382). Indubitably, the radical aims of the Empire would have struck a responsive chord in Knox: “Freedom in Commerce, Equality in Religion, Impartiality in Representation, and Justice to Man, as Man, all over the World.” These articles suggest that Knox had some radical contacts in London.
F. B. Smith, The People's Health 1830–1910 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979).
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 479.
On Victorian scientific naturalism see Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 1–37; Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (Beverly Hills/London: Sage, 1979), pp. 93–186; Robert M. Young, “The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature,” in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science, ed. Mikulas Teich and Robert M. Young (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 344–438. Roger Cooter argues for a generally earlier date than is usually accepted for the establishment of scientific naturalism among British phrenologists and other marginal men, and Desmond stresses the connection of the new naturalistic sciences of the Reform Bill period of the 1830s with the radical Dissenting campaigns against Tory-Anglican privilege: Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Desmond, The Politics of Evolution.
See Quetelet, Treatise on Man, passim; L. A. J. Quetelet, Du système social et des lois qui le régissent (Paris, 1848); Theodore M. Porter, “The Mathematics of Society: Variation and Error in Quetelet's Statistics,” Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 18 (1985), 51–69; Robert Knox, “Lectures on the Races of Men,” Men. Times, 18 (1848), 98; “Dr. Knox on the Intermarriages of Jewish Female,” ibid., p. 242.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 478. Although he paraded his lack of “Calvinistic credentials” (see above, n. 26), the fatalism and rigid determinism that pervaded Knox's materialistic and anti-Providential ideology is suggestive of a kind of deconsecrated Calvinism that may be attributed to his Edinburgh background. Desmond had pointed to a similar Calvinistic fatalism in Robert E. Grant's later views on organic development: Desmond, “Grant's Later Views” (above, n. 5). I have discussed Knox's religious beliefs in n. 110 below.
Lambert A. J. Quetelet, “Preface” to A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, trans. Robert Knox (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1842), pp. vi-vii; L. A. J. Quetelet, Letters Addressed to H. R. H. the Grand Duke of Saxe Coburg and Gotha on the Theory of Probabilities, as Applied to the Moral and Political Sciences (London: Charles and Edwin Layton, 1849), pp. 94–100. On the influence of Quetelet's anthropometry on nineteenth-century race science and anthropology see John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes or Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 21–34.
Knox, “Translator's Appendix,” in Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, trans. Robert Knox (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1842), pp. 122–123.
Knox, “Translator's Appendix,” in Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, trans. Robert Knox (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1842), pp. 8–9. Lonsdale states that Knox “indoctrinated the majority of his friends with his more advanced views” on race “after 1834” (Life, p. 295), and if this is so, it adds weight to my suggestion of the crytallizing impact of Quetelet's Sur l'homme, which was first published in 1835.
Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology, (Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 55.
Isobel Rae, Knox the Anatomist (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), pp. 131–146.
Knox's wife of seventeen years had died of puerperal fever in 1841, and this was followed shortly by the death of his four-year-old son; Lonsdale has documented his distress and despair at this personal loss (Life, pp. 241–242). He was forced to leave his surviving children in Edinburgh in the care of his nephew and oldest daughter in impoverished circumstances, while he tried to turn his public lecturing and journalism to his and their financial support. Knox had married “a person of inferior rank,” and lonsdale suggested that this also created social and professional difficulties for Knox. According to Lonsdale, Knox attempted to overcome these by keeping the marriage secret, and by maintaining two households, one for domestic life with his wife and five children, and one “acknowledged” residence (where his sister was hostess) for social purposes (ibid., pp. 36, 222–224). However, Rae discounts this (Knox, pp. 48–49), and indeed it does not square with Knox's image as a devoted husband and father, nor with his radical convictions.
Robert M. Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Thought,” Past and Present, 43 (1969), 109–145; Gay Weber, “Science and Society in Nineteenth-Century Anthropology,” Hist. Sci., 12 (1974), 260–283, esp. p. 268.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. v. His earlier public lectures were also published in the Medical Times: Robert Knox, “Lectures on the Races of Men,” Med. Times, 18 (June and July, 1848), 97–99, 114–115, 117–120, 133–134, 147–148, 163–165, 199–201, 231–233, 263–264, 283–285, 299–301, 315–316, 331–332, 365–366. Lonsdale states that Knox's public lectures in Manchester and other provincial towns “caused a sensation by their novelty, and led to much talk out of doors; and no small amount of controversy in the press” (Lonsdale, Life, p. 295).
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 1.
Knox's early Edinburgh enviornment would have been conducive to such a belief. He must have had some contact with the Edinburgh phrenologists with their naturalistic ideology and reformist platform; see Steven Shapin, “The Politics of Observation: Cerebral Anatomy and Social Interests in the Edinburgh Phrenology Disputes,” in On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge, ed. Roy Willis, Soc. Rev. Monograph, 27 (1979), 139–178; and Steven Shapin, “Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh,” Ann. Sci., 32 (1975), 219–243. But it seems almost certain, as Lonsdale suggests, that Knox was more directly influenced by the writings of the Edinburgh anatomist and physiognomist Alexander Walker (Lonsdale, Life, pp. 294–295). Walker, better known for his acrimonious dispute with Charles Bell over the functions of the roots of the spinal nerves, wrote a series of popular works in which he located the supposed mental and moral differences between the sexes and races in their anatomical and physiognomical differences. Just before he died, Knox was considering reediting Walker's Intermarriage, and had made some notes on this project (ibid., p. 383). Walker and Knox were acquainted, for when Walker appealed to Sir Robert Peel in 1849 for a government pension in recognition of his contribution to physiology, he enclosed a supporting letter from Knox in which Knox professed the highest esteem for Walker's work: “No one has thought more clearly on the great physiological questions than you have” (copy of letter from Dr. Knox to Alexander Walker, August, 1848; letter from Walker to Sir Robert Peel, February 22, 1849, Peel Papers 40601, fols. 50, 51, British Library, Manuscript Room). See also Alexander Walker Intermarriage; or the Natural Laws by Which Beauty, Health and Intellect, Result from Certain Unions, and Deformity, Disease and Insanity, from Others (London: John Churchill, 1841); and Physiognomy Founded on Physiology and Applied to Various Countries, Professions, and Individuals (London: Smith, Elder, 1834).
