Vol 25, no 3, October - The Linnean Society of London

NEWSLETTER AND PROCEEDINGS OF THE LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON 

VOLUME 25 • NUMBER 3 • OCTOBER 2009

THE LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON 

Registered Charity Number 220509 

Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BF 

Tel. (+44) (0)20 7434 4479; Fax: (+44) (0)20 7287 9364 

e-mail: info@linnean.org; internet: www.linnean.org 

President Secretaries Council 

Dr Vaughan Southgate BOTANICAL The Officers and 

Dr Sandra D Knapp 

Prof Pieter Baas 

Vice-Presidents 

Prof Richard Bateman 

Dr Mike Fay ZOOLOGICAL Dr Andy Brown 

Dr Sandra D Knapp Dr Malcolm Scoble Dr John David 

Dr Keith Maybury 

Dr Terry Langford 

Dr Malcolm Scoble EDITORIAL Prof Geoff Moore 

Dr John R Edmondson 

Dr Sylvia Phillips 

Treasurer 

Mr Terence Preston 

Professor Gren Ll Lucas OBE COLLECTIONS Dr Max Telford 

Mrs Susan Gove 

Dr Mark Watson 

Dr David Williams 

Executive Secretary Librarian Prof Patricia Willmer 

Dr Ruth Temple 

Mrs Lynda Brooks 

Conservator 

Financial Controller/Membership Assistant Librarian Ms Janet Ashdown 

Mr Priya Nithianandan 

Mr Ben Sherwood 

Special Publications 

Building and Office Manager Honorary Archivist and Education Manager 

Ms Victoria Smith Ms Gina Douglas Ms Leonie Berwick 

Communications Manager Office Assistant Conservation Assistant 

Ms Claire Inman Mrs Catherine Tanner Ms Lucy Gosnay 

THE LINNEAN 

Newsletter and Proceedings 

of the Linnean Society of London 

ISSN 0950-1096 

Edited by Brian G Gardiner 

Editorial .............................................................................................................. 1 

Society News ............................................................................................................ 1 

Library .............................................................................................................. 4 

Book Review ............................................................................................................ 9 

Charles Darwin, Live at the Linnean! (extra event) ............................................... 10 

In the footsteps of Charles Darwin on Tierra del Fuego ........................................ 11 

The Shadow of Perfection ...................................................................................... 27 

Darwin’s Lichens .................................................................................................... 36 

Obituaries ............................................................................................................ 52 

Minutes of the 221st Anniversary Meeting ............................................................ 59 

Taxonomy and Biodiversity Lectures ..................................................................... 67

THE LINNEAN 2009 VOLUME 25(3) 1 

Editorial 

This issue marks the 150 th anniversary of the publication of the On the Origin of 

Species (24 th November) and contains three articles, two of which were commissioned. 

The first article gives a graphic account of Darwin and his encounters with the 

hunter-gathering people of eastern Tierra del Fuego. Apparently he could not believe 

that such wretched savages belonged to the human race! Later he noted that their 

language was inarticulate “according to our notions” and describes their wigwams as 

being the size of a haycock, thatched on one side and used only for a few days since 

they were nomadic hunter-gatherers, compelled to wander from spot to spot. The 

article concludes with a short note on the differences between Bates’ and Darwin’s 

approach to the human dimensions of their experiences in South America. 

The article on Darwin’s lichens recounts how they came to light and then sets 

them in their correct historical and geographical perspective (Acharius – Linnaeus’ 

last student recorded 906 species in 43 years). Darwin, with his collection of lichens, 

proved to be the catalyst of Southern Hemisphere Lichenology, not only collecting 

from Tierra del Fuego but also from the rain forests of Chiloé and the Chonos 

archipelago. Darwin’s lichens were sent to Kew where Hooker made use of them in 

his Flora Antarctica. Finally, Darwin also collected three new lichen species on the 

Galapagos. 

The third article points out that the theory of evolution by Natural Selection is the 

keystone of modern life sciences. It later traces the impact Darwin had on the fixity of 

species, an idea which goes back to Linnaeus himself who used it in his search for a 

‘Natual Classification’. It then deals with the problem of perfection in living organisms 

and the implication of stasis. From there it confronts the struggle for existence and the 

relationship between genotype and phenotype, not terms used by Darwin although he 

was well aware of the importance Natural Selection had for/on ontogeny. The article 

concludes with Paley’s watch and earthworm activity. 

This issue also contains the Minutes of the Anniversary Meeting 2009 plus, as 

usual, news from the Executive Secretary and the Library. In addition there are three 

obituaries of Fellows who have died recently and a review of the English translation 

of Musa Cliffortiana – Clifford’s Banana plant. I have to remind you that this is the 

last issue of The Linnean for this year. Next year (and thereafter) there will be only 

two issues – in March and September – but Pulse will be circulated in the gaps. 

BRIAN GARDINER 

Editor 

Society News 

By the time this issue of The Linnean is published, we will be almost at the end of 

Darwin 200! We will, however, still have one of the most significant dates within the 

year to look forward to. November 24 th 2009 marks the 150 th anniversary of the 

publication of On the Origin of Species, a volume that challenged and changed many 

people’s thinking and continues to create debate today!

2 

THE LINNEAN 2009 VOLUME 25(3) 

I’m writing this, having just turned over the calendar; it’s September 1 st – a year to 

the day since I took up the role of Executive Secretary. This too has been a time of 

challenge and change (and much enjoyment!), and this provides a further opportunity 

to say thank you for everyone’s support and forbearance in this first year! The last 

twelve months have been a time of personal change – including a house move, and a 

wedding! – and the Society’s meetings programme, particularly over the last 6 months 

has focused on the many challenges and changes affecting science, scientists and us all. 

In April, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor John Beddington 

gave the Annual Biodiversity Policy Lecture, “Biodiversity in a Changing World” 

highlighting the importance of understanding biodiversity in developing policies to 

meet the many global challenges we face. Our joint meeting with the World Land 

Trust “The Great Ape Debate” focused on how to best ensure the survival of Orangutans 

– rehabilitation and reintroduction or preservation of natural habitat? This meeting 

was “live-streamed” from our website enabling many who could not attend in London 

to view the proceedings. 

Our meetings in May continued the theme of change and challenge as Professor 

Janet Browne reflected on “Two Hundred Years of Evolution” as part of the Burlington 

House Lecture Series (see p68 for information about the next lecture), and in a meeting 

organised by Dr Sandra Knapp, “The Future of Plant Genetic Resources”, in honour 

of Professor Jack Hawkes, PPLS, a programme of international speakers reflected on 

the critical importance of genetic resources to a growing human population. In June, 

the Earl of Selborne reviewed the House of Lords Reports on Systematics and 

Taxonomy produced over the last decade, highlighting the continuing challenges facing 

The President and his wife with the bride and (left) Linnaea 

borealis painted on her wedding dress.


these fields, and challenging the taxonomic and systematic communities to work for 

positive change. Patricia Wiltshire reflected on the significant role of Forensic Ecology 

in contributing to criminal investigation and in a two-day meeting with the Royal 

Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, organised by Professor David Molyneux 

and Dr Vaughan Southgate, speakers reflected on the issues facing the future 

development of policies and their relevance in the area of biodiversity, infection and 

global health. 

It was a great delight to see so many assembled on July 3 rd to celebrate the life of 

John Marsden, who brought such significant and dynamic change to the Linnean 

Society! Our Conversazione on July 9 th was an opportunity to celebrate further 

innovation within the Society with the launch of the new Virtual Tour; this can be 

downloaded from the homepage of the Society’s website. 

The Virtual Tour, the digitisation of the Linnean Collections and our meetings 

programme all serve to increase the accessibility of the Society and to underline its 

important role as a Society steeped in tradition, but with a significant contribution to 

make to contemporary science, debate and discussion during these times of change 

and challenge. The Society’s Fellows constitute a very large body of experts within 

the broad field of Natural History which Council feels could have a very significant 

impact on future developments in the Biological world. Would you be prepared to 

share your expertise and encourage others to get involved? If so, please complete the 

Fellows Survey enclosed with this issue and help us to meet the challenges! 

RUTH TEMPLE 

Executive Secretary 

Call for Nominations 

for Medals and Awards 2010 

Nominations are now sought for the Society’s Medals and Prizes to be awarded in 

2010. These are the Linnean Medal for Botany, the Linnean Medal for Zoology, 

the Darwin-Wallace Medal, the Bicentenary Medal (to be awarded to a Botanist 

in 2010), the HH Bloomer Award (to be awarded to a Zoologist in 2010), the Irene 

Manton Prize and the Jill Smythies Award. 

If you would like to nominate an individual for either of the Linnean Medals, the 

Bicentenary Medal or the HH Bloomer Award, please forward their details and the 

reasons for their nomination (no more than 1 side of A4) with names and confirmation 

of the proposer and a seconder to the Executive Secretary by 31 st December 2009. 

The proposer and seconder must both be Fellows of the Linnean Society of London. 

(The proposer and seconder may submit electronic signatures/verification via e-mail 

to the Executive Secretary.) 

If you would like to nominate an individual for either the Irene Manton Prize or the 

Jill Smythies Award, please see the Society’s website for more detailed guidelines 

and/or nomination forms http://www.linnean.org/index.php?id=330.

4 


Library 

I am delighted to report that our bid to the Wellcome Trust, for funding to catalogue 

the correspondence of Sir James Edward Smith, was successful. As a consequence, a 

lot of our time and energy over the past few months has gone into planning for the 

start of the project. The advertisement has gone out for an Archivist to work here parttime 

for nine months and we hope to have the successful candidate in post by mid- to 

late October. Cataloguing of the letters will be the first stage in making this material 

much more accessible and links will be created from the catalogue records to other 

resources, such as the biographical and biological content already available in databases 

created for the Linnaean and Smithian biological collections. Once the cataloguing is 

completed, we shall be looking for funding for the conservation and eventual digitisation 

of the letters. 

The digitisation of the Linnaean insect collection has now been completed and the 

last of the specimens were returned to the Society in July. It is hoped that the images 

will go up online later this year after they have been checked and all the relevant data 

has been attached. 

During the summer, we became concerned about changes in the appearance of the 

Collier portrait of Charles Darwin, which hangs in the Meeting Room. The canvas 

seemed to have developed some gentle undulations. We consulted a picture conservator 

who recommended that the canvas needed re-lining and that the work should be carried 

out without too much delay. We agonised over losing Darwin during his anniversary 

year, but it was decided that the work could not wait. The portrait has had to be 

removed to the conservator’s studio and some of you will have seen the forlorn empty 

frame hanging in the Meeting Room. We expect that the work will be completed and 

Darwin will be back in his rightful place by mid-October. 

Several other items from the Society’s collections have also been on the move 

recently. The Lincecum letter that was on loan to the Darwin exhibition at the Natural 

History Museum was safely returned to us in April when the exhibition closed. The 

focus then switched to items associated with Robert Brown, President of the Society 

from 1849-1853. Professor Cutler transported Robert Brown’s microscope to Kew in 

order to re-create the experiment which resulted in the discovery of Brownean 

Movement. The experiment was filmed and formed part of the programme The Cell 

which was broadcast in August. The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge 

has borrowed Brown’s seal for the exhibition Darwin the Geologist which opened at 

the beginning of July. 

Requests for tours of the Society’s rooms and collections are on the increase. We 

have given tours to the usual summer school groups from Michigan, Harvard, Georgia 

and Maryland and we have also hosted visits from the Anglo-Swedish Group, the 

Stanmore Strollers, Kensington and Chelsea National Trust Group, the London 

Committee of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Friends of Sydney Botanic Gardens, the 

British Association of Paper Historians and library staff from the Royal Society, the 

London Library and Kings College Special Collections. 

Members of the Library staff have recently attended two excellent seminars at the 

Royal Society; one examining the interpretation of museum exhibits and displays and


the other entitled The changing face of learned and professional societies’ libraries. 

Our volunteers continue to do sterling work for us. The cataloguing backlog has 

been dealt with, thanks to Lucy and Pia. Lucy has now joined Janet to work on cleaning 

the Smith herbarium specimens and Pia is concentrating on adding details of early 

20 th century Fellows to the database. John Sellick has completed the transcribing of 

the large Swainson and MacLeay correspondence collections and has now started 

work on some smaller collections. Alan Brafield is about to start on sorting and listing 

a collection of material on John Hooper and his bat-ringing research. 

LYNDA BROOKS 

Librarian 

Donations March - August 2009 

Dr José Antonio Amaya. Amaya, J.A. Mutis, apóstol de Linneo: historia de la botánica 

en el virrenato de la Nueva Granada, 1760-1783. 2 vols. Bogotà: Instituto Colombiano 

de Antropologia e Historia, 2005. ISBN 9588181321. 

Janet Ashdown. Lyle, T. and Wheeler, S. The wildlife of the Mudchute. 35p. London: 

The Mudchute Association, 1983. 

David Atty. Atty, D.B. Coleoptera of Gloucestershire. 136p. Cheltenham: The author, 

1983. 

Dr Halina Bednarek-Ochyra. Bednarek-Ochyra, H. [et al]. The liverwort flora of 

Antarctica. 236p. Krakow: Polish Academy of Sciencs, Institute of Botany, 2000. 

ISBN8385444742. 

Professor R.J. Berry. Berry, R.J. and Noble, T.A. [eds]. Darwin, Creation and the 

Fall. 208p. Nottingham: Apollos, 2009. ISBN 9781844743810. 

Dr Heather A. Binney. Battarbee, R.W. and Binney, H.A. [eds]. Natural climate 

variability and global warming: a holocene perspective. 276p. Chichester: Wiley- 

Blackwell, 2008. ISBN 9781405159050. 

Anders Björck. Franklin, A. and Ullhagen, B. Isblommor. 106p. Växjö: Artea, 2008. 

ISBN 9789185527175. 

Botanical Society of the British Isles. Murphy, R.J. Fumitories of Britain and Ireland. 

121p. London: Botanical Society of the British Isles, 2009. BSBI handbook no.12. 

ISBN 9780901158406. 

Bristol Cultural Development Partnership. Padel, R. A voyage round Charles 

Darwin. 40p. Bristol: Bristol Cultural Development Partnership, 2008. 

Kelly, A. and Kelly, M. [eds]. Darwin: for the love of science. 250p. Bristol: Bristol 

Cultural Development Partnership, 2009. ISBN 9780955074226. 

Jeff D. Bull. Attenborough, D. The first Eden: the mediterranean world and man. 

240p. London: Collins/BBC Books, 1987. ISBN 0002198271. 

Margaret Campbell. Campbell, M. The tree of life. 229p. Hobart: [s.n.], 2009. ISBN 

1876261528. 

