Abstract
Alexander Moritzi (1806–1850) is one of the most obscure figures in the early history of evolutionary thought. Best known for authoring a flora of Switzerland, Moritzi also published Réflexions sur l’espèce en histoire naturelle (1842), a remarkable book about evolution with an overtly materialist viewpoint. In this work, Moritzi argues that the (then) generally accepted line between species and varieties is artificial, that varieties can over time give rise to new species, and that deep time and turnover of species in the fossil record clearly support an evolutionary interpretation of biological diversity. Moritzi was also a gradualist and viewed relationships between taxa as best represented by a ramifying tree. Although Réflexions was the first full book to be written on the topic of evolution following Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique (1809), Moritzi’s evolutionist contribution was stillborn, read by almost no one in his lifetime and ultimately absent from the many historiographies of evolutionary thought. This is unfortunate since many of the arguments Moritzi marshaled on behalf of an evolutionary explanation of life can be found in subsequent transmutationist writings by Frédéric Gérard, Robert Chambers, Henri Lecoq, Baden Powell, Charles Naudin, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin—none of whom is likely to have ever known of the existence of Réflexions. Finally, Moritzi’s arguments, along with those found in Darwin’s private essay on evolution of the same year, provide an excellent window into the state of evolutionary thought and debate over the nature of species at the beginning of the 1840s.
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Notes
Published in the summer of 1860. The earlier appearing German preface is a direct translation of the preface that appeared in the third printing of the first American edition of Origin.
Additional published early evolutionists include Philippe Bertrand, Pierre Boitard, Ami Boué, Henry Cheek, William Chilton, Jean-Claude Delamétherie, Alberto Fortis, Giuseppi Gautieri, Frederic Gérard, Asa Gray, Robert Knox, Achille-Pierre Requin, Matthias Schleiden, Charles Southwell, Julien Virey, Sir Richard Vyvyan, and Hewett Watson; see Bange and Bange (1995), Charpa (2010), Corsi (1988, 2005, 2012), Desmond (1984, 1987), Dupree (1959), Egerton (2003), Jenkins (2015, 2016).
Darwin substantially expanded this essay in 1844, which was also finally published in 1909 (Darwin 1909).
A “natural system” of classification in botany was originally developed by Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu in the late eighteenth century in an attempt to go beyond the simple (single or few characters) classificatory system of Linnaeus. A.-P. de Candolle would significantly develop these ideas in plant systematics in the first half of the nineteenth century in an attempt to discover nature’s principles governing the form and symmetry of plant organs and, through the noting of such patterns, the recognition of species and higher taxonomic groups. Natural classification was not an evolutionary scheme of classification, although many of the groupings would ultimately be concordant with evolutionarily defined taxa. See Stevens (1994).
Original in the archives of the Conservatoire botanique, Geneva.
But see the later work by Linnaeus, discussed in Almquist (1917).
As will be seen later, it is not at all clear that Moritzi is specifically discussing Lamarck and his evolutionary ideas. In the three instances in Réflexions where Moritzi refers to the general notion that environmental change can induce biological character changes, he goes into no detail and does not link this evolutionary mechanism to the ideas of any predecessors who advocated such views.
Subsequently republished as a chapter on the flora of the Canary Islands in Physicalische Beschreibung der Canarischen Inseln, 1825; French translation, 1835.
Hegetschweiler was killed during the civil unrest of 1839 in Zurich, and Oswald Heer completed and arranged for the publication of this flora.
At that time (1840s), the Zurich school of plant systematics did not believe in evolution. For example, Oswald Heer maintained that there were six episodic interventions by the creator, each associated with a period when the fossil record showed many novelties and large numbers of extinctions. Eventually, Heer would accept evolutionary ideas but reject the mechanism of natural selection and Darwin’s general gradualist views. Heer continued throughout his life to maintain a guiding role for a creator in the evolution of biological diversity; see Leu (2009). Heer corresponded with Darwin specifically about the early evolution of flowering plants and the question of rates of evolutionary change; see Friedman (2009).