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 24–25.
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 292–293, 330; also Henry Lonsdale, “Biographical Memoir,” in John Goodsir, The Anatomical Memoirs, ed. William Turner (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1868), I, 27.
Following Biddiss, I am here employing the term racism to signify something narrower than prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory actions, i.e., “certain relatively systematic attempts at using race as the primary or even sole means of explaining the workings of society or politics, the course of history, the development of culture and civilization, even the nature of morality itself” (Biddiss, “Politics of Anatomy” [above, n. 9], p. 245). Biddiss represents Knox as one of a group of mutually independent pioneers of such racist theory, which included Gustav Klemm and Karl Gustav Carus in Germany and Arthur de Gobineau in France. There are some superficial similarities between Knox's and Gobineau's pessimistic schemas of racial history, but Knox's published work predates Gobineau's; see Michael D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (London: Weidenfeld, 1970).
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1862), p. 591.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 245.
“Men differ more in their intelligence than in their physique... These intellectual qualities are equally fixed, permanent, and unalterable, and are much more important than the physical characters of the race” (Robert, Knox, “Ethnological Inquiries and Observations,” Anthrop. Rev., 1 [1863], 257–258).
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), pp. 2–3.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 21.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), pp. 43–44.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 8.
“Dr. Knox on Intermarriages” (above, n. 45); and Knox, Races of Men (1850), p. 15.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 22; and Knox, “Lectures on Races of Men” (above, n. 45), p. 97.
Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 291; cf. Biddiss, “Politics of Anatomy,” p. 249.
Biddiss, “Politics of Anatomy,” p. 248.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), pp. 100–101.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 8.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), pp. 65–66.
Lambert A. J. Quetelet, “Preface” to A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, trans. Robert Knox (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1842), p. 456, and see pp. 243–244; Curtin, Image of Africa (above, n. 3), pp. 379–380.
Étienne Geoffroy St.-Hilaire, “Mémoire où l'on se propose de rechercher dans quels rapports de structure organique et de parenté sont entre eux les animaux des âges historiques, et vivant actuellement, et les espèces antédiluviennes et perdues,” Mém. Mus. Hist. Nat., 17 (1828), 209–229. A shortened and loose translation of this paper was published in Jameson's Journal for 1829, presumably through Knox's influcnce (see n. 19 above). On Geoffroy's theory of transmutation see E. S. Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology (London: Murray, 1916), chap. 5; Appel, Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, chap. 5: Steven J. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 49–52.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), pp. 29–30; Owsei Temkin, “German Concepts of Ontogeny and History around 1800,” Bull. Hist. Med., 24 (1950), 227–246; Alexander Gode von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism (New York: AMS Press, 1966), p. 120, and passim.
Robert Knox, “Observations on the Natural History of the Salmon,” Rep. Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci. (1831–32), 587–589; idem, “On the Natural History of the Salmon,” Edinburgh New Phil. J., 14 (1832–33), 397–400; idem, “Observations on the Natural History of the Salmon, Herring, and Vendace,” Trans. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh, 12 (1833), 462–518; idem, “Inquiries into the Philosophy of Zoology,” Zoologist, 13 (1855), 4777–92, esp. p. 4789. See also n. 40 above.
Karl Ernstvon Baer, Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere: Beobachtung und Reflexion (Königsberg: Bornträger, 1828), I, 221–223; Martin Barry, “On the Unity of Structure in the Animal Kingdom,” Edinburgh New. Phil. J., 22 (1836–37), 116–141; and Martin Barry, “Further Observations on the Unity of Structure in the Animal Kingdom,” ibid., pp. 345–364. On the influence of von Baer's embryology on British paleobiology, 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 ‘Palaeontological Applications of “von Baer's Law”,’” J. Hist. Biol., 9 (1976), 1–28; and Evelleen Richards, “A Question of Property Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed,” Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 20 (1987), 129–171. Knox's views on embryogenesis bear some relation to the Kantian concept of “generic preformationism” adopted by von Baer and others of the German teleomechanist school; see Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982), pp. 81–95. But Knox's version of this concept seems to me to be closer to that of Carl Vogt, the political radical and “scientific materialist,” as described by Lenoir (ibid., pp. 134–140). Like Vogt, Knox rejected spontaneous generation and insisted on the “simultaneous linkage of the phenomena of life to the pre-existence of structure rather than to hypothetical potencies” (ibid., p. 136). Hence, both identified the embryonic potencies of Kant, von Baer, etc. with material structures capable of direct observation. So Knox claimed to be able to observe all the specific characters of the different species of the salmon genus in the young salmon. Vogt also based his theoretical arguments largely on his study of salmon embryology, and his Histoire naturelle des poissons de l'eau douce (1838–42) must surely have been read by Knox. Vogt went on to support Darwinism, but like Knox he rejected the view that chance variation and natural selection could explain the generation of form, and again like Knox he insisted on the fixity and persistence of human racial differences. See part II, below.