Eric J. Clement. Poland, J. and Clement, E.J. The vegetative key to the British flora: 

a new approach to naming British vascular plants based on vegetative characteristics. 

526p. Southampton: John Poland, 2009. ISBN 9780956014405.

6 


Kevin Collins, Cathy Collins and Alex George. Collins, Kevin, Collins Kathy and 

George, Alex. Banksias. 376p. Melbourne: Bloomings Books, 2008. ISBN 

9781876473686. 

Joan Cramphorn. Cramphorn, J. A guide to the classification and distribution of 

living fishes frequenting fresh and brackish waters. 17p. London: The author, 2008. 

Hui, Tam Hoek. The Borneo suckers: revision of the Torrent Loaches of Borneo 

(Balitoridae, Gastromyzon, Neogastromyzon). 245p. Kota Kinabalu: Natural History 

Publications (Borneo), 2006. ISBN 9838121053. 

Professor Giovanni Cristofolini. Cristofolini, G. and Managlia, A. Il giardino di 

Darwin: l’evoluzione delle piante = Darwin’s garden: the evolution of plants. 239p. 

Torino: Umberto Allemandi & Co., 2009. ISBN 9788842217411. 

Helga Crouch. Crouch, H. Drawn to nature. 38p. [London: Jonathan Cooper, Park 

Walk Gallery], 2008. 

David Donaldson. Donaldson, D. “A really good gardener”: Thomas Corbett, head 

gardener at Pencarrow (1837-1848). 30p. [s.l: s.n, s.d]. Pencarrow occasional paper 

no.4. 

Professor Desmond Donovan. Bizikov, V.A. The shell in vampyropoda (cephalopoda): 

morphology, functional role and evolution. 88p. Moscow: Ruthenica, 2004. ISBN 

5873171823. 

Ragg, Lonsdale. Some of my tree friends. 31p. London: De La More Press, [s.d.]. 

Gina Douglas. Du Chatenet, G. Faune et flore de Martinique. 64 p. Paris : Editions 

Gallimard, 1998. ISBN 2070514668. 

Pouillot, G. Apiculture en Loiret. 168p. Gien: Le Cercle de Cartophiles du Loiret, 

2006. ISBN 2951761732. 

Seth-Smith, D. Adventures with the zoo man. 224p. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons 

Ltd., 1937. 

Dr John Edmondson. Dann, P. One for the pot: a small book about tea. [53]p. London: 

Elm Tree Books, 1985. ISBN 0241116910. 

Dr Brent Elliott. Stove, D.C. Darwinian fairytales: selfish genes, errors of heredity, 

and other fables of evolution. 345p. New York: Encounter Books, 2007. ISBN 

1594031401. 

Joel T. Fry. Dion, M. Travels of William Bartram reconsidered. 111p. Philadelphia, 

PA: Bartram’s Garden, 2008. ISBN 9780615257488. 

Jeanette Fryer. Fryer, J. and Hylmö, B. Cotoneasters: a comprehensive guide to 

shrubs for flowers, fruit and foliage. 344p. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2009. ISBN 

9780881929270. 

Professor Brian Gardiner. De Rijke, V. Duck. 191p. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. 

ISBN 9781861893505. 

Dr A.C. Hamilton. Hamilton, A.[ed.]. Medicinal plants in conservation and 

development: case studies and lessons learnt. 84p. Salisbury: Plantlife International, 

2008. ISBN 9781904749158. 

Hamilton, A. and Hamilton, P. Plant resource conservation.[In Chinese.] 312p. 2008. 

ISBN 9787802098763.


Dr Melissa Hardie. Dare, D. and Hardie, M. A passion for nature: 19 th century 

naturalism in the circle of Charles Alexander Johns. 275p. Penzance: Patten Press 

and Jamieson Library, 2008. ISBN 9781872229584. 

Dr S.M. Haslam. Haslam, S.M. The reed: Phragmites australis (CAV.) Trin. ex Steud. 

28p. Norwich: British Reed Growers Association, 2009. 

Haslam, S.M. The riverscape: and the river. 404p. Cambridge: C.U.P., 2008. ISBN 

9780521839785. 

J.D.M.H. Henderson. Gould, J.L. and Gould, C.G. [eds]. Life at the edge. 162p. New 

York: W.H. Freeman, 1989. ISBN 0716720116. 

Dr J.M.I. Klaver. Klaver, J.M.I. European scientific expeditions to the Arab world, 

1761-1881. 255p. Oxford: OUP, 2009. ISBN 9780199568895. 

Dr Sandra Knapp. McNulty, E. Missouri Botanical Garden: green for 150 years, 

1859-2009. 214p. St Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden, 2009. ISBN 9780615249667. 

Professor Dr H.W. Lack. Lack, H.W. Franz Bauer: the painted record of nature. 

130p. Wien: Verlag des Naturhistorischen Museums, 2008. ISBN 9783902421302. 

Lack, H.W. Alexander von Humboldt and the botanical exploration of the Americas. 

278p. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2009. ISBN 9783791341422. 

Dr Hugh Loxdale Thompson, D’Arcy W. A bibliography of Protozoa, sponges , 

coelenterata and worms including also the polyzoa, brachiopoda and tunicata for the 

years 1861-1883. 284p. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885. 

Professor Gren Lucas. Lindley, J. The vegetable kingdom ... 3rd ed. 908p. London: 

Bradbury & Evans, 1853. 

Loudon, J.C. An encyclopedia of plants … 1159p. London: Longman, Rees, Orme 

Brown & Green, 1829. 

Iain McCalman. McCalman, I. and Erskine, N. [eds]. In the wake of the Beagle: 

science in the southern oceans from the age of Darwin. 192p. Sydney: University of 

New South Wales Press, 2009. ISBN 9781921410949. 

James McCarthy. McCarthy, J. Monkey puzzle man : Archibald Menzies, plant hunter. 

223p. Dunbeath: Whittles Publishing, 2008. ISBN 9781904445616. 

Michael McCarthy. McCarthy, M. Say goodbye to the cuckoo. 243p. London: John 

Murray, 2009. ISBN 9781848540639. 

James MacEwan. Amory, Michael Heathcoat. The oaks of Chevithorne Barton. 219p. 

London : Adelphi Publishers, 2009. ISBN 9780956238702. 

Professor Conley McMullen. McMullen, C. Flowering plants of the Galápagos. 

370p. Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1999. ISBN 9780801486210. 

Richard Milner. Milner, R. Darwin’s universe: evolution from A-Z. 488p. Berkeley, 

Calif.: University of California Press, 2009. ISBN 9780520243767. 

Dr Masahiko Miyata. Natural History Museum and Institute, Chiba. Carl von Linné 

as the root of natural history. 297p. Tokyo: Bun-ichi Sogo Shuppan Co. Ltd., 2008. 

ISBN 9784829901298. 

Dr Staffan Müller-Wille. Müller-Wille, S. and Rheinberger, H.-J. [eds]. Heredity 

produced: at the crossroads of biology, politics and culture, 1500-1870. 496p.

8 


Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. ISBN 9780262134767. 

Dr E.C. Nelson. Drake, J. Wood & Ingram: a Huntingdonshire nursery, 1742-1950. 

260p. Huntingdon: Cambridgeshire Gardens Trust, 2008. ISBN 9780953854219. 

Green, P. Flora of County Waterford. 401p. Dublin: National Botanic Gardens of 

Ireland, 2008. ISBN 978075776078. 

Miskerry, C. [ed.]. Chatham Islands: heritage and conservation. 205p. Christchurch, 

NZ: University of Canterbury, 2008. ISBN 9781877257780. 

Dr Henry Noltie. Noltie, H.J. Raffles’ ark redrawn: natural history drawings from 

the collection of Sir Thomas Raffles. 180p. London: The British Library and RBG 

Edinburgh, 2009. ISBN 9780712350846. 

Dr Ryszard Ochyra. Bednarek-Ochyra, H. A taxonomic monograph of the moss genus 

Codriophorous P. Beauv. (Grimmiaceae). 276p. Krakov: Polish Academy of Sciences, 

Institute of Botany, 2006. ISBN 8389648407. 

Alexandra Papdakis. Stuppy, W. and Kessler, R. Fruit: edible, inedible, incredible. 

264p. London: Papadakis, 2008. ISBN 9781901092745. 

D.A. Pearman. Pearman, D.A. [et al]. The flora of Rum: an Atlantic island reserve. 

480p. Cornwall: [The authors], 2008. ISBN 9780953811137. 

Dr K. Sankara Rao. Sankara Rao, K. Flowering plants of Indian Institute of Science: 

a field guide. 2 vols. Bangalore: Indian Institute of Science, 2009. 

Dr Elaine Robson. 50 years of zoological research: reflection and insights: 50 th 

anniversary conference of the Zoological Society of Southern Africa. 94p. [s.l.]: 

Zoological Society of Southern Africa, 2009. 

Dr Frank Ryan. Ryan, F. Virolution. 390p. London: Collins, 2009. ISBN 

9780007315123. 

Wim Snoeijer. Snoeijer, W. Clematis cultivar group classification with identifying 

key and diagrams. 204p. [Gouda: The author], 2008. 

Judith M. Taylor. Taylor, J.M. The global migrations of plants: how the world got 

into your garden. 312p. St Louis, Mo.: Missouri Botanical Garden, 2009. ISBN 

9781930723696. 

Dr Maximilian J. Telford and Dr D.T.J. Littlewood. Telford, M.J. and Littlewood, 

D.T.J. [eds]. Animal evolution: genomes, fossils, and trees. 245p. Oxford: OUP, 2009. 

ISBN 9780199549429. 

Professor Nancy Turner and Professor Patrick von Aderkas. Turner, N.J. and Von 

Aderkas, P. The North American guide to common poisonous plants and mushooms. 

375p. Portland, OR: Tomber Press, 2009. ISBN 9780881929294. 

Madeleine von Essen. Von Essen, M. Bogstad : park og hager til nytte og behag 

256p. Oslo: H. Aschehoug & Co., 2009. ISBN 9788203236204. 

Colin Watkins. Watkins, C., Kolehmainen, J. and Schulman, L. The wild African 

violet Saintpaulia (Gesneriaceae): an interim report. 52p. Cambridge: Worldstage, 

2002. ISBN 0954408101. 

Watkins, C. [et al]. A walking and wildlife guide to the Uluguru Nature Reserve. 

200p. Cambridge: Banson, 2009. ISBN 9987911838.


David Alexander Whyte Henderson. Whyte Henderson, D.A. Alexander Whyte FLS 

FZS, botanist, naturalist, zoologist: a study of his life and travels in Ceylon and Africa. 

2 vols. Gloucestershire: [The author], 2009. 

Dr Anne Wilkinson. Wilkinson, A. The passion for pelargoniums: how they found 

their place in the garden. 302p. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2007. ISBN 9780750944281. 

Wilkinson, A. The Victorian gardener: the growth of gardening and the floral world. 

236p. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2006. ISBN 075094043. 

Book Review 

Musa Cliffortiana – Clifford´s banana plant. Carl Linnaeus, 1736. Translated into 

English by Stephen Freer with an introduction by Staffan Müller-Wille, 264 pp. illus., 

2007. Regnum Vegetabile. 148 ISSN 0080-0694. Gantner Verlag, Liechtenstein. 

Distributed by Koeltz Scientific Books, Koenigstein Germany. ISBN 978-3-906166- 

63-6. Price 80 EUR (hardback). 

The precious original copy of Musa Cliffortiana in the library of the Leiden branch 

of the National Herbarium of the Netherlands (better known perhaps as the 

Rijksherbarium) is still uncut: only the large hand-coloured plate by Hoffman of a 

large developing infructescence can be unfolded from its hiding place. Does this lack 

of interest by Dutch botanists in Linnaeus’ first ever botanical monograph, written in 

Holland, reflect on its limited scientific value as insinuated by an English contemporary, 

Thomas Knowlton, cited in Wilfred Blunt’s biography? Or is it because everything 

written by Linnaeus before 1753 is irrelevant to practicing botanical nomenclaturists, 

who are even on record as referring to all Linnaeus’ publications before Species 

Plantarum (1753) as pre-Linnaean? Whatever the explanation, Stephen Freer’s 

translation and Staffan Müller-Wille’s extensive and in-depth introduction are now 

available to show what philistines we have been in Holland by not studying this 

masterpiece more closely. 

The story of Clifford’s banana has been told numerous times: during his visit to 

Holland (1735-1738) Linnaeus, enjoying the patronage of the rich banker and East 

India Company director, George Clifford, on his estate, the Hartenkamp near Haarlem, 

not only catalogued part of Clifford’s botanical collections and library to be published 

in Hortus Cliffortianus (1738) but it would remain his finest book, thanks to the 

beautiful illustrations by Ehret and Wandelaar. Together with Clifford’s gardener 

Dietrich Nietzel he also succeeded in inducing banana plants to flower and set fruit, 

and in doing so, attracted attention from the Dutch intelligentia. The 45 pp. monograph 

Musa Cliffortiana, published by Linnaeus four weeks after the onset of the first 

flowering of Clifford’s banana, far from just being a coffee table book in honour of 

George Clifford (it must also have served that purpose rather well), appears to epitomize 

all Linnaeus stood for in terms of scientific methodology, botanical insights and 

networking skills. Following his own prescription for describing any natural subject, 

as published in his one folio page Methodus (1736), Linnaeus comprehensively deals 

with the names, theoretical matters, the genus, the species, its attributes, its uses, and

10 


literary matters associated with the banana plant. The English translation by itself 

makes for good reading. Especially the later handwritten notes by Linnaeus in his 

personal copy, are enlightening about his progressing knowledge and insights into the 

systematic position, reproductive biology, and traditional knowledge of Musa, including 

the reference to Syrian and Egyptian Christians who called the banana the pome of 

Paradise, because its phallic shape must have aroused Eve to unbridled lust by its 

appearance. Stephen Freer aptly comments in a footnote “Again, a remark highly 

revealing of Linneaus’ fixation with sex”. As Müller-Wille convincingly demonstrates, 

Musa Cliffortiana foreshadows Linnaeus’ later masterpieces such as Classes 

Plantarum, Fundamenta Botanica, Species Plantarum and the later editions of Systema 

Naturae and can be seen as a key to understanding Linnaeus’ scientific agenda. I 

found the introduction on Linnaeus’ early career, and the links between botany, 

patronage and global trade also very insightful and erudite. The translator and the 

introductory author have done us a great service by unlocking this treasure box of 

Linnaeus’ heritage for a wide audience. No Fellow of the Linnean Society or Member 

of the International Association of Plant Taxonomists (who made this publication 

possible and enjoy a discount price of 64 EUR) should miss reading it. 