According to Duris (1994, p. 117): “During the first half of the 19th century, and notably during the Restoration, many French naturalists gathered into some new natural history Societies, called Linnean Societies. They tried to remove the chaos of the zoological and botanical nomenclature, and decided to fight against the generalization of the natural method. They worshipped Linnaeus' memory, his artificial system of classification of plants and animals, and his binomial nomenclature. This worshipping, ignored by the official scientific institution, opened up the way to an international critical approach aiming at the stabilization and universalization of zoological, botanical and geological nomenclatures.”
As Bloch noted: “Lang calls into question de Candolle’s statement that Moritzi had taken his descent theory views from Hegetschweiler’s school, and rightly so…. But even if [for] Hegetschweiler the external conditions have a significant influence on the variability of species and testify to his intended work of great ingenuity, so, as Oswald Heer also emphasizes, he [Hegetschweiler] did not sufficiently bring these ideas into clear awareness, as he was short of time, while Moritzi had the idea of the variability of species and especially the thought of the gradual development of the world of organisms with all clarity.”
Moritzi makes no reference to the works of the early evolutionist Constantine Rafinesque, a European-born American, who was an extreme splitter and one of the most prolific describers of new plant species in history—a great deal of which are no longer valid (many are synonyms). Most of Rafinesque’s publications were of extremely limited print runs in America, and so were perhaps unlikely to have been seen by Moritzi (see Endersby 2009).
Examples include de Candolle (1820, p. 59), “species of organized beings are permanent, and every living individual comes from another being similar to it,” and Lyell (1830–1833, vol. II, p. 65), “From the above considerations, it appears that the species have a real existence in nature, and that each was endowed, at the time of its creation, with the attributes and organisation by which it is now distinguished.” See also Mayr (1982) for a broader discussion of early species concepts.
See de Beer (1960) for a shorter, if somewhat cursory, list of Moritzi’s evolutionary arguments.
This viewpoint is mirrored in Darwin’s (unpublished) essay on evolution written in the very same year, 1842: “Looking now to the affinities of organisms, without relation to their distribution, and taking all fossil and recent, we see the degrees of relationship are of different degrees and arbitrary, - sub-genera, - genera, - sub-families, families, orders and classes and kingdoms. The kind of classification which everyone feels is the most correct is called the natural system, but no [one] can define this” (Darwin 1909, p. 35).
See Mayr (1982) and, more recently, Tanghe (2017), among a host of others, for historical treatments of species concepts. Generally, Buffon is credited with the introduction of the concept of reproductive isolation as a means to recognize species: “one can always draw a line between two species, that is, between two successions of individuals that cannot reproduce with each other”; translation of Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière by Mayr (1982, p. 261).
“If it is meant, only that a fertile offspring may be supposed to intimate, that the two parent plants have branched out from one common stock since the creation of the world, I am fully disposed to admit the truth of that position; but I should go much further, considering that many species, which we cannot now, by artificial means, prevail upon to intermix, have also descended from one original; and I doubt very much whether such a multiplication of distinct species may not also have taken place in the animal and insect tribes.…” (Herbert 1822, p. 16).
Unlike Cuvier, who viewed his four embranchements of animal life as fundamentally separate and unconnectable, Moritzi turns the inability to find morphological equivalence between the major groups of animals on its head and suggests that through a process of transformation, novel animal organs can appear over time. “From a nearly homogeneous mass of which the lower animals are composed, nature has formed, by specializing and gradually localizing, the composite bodies, so that the different organs appear only successively in the series of organisms.”
“Nothing can therefore be explained more naturally than the supposition of the species. The idea of groups which is founded in nature imperceptibly changes into an idea of species, and those who claim to have conceived the idea of the species a priori and as a truth innate to the human mind deluded themselves, for it was the idea of natural groups which guided them when they took on the task of aligning the conceptions of their minds with the nature of things” (1844, p. 28).