Robert Knox, “Some Remarks on the Aztecque and Bosjieman Children, Now Being Exhibited in London, and on the Races to Which They Are Presumed to Belong,” Lancet (January–June 1855), 358; idem, “Introduction to Inquiries into the Philosophy of Zoology,” ibid., p. 627; idem, “Contributions to the Philosophy of Zoology, with Special Reference to the Natural History of Man,” Lancet (July–September 1855), 24–26, 45–46, 68–71, 162–164, 186–188, 216–218. These papers of 1855 comprise Knox's most comprehensive presentation of his developmental views.
Knox, “On the Aztecque Children,” p. 358.
Knox, “Introduction to Inquiries,” p. 627.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 444; and Races of Men (1862), p. 503.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1862), pp. 507, 509; and Races of Men (1850), p. 444.
Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 218. My interpretation differs from that of Rehbock, who argues that Knox believed in a community of hereditary descent only among the species of a particular genus and that this genetic connection did not extend to different genera, which, according to Knox, were permanent and distinct and had been separately created (Rehbock, Philosophical Naturalists, p. 50). However, in my opinion this is a misinterpretation of Knox's meaning and bears out my emphasis on the need to relate Knox's biology to his radical materialism. Rehbock tends to collapse Knox's views into those of his one-time pupil, the idealist Edward Forbes, who believed that the genus was the “permanent and original” idea (ibid., p. 73). But Knox did not accept Forbes's conception of the creation of genera and the radiation of species from such “centres of creation” (Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 45), nor his belief in the supremacy of ideas: “The idea of new creations, or of any creation saving that of living matter, is wholly inadmissible. The world is composed of matter, not of mind” (Knox, Races of Men [1850], p. 444). Their differences may be best understood by reference to Jacyna's excellent analysis of the early nineteenth-century conflict between immanentist (Knox) and transcendentalist (Forbes) cosmologies: L. S. Jacyna, “Immanence or Transcendence: Theories of Life and Organization in Britain, 1790–1835,” Isis, 74 (1983), 311–329. Apart from explicit statements such as the one I have quoted in the text, Knox made it clear that his focus on the relation of species to genera was but the obvious and first step to the “more difficult” question of the development of genera (Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, pp. 71, 162; idem, “Introduction to Inquiries,” p. 627).
Knox, Great Artists, p. 109. This was the passage cited by Baden Powell as evidence of Knox's “transmutationism”; see n. 5 above.
Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 45.
Ibid., p. 46.
Knox, “Introduction to Inquiries,” p. 627; idem, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 217.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), pp. 100–101.
Knox, “On the Aztecque Children,” p. 359.
Knox, “Introduction to Inquiries,” p. 627.
Not unlike the theory of “punctuated equilibria” of some modern evolutionists.
Robert, Knox, “Contributions to the Philiosophy of Zoology,” Zoologist, 13 (1855), 4841–42.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1862), p. 507.
Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 26; “Dr. Knox on Intermarriages” (above, n. 45), p. 242. At the same time, although he refused to rank races, Knox, in common with most of his contemporaries, assumed the biocultural inferiority of the “dark races” who were everywhere losing ground to colonial expansionism: Knox, Races of Men (1850), pp. 215–317.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1862), p. 576 and passim. See also n. 48 above.
Knox, “Introduction to Inquiries,” p. 627.
Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 45; idem, Races of Men (1850), p. 35; idem, Great Artists, pp. 60–63.
Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 218.
Ibid., p. 45; idem, Races of Men (1850), pp. 445–446; and Races of Men (1862), p. 503. Knox was clearly not content to leave the expression of his “law of generation” in the metaphysics of polarity: “... these varieties [of man] must have a producing cause, and that cause must be physical. Nothing metaphysical can exist, and it is an outrage on common sense to give the nonentity a corporeal existence” (Knox, “Ethnological Inquiries” [above, n. 62], p. 256). At the same time, he was insistent that these physical causes “must have a direct relation to the existing order of things” (Rehbock, Philosophical Naturalists, p. 50). However, his ideological exclusion of environmentalism (because of his racial determinism) meant that he was clearly at a loss for any other materialistic explanation of species generation, although he readily invoked environmental agencies for the extinction of species. This in my view accounts for the equivocation in his writings detected by Rehbock (ibid.), and for his falling back on a demystified version of the “law of deformation” in combination with the indirect action of the environment. Cf. Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” p. 198.
Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 70.
Knox, “On the Aztecque Children,” p. 358. It must be acknowledged that for all his antiprogressionism Knox had an underlying romantic commitment to the great chain of being and the associated principle of continuity whereby species merge into one another and have no separate reality Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology, (Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 49–52). He could therefore invoke the “serial unity of all that lives, or has lived, or may hereafter,” and through his concept of “generic descent” explain the apparent gaps in the fossil and taxonomic series —expecially the gulf he insisted on between the apes and humans. According to Knox, a “class or natural family between man and animals is wanting, or they never have appeared”; either fossil evidence of “anthropomorphous apes or pithecian men” would be uncovered, or such affiliating representatives would be generated sometime in the remote future in accordance with “Nature's great plant or scheme” of unity of organization (Knox: “Introduction to Inquiries,” p. 627; Great Artists, p. 63). Knox had a romantic — but not, it should be stressed, theological — aversion to bestialism (Lonsdale, Life, pp. 255–256).
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, 1850), p. 28.