PIETER BAAS FLS 

LEIDEN 

Charles Darwin, Live at the Linnean! 

A Lecture and Performance by 

Richard Milner FLS 

for the launch of his book 

“Darwin’s Universe” 

followed by a wine reception 

10th November 2009, 6.00pm 

To register please e-mail events@linnean.org 

Join anthropologist and historian Richard Milner for a multimedia 

roundup of his favourite stories in the history of science, taken from 

his new authoritative and entertaining book Darwin’s Universe: 

Evolution from A to Z, published by University of Califormia Press. 

Written and performed by The New York Times’ favourite “singing 

Darwinian scholar”, Milner’s entertaining and scientifically rich 

lyrics span musical styles from Gilbert and Sullivan to Tom Leher 

and the blues. 

Copies of the book will be available for signing after the lecture.


In the Footsteps of Charles Darwin 

on Tierra Del Fuego 

Tim Cloudsley 

CRA 17 No. 68-17, La Victoria, Bucaramanga, Colombia 

timcloudsley@yahoo.co.uk 

“While entering (the Bay of Good Success) we were saluted in a manner becoming the 

inhabitants of this savage land. A group of Fuegians partly concealed by the entangled 

forest, were perched on a wild point overhanging the sea; and as we passed by, they 

sprang up, and waving their tattered cloaks sent forth a loud and sonorous shout. The 

savages followed the ship, and just before dark we saw their fire, and again heard their 

wild cry.” 

Charles Darwin, Voyage Of The Beagle. 

This is how Darwin described his first encounter with the Haush, or Selk’nam, a 

hunter-gathering people of eastern Tierra del Fuego, on December 17th 1832, in his 

Journal Of Researches Into The Geology And Natural History Of The Various Countries 

Visited By H.M.S. Beagle, Under The Command Of Captain Fitzroy, R.N. From 1832 

To 1836, the book which subsequently became known as Voyage Of The Beagle. 

David Wilson, in his book Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present, 

writes thus of Darwin‘s account of meeting Fuegian peoples: 

“..........upon encountering the (Fuegian) people, this nineteenth-century European 

gentleman could scarcely believe that such ‘wretched savages’ belonged to the human 

race. Nevertheless, the scientist in him was able to rise above narrower nineteenthcentury 

English prejudices, permitting him to see that these people, so different from 

any indigenous peoples to the north (i.e. in the Andes and Brazil), must have come down 

from the north at some remote time in the past to adapt, and thus endure, in the Fuegian 

climate.” 

Of course, one must understand Darwin’s observations in the light of his social 

and historical context: as a member of the English upper classes of the 1830s, but also 

as a ‘member’ of the fraternity of European scientist-travellers of that period who 

visited and reported on their observations in South America. Nevertheless, his 

perceptions are striking, partly because of the precise and exact prose he used in his 

accounts of the native peoples he met, which is quite as limpid and superb as are his 

geological and biological descriptions. Darwin‘s attitudes can surprise today’s readers 

perhaps, because it was not inevitable that a European gentleman-scientist of his period 

should think in his way. Humboldt for example, in his writings about his experiences 

in Colombia and Venezuela some thirty or so years earlier, stressed a universalistic 

humanism which united peoples of the Old and New Worlds; and although convinced 

of the cultural inferiority of South American ‘natives’ in certain respects in comparison 

with Europeans, he adopted a different tone from Darwin, and constantly affirmed his 

belief that slavery was the greatest evil in the world. He put his Kantian ethics where 

his mouth was, so to speak. And H.W. Bates, Darwin’s contemporary and fellow 

countryman, in his book The Naturalist On The River Amazons, speaks of Amazonian

12 


Indians and what would today be called caboclos in much more sympathic and 

respectful terms, noting particularly how beautiful the women of the region were! 

(See the NOTE at the end of this essay.) 

Let us follow Darwin’s account further: 

“In the morning, the Captain sent a party to communicate with the Fuegians. When we 

came within hail, one of the four natives who were present advanced to receive us, and 

began to shout most vehemently, wishing to direct us where to land. When we were on 

shore the party looked rather alarmed, but continued talking and making gestures with 

great rapidity. It was without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I had 

ever beheld. I could not have believed how wide was the difference, between savage 

and civilized man. It is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, in as much 

as in man there is a greater power of improvement.” 

The extraordinary thing about this passage is not really the snobbery of comparing 

a ‘savage’ with a wild animal, in comparison with a ‘civilized’ man who is compared 

with a domesticated animal. It is rather that, as Darwin would later show in On the 

Origin of Species, in the course of man’s domestication of animals and plants from 

wild precursors, their original ‘natures’ are lost, and replaced by artificial races that 

can no longer survive in nature. The latter owe their existence entirely to the species 

Homo sapiens sapiens; they are wholly dependent upon man, having been manipulated 

through breeding to yield what man wants, and to be tame, obedient, and subservient 

to man. In a sense of course, they are no more nor less ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ than wild 

species, and no less ‘free’ or ‘unfree’. The only relevant criterion within the theory of 

evolution is survival. Nevertheless, it is strange that this man, Charles Darwin, should 

prefer being similar to a domesticated animal than to a ‘wild’, ‘authentic’, ‘natural’ 

one, especially when it is he who will unlock the great secret of biology, the theory of 

evolution, as driven by ‘natural selection’. That human ‘improvement’ within 

‘civilization’ should seem analogous to being shaped into an obsequious and dependent 

condition by others purely for their exploitative convenience, might in fact be a very 

apt insight into the condition of the vast majority of people in civilizations based on 

social classes and hierarchical domination; yet for the fearless, rebellious scientist 

who was to enter with his mind into the wildest truths of organic nature, in an era still 

largely dominated by religious dogmas and unquestioned traditions, it cannot but appear 

amazing. 

Darwin continues: 

“The chief spokesman was old, and appeared to be the head of the family; the three 

others were powerful young men, about 6 feet high. The women and children had been 

sent away. These Fuegians are a very different race from the stunted miserable wretches 

further to the westward, They are much superior in person, and seem closely allied to 

the famous Patagonians of the Strait of Magellan. Their only garment consists of a 

mantle made of guanaco skin, with the wool outside; this they wear just thrown over 

their shoulders, as often leaving their persons exposed as covered. Their skin is of a 

dirty coppery red colour.” 

Darwin‘s observations become contradictory here: though these people are 

according to him ‘superior’ to the ‘stunted miserable wretches further to the westward’ 

(in fact the first group must have been Haush or Selk’nam, the second Yámana). They


(the Haush) are described as being of a ‘dirty’ colour. (No doubt Darwin thought the 

Yámana were still dirtier.) Yet at the same time Darwin creates a picture of dignified 

people, ‘powerful’, and ‘six feet high’. These people were adapted to a tough climate 

and geography, and made effective use of the only large mammal available, the guanaco, 

from which they obtained their food and their clothing. Yet the latter is described 

disdainfully by Darwin, as representing ‘their only garment’. 

“The old man had a fillet of white feathers tied round his head, which partly confined his 

black, coarse, and entangled hair. His face was crossed by two broad transverse bars; 

one painted bright red from ear to ear, and included the upper lip; the other, white like 

chalk, extended parallel and above the first, so that even his eyelids were thus coloured. 

Some of the other men were ornamented by streaks of black powder, made of charcoal. 

The party altogether closely resembled the devils which come on stage in such plays as 

Der Freischutz.” 

Strangely paradoxical is this passage. The old man is wonderfully depicted, though 

to use the word ‘coarse’ to describe his hair rather than perhaps ‘thick’ seems a little 

contemptuous. But the picture of his and the other Haush men’s painted faces is brilliant, 

and would suggest that Darwin, like any intelligent observer, realizes how difficult it 

must be to enhance facial features with access only to substances available in the 

immediate environment, and how strongly this fact testifies to a powerful aesthetic 

and imaginative urge, no less strong than that witnessed in ‘Civilization’. With respect 

to these men being compared with the devils in Der Freischutz, one wonders whether 

for Darwin this is a compliment or a condemnation! For are not these ‘devils’ the 

product of a great Romantic European imagination? To find their archetypes at the 

other end of the earth might have been as exciting to Darwin as his discovery that 

Lyell’s theories of geology, derived from the latter’s studies in Europe, applied 

admirably to the mountain ranges of South America. 

“Their very attitudes were abject, and the expression of their countenances distrustful, 

surprised, and startled. After we had presented them with some scarlet cloth, which they 

immediately tied around their necks, they became good friends. This was shown by the 

old man patting our breasts, and making a chuckling kind of noise, as people do when 

feeding chickens. I walked with the old man, and this demonstration of friendship was 

repeated several times; it was concluded by three hard slaps, which were given me on 

the breast and back at the same time. He then bared his bosom for me to return the 

compliment, which being done, he seemed highly pleased. The language of these people, 

according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate. Captain Cook has 

compared it to a man clearing his throat, but certainly no European ever cleared his 

throat with so many hoarse, gutteral, and clicking sounds.” 

These people, faced with the unexpected appearance of a shipful of Europeans on 

their land, were friendly, communicative, and eager to display and share their customs 

with Darwin and his colleagues. Certainly, they might be ‘surprised’, ‘startled’, and 

indeed ‘distrustful’, unsurprisingly. Yet they were courageous and welcoming enough 

to ‘advance’ and ‘receive’ the strangers. One wonders how Darwin and the crew of the 

Beagle would have reacted if they had been walking one day in the hills on the coast 

of North Devon, when a shipload of men from Tierra del Fuego suddenly arrived from 

the sea and disembarked before their eyes. Darwin`s description of ‘their very attitudes’ 

as ‘abject’ seems indeed an unsympathetic and unimaginative one.

14 


But it is at the point where Darwin describes their language as ‘inarticulate’ that 

he displays pure bigotry, even though he qualifies his words with the phrase ‘according 

to our notions’. ‘No European ever cleared his throat with so many hoarse, gutteral, 

and clicking sounds.’ Now would the man who discovered the theory of evolution 

compare the wings of one species of finch on the Galapagos Islands with another in 

the way he here compares a Fuegian language with a European one? He would surely 

not compare the morphological adaptations of two different finch species in a way 

that was derogatory to one and praising of the other, inasmuch as they differed. He 

would not take one as a desirable norm, the other as deficient in some way. 

“They are excellent mimics: as often as we coughed or yawned, or made any odd motion, 

they immediately imitated us. Some of our party began to squint and look awry; but one 

of the young Fuegians (whose whole face was painted black, excepting a white band 

across his eyes) succeeded in making far more hideous grimaces. They could repeat 

with perfect correctness, each word in any sentence we addressed them, and they 

remembered such words for some time. Yet we Europeans all know how difficult it is to 

distinguish apart the sounds in a foreign language. Which of us, for instance, could 

follow an American Indian through a sentence of more than three words? All savages 

appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry. I was told almost in 

the same words, of the same ludicrous habits among the Caffres: the Australians, likewise, 

have long been notorious for being able to imitate and describe the gait of any man, so 

that he may be recognized. How can this faculty be explained? Is it a consequence of the 

more practised habits of perception and keener senses, common to all men in a savage 

state, as compared to those long civilized?” 

Darwin here admires the ability of these Haush to mimic his and his companions’ 

gestures, sounds, and words. He admits they are better at this than ‘we Europeans’, 

and even commences, for a moment, to enter into a scientific speculation into the 

reasons for this. Yet he describes this facility as a ‘ludicrous habit’. 

“When a song was struck up by our party, I thought the Fuegians would have fallen 

down with astonishment. With equal surprise they viewed our dancing; but one of the 

young men, when asked, had no objection to a little waltzing. Little accustomed to 

Europeans as they appeared to be, yet they knew, and dreaded our fire-arms; nothing 

would tempt them to take a gun in their hands. They begged for knives, calling them by 

the Spanish word ‘cuchilla’. They explained also what they wanted, by acting as if they 

had a piece of blubber in their mouth, and then pretending to cut instead of tear it.” 

Here again, Darwin observes and apparently admires these Indians’ interest in, 

and openness to entering into his and his colleagues’ way of dancing. He observes 

their sensible reluctance to play around with fire-arms. And he shows how well they 

know which piece of European technology they want, the knife, and how they can 

communicate very well both their desire for this and the use to which they will put it. 

“It was interesting to watch the conduct of these people towards Jemmy Button (one of 

the Fuegians who had been taken, during the former voyage, to England. Captain Fitzroy 

has given a history of these people. Four were taken to England; one died there, and the 

three others – two men and one woman – were now brought back and settled in their 

own country): they immediately perceived the difference between him and the rest, and 

held much conversation between themselves on the subject. The old man addressed a 

long harangue to Jemmy, which it seems was to invite him to stay with them. But Jemmy 

understood very little of their language, and was, moreover, thoroughly ashamed of his


countrymen. When York Minster (another of these men) came on shore, they noticed 

him in the same way, and told him he ought to shave; yet he had not twenty dwarf hairs 

on his face, whilst we all wore our untrimmed beards. They examined the colour of his 

skin, and compared it with ours. One of our arms being bared, they expressed the liveliest 

surprise and admiration at its whiteness. We thought that they mistook two or three of 

the officers, who were rather shorter and fairer (though adorned with large beards), for 

the ladies of our party. The tallest amongst the Fuegians was evidently much pleased at 

his height being noticed. When placed back to back with the tallest of the boat’s crew, he 

tried his best to edge on higher ground, and to stand on tiptoe. He opened his mouth to 

show his teeth, and turned his face for a side view; and all this was done with such 

alacrity, that I dare say he thought himself the handsomest man in Tierra del Fuego. 

After the first feeling on our part of grave astonishment was over, nothing could be more 

ludicrous or interesting than the odd mixture of surprise and imitation which these savages 

every moment exhibited.” 

To us today, these observations must evoke some sadness, now that these peoples 

have been exterminated or wholly assimilated, by a combination of genocide and 

ethnocide. It is not clear with whom Darwin’s sympathies lie in this fatefully significant 

and tragic encounter between the minimally acculturated Haush and the three Yámana 

who had previously been wrenched from their land and culture and dragged over to 

England. Darwin had come to know these ‘Europeanized’ Yámana on the voyage 

from England, before reaching Tierra del Fuego where he met their ‘savage 

countrymen’. 

Darwin says that the old Haush man ‘addressed a long harangue to Jemmy (a 

Yámana) which it seems was to invite him to stay’, indicating that he disapproved of 

these Fuegians being taken away to become ‘Europeanized’. He and the other Haush 

tell York Minster that he ought to shave, rather than grow a beard like Englishmen. 