See Carozzi (1966) for a superb analysis of Agassiz’s catastrophist theories. A second, and equally radical, reading of the fossil record by Agassiz involved the assertion of four great ages of vertebrates (the reigns of fishes, reptiles, mammals and man), in which each “great epoch” ended as a consequence of a global glaciation that resulted in the complete and catastrophic extermination of life. For Agassiz, there could be no genealogical connections between species in successive epochs. Upon return to warming conditions (and diminution of glaciation), worldwide independent creation of new species would mark the onset of the next great epoch (Agassiz 1837, 1841).
See Friedman (2009) for a similar challenge that Darwin faced with an incomplete early record of flowering plants. Seventeen years later, Darwin still felt a keen need to deal with a yet incomplete fossil record. An entire chapter of Origin, “On the imperfection of the geological record,” was dedicated to this challenge. In the section “On the sudden appearance of groups of Allied Species in the lowest known fossiliferous strata,” Darwin wrote, “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged … as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection.” (1859, p. 302). Several pages later, he stated: “There is another and allied difficulty, which is much graver. I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group, suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. Most of the arguments which have convinced me that all the existing species of the same group have descended from one progenitor, apply with nearly equal force to the earliest known species. Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question of why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer” (1859, pp. 306–307).
These arguments strongly mirror the work of Poiret (1819–1820) and d’Omalius (1831, 1838). As Poiret noted: “Although it seems a little reckless, according to the most generally adopted opinion, to suggest that new species are formed in nature, it is very difficult to deny this assertion when we carefully observe what is happening every day in our gardens, where it is not uncommon to see varieties end up constantly reproducing the same by their seeds. Why wouldn’t the same thing happen in nature?” (1819–1820, vol. 2, p. 20). As d'Omalius wrote in the third edition of Éléments de Géologie: “Human interference, by augmenting, diminishing, or varying the nourishment of such beings, or by changing the temperature of the medium which they inhabit, has made single flowers double, has rendered fruit larger and more succulent, and has given to domestic animals such new and varied forms, that zoologists are obliged to group together, in the species canis, a collection of animals differing from each other to a greater extent than the fox does from the wolf. Changes of this sort occur without the interference of man, in consequence of changes of circumstances affecting living beings. The Spanish horses which have become wild in the burning pampas, or cold paramos, of South America, have produced two races, which are as different from each other, as the ass and the zebra.… Now, it is evident that all these causes of change must be much less operative than those brought about by geological means” (1838, p. 374; translation from Vyvyan 1845). See also De Bont (2007).
This notion was carried into Origin (1859, p. 16): “When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us, is, that they generally differ much more from each other, than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature. When we reflect on the vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment, I think we are driven to conclude that this greater variability is simply due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent-species have been exposed under nature.”
As Darwin wrote so eloquently in the conclusion to his 1842 essay (Darwin 1909, p. 51): “It accords with what we know of the law impressed on matter by the Creator, that the creation and extinction of forms, like the birth and death of individuals should be the effect of secondary [laws] means.” This passage was carried forward into the conclusion of Origin: “To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual” (1859, p. 488).
Moritzi expanded on this rhetorical flourish: “If it was the creator who acted directly, it would have been, according to our way of judging, more worthy of him to create different forms than to build ceaselessly on the same plan. We would be more drawn to admiration if we see animals in the form of crystal, walking without feet, eating without a mouth, seeing without eyes or trees which, in growing, take on the form of a house with all the comfort to be well accommodated. These are proper miracles to amaze! But there is none of that. There is not in the whole of nature a single being which, by a particular organization, departs from the general types and forms to itself a class apart. The great classes themselves offer passages from one to the other” (1842, p.31).
In the chapter on morphology, Darwin wrote similarly of the creator: “Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes…. On the ordinary view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is;—that it has so pleased the Creator to construct each animal and plant” (1859, p. 435).