Knox, Great Artists, p. 63; idem, “Contribution,” Lancet, p. 26; Lonsdale, Life, pp. 249–253.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 278.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862), pp. 34, 420; Robert Knox, “Contributions to Anatomy and Physiology,” London Med. Gaz., 32 (1843), 530; idem, “On Organic Harmonies: Anatomical Co-relations, and Methods of Zoology and Paleontology,” Lancet (1856), 245–247, 270–271, 297–300. See also C. Carter Blake, “The Life of Dr. Knox,” J. Anthrop., 1 (1870), 332–338, esp. p. 334; Rehbock, Philosophical Naturalists, pp. 46–49, 78–79.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), pp. 28, 437–438; Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” p. 198.
Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” p. 198; see also Desmond: “Interpreting the Origin of Mammals” (above, n. 10), “Grant's Later Views” (above, n. 5). Desmond, in his brief references to Knox's “transmutationism,” does not take sufficient cognizance of the ideological differences between Knox and Grant. My interpretation explains why Knox “leaned more toward a demystified Naturphilosophie” than Grant. It is difficult to form any concrete opinion of the relations between Knox and Grant. Neither ever referred to the other, or to the other's views, in their published writings, so far as I have been able to ascertain. Lonsdale scarcely refers to Grant (who left Edinburgh in 1827), but it would seem that he and Knox were rivals in the Edinburgh context. In 1826 Grant was supported by Knox's enemies for the position of curator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (Rae, Knox, p. 36). However, Grant subsequently supported Knox during the Burke and Hare scandal; see Rickman J. Godlee, “Thomas Wharton Jones,” Brit. J. Ophthalmol., 93 (1921), 145–181 (I am grateful to Adrian Desmond for this reference). There is some evidence that Knox and Grant moved in the same London reformist circles, in that when an attempt was made to found the Royal Free Medical School in 1853, both Knox and Grant were advertised as lecturers (Rae, Knox, pp. 152–154).
Desmond, “Interpreting the Origin of Mammals,” p. 10.
Knox, “Contributions,” Lancet, p. 218. Knox has been represented as a deist, but he seems more of a pantheist to me. Although he sometimes referred to “secondary causes,” there is little implication in his cosmology of a remote deity; rather, we find anthropomorphic references to “Nature's great plan” and a good deal of romantic nature-worship. Perhaps, like the Naturphilosophen, he conceived of a God somehow immanent in the unfolding of nature's plan, and his cosmology was thoroughly deterministic in true Naturphilosophie fashion. But his insistence on material causality demarcates him from the idealistic Naturphilosophen. What Desmond has said of Grant is equally true of Knox: “his problem was not theology... but the production of a self-consistent materialistic theory of life” (Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” p. 208n 74).
Desmond, “Interpreting the Origin of Mammals,” pp. 9–10. Grant's environmental determinism and Lamarckian transmutationism are assimilable to the more popular evolutionism of the artisan radicals of the thirties and forties, whereas Knox's developmental views do not fit easily into this more “orthodox” radical framework; see Adrian Desmond, “Artisan Resistance and Evolution in Britain, 1819–1848,” Osiris, 2nd. ser., 3 (1987), 77–110.
Biddiss, “Politics of Anatomy,” p. 250.
Quoted in Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 381. Other reviewers discussing colonial policy and racial issues began to employ Knoxian arguments to promote conservative opinion (ibid.).
“Types of Mankind,” Westminster Rev., n.s., 9 (1856), 378–379; see also Robert Knox, The Races of Men, A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850); Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: Or Ethnological Researches... (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854; London: Trubner, 1854), p. 53. John Campbell also cited Knox in his notorious Negro-Mania; see Curtin, Image of Africa, p. 372.
Robert, Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, (1850), p. 23; Races of Men (1862), p. 565. See also “Races v. Nations,” Med. Times Gaz., 11 (1862), 226–227: “Dr. Knox, who has laboured all his life to establish the influence of race in the destinies of nations, is well avenged by finding that those who once denied, finish by proclaiming his theories as if discoveries of their own, or else adopting them — of course without acknowledgement.” Knox himself felt constrained to enter a caveat upon the overly enthusiastic applications of some of his “plagiarists” and followers: “Day by day the opposition weakens; the great questions of race are discussed in a calmer and more philosophic tone, and there is every danger of their running to the other extreme, and undervaluing those acquired and artificial qualities strictly the result of national influences” (Knox, Races of Men [1862], pp. 566, 596). Note also his statements at the conclusion of his Man, His Structure and Physiology, Popularly Explained and Demonstrated (London: H. Bailliere, 1857), pp. 170–171.
Biddiss, “Politics of Anatomy,” p. 250.
“The Late Dr. Knox” (above, n. 31), p. 684. The Lancet made the same point: “The Late Dr. Knox,” Lancet (January 3, 1863), 19–20, esp. p. 20.
[Luke Burke], “Criticism: Lectures on the Races of Men, by Robert Knox, M.D., F.R.S.E.,” The Ethnological Journal: A Magazine of Ethnography, Phrenology, and Archeology, considered as elements of the Science of Races: with the application of this science to Education, Legislation, and Social Progress, 2 (1848), 94. Other reviewers of the same period failed to perceive Knox's developmentalism at all: “If we understand Dr. Knox's theory, it is that men were originally created of different races, like the wild animals...” (“Human Progress,” Westminster Rev., 52 [1850], 2).
See Lancet, 1 (1847), 565–571, 630; 653–654, 685; Rae, Knox, pp. 134–161; Lonsdale, Life, pp. 343–394; Blake, “Life of Dr. Knox.” All accounts of Knox's London period are very sketchy and incomplete. Knox does seem to have had some contact with London medical reformist circles (see n. 108 above), and he eventually found employment in 1856 as pathological anatomist to the Cancer Hospital, founded by the reformer William Marsden.