The Haush wonder whether, having been some time with the Englishmen in their 

country, York Minster’s skin has changed colour, to become like theirs. This passage 

of Darwin’s is full of most pertinent observations, though it is peppered with prejudices: 

the Haush men’s surprise is once again described as ‘ludicrous’, whilst their 

examination of an Englishman’s skin is assumed to express ‘admiration at its whiteness’. 

But perhaps the saddest remark of all that Darwin makes, and let us assume he is 

correct in his assessment, is that Jemmy was ‘thoroughly ashamed of his countrymen’. 

The observation is made in a ruthlessly cold, ‘objective’ manner, though Darwin seems 

unconscious of this. 

Let us emphasize again that Jemmy and York Minster were Yámana, whilst the 

Fuegians they met here with Darwin were Haush, or Selk’man. It is significant that 

Darwin considers the Yámana living in Tierra del Fuego to be more degraded than the 

Haush living there, although Jemmy Button, the captured Yámana that had been taken 

to England, he sees as loftier than the Haush. 

The account given by Darwin so far, has all been from his journal entry for 

December 17th 1832. Let us now move on to that of December 25 th , when he 

encountered some Yámana Indians further to the west of the island: 

“This part of Tierra del Fuego (called Kater’s Peak) may be considered as the extremity 

of the submerged chain of mountains already alluded to. The cove takes its name of 

‘Wigwam’ from some of the Fuegian habitations; but every bay in the neighbourhood

16 


might be so called with equal propriety. The inhabitants living chiefly upon shellfish, 

are obliged constantly to change their place of residence; but they return at intervals to 

the same spots, as is evident from the pile of old shells, which must often amount to 

some tons in weight. These heaps can be distinguished at a long distance by the green 

colour of certain plants, which invariably grow on them. Among these may be enumerated 

the wild celery and scurvy grass, two very serviceable plants, the use of which has not 

been discovered by the natives. 

“The Fuegian wigwam resembles, in size and dimensions, a haycock. It merely consists 

of a few broken branches stuck in the ground, and very imperfectly thatched on one side 

with a few tufts of grass and rushes. The whole cannot be so much as the work of an 

hour, and it is only used for a few days. At Goeree Roads I saw a place where one of 

these naked men had slept, which absolutely offered no more cover than the form of a 

hare. The man was evidently living by himself, and York Minster said he was ‘very bad 

man’, and that probably he had stolen something. On the west coast, however, the 

wigwams are rather better, for they are covered with seal-skins.” 

Darwin provides a good description here of the Yámana mode of life. It is strange 

though, that the ‘wigwam’ he observed is described as ‘merely consisting of a few 

broken branches’, and as ‘very imperfectly thatched’. No doubt these houses sufficed; 

they would have represented a bad adaptation to a hard environment if more labourtime 

than was necessary were expended on their construction. In a case like this, a 

direct comparison might reasonably and legitimately be made between adaptations to 

the environment developed by human beings on the one hand and by other animals on 

the other. 

These people were nomadic hunter-gatherers, spending ‘only a few days’ in any 

particular ‘wigwam’; if ‘on the west coast the wigwams are rather better, for they are 

covered with seal-skins’, presumably this is either because seals are more available 

on the west coast than at Kater’s Peak, or because the weather on the west coast is that 

much more inclement, making it worthwhile or necessary to undertake the effort of 

protecting homes with seal-skins. 

It is unreasonable perhaps to dispute the validity of Darwin’s observations of 

Yámana houses. Nevertheless, when one looks at the replicas of typical Yámana houses 

outside the Museo Del Fin Del Mundo in Ushuaia, or at old photographs of real ones, 

one can only say that they appear extremely well-built, sturdy, functional, and attractive. 

Just as the bows and arrows, harpoons, baskets and other utensils on display in the 

museums at Ushuaia are very beautifully made; exemplary instances of objects made 

both for use and in accordance with aesthetic principles, as William Morris believed 

is true of all authentic art and craft. 

The comment made by York Minster that Darwin records, indicates that the former’s 

English acculturation has turned him into something of a snob, as well as encouraging 

him apparently to accuse a man of a crime without evidence or proof. 

It is striking that amidst the close and accurate account that Darwin gives of the 

Yámana lifestyle, he describes their evidently effective solution to the challenges of 

their environment as obliging them ‘constantly to change their place of residence’. 

This mode of expressing it implies it is undesirable and abnormal so to live; to stay in 

one place indefinitely is desirable and normal. Is it not odd that Charles Darwin, the


man who discovered who and what humanity really is, should consider the mode of 

life that predominated over the vast majority of its existence – the mode moreover that 

undoubtedly represents a direct continuity from our ‘natural’ and animal past – as 

undesirable and abnormal? 

“At a subsequent period the Beagle anchored for a couple of days under Wollaston 

Island, which is a short way to the northward. While going on shore we pulled alongside 

a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the most abject and miserable creatures I any 

where beheld. I believe, in this extreme part of South America, man exists in a lower 

state of improvement than in any other part of the world. The South Sea islander of 

either race is comparatively civilized. The Esquimaux, in his subterranean hut, enjoys 

some of the comforts of life, and in his canoe, when fully equipped, manifests much 

skill. Some of the tribes of Southern Africa, prowling about in search of roots, and living 

concealed on the wild and arid planes, are sufficiently wretched. But the Australian, in 

the simplicity of the arts of life, comes nearest the Fuegian. He can, however, boast of 

his boomerang, his spear and throwing-stick, his method of clmbing trees, tracking 

animals, and scheme of hunting. Although thus superior in acquirements, it by no means 

follows that he should likewise be so in capabilities. Indeed, from what we saw of the 

Fuegians, who were taken to England, I should think the case was the reverse.” 

One feels like asking Darwin, why are people who live in, and are adapted to, a 

tough environment, in which they have very likely survived for millenia, to be 

considered ‘abject’ and ‘miserable’? No doubt, if seen canoeing on a cold, stormy 

day, elemental wear and tear would be expressed on people’s faces; but would not this 

be equally true for Cornish fishermen in a storm, or for Lancashire workmen walking 

to the cotton-mill on a cold, rainy morning? In his comparisons of the Fuegians with 

South Sea Islanders, Eskimos, and peoples from Southern Africa and Australia, he is 

scientific again (except in his use of the word ‘wretched’). Interestingly though, in his 

statement that native Australians are ‘superior in acquirements’ to the Fuegians, he 

also suggests that Fuegians are superior to Australians in ‘capabilities’. This judgement 

apparently rests on Darwin’s assessment of how well the Fuegians who had been 

taken to England ‘improved’. Here he seems to be in a real confusion. If it was the 

entry into civilized English culture and society that ensured these Fuegians’ 

‘improvement’, then he does not assume their deficiencies are intrinsic to their ‘race’, 

that is, as a biological given. But on the other hand, in suggesting that the Australians, 

in spite of their ‘superiority in acquirements’, are intrinsically inferior in ‘capabilites,’ 

he implies in their case the opposite. 

Of course Darwin can hardly be blamed for not having resolved the nature/nurture, 

biology/culture dilemma in the understanding of human societies: that issue remains 

far from resolved to this day. But it is striking that his observations of different forms 

of human adaptation to different natural, ecological environments should be so filled 

with pejorative value judgements and unscientific preconceptions; again, in a fashion 

so different from his mode of analysing and comparing geological and biological 

phenomena. The fact is, as David Wilson has shown in the book cited above, that 

different societies become adapted to different natural environments in more or less 

effective ways. Terms such as ‘simplicity’ or ‘complexity’ of adaptation, where they 

refer to population sizes typical of human groups, their technologies, or their forms of 

shelter and so on, should be used absolutely neutrally, for they do not register or imply

18 


any cultural, ethical, or aesthetic inferiority or superiority at all. A small-scale, 

technologically ‘simple’ society that is well-adapted to existence in its environment is 

in scientific terms merely successful at surviving in its natural environment. 

Clearly however, Darwin‘s implicit view of humanity, though contradictory, rests 

on one conspicuous presupposition. Whether it is a cultural or biological process, 

humanity engages in, or can engage in, a process of ‘improvement’ of a kind which 

Darwin will not build into his theory of the biological evolution of non-human living 

organisms. It seems worth noting therefore, that a presupposition of human history 

involving a kind of ‘linear progress’, an ideology that many have taken to result from 

the uncritical translation of the fully developed Darwinian theory of organic evolution 

onto human society – by such late nineteenth-century thinkers as Herbert Spencer for 

example – was evidently in Darwin’s mind well before he had made the scientific 

breakthrough into his theory of biological evolution. 

“On the east coast the natives, as we have seen, have guanaco cloaks, and on the west, 

they possess seal-skins. Amongst these central tribes the men generally possess an otterskin, 

or some small scrap about as large as a pocket-handkerchief, which is barely 

sufficient to cover their backs as low as their loins. It is laced across the breast by 

strings, and according as the wind blows, it is shifted from side to side. But these Fuegians 

in the canoe were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It 

was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body. 

In another harbour not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child, 

came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there whilst the sleet fell and thawed 

on her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked child. These poor wretches were 

stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy 

and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without 

dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow-creatures, 

and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in 

life some of the less gifted animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same 

question may be asked with respect to these barbarians. At night, five or six human 

beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, 

sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals. Whenever it is low water, they must rise 

to pick shell-fish from the rocks; and the women, winter and summer, either dive to 

collect sea eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and, with a baited hair-line, jerk out 

small fish. If a seal is killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale discovered, it is a 

feast: such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries and fungi. Nor are they 

exempt from famine, and, as a consequence, cannibalism accompanied by parricide.” 

Darwin seems to imply here that the ‘small scrap’ the men wear is insufficient, 

just as he assumes that the nakedness of other men and women is lamentable. His own 

morality and preconceptions prevent him from asking whether these are not once 

again effective adaptations to the environment. Attitudes like these of Darwin are 

perfectly borne out in photographs of Yámana taken by missionaries later in the 

nineteenth century, in which both men and women have been coerced humiliatingly 

into hiding their genital regions with their hands. 

Yet in a climate where rain is frequent, the Yámana found that not wearing clothes, 

but instead applying oil or grease to their skins, was a better form of protection. Clothes 

can often remain permanently wet when one is exposed to such an environment, whereas 

water ‘trickles down’ a body covered in grease.


Why Darwin thinks ‘these wretches were stunted in their growth’, rather than 

having adapted their average height to the physical exigencies and pressures of their 

existence, is also strange. But his finding their faces ‘hideous’ is merely prejudice, 

whilst his observation that their skins are ‘greasy’, which should answer his 

bewilderment that they go naked, means to him that they are merely ‘filthy’, all of 

which is in accord with his judgement that their hair is ‘entangled’, ‘their voices 

discordant’, ‘their gestures violent and without dignity’. The passage that follows 

these remarks is rhetorical, and perhaps it is more a poetry of (unnecessary) pity and 

sympathy than of arrogance, as the prejudice and sense of superiority appear to be 

unconscious and gentle: ‘Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe 

they are fellow-creatures......’. But then comes the suggestion that people often wonder 

what pleasure in life ‘some of the less gifted animals can enjoy’. 

Do people so wonder, or did they really in Darwin’s time? There seems to be 

something false in the rhetoric here: according to the religious view, all animals are 

created to fulfil their particular, humble purposes, as part of God’s larger, transcendent 

plan. This is true of Man as well, but since he alone among living things has Free Will, 

his situation is distinct from that of the other animals. The question posed here by 

Darwin could have no meaning for animals; indeed it might even be blasphemous in 

terms of traditional Christian theology. 

Now, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, which at the time of his voyage 

on the Beagle he had not yet arrived at, the question must be even more meaningless. 

Animals, except for Man, have no consciousness, self-awareness, sense of purpose, 

ethical principles, moral, aesthetic, or sensual ambitions, nor criteria for comparisons 

over such values or pleasures. They are driven by a blind, non-conscious will to survive, 

in order to reproduce biologically. In Man alone, because of the emergence through 

evolution of intelligence, mind, and consciousness, can issues of pleasure or purpose 

arise. Precisely how Darwin understood these issues in 1832 is not clear, but the 

movement of his thoughts from ‘the less gifted animals’ to ‘these barbarians’, is hardly 

a ‘reasonable’ one, on the basis of any consistent system of thinking available in his 

time. But when Darwin’s account moves once again onto the naked Fuegians sleeping 

unprotected from the elements (although he has already shown that they are not wholly 

unprotected, due to the grease they apply to their bodies), ‘coiled up like animals’, 

comparison between animal and savage, savage and animal (‘how much more 

reasonably the same question may be asked with respect to these barbarians’) is turned 

around again, in such a way that, given we are considering the thought processes of 

one of the greatest geniuses in recorded human history, we are moved to conclude that 

he is sacrificing intelligence here to some kind of spiteful contempt, or at least, to a 

deep human insensitivity. 

“Whenever it is low water, they must rise to pick shellfish”, Darwin says (emphasis 

added). One might equally say that at every dawn, every maid and servant in every 

house in England that has maids and servants, must perforce rise to work for their 

masters and mistresses. Or that on those days when a University lecturer has morning 

lectures, he or she must rise to deliver those lectures. And animals must go to feed 

when opportunity arises. What is Darwin’s point? Perhaps he, as a Victorian gentleman 

from a wealthy background with a large unearned income, was one of the very few

20 


organisms of any species who did not need to work or make any effort in order to eat, 

and one is not sure which fact is more extraordinary: that the scientist who would later 

make one of the most important discoveries of the modern age could be so intellectually 

limited in his choice of words here, or that this very scientist should have nevertheless 

come from the particular class of human beings that he did come from. 

Darwin is appalled, and contemptuous, that people should make a feast out of a 

‘putrid whale’, but surely since time immemorial human beings have had to eat the 

meat of animals that have been dead for a greater or lesser period of time. Refrigeration 

is a relatively new phenomenon, whilst the arts of meat preservation have been very 

gradual in their historical development. And perhaps taste is in the mouth of the eater: 

certainly, even in 1832 Darwin must have been aware that taste in food is culturally 

extremely relative, as it is in other things. To put it simply, the Yámana may not have 

found their berries and fungi ‘tasteless’. 