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd, Of language, reason, and reflection proud, With brow erect, who scorns this earthy sod, And styles himself the image of his God; Arose from rudiments of form and sense, An embryon point, or microscopic ens!
For Whewell on classification, see Quinn (2017).
Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, and Asa Gray would also view the implications of an evolutionary world for purposes of classification with pragmatism; see below and Stevens (1997).
“[T]he activity of the creator has continued from the beginning up to our time to produce new forms of organized beings. It is a purely geological result and independent of the opinion one can have on the species and on the final cause of its existence.”
Darwin, in Origin, argued that “Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence” (1859, p. 483).
Indeed, these words and the larger philosophical implications of an evolved world on the meaning of suffering ultimately found their way into the final paragraph of Origin. “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows” (1859, p. 490).
For De Candolle, varieties were the result of members of a species being subjected to strongly differing environmental conditions (the influence of “external circumstances” such as light, temperature, humidity and soils)—see §. 128 in Théorie élementaire de la botanique.
“I know that the partisans of the system of the non-permanence of species, admit that these changes take place only slowly and gradually, and require, in order to be achieved, more centuries than we can appreciate. But if, on the one hand, one is forced to agree that some ambiguities on a certain number of plants, do not destroy the theory of the species; if, on the other hand, this theory agrees with all the facts well observed and observable for several centuries, should we not recognize that this theory carries with it a great character of probability; that we must study and describe the species, as constants, and join only to this first study, the research in depth of the causes that can vary the specific characters, the limits of these variations, and the means of recognizing them? This research is infinitely more worthy of occupying a naturalist, than the accumulation of ambiguous examples in favor of the non-permanence of species; an improbable theory, since it is contrary to the general mass of the best-known facts, and useless, since if it were true, we should, on penalty of knowing nothing, behave as if it were false, and study, as today, the most usual forms of beings. Let us remark that all those who have denied the permanence of species, once engaged on this road, have found themselves trained to support assertions which are obviously absurd; as, for example, that the forms of beings are the results of their habits; that the anteater has an elongated and viscous tongue, because he loves ants; or that the man has a nose, because he blows one’s nose, etc. Let us, therefore, defy this dangerous pyrrhonism, and first seek to appreciate exactly the possible causes of the variations of beings.” (De Candolle 1813, pp. 159-160; this passage remained unchanged in later editions).
From J.D. Hooker, [mid-July 1845,] Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 884,” https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-884.xml. Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 3.
In addition, Moritzi was Protestant and Solothurn was a deeply Catholic canton, with profound incompatibility between Protestants and Catholics at the time. Moritzi’s correspondence with Alphonse de Candolle alludes to a politicized process associated with his re-election to his teaching post in Solothurn (see Bloch 1906).
There are seventeen known letters from Moritzi held at the Conservatoire Botanique de Geneva and twelve in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. In the Library of the Canton Graubünden and the Archive of the Canton Graubünden (in Chur), there are a few manuscripts on floristic matters. Bloch (1906) printed brief excerpts from a few letters from Moritzi to others, but it is unclear whether these letters are extant in any archives.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Pamela K. Diggle and Charles S. Henry and two reviewers for valuable feedback on the manuscript and suggestions for its improvement; Patrick Bungener and Martin Callmander, Conservateurs at Conservatoire botanique Geneva, for assistance with archival holdings; Martin Spinnler, Librarian of the Library of the Botanical Institutes of the University of Zurich, for help locating correspondence of Moritzi; Reto Weiss and Sandra Nay of the Archive of the Canton Graubünden; and Ralph Manzanell, Professor at the Cantonal High School, Chur, for information about the monument of Alexander Moritzi on the Rosenhügel, Chur.
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Friedman, W.E., Endress, P.K. Alexander Moritzi, a Swiss Pre-Darwinian Evolutionist: Insights into the Creationist-Transmutationist Debates of the 1830s and 1840s. J Hist Biol 53, 549–585 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09619-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09619-0