The French physical anthropologist Paul Broca, founder of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, incorporated Knox's arguments on the infertility of racial hybrids into his polygenist writings, and in 1861 Knox was elected the first foreign corresponding member of the Société. See Henry Lonsdale A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 385; James Hunt, “Preface” to Carl Vogt, Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth (London: Anthropological Society, 1864); Paul Broca, On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo (London: Anthropological Society, 1864), pp. 61–71.
Quoted in Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 368. See also Knox, Races of Men (1862), pp. 570, 589, 594; Robert Knox, “On the Application of the Anatomical Method to the Discrimination of Species,” Anthrop. Rev., 1 (1863), 263–270, esp. p. 267. Knox dealt very peremptorily and dismissively with the Origin, but it is tempting to speculate that Darwin's utilitarian Malthusian mechanism of natural selection was unacceptable to the radical and anti-Malthusian Knox; see Knox, Races of Men (1862), p. 580. As well, Knox, like the other transcendentalist-influenced critics of Darwin, would have found the chance element of natural selection incompatible with his deterministic schema of development; see Russell, Form and Function (above, n. 75), pp. 241–245. His dismissive attitude toward the Origin possibly accounts for Knox's failure to make any bids for acknoledgment as a “precursor,” unlike Grant who gloried in the connection: see Desmond, “Grant: Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist,” pp. 191–192.
See Sandra Herbert, “The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin's Theory of Transmutation. Part II,” J. Hist. Biol., 10 (1977), 155–227, esp. pp. 156–157; Martin J. Rudwick, “Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science,” Isis, 73 (1982), 186–206.
Stocking, “What's in a Name?” (above, n. 3), p. 376.
James Hunt, “On the Origin of the Anthropological Review and Its Connection with the Anthropological Society,” Anthrop. Rev., 6 (1868), 432.
Stocking, “What's in a Name?”; and George W. Stocking, “From Chronology to Ethnology: James Cowles Prichard and British Anthropology 1800–1850,” in James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, ed. George W. Stocking (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. ix-cx.
Hunt. “Origin of the Anthropological Review,” p. 432.
Ibid.
Ethnological Society of London (ESL) Minutes, February 7, 1855, “Council Minute Book, 1844–1869,” Archives, Royal Anthropological Institute. The society had previously purchased a copy of Knox's Races of Men as part of its library collection: ESL Minutes, June 11, 1851.
Hunt was elected a fellow in 1856; Knox was elected honorary fellow on November 27, 1860: ESL Minutes; Hunt, “Origin of the Anthropological Review,” p. 432. Hunt gives the date of Knox's election as 1858, but according to the Minutes this is incorrect.
ESL Minutes. Knox was formally appointed honorary curator on June 17, 1862. Over the two years of his membership he read six papers in all to the society, of which three were published in the society's Transactions—a record exceeded only by Crawfurd; see G. W. Bloxam, Index to the Publications of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1843–1891 (London: Anthropological Institute, 1893). This same period was a stormy one, with conflict over the issue of the admission of women to the Ethnological Society's meetings (forcefully opposed by Hunt, who resigned as secretary at one point, ostensibly on health grounds, but was persuaded to withdraw his resignation: ESL Minutes for November 27, 1860; February 6, February 20, 1861). Hunt later represented this issue as one of the major reasons for his secession from the Society: James Hunt, “Dedication to Broca,” in Vogt, Lectures on Man, pp. viii-ix. See Evelleen Richards, “Huxley and Woman's Place in Science: The ‘Woman Question’ and the Control of Victorian Anthropology” in History, Humanity, and Evolution, ed. James R. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 253–284.
Hunt, “Dedication,” pp. vii-viii; idem, “Origin of the Anthropological Review,” pp. 432–434; Lonsdale, Life, pp. viii, 384–387; Knox, Races of Men (1862), p. 600. Cf. Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science” (above, n. 3), pp. 56–57.
James Hunt, “On the Application of the Principle of Natural Selection to Anthropology, in Reply to Views Advocated by Some of Mr. Darwin's Disciples,” Anthrop. Rev., 4 (1866), 320–340; esp. p. 336. Hunt was collecting material for a biography of Knox, and had advertised to this effect in the Anthropological Review, when Lonsdale made known his proposed biography; Lonsdale, Life, p. viii.
James Hunt, A Treatise on the Cure of Stammering (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1854), p. 25. This work does indicate Hunt's early preference for naturalistic explanations: ibid., p. 12. Little is known of Hunt's early career. See “James Hunt,” Dict. Nat. Biog., 28: 266–267; also Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 376; Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science,” p. 52.
See Stocking, “What's in a Name?”; Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science”; John W. Burrow, “Evolution and Anthropology in the 1860's: The Anthropological Society of London,” Vict. Stud., 7 (1963–64), 137–154. Stocking's is by far the best and most detailed analysis.
James Hunt, “Anniversary Address to the Anthropological Society of London, January 5, 1864,” J. Anthrop. Soc., 2 (1864), lxxxi, xciii.
James Hunt, “Anniversary Address, January 1, 1867,” J. Anthrop. Soc., 5 (1867), lxi-lxii; cf. Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science,” p. 61.
James Hunt, “On the Negro's Place in Nature,” Mem. Anthrop. Soc., 1 (1863), 1–64, quotation on pp. 51–52. According to Hunt, his paper was initially presented at the Newcastle meeting of the British Association, where it was hissed by the audience. He subsequently read it to the Anthropological Society, where he received “the cordial and earnest support of our scientific brethren” (ibid., p. vi). This paper contains a number of references to Knox's anthropology in support of Hunt's views: ibid., pp. 13, 17. As Stocking has noted, Hunt's defence of slavery was well timed to coincide with the American Civil War: Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 376.