At the end of this passage, Darwin makes reference to issues of food shortage and 

cannibalism. The ethnographical literature does not record cannibalism (nor ‘parricide’) 

as being practiced by Fuegian peoples at any known time. There is some debate within 

the literature concerning whether infanticide was practiced at any time as a form of 

population control and/or as a response to food shortage. The following conclusions arrived 

at by David Wilson (op. cit.) concerning the Yámana might be worth quoting here: 

“...........overall Yahgan (Yámana) population densities were low and probably always 

had been so, since the environment and their subsistence adaptation would not permit 

any higher numbers of people. We may thus hypothesize that over the hundreds and 

thousands of years of their presence in the archipelago the Yahgan must have had to 

practice one or another form of population regulation............. (but also) children between 

the ages of two and ten years old were especially at risk in this difficult setting. In light 

of this, prior to the arrival of the European diseases in pre-Contact times high infant 

mortality may have been a major factor in the regulation of population numbers. In 

other words, the rigorous environment itself may have been regulatory in keeping Yahgan 

numbers adjusted to the carrying capacity of the subsistence-settlement system.” 

Let us continue with Darwin‘s account: 

“The tribes have no government or head, yet each is surrounded by other hostile ones, 

speaking different dialects; and the cause of their warfare would appear to be the means 

of subsistence. Their country is a broken mass of wild rock, lofty hills, and useless 

forests: and these are viewed through mists and endless storms. The habitable land is 

reduced to the stones which form the beach; in search of food they are compelled to 

wander from spot to spot, and so steep is the coast, that they can only move about in 

their wretched canoes. They cannot know the feeling of having a home, and still less that 

of domestic affection; unless indeed the treatment of a master to a laborious slave can be 

considered as such. How little can the higher powers of the mind be brought into play! 

What is there for imagination to picture, for reason to compare, for judgement to decide 

upon? to knock a limpet from the rock does not even require cunning, that lowest power 

of the mind. Their skill in some respects may be compared to the instinct of animals; for 

it is not improved by experience: the canoe, their most ingenious work, poor as it is, has 

remained the same, for the last 250 years.” 

The beginning of this passage invites no controversy, until we arrive at the word 

‘useless,’ which comes before the word ‘forests.’ Surely, even a gentleman from


domesticated England in 1832 would be aware that forests have many resources, and 

that numerous nomadic peoples had inhabited them, and still did in 1832. The Yámana 

extracted among other things wood and tree bark from the forests, from which they 

fashioned many items including buckets, and the ‘wretched’ canoes that Darwin 

denigrates. The Argentinian archaeologist Luis Albert Borrero has written of the 

Yámana (in an article called The Origins of Ethnographic Subsistence Patterns in 

Fuego-Patagonia), that: 

“Canoes were the mainstay of their maritime adaptation. They were not only an 

indispensable means of transportation, but also formed the focus of family life. Families 

moved everywhere by canoe, some even carrying fires burning inside them almost 

permanently, and they have been observed consuming mussels on board”. 

The territory of the Yámana was limited to areas where maritime and forest 

environments were close by, as they depended crucially on both. Habitable land was 

not only to be found among the stones on the beach; though why Darwin should think 

such a location beneath contempt is anyway extraordinary. 

Now there may have been a particular aspect of the European mind-set which 

influenced Darwin in his choice of the word ‘useless’ to describe the forests. We 

know that a dominant perception of forests throughout the European Middle Ages 

was that they were dangerous, Satanic, wicked places. In the Confessions, Saint 

Augustine includes mountains, rivers, and oceans in the category of nature’s fallen 

matter, admiration of whose sights was capable of distracting a Christian from the 

proper contemplation of God and one’s own soul. One can easily imagine forests 

could have joined the list, if he had extended it further. As a realm of material nature, 

standing over and against the spiritual realm and that of civilization, forests for centuries 

symbolized both sinful temptation and a chaotic, unproductive world that must be 

tamed and brought under control by hard work and godliness, that is, under human 

control – meaning also human self-control. In the modern era, up to the emergence of 

the (first) Romantic Movement and its associated Romantic sensibility, much of this 

way of thinking persisted, and was indeed intensified by the new imperatives of 

capitalism, science, technology, urbanism, and modernizing agriculture. Francis Bacon, 

the first major philosopher of modern science, considered that Nature should be 

interrogated like a harlot to yield up Her secrets. Descartes considered that for the 

rational scientific mind, inorganic and organic nature must be regarded as machinelike, 

and they would yield up infinite resources if treated in that way. 

But from about 1770 some of these attitudes began to change, especially in Germany 

and Britain, under the influence especially of the Romantic poets Wordsworth, 

Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; and of artists like Constable and Turner. 

In Germany, analogous sentiments are to be found in much of Goethe’s poetry, and in 

the art of Caspar David Friedrich, but especially in the great German and Austrian 

composers, Beethoven and Schubert. All these people were dead or old by 1832; had 

Darwin not been influenced by them at all? His view of the vast, stupendous forests of 

Tierra del Fuego is closer to the aesthetic attitude to nature of Dr. Samuel Johnson as 

expressed in his account of travels in 1773 to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 

A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, than to that expressed in the numerous 

Guides to the English Lake District that were available by the 1830s, let alone to the

22 


poetic imagination of William Wordsworth, who was a student at Cambridge University, 

like Darwin, though roughly fifty years earlier. To the Romantic mind forests, like all 

‘wild’ nature, offered excitement, adventure, and challenge to the over-ordered, onesidedly 

rational character of modern man: they mirrored the strange and unfathomable 

depths of the human mind and soul, as otherwise only art, poetry or music could, or 

the emotions of love, or the realm of dreams. ‘Wild’, ‘chaotic’, ‘raw’ nature was 

something awesome and sublime, as Emanuel Kant had it, because it was ‘infinite’ 

and beyond any narrow usefulness. It displayed ‘final form’ as art did, precisely through 

its apparent chaos. To use Ehrenzweig’s phrase, ‘untamed’ nature expressed ‘the higher 

order of chaos’. 

Once again, we are amazed that the young Darwin, who would later give the 

world the Theory of Evolution, thought thus in 1832. For Evolution was to provide a 

most powerful impetus to the second great wave of Romanticism in the second half of 

the Nineteenth Century, and in the Twentieth Century up until the First World War. 

Friedrich Nieztsche, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont are among those who were thrilled 

and enthralled by the subversiveness, the struggle and challenge forced upon the human 

mind by Darwin; the complete decentering of man that his theory entailed – far more 

even than the Galilean-Newtonian revolution had, and the final defeat of theology 

that it appeared to them to represent. 

As for the influence of these last upon subsequent artists, poets, composers, and 

philosophers the list would be almost impossible to complete. Among them Otto Dix, 

Scriabin, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and the Surrealists stand out. But the influence of 

Nietzsche especially on art and culture was and is immeasurable. 

These remarks pertain to the worlds of literature, art, and philosophy: how equally 

much did Evolution transform all science itself, and none less than the human sciences. 

In his influence upon, and the admiration he induced in Karl Marx and Friedrich 

Engels, and in the emergence of Sociology and Anthropology as disciplines, Darwin 

was the Copernicus of the modern mind. 

But of course, the whole nature of the Beagle’s voyage must be borne in mind, as 

this is well summarized here by Gillian Beer (in an essay called Travelling The Other 

Way): 

“(Such) voyages......were those whose prize was represented as knowledge rather than 

treasure. The categories are, however, not altogether separate. Although the nineteenthcentury 

journeys that set out from Britain to survey the sea and coasts around the world 

were not piratical, not part of that unconcerned predation that earlier centuries justified 

as exploration or discovery, they were nevertheless an expression of the will to control, 

categorise, occupy and bring home the prize of samples and of strategic information. 

Natural history and national future were closely interlocked. And natural history was 

usually a sub-genre in the programme of the enterprize, subordinate to the search for 

sea-passages or the mapping of feasible routes and harbours.” 

Indeed, in their historical study Tierra del Fuego, Luiz and Schillat show that the 

Beagle voyages under Captain Fitzroy’s command were largely concerned with 

garnering information for the British Admiralty, as part of a widely-embracing concern 

in regard of strategies for British conquest, colonization, and control of trade in the 

Southern Atlantic.


But to return again to Darwin’s account. The assertion that the nomadic Yámana 

“cannot know the feeling of having a home” needs no further comment in the light of 

the above; but that they know “still less that of domestic affection” enters the bizarre 

once again. Affections are dependent on staying indefinitely in one place? But in any 

case the touching accounts in the ethnographic literature about how Selk’nam and 

Yámana men would set about looking for a wife, and how a woman indicated ‘yes’ or 

‘no’ to a man’s proposal (to be found in Wilson, op. cit.), suggest Darwin was wrong 

in assuming a lack of romantic affection among Fuegians. But his following phrase, 

“unless indeed the treatment of a master to a laborious slave can be considered as 

such”, I confess baffles me entirely. Who is the master and who the slave in the 

egalitarian societies of Tierra del Fuego? Perhaps Darwin means the people are like 

slaves before their natural environment, but in that case they are at least equal in their 

servitude, unlike in the England of 1832, where the majority of people were slaves 

towards both Nature and their human rulers. 

Gillian Beer (op. cit) sees these aspects of Darwin’s reactions in a rather different 

way from me. She considers that: 

“.....one of the most pressing issues raised by travels and their narratives in the nineteenth 

century (was).....what are the boundaries of natural history? Are human beings within its 

scope? Are they one species or several? Are they separate from all other species because 

created as souls by God? And do all, all savages, have souls? Or are they – here danger 

lies – a kind of animal? (If they, then we?) 

“Over and over again the narratives of voyages demonstrate how the borders of natural 

history were blurred by human encounter and how evolutionary theory profited from 

that growing uncertainty about the status of the human in knowledge and in nature.” 

She thus sees Darwin’s prejudices in relation to the scientific revolution he would 

later undertake: 

“Darwin’s encounters with Fuegians in their native place gave him a way of closing the 

gap between the human and other primates, a move necessary to the theories he was in 

the process of reaching.” 

Elsewhere she suggests: 

“Darwin’s much later The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) may 

owe much to his puzzling experiences on the Beagle and be in part a final attempt to 

regulate the irregularities he had there encountered.” 

But, though it may be that on some unconscious level Darwin’s scientific mind 

was fomenting the utterly novel worldview he would eventually promulgate, his account 

of Fuegian peoples in Voyage of the Beagle includes many tedious and prejudiced 

ideas about primitive people being inferior and degraded. The terms he deals in are 

ethical, and assume ‘civilization’ represents an indisputable improvement upon 

‘primitiveness’, which implicitly justifies arrogant and dictatorial behaviours, such as 

snatching people and taking them to England, or missionary activity intended to convert 

‘savages’ to Christianity and Western ways of behaving. The fact is that Darwin, neither 

in 1832 nor later when he formulated the theory of Evolution, had any clear idea of 

the relationship between biological evolution, which had brought into being Man 

from its animal antecedents, and human history, the development of different cultures 

and civilizations within the general biological framework of the human species. And

24 


though it may be necessary now, in the context of neo- or post-Darwinism, to understand 

that biological evolution can continue in interwoven relationship with the cultural 

and historical development of humanity, generally Darwinism has in the past failed, 

and still does fail now, to distinguish between the two processes. From Darwin himself 

to Herbert Spencer, through to many Darwinian biologists who today attempt analyses 

of human history and society, the confusions are deep, and persist, as many writers 

have attempted to show. Darwin’s ‘swerving’, his ‘disturbance’(to use Beer’s words), 

in his meditations on the Fuegians, and their imagined similarity or difference from 

animals, is conducted in a confused, moralistic, and derogatory mode of thinking 

which is as common today as it was in Darwin’s own. It absolutely fails to see that 

different human societies have different cultures, different behaviours and different 

ethical systems and attitudes: conditioned greatly by natural and environmental factors 

and processes, in ways that are extremely complex, but again, not in ways that mirror 

the environmental determinism of other animals’ physiology or behaviour. 

Human societies can only be judged one against another according to the taste of 

he or she who judges or according to ethical principles which should be made absolutely 

explicit in the course of making such judgements, and according to which certain 

Western cultures, vis-a-vis the morality of killing other human beings for example, 

would rank very low in any pan-human table of ethical comparison. Human beings 

are animals, yes, but as members of one animal species, Homo sapiens. Yet it is 

remarkable how often European or Neo-European individuals and nations that want 

to justify and rationalize their nastiest kinds of behaviour (ethically speaking), draw 

upon the fact that human beings are, after all animals. 

Major differences between human beings are either individual, or culturally based; 

though it is true that the roles of biology and genetics in understanding these differences 

are only just beginning to be understood. 

A NOTE ON H.W. BATES 

Two quotations from H.W. Bates’ science-cum-travelogue book The Naturalist 

On The River Amazons may suffice to indicate some of the differences between Bates’ 

and Darwin’s approaches to the human dimensions of their experiences in South 

America. Bates certainly has some stereotypical European prejudices, and his 

perceptions are often constructed through characteristic nineteenth-century tropes, 

themes, vistas, and metaphors belonging to a British colonial view of ‘tropicality’, 

with his readership at home always in mind. But, like Alfred Russel Wallace, who 

also displayed “a somewhat baffling mixture of the conventional and the unconventional 

........ (in an attitude of) unsettled ambivalence” (as explained in Nancy Stepan’s book 

Picturing Tropical Nature), Bates has at the same time a spontaneous sympathy and 

empathy with people, and a more admiring attitude towards the people he meets, than 

Darwin evinces: 

(I) “On the morning of the 28th of May we arrived at our destination (Belém de Pará). 

The appearance of the city at sunrise was pleasing in the highest degree. It is built on a 

low tract of land, having only one small rocky elevation at its southern extremity; it 

therefore affords no amphitheatral view from the river; but the white buildings roofed 

with red tiles, the numerous towers and cupolas of churches and convents, the crowds of

THE LINNEAN 2009 VOLUME 25(3) 25 

palm trees reared above the buildings, all sharply defined against the clear blue sky, 

give an appearance of lightness and cheerfulness which is most exhilarating. The perpetual 

forest hems the city in on all sides landwards; and towards the suburbs, picturesque 

country houses are seen scattered about, half buried in luxuriant foliage. The port was 

full of native canoes and other vessels, large and small; and the ringing of bells and 

firing of rockets, announcing the dawn of some Roman Catholic festival day, showed 

that the population was astir at that early hour. 

“The impressions received during our first walk, on the evening of the day of our arrival, 

can never wholly fade from my mind. After traversing the few streets of tall, gloomy, 

convent-looking buildings near the port, inhabited chiefly by merchants and shopkeepers; 

along which idle soldiers, dressed in shabby uniforms, carrying their muskets carelessly 

over their arms, priests, negresses with red water-jars on their heads, sad-looking Indian 

women carrying their naked children astride on their hips, and other samples of the 

motley life of the place, were seen; we passed down a long narrow street leading to the 

suburbs. Beyond this, our road lay across a grassy common into picturesque lane leading 

to the virgin forest. The long street was inhabited by the poorer class of the population. 

