Abstract
AbstractBritish systematics was distinctly marked by a raft of vituperative controversies around the turn of the 1830s. After the local collapse of broad consensus in the Linnaean system by 1820, the emergence of new schemes of classification—most notably, the “quinarian” system of William Sharp Macleay—brought with it an unprecedented register of public debate among zoologists in Britain, one which a young Charles Darwin would bitterly describe to his friend John Stevens Henslow in October 1836 as possessing a “mean quarrelsome spirit,” conducted in “a manner anything but like that of gentlemen.” This article aims to provide a social and conceptual account of the remarkable tenor of zoological discourse in Britain in the late 1820s and early 1830s, with joint attention to the philosophical and interpersonal commitments at play. In doing so, it analyzes the three of the period’s most striking public controversies, each of which counted key advocates of the quinarian system as central participants.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
History and Philosophy of Science,General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Reference61 articles.
1. Appel, Toby A. 1987. The Cuvier-Geoffroy debate: French biology in the decades before Darwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. Babbage, Charles. 1830. Reflections on the decline of science in England, and on some of its causes. London: B. Fellowes.
3. Bentham, George. 1823. Essai sur la nomenclature et la classification des principales branches d’art-et-science. Paris: Bossange Frères.
4. Bentham, Jeremy. 1817. Chrestomathia. London: Payne & Foss.
5. Bicheno, James Ebenezer. 1827. On systems and methods in natural history. Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 15: 479–496.