Hunt, “Anniversary Address, 1867,” p. lx. Here Hunt expressed his own preference for a “well-selected hereditary aristocracy” as being “more in accordance with nature's laws than those glittering trivialities respecting human rights which now form the stock-in-trade of some of our professors of political economy, and many of our politicians” (ibid., p. lxi).
Ibid., p. lix; and [James Hunt], “Race in Legislation and Political Economy,” Anthrop. Rev., 4 (1866), 113–135; Harris, Rise of Anthropological Theory (above, n. 3), p. 101.
George W. Stocking, “What's in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837–71),” Man, 6 (1971), pp. 384–386; idem, “From Chronology to Ethnology” (above, n. 125), pp. ciii–cx; Weber, “Science and Society” (above, n. 53), pp. 269–272.
Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 385; Frank M. Turner, “The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension,” Isis, 69 (1978), 356–376.
Burrow, “Evolution and Anthropology”; Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 378; Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science,” pp. 58–59.
Notably: “I cannot think that any advance can be made in the application of the Darwinian principles to anthropology until we can free the subject from the unity hypothesis which has been identified with it, especially by the influence of Professor Huxley” (Hunt, “Application of the Principle of Natural Selection,” p. 339).
Alfred R. Wallace, “The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of Natural Selection,” J. Anthrop. Soc., 2 (1864), clviii-clxxxvii; Stepan, Idea of Race (above, n. 3) pp. 68–70; Joel S. Schwartz, “Darwin, Wallace, and the Descent of Man,” J. Hist. Biol., 17 (1984), 271–289, esp. pp. 272–275.
James Hunt, “On the Doctrine of Continuity Applied to Anthropology,” Anthrop. Rev., 5 (1867), 110–120. esp. p. 113. Hunt also objected to Wallace's exemption of man from natural law: Wallace, “Origin of Human Races,” p. clxxx.
Burke in Wallace, “Origin of Human Races,” p. clxx.
James Hunt, “Preface” to Carl Vogt, Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth (London: Anthropological Society, 1864), p. xv. See also Hunt's endorsement of Vogt's interpretation in Hunt, “Doctrine of Continuity,” pp. 114, 118.
Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science,”. p. 58.
Hunt, “Application of the Principle of Natural Selection,” p. 340; see also Hunt, “Doctrine of Continuity.”
Hunt, “Application of the Principle of Natural Selection,” p. 326. Hunt did make some statements that are suggestive of a Knoxian/Vogtian embryological model of “natural development” in his unsigned “Race in Legislation” (above, n. 139), pp. 120, 129; see Vogt, Lectures on Man, pp. 183–192. I have pointed to the affinities between the views of Knox and Vogt (see above, n. 78). However, Hunt was undoubtedly far more interested in the political applications of Knox's views than in the biological details of his developmentalism, which Knox did not present very coherently in his major anthropological writings. Also, Hunt made very clear his preference for an interpretation of development that did not promote revolutionary change; see n. 151.
Hunt: “Anniversary Address, 1867,” p. lx; and “Doctrine of Continuity,” pp. 119, 120.
It is possible that Hunt modeled this strategy on Broca's in the “parent” société d'Anthropologie de Paris. See Joy Harvey, “Evolutionism Transformed: Positivists and Materialists in the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris from Second Empire to Third Republic,” in The Wider Domain Of Evolutionary Thought, ed. David Oldroyd and Ian Langham (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), pp. 289–310.
C. Carter Blake, “Man and Beast,” Anthrop. Rev. 1 (1863), 161; see also idem, “On the Relations of Man to the Inferior Animals,” Ibid., pp. 107–117.
Carter Blake to Owen, December 22, 1863; September 5, 1865; August 14, 1868; August 29, 1873, British Museum (Natural History), Owen Collection, 4, fols. 202, 204, 209, 211. See also the invitation to Owen to attend the Anthropological Society meeting of December 6, 1864, to comment on a collection of human remains: ibid., 8, fol. 343a. Note also Hunt's remarks re Owen in “Doctrine of Continuity,” p. 117. Owen was another of those who based his developmentalism on embryogenesis; see Richards, “A Question of Property Rights” (above, n. 78).
ASL Council Minutes, February 18, 1863.
Ibid., May 12, 1863; ESL. Minutes, May 5, 1863; Huxley to Carter Blake, May 2 and 5, 1863, Huxley Papers, V. XI, fols. 17–20, Imperial College Archives (hereinafter cited as Huxley Papers); Rolleston to Huxley, ibid., XXV, fol. 165. Huxley's resignation was ostensibly over Carter Blake's mauling of Rolleston; however, as Desmond has noted, the article was a general attack on Man's Place, so Huxley had a more personal reason for resigning. See Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors (above, n. 10), p. 223n 51; Huxley to Lubbock, May 3; 1863, Avebury Papers, Correspondence of Sir John Lubbock, III, 49640, fol. 53, British Library (hereinafter cited as Lubbock Correspondence). Matters were not improved when Hunt entitled his proslavery paper “On the Negro's Place in Nature,” in obvious paraphrase of Huxley; Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 379.
ESL Minutes, May 5, 1863. The previous two years had seen an influx of Darwinians into the ESL: Charles Darwin had been elected an honorary fellow on May 14, 1861; Francis Galton became a member on March 1, 1862, and Erasmus Darwin (who served on the Council for a time) on March 18, 1862. On the reasons for Hunt's resignation, see Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 376.
Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 381.
Ibid., p. 377.
Ibid.; Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors, p. 81.