The houses were of one story only, and had an irregular and mean appearance. The 

windows were without glass, having, instead, projecting lattice casements. The street 

was unpaved, and inches deep in loose sand. Groups of people were cooling themselves 

outside their doors – people of all shades in colour of skin, European, Negro and Indian, 

but chiefly an uncertain mixture of the three. Amongst them were several handsome 

women, dressed in a slovenly manner, barefoot or shod in loose slippers; but wearing 

richly decorated ear-rings, and around their necks strings of very large gold beads. They 

had dark expressive eyes, and remarkably rich heads of hair. It was a mere fancy, but I 

thought the mingled squalor, luxuriance and beauty of these women were pointedly in 

harmony with the rest of the scene; so striking, in the view, was the mixture of natural 

riches and human poverty. The houses were mostly in a dilapidated condition, and signs 

of indolence and neglect were everywhere visible. The wooden palings which surrounded 

the weed-grown gardens were strewn about, broken; and hogs, goats, and ill-fed poultry 

wandered in and out through the gaps. But amidst all, and compensating every defect, 

rose the overpowering beauty of the vegetation. The massive dark crowns of shady 

mangoes were seen everywhere amongst the dwellings, amidst fragrant blossoming 

orange, lemon, and many other tropical fruit trees; some in flower, others in fruit, at 

various stages of ripeness. Here and there, shooting above the more dome-like and 

sombre trees, were the smooth columnar stems of palms, bearing aloft their magnificent 

crowns of finely-cut fronds. Amongst the latter the slim assai-palm was especially 

noticeable, growing in groups of four and five; its smooth, gently-curving stem, twenty 

to thirty feet high, terminating in a head of feathery foliage, inexpressibly light and 

elegant in outline.” 

(II) “I suffered most inconvenience from the difficulty of getting news from the civilized 

world down river, from the irregularity of receipt of letters, parcels of books and 

periodicals, and towards the latter part of my residence from ill health arising from bad 

and insufficient food. The want of intellectual society, and of the varied excitement of 

European life, was also felt most acutely, and this, instead of becoming deadened by 

time, increased until it became almost insupportable. I was obliged, at last, to come to 

the conclusion that the contemplation of Nature alone is not sufficient to fill the human 

heart and mind. I got on pretty well when I received a parcel from England by the 

steamer once in two or four months. I used to be very economical with my stock of 

reading, lest it should be finished before the next arrival, and leave me utterly 

destitute..............

26 


“During so long a residence I witnessed, of course, many changes in the place (the 

village of Ega, modern Tefé). Some of the good friends who made me welcome on my 

first arrival died, and I followed their remains to their last resting-place in the little 

rustic cemetery on the borders of the surrounding forest. I lived there long enough, from 

first to last, to see the young people grow up, attended their weddings, and the christenings 

of their children, and before I left, saw them old married folks with numerous 

families............. 

“The people became more ‘civilized’, that is, they began to dress according to the latest 

Parisian fashions, instead of going about in stockingless feet, wooden clogs, and shirt 

sleeves; acquired a taste for money-getting and office-holding; became divided into 

parties, and lost part of their former simplicity of manners............ 

“Many of the Ega Indians, including all the domestic servants, are savages who have 

been brought from the neighbouring rivers; the Japurá, the Issá, and the Solimoens.......... 

most of whom had been bought, when children, of the native chiefs. This species of 

slave dealing, although forbidden by the laws of Brazil, is winked at by the authorities, 

because without it there would be no means of obtaining servants......... But the boys 

generally run away and embark on the canoes of traders; and the girls are often badly 

treated by their mistresses............” 

There is a marvellous illustration in Bates’ The Naturalist On The River Amazons 

called Masked Dance And Wedding-Feast Of Tucuna Indians. Bates is pictured inside 

a Tucuna maloca, graciously and gratefully accepting something to eat from a 

handsomely depicted naked Indian woman with long black hair, which he seems to 

find delicious. He seems wholly at ease in the huge interior of the maloca, in which is 

taking place, without reference to him, a masked dance in costumes very like those 

one can see today in ethnographic museums in Manaus or Leticia. The whole scene is 

certainly idealized and shaped into a European stylized ‘interior’, but it is also authentic 

in its depiction of someone in a hammock, and others up on a typical kind of structure 

made of wooden poles, from which also hang animal skins and on which a parrot 

perches. The whole scene is warm and convivial, suggesting that Bates’ hosts enjoy 

his presence as much as he enjoys their hospitality. And though it is slightly 

sentimentalized, the scene somehow resembles very much the indoor life of Amazonian 

Indians even today. 

POSTSCRIPT 

On a retrospective reading of this essay I wondered if I had been hard on Charles 

Darwin both in the sense of suspending recognition of the extent to which he, like 

anyone else, was a prisoner of his socio-historical context (though I tried to show that 

he could have embraced different attitudes), but also in the sense that further reading 

undertaken after I had already written the bulk of this essay indicated to me the extent 

of his enlightened, liberal, and humanitarian attitudes in certain other situations outside 

of his account of the Fuegians, both during the voyage of the Beagle and at other 

periods of his life. His argument with Captain Fitzroy in Brazil over slavery – Darwin 

against, Fitzroy in defence – which Darwin feared at first might require him to leave 

the voyage, is only one rather noble example. 

Nevertheless, the central purpose in writing the essay was to show how narrow a 

view of the Fuegian Indians even a great genius could have, and how the contrast


between his genius for scientific understanding of nature and his socially prejudiced 

views of a culture very different from his own, might be seen as deeply symptomatic 

of the horrible, tragic fact that one hundred years after Darwin’s encounter with them, 

‘progress’ in the surrounding and intruding semi-Westernized forms of society would 

result in their complete genocidal extermination or assimilation. It also allowed me, 

briefly at the end, to refer to the great importance of distinguishing biological evolution 

from human, social and cultural history, a highly problematical area that concerns the 

interface between the biological and the social sciences. 

The Shadow of Perfection 

Peter J. James FLS 

2 St Edmund’s Terrace, Hunstanton, Norfolk PE36 5EH. 

The Jardin des Plantes faces the Quai St. Bernard and the River Seine to the N.E. 

Its other three sides are bounded by the Rue Cuvier, Rue Geoffroy St. Hilaire and the 

Rue Buffon. Just inside the main entrance stands a statue (erected by public 

subscription) of Lamarck. Leading to the whole complex is the Rue Linné. In contrast, 

our own Natural History Museum is confined by Exhibition Rd., Queen’s Gate and 

Imperial College. Of course, the French did have a Revolution in the wake of which 

all references to the monarchy were swept away. Even the Jardin itself had its name 

changed from du Roi to des Plantes. Does our lack of such a Revolution explain why 

Darwin Boulevard is not a major thoroughfare in South Kensington’s ‘Albertopolis’? 

Alfred Waterhouse’s incredible romanesque masterpiece was intended as a ‘temple’ 

to the vision of Darwin’s critic, Richard Owen, and poor Darwin’s statue until recently 

presided over the tea room whilst that of Owen commanded the grand staircase. In 

addition, the whole of the South Kensington site was a development celebrating 

imperialism, empire and the march of Human, specifically British, progress. The 

museum was a ‘Bridgewater Treatise’ in terracotta or, as the Times of April 18 th 1881 

put it, ‘...a true Temple of Nature, showing, … beauty of Holiness’. And yet, it is 

worth sounding a sotto voce note of paradox. The mighty 675 foot eastern entrance 

facade, originally with a statue of Adam atop its central gable, fronts the Cromwell 

Road named after Oliver, Lord Protector during England’s Interregnum. This period 

saw the repudiation of Divine Rights and of the perfect, static hierarchical structure 

which underlay both human society and, indeed, all of Nature. In addition, the Ruskinian 

ornamentation, which covers the museum, celebrates Nature’s diversity. It is, of course, 

the generative mechanism of that very diversity which Darwin made his life-long 

study and the heretical answers at which he arrived served, in no small measure, to 

dismantle the philosophy of ‘The rich man in his castle …’. So, perhaps, we do not 

need a Darwin Boulevard after all or, indeed, any obvious public tokens of Charles 

Robert Darwin MA FLS FRS. His work and thoughts are still so much a part of the 

philosophy of the life sciences that he requires neither street names nor monumental 

statuary to celebrate his memory.

28 


By contrast, the works of the naturalist-philosophers, whose names surround the 

Jardin des Plantes, are now only read by historians of science. Lamarck’s Philosophie 

Zoologique, published in the year of Darwin’s birth, 1809, the massive works of Buffon 

and the transcendental anatomy of St. Hilaire have all been sidelined. These men were 

influential in their time but their approaches and philosophies have become 

superannuated. The works of Charles Robert Darwin, however, remain a living presence, 

embedded in our subconscious and, as Jim Secord has said, ‘his theory of evolution by 

natural selection is the coping stone of the modern life sciences’ although the January 

issue of the Scientific American, continuing the architectural analogy, depicts the Origin 

rather as the keystone. Most of Darwin’s twenty nine volumes are still available as hard 

copy and all are on the web. Darwin himself called the Origin ‘One long argument’; he 

was right, and although it is the ‘Origin’ whose sesquicentenary we celebrate this year, 

we should remember that, taken together, all his works form one long argument and the 

‘Origin’ should be placed in this context if we are to attempt any understanding of 

Darwin’s thinking. To this end, over the years, much ink has been spilt in analysing the 

evolution of this truly incredible work. Again, there has been much scholarly speculation 

as to why Darwin delayed publication for twenty years. Due regard for his wife, Emma’s 

religious sensitivities? No. A digression on barnacles? Yes, to some extent. An attempt 

to distance himself from the radical left? Almost certainly. Darwin, although he denied 

it, was a very clever man, so perhaps the real answer is that he foresaw that by waiting, 

the bicentenary of his birth and the sesquicentenary of the Origin could be conveniently 

and therefore economically – he’d read his Adam Smith – concelebrated in 2009 in the 

illustrious company of Henry VIII and the 500 th anniversary of his accession along with 

the 250 th of the founding of Kew Gardens as we know them. Whatever Darwin may or 

may not have foreseen, these other events have, like the Origin of Species, opened the 

doors to two new worlds, the vernacular Bible and tropical biodiversity respectively. A 

web of connections link these events but our focus here is on Charles Darwin and on 

the doors he opened for us. 

In the late 1960’s an engineer colleague asked me ‘what was all this fuss about 

evolution?’ and could I recommend a book to enlighten him. The nearest to hand 

happened to be ‘Genetics, Palaeontology and Evolution’ edited by Jepsen, Simpson 

and Mayr, first published in 1949 but reprinted, unrevised, in 1963, four years after 

the centenary of the Origin celebrations. I lent my colleague this work and, several 

weeks later, he handed it back with the pithy comment ‘They don’t know much do 

they?’ He did have a point and he followed in the tradition of engineers asking biologists 

awkward questions; remember Fleeming Jenkin and the famous opening line of 

François Jacob’s paper at the 1982 centenary conference: ‘If an engineer were asked 

....to manufacture a frog, it seems unlikely that he would first design such a swimming 

precursor as a tadpole....’.The stated purpose of Genetics, Palaeontology and Evolution 

was to reunite the, by then, disparate specialisms of the title and to harness the results 

of such a reunification to clarify the mechanism of evolution. It was an ambitious task 

as, ‘The genetics of today traces the fact of evolution back to the existence of 

ultramicroscopic bodies, the genes, ....’ (p.422). There was no mention of nucleic 

acids, ribo- or deoxyribo- and, of course, no Hox boxes etc. etc.. True, these 

‘ultramicroscopic bodies’ were, by this time, firmly located in cell nuclei and, unlike 

Darwin’s hypothetical ‘gemmules’, they did not float about freely and then fortuitously


assemble in the reproductive organs at the right moment. Post the rediscovery of 

Mendel’s work and A.C. Hardy’s mathematical analysis of gene flow, changes in gene 

frequency were measured using their phenotypic expression, but understanding at the 

molecular level had advanced little since Darwin’s day. It is indeed remarkable, in 

hindsight, that the ‘New Synthesis’ was achieved using this ‘Black Box’ approach in 

complete ignorance of what the gene actually was. Just as Dalton’s atomic theory had 

offered a numerical approach to chemistry in complete ignorance of the nature of 

atoms, so the ‘New Synthesis’ provided a mathematical tool for analysing Darwin’s 

Natural Selection; his preferred evolutionary mechanism. Moreover, these mathematics 

both underpinned gradualism and reconciled it with the existence of Mendel’s discrete 

particles, so long a contentious issue between the ‘Mendelians’ and the ‘Biometricians’. 

It is, perhaps, ironic that Hardy’s formulation, now known as the Hardy-Weinberg 

rule, rests on the binomial theorem with which, Darwin said, he ‘...had a special quarrel’ 

(AB. p.114). So successful and influential did Population Genetics and the ‘New 

Synthesis’ become, – together they dominated the 1959 centenary despite a warning, 

a decade earlier, from C.H. Waddington that something was missing – that Ron 

Amundson, in his ground-breaking book The Changing Role of the Embryo in 

Evolutionary Thought (CUP 2005) argues that, what he calls, ‘Synthesis Historiography’ 

(S.H.) has tinted the spectacles through which the real Charles Darwin and his 

predecessors are now viewed. As a consequence, Amundson suggests that this S.H. 

bias has led evolutionists and historians alike to see both nonexistent philosophical 

flaws in Darwin’s approach and to downgrade the work of the comparative anatomists 

and embryologists. The two centenaries of 2009 and the concurrent rise of the discipline 

of ‘Evo-Devo’ provide an opportunity, Amundsen suggests, to reassess the master’s 

work using a new pair of spectacles and to trace the changes in perception through the 

centenaries of 1909, 1959 and 1982. We must, however, be careful not to emulate 

George Orwell’s Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty Four, who constantly rewrote 

history in order to satisfy contemporary prejudices. 

Of his Cambridge days Darwin wrote, in his Autobiography, William Paley’s 

Natural Theology ‘… gave me as much delight as did Euclid’ (p.19). He went on to 

write that he regarded the works of these two authors as ‘…the only part of the 

academical course which, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind.’ 

