Diary of George Templeton Strong, March 6, 1860

. . . Looking further into Darwin’s Origin of Species this evening. Though people who don’t like its conclusions generally speak of it as profound and as a formidable attack on received notions, I timidly incline to think it a shallow book, though laboriously and honestly written.

Darwin cannot understand why Omnipotent Power and Wisdom should have created so many thousand various types of organic life, allied to each other by various complex relations and differing in points of detail for which we can assign no reason. He wants to shew that the original creative act was on the smallest scale and produced only some one organism of the humblest rank but capable of development into the fauna and flora of the earth, from moss to oak and from monad to man, under his law of progress and natural selection. To him, as to the physicists of the last one hundred years, the notion of a supernatural creative power is repugnant and offen¬ sive. He wants to account for the wonderful, magnificent harmonies and relations of the varied species of life that exist on earth by reducing the original agency of supernatural power in their creation to a minimum. This feeling sticks out at page 483, where he asks triumphantly. Do people “really believe that . . . certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues?” (That passage is the keynote of the whole book.)

I must say I find it just as easy to answer that question in the affirmative as to admit that certain elemental atoms of lime, silex, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so forth are daily and hourly “commanded to flash into” organic wood fibre, cellulose, parenchyma, and so on. The latter miracle is being performed on the largest scale this minute wherever vegetation is in progress; the former seems to occur only at long intervals. I can see no other distinction between them. One is familiar to our senses, the other is proved by deduction. They are a priori equally credible, or incredible, whichever Mr. Darwin pleases. The inorganic world has its own internal harmonies and relations quite as distinct and unmistakeable as the organic. But no law of progressive development can be inferred from them. Mr. Darwin would not venture to maintain that iodine and bromine are developments of chlorine or vice versa, that some one little dirty, obscure or obsolete element was parent and progenitor of osmium, iridium, ruthenium, and all the rest of the platinum group. Very possible that these so-called elements may be hereafter decomposed and proved to be composite, but we have no right to assume that they will be, and until analysis reduces the inorganic world to a series of compounds of only two primal entities, it will testify against Darwin’s theory.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 13-4

Diary of George Templeton Strong: February 18, 1860

Spent this evening diligently cutting the leaves of Darwin’s much discussed book on The Origin of Species and making acquaintance with its general scope and aim. It’s a laborious, intelligent, and weighty book. First obvious criticism on it seems this, that Darwin has got hold of a truth which he wants to make out to be the one generative law of organic life. Because he shews that the fauna and flora of a group of islands lying near a certain continent are so like those of that continent, though differing specifically therefrom, and so unlike those of other regions more remote, as to make it probable that they are the offspring of the continental species modified by the altered conditions of their new habitat, he considers himself entitled to affirm that all beasts, birds, and creeping things, from mammal to medusa, are developments from one stock, and that man is the descendant of some ancestral archaic fish, with swimming bladder improved into lungs, that flying fish have by successive minute steps of progress through countless ages become albatrosses, and flying squirrels bats. But I suspect that He who created and upholds this great marvelous system of various harmonious life is not obliged to conformity with any one Law of Creation and preservation that Darwin’s or any other finite intellect can discover.

Darwin asks rather large concessions. You must begin by giving him thousands of millions of millions of years (that Johnny Strong would be puzzled to read were they expressed in Arabic numerals) for the operation of his Law of Progress, and admit that the silence of the stratified record of those ages as to its operation and existence may be explained away; and then, the want of affirmative evidence to sustain his theory being accounted for, he can make out a plausible case for it by suggesting that “it may have been’’; “why should not’’; “we may suppose that,” and the like.

The period required for the production of the whole animal world from a single parent stock (and he holds that both the animal and vegetable races have one common primeval parent, a diatom, I suppose) by the working of his imaginary law of natural selection is even beyond the all but inconceivable procession of ages which he concedes that his theory calls for. Let us see. We have records of the condition of animal life in certain of its departments that go back to the earliest picture writing of Egypt and become more and more abundant and minute as they approach our own days. Those of the last two hundred years are copious and elaborate. During the last fifty, a mass of evidence has been collected that could hardly be read through in one lifetime. The superficial area covered by investigations thus recorded in our own day is immensely great; that is, 25,000 miles of European coast line alone, studied almost inch by inch, every zoological province of all the earth’s surface investigated (though, of course, not exhaustively) by inquisitive travelers and men of science. Practical men, stimulated by hope of profit in money, have been working hard and intelligently to modify existing breeds or species by changing all their original or natural relations to climate, food, and habit, and perpetuating as far as they could every improvement in the breed artificially or accidentally produced. But no symptom of the change of one species to another has been produced or has occurred within the historic period. There is not even a legend of the ancient identity of lion and eagle, no tradition of a period before horse and ass; geese and ducks were distinct animals. No development of new organs or new functions by any animal is anywhere recorded or traceable. Scientific breeders after centuries of vigilant work have produced various types of horse, sheep, pigeon, and so forth; but these several types lose their respective peculiarities, unless their purity be carefully maintained. (Note Darwin’s statement about the tendency of peculiarities of the rock pigeon, the original progenitor, to recur in the fancy breeds, pouter and tumbler and so forth.) The area covered by scientific research and by experiments in breeding for the last century is equivalent (in considering Darwin’s theory) to scores of thousands of years of recorded observation in a single district. But however this may be, man’s experience for, we will say, only four thousand years furnishes no instance of the development of new functions or new organs by any animal or vegetable organism.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, p. 10-11

William Barton Rogers to Henry Darwin Rogers, January 2, 1860

Boston, January 2, 1860.

My Dear Henry,  . . . Robert has had some trouble of late in arresting the foolish attempt of the Southern students to withdraw from Philadelphia. Through his exertions the University class lost only some fifteen, and those of the most worthless sort, but one hundred and fifty of the class at the Jefferson school went off in a body to Richmond. It seems that the movement was in part instigated by some of the professors in Richmond and other Southern cities, and, worse still, the foolish young men were received with rejoicings and a speech of congratulation from Governor Wise!!

No Speaker has yet been elected in Congress, but there is little doubt that the Republican candidate will be chosen. Nor do I think the Southern members, with all their threats of secession and resistance, will attempt anything of the kind. After blowing off their superfluous steam, they will subside into more rational speech and action. It is, however, clear that the conflict between pro-slavery and anti-slavery is henceforth to be perpetual until freedom has triumphed throughout all the States. Little as I can sympathize in John Brown's insurrectionary projects, I believe that the panic will bear good fruit by and by in hastening the legislation which was once in Virginia so near arranging a plan of prospective emancipation. . . .

I have been reading the early chapters of Darwin's book with great interest. . . .

I send you the proceedings of the Natural History Society, containing some little matters of mine which may be interesting. What I say in regard to the Vespertine and Umbral rocks of the Provinces, etc., is intended to show that we long ago recognized these two divisions as important in North American geology, although they are only now becoming recognized by Logan and Dawson. You will see also a short notice of my discovery of a Lingula in the slates of St. John, where no fossils had previously been found.

A Memorial prepared by me in behalf of the Natural History, Horticultural and other societies will be presented to the Legislature erelong, and it is thought the grant of land on the Back Bay will be made for their benefit. My Memorial has been highly approved.

. . . The more I look into Darwin's argument the more I like it, save in the one particular of ignoring entirely violent and sudden physical changes. The calmness and truth-loving spirit of the book are truly admirable. Much of it I know you will approve.

SOURCE: Emma Savage Rogers & William T. Sedgwick, Life and Letters of William Barton Rogers, Volume 2, p. 18-9