Huxley to Lubbock, October 18, 1867, Lubbock Correspondence, V, 49642, fol. 63; Stocking, “What's in a Name?” pp. 337, 381–382. Stocking does not attribute such an overtly manipulative role to Huxley, but see Turner, “Victorian Conflict” (above, n. 141), on the takeover of London science by the Darwinian “Young guard”; see also Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors, pp. 110–112, 158–164.
Thomas H. Huxley, Man's Place in Nature and a Supplementary Essay (London: Watts, 1908), p. 39.
Thomas H. Huxley, “On the Methods and Results of Ethnology,” in Man's Place in Nature, pp. 104–123; quotation on p. 121.
Ibid., p. 118.
Ibid., p. 123. See also Stepan, Idea of Race, pp. 78–79. On Huxley's “Persistence,” see Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors, pp. 84–112.
Hunt, “Application of the Principle of Natural Selection,” p. 320. Hunt actually wrote to Huxley in acknowledgment of Huxley's conciliating role, expressing the willingness of the Anthropologicals to consider amalgamation under Huxley's presidency. Whatever the reality of this offer (the Council of the ASL refused to even consider Huxley's candidacy for honorary fellow), a few weeks later Hunt, on hearing that Huxley had joined the Jamaica Committee, publicly derided Huxley for his recent attack of “negromania”: Hunt to Huxley, October 6, 12, and 18, 1866, Huxley Papers, V. XVIII, fols. 334–357; Hodgson to Huxley, November 3, 1866, ibid., fol. 201. Hunt subsequently lambasted Huxley in print as “for five years ... our most deadly, and sometimes even our most bitter, foe” (James Hunt, “President's Address,” Anthrop. Rev., 6 [1868], 77). As Stocking has noted, Hunt was capable of some duplicity in his dealings with Huxley, and on one occasion even apologized to Huxley for lampoons that had appeared in the Anthropological Review “at the caprice of the Editor” — i.e., Hunt himself, as subsequent enquiries revealed: Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 382.
Hunt, “President's Address,” 1868, p. 77. It is significant that this setback to his British Association aspirations provoked Hunt's most vehement denunciations of Darwinism, and it is noteworthy that the Dundee Courier, in reporting Hunt's speech, voiced the “faint suspicion” that Hunt's disavowal of Darwinism had been written “with just a tinge of a desire to suit the latitude and longitude of Dundee” (quoted in ibid., p. 83).
Hunt, “Application of the Principle of Natural Selection,” pp. 322, 325–326.
Ibid., p. 336.
Ibid., p. 340.
[James Hunt], “Race Antagonism,” Pop. Mag. Anthrop., 1 (1866), 24. Hunt's short-lived Popular Magazine lasted only from January to October, 1866. Hunt was not only owner and editor, but author of this venture, which was largely devoted to a defence of Eyre on “anthropological” grounds; see Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science,” pp. 62–63.
[James Hunt], “Introduction,” Pop. Mag. Anthrop., 1 (1866), 1.
[James Hunt], “Knox on the Saxon Race,” Anthrop. Rev., 6 (1868), 276, 278.
James Hunt, “Anniversary Address,” Anthrop. Rev., 4 (1866), lxxviii. The ASL organized a public meeting in defence of Eyre, at which Captain Bedford Pim (who had been hastily admitted to the society for the purpose) delivered a racist diatribe on “The Negro and Jamaica” to the loud cheers of his audience and their unanimous vote of thanks: Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 379. Huxley, of course, was a noted leader in the liberal attack on Eyre. Some members of the Anthropological Society tendered their resignations over the affair; letters from Bainsford (March 9, April 16, 1866) and Buxton (February 6, 26, and 29, 1866), ASL, Letters to the Society, 1865–66, Archives, Royal Anthropological Institute.
[James Hunt], “Knox on the Celtic Race,” Anthrop. Rev., 6 (1868), 190–191.
Hunt. “On the Negro's Place in Nature” (above, n. 137); [Hunt], “Race in Legislation” (above, n. 139).
To wit: “With [the white races] has originated everything that is highest in science, in art, in law, in politics, and in mechanical inventions. In their hands, at the present moment, lies the order of the social world, and to them its progress is committed” (Huxley, “Methods and Results,” p. 114).
Thomas H. Huxley, “Emancipation Black and White” (1865), in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 25–30; Stepan, Idea of Race, pp. 79–80. Huxley made the same point with respect to the higher education of women; see Evelleen Richards, “Darwin and the Descent of Woman,” in Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought (above, n. 152), pp. 57–111, esp. pp. 92–93.
Weber, “Science and Society” (above, n. 53), p. 280.
Turner, “Victorian Conflict” (above, n. 141), p. 363.
Roy M. MacLeod, “Introduction: On the Advancement of Science,” in The Parliament of Science: The British Association for the Advancement of Science 1831–1981, ed. Roy MacLeod and Peter Collins (Northwood: Science Reviews, 1981), p. 28; and Roy M. MacLeod, “The X-Club: A Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England,” Notes Rec. Roy. Soc., 24 (1970), 305–322.
Huxley to Joseph Hooker, October 24, 1868, Huxley Papers, V. II, fol. 140; Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 382.
Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 382.
Ibid., p. 383. Peter Martin Duncan had been elected to the Council of the ASL and was actively working on Huxley's behalf to undermine Hunt's authority: Duncan to Huxley, September 8 and 25, 1868; June 2 and 16, 1869, Huxley Papers, V. XV, fols. 26–32.