Although it was Paley’s Evidences of Christianity and his Moral Philosophy rather 

than his ‘Natural Theology’ which were the set texts, it was this latter which really 

impressed Darwin. It was Paley’s ‘clear language’ and ‘logic’ in all his works that 

Darwin admired although, he adds, ‘I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s 

premises’ (AB p.59). So, ‘By answering well the examination questions in Paley, by 

doing Euclid well, and by not failing miserably in Classics, I gained a good place 

among the hoi poIloi...’ (January 1831). He collected his degree in April of that year; 

‘…it cost £15: there is a waste of money.’ he wrote to his sister Caroline (Corr. Vol. I 

p.122). So, what next? Lord Goring, in Oscar Wilde’s Ideal Husband, says that, if a 

gentleman does not go into politics then there is ‘….nothing left for him as a profession 

except Botany or the Church’. Darwin was certainly a gentleman and, having become 

disillusioned by medicine at Edinburgh, his Cambridge years were intended to enable 

him to establish himself as a country vicar. Politics, it seems, was never an option so, 

to use one of Darwin’s favourite expressions, ‘in a large sense’ Botany it had to be. At

30 


this time there was no professional career structure in the Natural Sciences, as we 

would understand it. Only those peripheral to medicine offered any sort of opportunity, 

a fact that was to have important repercussions. Lord Goring was, however, wrong in 

seeing the Church and Botany as being mutually exclusive alternatives. Many country 

clergymen were also botanists vide Darwin’s Cambridge mentor. Rev. John Stevens 

Henslow, who held the University Chair in the subject. Darwin, as we know, inherited 

sufficient wealth and, by his own financial acumen acquired more, so as to obviate 

any need for him to earn a living at all. If it had been otherwise I would not be writing 

this! Indeed, if Wedgwood had had to call in the administrators 200 years before they 

did (Times 7 Jan. 2009) or if Darwin had taken a fancy to medicine and followed his 

grandfather, father and elder brother into that professsion, if Capt. Pringle Stokes had 

not shot himself and/or Lieutenant Skyring had been ratified as the Beagle’s captain, 

or, even, if the Beagle had been able to explore the southern shores of Gondwanaland, 

who knows where we would be? The ‘ifs’ of history are frowned upon by historians 

but sometimes attempts to reconstruct these virtual scenarios enable us to focus on the 

reasons as to why certain things didn’t happen. One of the best of the crop of anniversary 

books this year is Nick Spencer’s Darwin and God. This work, by tracing in detail the 

reasons for the gradual erosion of Darwin’s faith, such as it ever was, prompts us to 

question how things would have worked out had Darwin not been disillusioned by 

Christianity. However, the unexpurgated version (Nora Barlow, 1958) of the 

Autobiography makes it quite clear that he was so disillusioned and the rest is history. 

Darwin himself was not averse to framing historical ‘if’ questions and certainly 

one of these, occasioned by his visit to Chile in March 1835, was to initiate a train of 

thought the fruits of which we are still reaping. While near the town of Concepcion he 

witnessed an earthquake that devastated the area. This prompted Darwin to speculate 

on what sort of mayhem such a catastrophe would produce if it were to hit the British 

Isles. It would, he says, result in the destruction of private property, public buildings 

along with their records and, in short, destroy the whole, apparently stable, perfect 

and internal infrastructure of society within a few minutes and ‘...violence and rapine 

would remain uncontrolled. In every large town famine would go forth, pestilence 

and death following in its train’. He was deeply moved by what he saw and it ‘...cast 

shadows over the stable, ordered vision of nature that supposedly pointed directly to 

the deity that Darwin imbibed at Cambridge’ (Spencer p.27). 

The ‘Darwin Industry’ has provided us with an overwhelmingly massive literature 

on Darwin’s ‘Sea Change’. However, in summary, albeit an over simplistic one, by 

the time he docked at Falmouth on October 2 nd 1836 he had begun to ask how it was 

that clear evidence pointed to the fact that Nature was not perfectly harmonious, 

anthropocentric, and stable, presided over by a benevolent Deity as depicted in the 

popular painting, by Edward Hicks. ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ (1820). Nature was, in 

fact. dynamic, capricious and, above all, indifferent to human life. In fact, the very 

opposite to what his Anglican upbringing had led him to believe and which, up to that 

point, he had indeed believed. Charles Darwin had begun to frame some very difficult 

questions many of which we are still attempting to answer. 

It was the received wisdom surrounding the intertwined ideas of stability, perfection 

and purpose about which Darwin came to have doubts. Furthermore, he came to be


Of making many books there is no end! 

acutely aware of the risks he ran by voicing these doubts. Perhaps too much has been 

made of Darwin’s confrontation with the Consensus Fidelium per se. Pius IX’s (1846- 

1878) Syllabus errorum and Quanta cura had made it quite clear that Holy Church set 

its face against all aspects of ‘Modernism’. Moreover Papa Ferretti conferred an Honorary 

Doctorate (1876) on St. George J. Mivart, one of Darwin’s most perceptive critics who, 

according to Darwin himself, says ‘ ...with uncommon cleverness all that is most 

disagreeable’ (Darwin to Hooker Sept. 16 th 1871) which was his way of saying ‘well 

bowled!’ In fact, Darwin took Mivart’s criticisms very seriously indeed particularly the 

one concerning the use of incipient stages of organs. Despite all this neither the Origin 

nor yet The Descent of Man was ever placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The 

Anglican Church may have huffed and puffed a little over doctrinal issues but the real 

conflict lay beneath these superficial posturings and is perhaps best encapsulated in 

Voltaire’s prophetic observation that one should not blaspheme in front of the servants 

lest one day ‘they should cut all our throats’ (Quoted in Desmond p.120). 

In his Autobiography Darwin recollects that, on his return from his Beagle Voyage, 

he ‘ .. was also ambitious to take a fair place among scientific men, …’. But whom? 

The medical school Radicals or the Conservatives of the “Atheneum”? London, in the 

1830s and 1840s, was in as much of an intellectual ferment and political conflict as 

Paris had been in the 1130s. Kenneth Clark, in his magisterial work, Civilisation (1969), 

quotes the revolutionary writings of Peter Abelard – ‘I must understand in order that I 

may believe’ and, ‘By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we perceive 

the truth’. He could well have been quoting Darwin when he opened his first notebook 

on transmutation in July 1837 and not Abelard in 1122. This understanding, however, 

had many facets and all of them had social and political price tags. 

Darwin was in an ambivalent position. He was a Whig gentleman with private

32 


means, a Cambridge graduate and, for five long years, had been the sailing companion 

of the aristocratic FitzRoy. In short, Charles Darwin was ‘blue chip’ Establishment 

yet he had begun asking those questions whose answers, whatever the final technical 

details turned out to be, he knew full well had the potential to blast away the foundations 

of that very society of which he was a member. Of course, having independent means 

meant that he did not require either approval or patronage from anyone and yet, as a 

human being, neither did he seek to attract opprobium. He took pains to distance both 

himself and his nascent theory from any associations with the radical Left. The idea of 

evolution, as distinct from its various postulated mechanisms, had been ‘in the air’ as 

Lyell put it, for nearly a century. Unfortunately its proponents had been those very 

maverick thinkers from whom Darwin wished to disassociate himself. One such 

maverick was William Lawrence whose book Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and 

the Natural History of Man (1822) had been denounced as blasphemous and associated 

with the writngs of the ‘Infidel’ Tom Paine. It was refused copyright by the Lord 

Chancellor and was, of course, pirated (Darwin had a copy) and became hugely popular. 

Nevertheless it ruled out the possibility of ‘Evolution’ being judged dispassionately. 

To make matters worse Lawrence had been inspired by the works of Darwin’s own 

Grandfather, Erasmus, whose writings conveyed a suspicious scent of atheism and, as 

for his erotic botany….. In addition, the infamous ‘Vestiges’ was to give Darwin pause. 

Darwin thought of himself primarily, at least to start with, as a geologist and, on 

his return from the Voyage much of his work was geological and he became closely 

associated with his idol, Charles Lyell and with the London Geological Society with 

its ‘official’ inductive or Baconian approach, a philosophy which Darwin claims to 

have adopted in his work on evolution. This was in sharp constrast to his Grandfather, 

Erasmus’ work in which, says Darwin ‘...the proportion of speculation being so large 

to the facts given.’ (AB p.49). Darwin wanted his theory to be seen to arise de novo 

from objective observations unsullied by presuppositions and speculation. It wasn’t 

to be. Is it any wonder that he had his wife, Emma, place the 1844 Essay under lock 

and key, avoided the word ‘evolution’ and made only passing reference to man’s descent 

in the Origin? Darwin had become a reluctant subversive, a ‘Fifth Columnist’ 

masquerading as a respectable country gentleman. Whether this ‘mimicry’ was, in the 

end, Batesian or Mullerian is, perhaps, an issue future historians may wish to debate. 

However, whether he liked it or not Darwin’s theory was, as T.H. Huxley put it, to 

become ‘a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism’. (Huxley’s review 

of the Origin in Westminster Review NS 17 1860 pp.541-70. Quote p.541) 

No one, including Charles Darwin, can totally divest themselves of the beliefs 

which are part of their upbringing. One such belief was the doctrine of the fixity of 

species and the trials and tribulations which Darwin underwent to dispose of it – ‘it is 

like confessing a murder’– have been fully, if not over, documented. It seems, in 

retrospect, that neither Darwin nor his biographers need have borne such a burden, 

because Ron Amundsen has convincingly argued that the fixity of species, as an idea, 

goes back only as far as Linnaeus, who used it as a taxonomic tool in his search for a 

‘Natural Classification’. It never was, it seems, a Divine edict. However, it is fair to 

speculate that, if Darwin had not begun with this apparently ‘Straw Man’, Evolution 

and Natural Selection would have been still-born!


The concept of Perfect adaptation is much more difficult and is very far from a 

satisfactory analysis. Darwin himself was loath to relinquish this belief as, indeed, are 

most of the natural history programmes aimed at the general public. Despite ‘The 

Spandrels of San Marco’ (or were they really pendentives?) we still cling tenaciously 

to the notions of purpose and of perfect adaptation perhaps because the alternatives to 

this ‘Panglossian paradigm’ are so subtle, complex and/ indeed, unacceptably bleak. 

‘The shadow of perfection’ is long and getting longer. It certainly was for Darwin. 

Whether or not Darwin’s attitude to Perfect Adaptation stems from his youthful 

admiration of Paley’s works or whether he was, as Andrew Cunningham puts it, 

‘provisionally converted’ (Cunningham. 1981 p.96) is a matter for debate. However, 

it should be noted that Paley himself presented the matter in a qualified manner. 

‘Contrivance, by its very definition and nature, is the refuge of imperfection’ (Paley 

vol.1 p.112). He felt that organisms were as perfect as they could be, given the 

constraints of the general laws of Nature ordained by God. In fact, what Paley was 

saying is that God was demonstrating his Wisdom and Intelligence to mankind by 

creating perfection despite those constraints but that this perfection could never be 

absolute. Paley’s discussion of the famous watch on the heath underlines this point. 

This qualification was, however, lost on his disciples and was far too subtle to use as 

a tool for ‘crowd control’. So it was that Paley’s ‘Natural Theology’ became a rich 

seam of examples illustrating perfect adaptation and the ‘Argument from Design’. 

The product of this mine were the nine volumes of the Bridgewater Treatises. 

Perfection is a difficult concept to apply to living organisms and its reality has 

usually been taken as an article of faith, based on the assumption that, since God had 

created all things, they could not be other than perfect. This assumption often flew in 

the face of evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, in the pre-Darwinian world all 

organs and organisms were assumed to have purpose or ‘Final Cause’ and this was 

sufficient to explain all structure and function. This teleological approach, as it was 

called, had begun to be perceived as sterile some thirty years before Darwin’s final 

demolition, but it left, supposedly, perfect adaptation without an explanation. Erasmus 

Darwin’s co-member of the ‘Lunar Society’, James Watt, could define perfection very 

precisely in respect to his steam 

engines. One cylinder, full of steam, 

condensing to a perfect vacuum 

would yield maximum work. It was 

neat and numerical and suggested a 

route for achieving this ideal in 

engineering terms. In fact, via the 

Carnot cycle, steam engine 

technology was to lead to the 

The earthworm’s challenge.

34 


discipline of thermodynamics; a discipline which, in the 1980s, began to shed new 

light on the organisation of living organisms. The perfection of buildings also had a 

mathematical definition. Leon Battista Alberti, in the fifteenth century, defined 

perfection in architecture as a geometric construction in which all elements are 

proportioned exactly. These proportions could, of course, be expressed mathematically 

as Euclidean ratios. On this definition, nothing could be added, diminished, or altered 

but for the worse. It could have been George Cuvier defining the body plan of one of 

his embranchments and closing the gates on transmutation and, consequently, on 

evolution. The problem with the concept of perfection is that it implies stasis; systems 

at, or close to, equilibrium. Living organisms are systems very far from equilibrium 

and do not behave like perfect engines and, unlike buildings, they have a life cycle. 

Jacob’s frog has no option but to be first a tadpole. Perfection, then, faced Darwin 

with three problems. First, was there any objective measure of perfection in living 

organisms? Second, how could a chancy process, such as Natural Selection, produce 

‘organs of extreme perfection’? How could that watchmaker have possibly been blind? 

Third, if organisms were indeed perfect, Cuvierian logic tells us that no further change 

is possible. Cuvier’s answer was, of course, catastrophism but, wedded as he was to 

Lyellian gradualism, this answer would not do for Darwin. How to answer and to 

reconcile these conflicts was Darwin’s life’s work and, in the absence of any known 

mechanism for heredity, his achievement is no less than breath-taking. 

Perfection, as we now realise, does not exist in the way that Paley, the authors of 

the Bridgewater Treatises and Darwin himself, at least for a time, believed. The eye, 

Darwin’s bete noire, is ‘jury rigged’, so are orchid flowers. Hiccups are the legacy of 

our aquatic ancestry, diabetes is a hangover from leaner times and surely a rotary 

heart is mechanically preferable to a reciprocating one. Indeed, the whole new discipline 

of Darwinian medicine is a scion of Darwin’s realisation that evolution, by Natural 

Selection, could not result in perfection but is only a mechanism for tracking 

environmental change given its inherited potential; remember those ‘ten thousand 

wedges’? Darwin well knew that Natural Selection was ‘Daily and hourly scrutinising, 

throughout the world, every variation;’ (Origin p.84). Furthermore those variations, 

although their causes were unknown to him, Darwin knew that they were expressed at 

all stages in the life cycle of an organism and that, therefore, the scope for Natural 

Selection to act was enormous. This resulted in ‘The Struggle for Existence’ being far 

more complex than his contemporaries ever realised, preferring, as we still do, 

Tennyson’s poetic, if simplistic and wholly misleading, ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’. 

.The power of Natural Selection and the resulting evolutionary divergence was very 

clear to Darwin but, he lamented, his contemporaries, even his staunchest allies, never 

really grasped the significance of it. Asa Gray even congratulated Darwin for 

reintroducing teleology and Lyell saw Natural Selection and the Principle of Divergence 

as alternatives! It was all too novel. Darwin’s arguments lay outside the accepted 

philosophical framework and yet the language available to him was derived from that 

very framework. His term ‘Natural Selection’, as Gillian Beer has pointed out was 

‘...poised on the edge of metaphor...’ (Beer p.xviii). 

Darwin had come a long way from Paley’s watch, whose perfection, or approach 

to it, could only be assessed in the final product. When Darlington warned, in 1951, 

that something was missing from the ‘New Synthesis’ he was quite right; with


population genetics, and its seductive mathematical underpinning, we had forgotten 

the organism and the relation between genotype and phenotype. Of course, Darwin 

did not, could not, use these terms but he was fully aware of the importance Natural 

Selection had for ontogeny. With the advent of ‘Evo-Devo’ Darlington’s missing part 

has been found, but of course, it was there all the time, lying quietly in Chapter XIII of 

the Origin. Perhaps, in this double-centenary year, we should all re-read the Origin 

with new eyes, without preconceptions, be open to Darwin’s plurality of thought and, 

above all, be thankful that Wallace wrote that letter and that the resulting publication 

wasn’t called ‘The Origin of Pigeons’. Who knows what treasures still lie there. 

Paley’s watch is probably still lying on that heath, as Darwin, late in life, showed 

that earthworm activity on heathland is poor (the pH is too low). It probably isn’t still 

ticking, it wasn’t perfect, after all, but if it were perhaps it would take us to the 

sesquicentenary of Darwin’s forgotten work on orchids in 2012. Who knows what 

revelations that might bring. 

This work is dedicated to my wife, Judith who has provided the commas, just as 

Emma did for Charles. 

SOURCES 

TITLE: Shakespeare’s Two Gentleman of Verona 1 Act III Sc.i. Valentine speaking of Sylvia. 

AMUNDSEN, R. (2005) The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots 

of Evo-Devo. Cambridge University Press. 

ARTIGAS, M., CLICK, T.F. and MARTINEZ (2006) Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican 

confronts Evolution 1877-1902. John Hopkins Univ. Press. Chap 7 deals with Mivart. 

BARLOW, N. (1958) The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Collins. All quotations are 

taken from this, the first complete version. 

BEER, G. (1983, 2000, 2009) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George 

Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction. Cambridge Univ. Press. 3rd Ed. 

CARROLL, S.B. (2006) The making of the fittest: DNA and the ultimate forensic record of 

evolution. Quercus. One of the best available works which links Darwin with modern 

genetics. 

CUNNINGHAM, A. (1981) Sydenham versus Newton: the Edinburgh fever dispute of the 

1690s between Andrew Brown and Archibald Pitcairne. Med. Hist. Suppl. no.l pp.71-98. 

DARWIN, C. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge Univ. Press. 

DARWIN, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species, facsimile of the First Edition. All quotes and 

pagination refer to this work. 

DESMOND, A. (1989) The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in 

Radical London. Univ. Chicago Press. 

GOULD, S.J. and LEWONTIN, R.C. (1979) The spandrels of San Marco and the 

Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. 

B 205 pp. 581-598. 

NICHOLLS, H. (2009) A Flight of Fancy. Nat. 457. no. 7231. Feb. 12th. pp.790-791. In this 

article the author poses the ‘if’ question: what if Murray had accepted the advice that the 

Origin “should have been entitled ‘The Origin of Pigeons’?” 

SPENCER, N. (2009) Darwin and God. SPCK.

36 


Darwin’s Lichens 

David J. Galloway, FLS 

Landcare Research, Private Bag 1930, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand 

(gallowayd@xtra.co.nz) 

Introduction 

In 1992-1993, I helped the late Prof. David L. Yudilevich (1930-2006) (see Mann 

2006) coordinate an international symposium, “Darwin and the Beagle in Chile: 

Evolution Today”, at the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile (29 September-1 

October 1993) as part of the ICSU General Assembly meetings held at that time in 

Santiago. The symposium was wide-ranging, covering the major themes of Geology, 

Palaeontology, Evolution & Genetics, Botany, Zoology, Ecology, Medicine & 

Psychology, Anthropology, History, Philosophy and Religion. To this symposium I 

contributed an account of Darwin’s lichens (Galloway 1993a). Although David 

Yudilevich later produced a fine book on Darwin in Chile (Yudilevich & Castro Le- 

Fort (1995), based very much on the Symposium and its associated Darwin Exhibition 

(to which the Linnean Society contributed a life-size copy of the Collier portrait of 

Darwin from the Society’s Meeting Room) which was assembled in the Patio Ignacio 

Domeyko of the University of Chile, none of the papers contributed to the Symposium 

were published, hence this account of Darwin’s lichens in a revised form in this his 

bicentennial year. 

How I first became aware of, and interested in, Darwin’s lichens is quite a diverting 

story. Early in 1973 when I began work on a New Zealand Lichen Flora at the then 

British Museum (Natural History), I was disappointed at not being able to find any of 

Banks and Solander’s New Zealand lichen specimens, even though the Slip Catalogue 

in the Botany Library indicated that they had collected a few lichens from New Zealand 

on the Endeavour voyage (Galloway 1998a). Peter James, then Head of the Lichen 

Section, suggested that I look in the Botany storeroom at the top of the western central 

tower above the Museum entrance, as he thought that there could be early, 

unincorporated material to be found there. Early material there certainly was, in crazily 

stacked and disintegrating cardboard boxes perched on rusting shelving under one of 

the large water tanks. Occasional leaks from the tanks over the years, plus debris from 

starling nests (a broken window pane had allowed easy entry for the birds!) contributed 

to the scene of mild devastation and chaos, almost more reminiscent of Miss Havisham’s 

dining room than a Museum storeroom. But what treasures were forthcoming! There 

I found the missing Banks and Solander lichens and a box marked “Darwin’s Lichens”. 

When I brought this box down to the Lichen Section Peter said disarmingly “Oh, I 

rather thought they must have been somewhere”! The box, evidently Henslow’s 

specimens that had been sent to Kew, contained a number of specimens on small 

pieces of yellow paper with inked annotations and also a full sheet of Sticta divulsa 

(Fig. 1) collected by Darwin from the Chonos Archipelago, that I was later to select as 

lectotype (Galloway 1992a: 97). But it was not until my first collecting visit to Chile 

in 1986, that I realised just how important these old abandoned Darwin lichen specimens 

might be.


Fig. 1. Darwin’s 1834 collection of Pseudocyphellaria divulsa from the 

Chonos Archipelago, southern Chile (BM)

38 


In order to set Darwin’s lichens in their correct historical and geographical 

perspective, a few basic questions should be considered. (1): What was known of 

lichens worldwide and who were the leading lichenologists in the early 1830s when 

Darwin was contemplating his forthcoming long voyage on the Beagle from 1832- 

1836? (Barlow 1945; Keynes 1988, 2002; Browne 1995); (2): What was known of the 

lichens of South America at the time of Darwin’s visit? (3): How much might Darwin 

have known about lichens at the time of the voyage? 

(1) As a student at Cambridge (1828-1831), Darwin was greatly influenced by the 

Professor of Botany, John Stevens Henslow, who was both his mentor and friend 

(Barlow 1967; Browne 1995; Walters & Stow 2001). Lichenology in Britain was then 

at a low ebb (Hawksworth & Seaward 1977; Laundon & Waterfield 2007). Three 

decades earlier, the Swedish lichenologist, Erik Acharius (1757-1819), Linnaeus’s 

last student (Kärnefelt & Frödén 2007), had set systematic lichenology on a bright 

new path when he segregated Linnaeus’s collective genus Lichen into smaller 

independent genera, consolidating his new arrangement in three important foundational 

books, the Methodus (Acharius 1803), Lichenographia Universalis (Acharius 1810) 

and the Synopsis methodica lichenum (Acharius 1810). His ideas were quickly taken 

up in Britain by Dawson Turner and William Borrer, and then W.J. Hooker (Hooker 

1829-1866; Turner & Borrer 1839; Hawksworth & Seaward 1977; Galloway 1981a, 

1988; Seaward 2002; Laundon & Waterfield 2007), but much less enthusiastically by 

James Edward Smith, who, while admiring Acharius’s knowledge and industry, would 

not subscribe to the new segregate genera. On receiving a copy of Acharius’s Methodus 

he wrote to Acharius in 1804 explaining his conservative position “… do not blame 

me if my opinion on speculative points differs sometimes from yours. Neither dare I 

change names so freely as you have done. I must keep in view those Laws of Linnaeus 

which are sanctioned by experience and founded in justice…It is easy enough to use 

new words. Genius appears best in using old ones properly…I regret that there should 

be a word in your excellent book that I cannot zealously defend as a friend ought: but 

I know we cannot all think alike in philosophy any more than in religion…” (Galloway 

1988: 165). 

Acharius’s world view of lichens in 1814 amounted to 906 species in 43 genera 

(Acharius 1814; Kärnefelt & Frödén 2007) and by the early 1830s, the number of 

species was slowly starting to grow, when the impetus for lichen taxonomy passed 

from Sweden to France and Germany, with the work of such lichenologists as Fée 

(1824-1837), Eschweiler (1824), Wallroth (1824) and Delise (1825a, 1825b) creating 

new names and opening up new vistas. But lichenology remained poised, waiting for 

a catalyst to open the still-closed book of Southern Hemisphere lichenology. As we 

shall see, Darwin was to be very much part of that necessary catalyst. 

(2) When the Beagle sailed from Plymouth on 27 December 1831 bound initially 

for southern South America via the Cape Verde Islands and Brazil, what in fact was 

known of the lichens of South America? Not a lot. From Commerson’s collections 

made from the Straits of Magellan in 1767, Jacquin (1781) described Lichen aurantiacoater 

[= Usnea aurantiaco-atra (Walker 1985: 62)] and L. antarcticum [= Nephroma 

antarcticum (White & James 1988)]. Cook’s three voyages yielded several collections 

from Banks & Solander, the Forsters & Sparrman and Anderson, but only one species


was named from these collections, George Forster’s Lichen berberinus [= 

Pseudocyphellaria berberina (Forster 1787; Galloway & James 1977; Galloway 

1981b)]. The Scottish botanist Archibald Menzies, Captain Colnett’s surgeon, spent 

17 days in New Year’s Harbour, Staten Island early in 1787 and during that time he 

collected 32 taxa in 19 genera (Galloway 1995b), with 5 of these subsequently being 

described by Acharius (1803). Delise (1825a, 1825b) named two species of Sticta 

from the southern zone, S. endochrysa [= Pseudocyphellaria endochrysa] from the 

Falkland Islands (see also Gaudichaud 1827) and Sticta faveolata [= P. faveolata] 

from the Straits of Magellan (Galloway & James 1986). Several tropical species are 

found in the works of Kunth (1822), Fée (1824) and Hooker (1829; Galloway 1995a), 

and that was pretty much the lichen record for South America. It is therefore very 

apparent just what a clean slate, in lichenological terms, Darwin had as a collector. 

(3) It is likely that Darwin would have known only very little about lichens when 

he boarded the Beagle. Perhaps he may have skimmed through the 5 th edition of James 

Edward Smith’s Botany textbook that Henslow used in his courses at Cambridge (see 

Walters & Stow 2001). This book – Introduction to Physiological and Systematical 

Botany – originally published early in the 19 th century (Smith 1807), discussed lichens 

as part of the Algae (as did Linnaeus) and although acknowledging the recent works 

of Acharius (Acharius 1799, 1803) Smith was cautious, if not suspicious, of the Swede’s 

radical ideas and terminology and maintained his conservative view of Lichens being 

classified in the collective genus Lichen (see also Smith & Sowerby 1790-1814; 

Galloway 1981a, 1988; Laundon 2005). The Beagle library had the 17-volume 

Dictionnaire Classique d’Histoire Naturelle edited by Bory de Saint-Vincent (1822- 

1831) on its shelves (Burkhardt & Smith 1985: 558-565), and in this work the account 

of Lichens was written by the Strasbourg lichenologist, Apollinaire Fée (Fée 1826) an 

altogether more progressive account. In the Dictionnaire essay, Fée adopted the system 

of classification used in his two-volume work on the lichen epiphytes of Cinchona 

bark and other trees with pharmaceutical properties (Fée 1824). His arrangement 

incorporated contemporary results of Fries (1821), Eschweiler (1824) and Wallroth 

(1824) and benefited from Fée’s own discussions with Bory, Delise, Dufour and 

Persoon. For its time, it would have been one of the most modern treatments of lichens 

available. In addition, the Dictionnaire also contained accounts of individual lichen 

genera compiled by Bory (often from his own collections and containing many 

novelties) and by Fée, so that Darwin, should he have felt the need to consult these, 

would have been reasonably well catered for in terms of what was known of non- 

European lichens. But that is not really saying very much, for in 1832 comparatively 

little was known of the lichens of the southern zone and the Pacific (Galloway 1985). 

It was still largely “terra incognita”, but Darwin and a little later, Joseph Hooker, were 

soon to change all that. 

Darwin’s lichen collections 

For most of the Beagle voyage Darwin was an industrious and conscientious 

collector (see Porter 1980, 1985, 1987: Browne 1995; Keynes 2002), so it is scarcely 

surprising that his collecting canvas should extend to lichens, especially in places 

(e.g. in Tierra del Fuego and in the dripping rainforests of Chiloe and the Chonos 

Archipelago) where they form prominent and characteristic components of the

40 


vegetation, a view encouraged by Henslow in a letter to Darwin written on 15 January 

1833 “…The Lichens are good things as scarcely any one troubles himself to send 

them home…” (Burkhardt & Smith 1985: 294; Porter 1987: 149). Darwin’s lichens 

were sent by Henslow to the mycologist M.J. Berkeley, Darwin noting in a letter to 

Joseph Hooker on 11 January 1844 “…My cryptogamic collection was sent to Berkeley; 

it was not large; I do not believe he has yet published an account but he wrote to me 

some year ago that he had described & mislaid all his descriptions. W d it not be well 

for you to put yourself in communication with him; as otherwise some things will 

perhaps be twice laboured over. – My best (though poor) collection of the Cryptogam. 

was from the Chonos Islands…” (Burkhardt & Smith 1987: 2). 

On 29 January 1844 Hooker wrote to Darwin “…M r Berkeley was with us shortly 

before your letter arrived, & I gave him all my Fungi, he has returned me for M r 

Henslow your Lichens, which he had; but said nothing about the other orders in his 

possession…”(Burkhardt & Smith 1987: 6). Thus, Darwin’s lichens went to Kew 

where Hooker made extensive use of them during the preparation of his Flora 

Antarctica, the first part of his Botany of the Antarctic Voyage. Hooker enlisted the 

help of the Irish lichenologist, