Charles Darwin, in his species notebooks, engaged seriously with the quinarian system of William Sharp Macleay. Much of the attention given to this engagement has focused on Darwin’s attempt to explain, in a transmutationist framework, the intricate patterns that characterized the quinarian system. Here, I show that Darwin’s attempt to explain these quinarian patterns primarily occurred before he had read any work by Macleay. By the time Darwin began reading Macleay’s writings, he had already arrived at a skeptical view of the reality of these patterns. What most interested Darwin, as he read Macleay, was not the quinarian system itself. Rather, Darwin’s notes on his reading primarily concerned certain background principles animating Macleay’s work, in particular: (a) the non-existence of a saltus between human and animal minds, (b) the difficulty of establishing boundaries between species and varieties, and (c) Macleay’s method of variation. Darwin’s interest in the last of these left a mark on his discussion of taxonomic methodology in the Origin.

中文翻译：

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对查尔斯·达尔文对威廉·夏普·麦克利工作的重新评价

查尔斯·达尔文在他的物种笔记本中，认真地研究了威廉·夏普·麦克利 (William Sharp Macleay) 的五元系统。对这种参与的大部分注意力都集中在达尔文试图在嬗变主义框架中解释五元系统特征的复杂模式上。在这里，我表明达尔文试图解释这些五元模式主要发生在他阅读麦克利的任何著作之前。当达尔文开始阅读麦克利的著作时，他已经对这些模式的现实持怀疑态度。在读麦克利时，达尔文最感兴趣的不是五元体系本身。相反，达尔文在他的阅读中的笔记主要涉及使麦克利的作品活跃的某些背景原则，特别是：（a）人类和动物思想之间不存在盐度，(b) 在物种和品种之间建立界限的困难，以及 (c) 麦克利的变异方法。达尔文对最后一个的兴趣在他在《起源》中对分类学方法论的讨论中留下了印记。