Huxley to Hooker, January 24, 1868, Huxley Papers, V. II, fol. 140; Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 383. One of Huxley's innovations was to demarcate between special meetings, where “popular” topics could be discussed, and ordinary meetings, which would be for “scientific” discussions, to which “ladies will not be admitted”. “Report of the Council,” J. Ethnol. Soc., n. s., 1 (1869), viii–xv. He thus demonstrated his concurrence with Hunt on this contentious issue, and removed one of the major obstacles to amalgamation. See nn. 130, 178 above.
George W. Stocking, “What's in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837–71),” Man, 6 (1971), pp. 380–381.
John W. Burrow, “Introduction” to Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, reprint of 1st ed., ed. J. Burrow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 4.
Ronald Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science: The Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s,” Vict. Stud., 22 (1978), 61–62.
E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), p. 268.
Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors, pp. 158–164. Helfand's rereading of Huxley's later famous Romanes Lecture supports Desmond's interpretation: M. S. Helfand, “T. H. Huxley's ‘Evolution and Ethics’: The Politics of Evolution and the Evolution of Politics,” Vict. Stud., 20 (1977), 159–177. See also Stepan, Idea of Race, pp. 80–82.
“Professor Huxley on Political Ethnology,” Anthrop. Rev., 8 (1870), 197–216; Rainger, “Race, Politics, and Science,” pp, 64–65.
“Owen threw wide the door and entered with nods and wreathed smiles, while his great adversary scowled as if he could kill him” (John Beddoe, Memories of Eighty Years [Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1910], pp. 212–213).
Stocking, “What's in a Name?” p. 383; Beddoe, Memories, pp. 215–216.
Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 83–110; Stocking, “What's in a Name?” pp. 384–386; Stocking, “From Chronology to Ethnology” (above, n. 125), p. lxx; George W. Stocking, “The Persistence of Polygenist Thought in Post-Darwinian Anthropology,” in idem, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 42–68.
Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 126–128.
John C. Greene, “Darwin as a Social Evolutionist,” J. Hist. Biol., 10 (1977), 1–27; Greta Jones, “The Social History of Darwin's Descent of Man,” Economy and Society, 7 (1978), 1–23; John R. Durant, “The Ascent of Nature in Darwin's Descent of Man,” in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 283–206.
Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 51. See Charles Darwin, “M and N Notebooks and Old and Useless Notes,” in H. E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (New York: Dutton, 1974); Gavin de Beer, ed., “Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species,” Bull. Brit. Mus. (Nat. Hist.) Hist. Ser., 2, nos. 2–6 (1960–61), and 3, no. 5 (1967); Schweber, “Origin of the Origin Revisited” (above, n. 30); Herbert, “Place of Man” (above, 122); Jones, “Social History of Darwin's Descent.”
Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists” (above, n. 53); G. Gale, “Darwin and the Concept of a Struggle for Existence: A Study in the Extrascientific Origins of Scientific Ideas,” Isis, 63 (1972), 321–344; Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, “Darwin and Social Darwinism: Purity and History,” in Barnes and Shapin, Natural Order (above, n. 44), pp. 125–142; John C. Greene, “Biology and Social Theory in the Nineteenth Century: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), pp. 419–446. For Darwin's debt to Quetelet see Schweber, “Origin of the Origin Revisited,” pp. 287–293; and Silvan S. Schweber, “Darwin and the Political Economists: Divergence of Character,” J. Hist. Biol., 13 (1980), 195–289.
Although the connection is tenuous, the young Darwin possibly attended some of Knox's famous Saturday lectures on ethnology while he was studying medicine in Edinburgh in the year from 1826 to 1827, when Knox was at the height of his fame as a lecturer and just before the Burke and Hare affair. Darwin's exposure to transcendental and Lamarckian views via his association with Grant in this period is well known, and Manier has recently stressed the young Darwin's enthusiastic response to romanticism: Edward Manier, “History, Philosophy and Sociology of Biology: A Family Romance,” Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 11 (1980), 1–24. See also Phillip R. Sloan, “Darwin's Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836: Preconditions for Transformism,” in Kohn, Darwinian Heritage, pp. 71–120.
Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 176, 180. As his references indicate, Darwin had read Knox's major works (see above, n. 5) and (in spite of his distaste for their racist ideology) was an assiduous reader of the publications of the defunct Anthropological Society.
Richard Owen's struggle to have himself included in the pre-Darwinian evolutionary roll call may be recalled in this connection, and the establishment and ultrarespectable Owen had a good deal more going for him as an acceptable “precursor” than did Knox. See Roy MacLeod, “Evolutionism and Richard Owen, 1830–1868: An Episode in Darwin's Century,” Isis, 56 (1965), 259–280; and Richards, “A Question of Property Rights” (above, n. 78).
Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 166–199; quotation on p. 173. Note the reference to Knox in this connection: Darwin characterized Knox as “another firm believer in the specific distinctness of the races of man” (ibid., p. 168n 5). See also Stepan's excellent discussion of the Descent in Idea of Race, pp. 52–66.
I have discussed Darwin's biological determinism within the context of Victorian scientific naturalism elsewhere; see Richards, “Darwin and the Descent of Woman” (above, n. 178). Cf. Stepan, Idea of Race, p. 86.
Richards, “Darwin and the Descent of Woman,” pp. 87–89; Weber, “Science and Society” (above, n. 53), p. 280; Robert M. Young, “Darwinism is Social,” in Kohn, Darwinian Heritage, pp. 609–638; James R. Moore, “Socializing Darwinism: Historiography and the Fortunes of a Phrase,” in Science as Politics, ed. Les Levidov (London: Free Association Books, 1986), pp. 38–80.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Richards, E. The “Moral Anatomy” of Robert Knox: The interplay between biological and social thought in Victorian scientific naturalism. J Hist Biol 22, 373–436 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00401576
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00401576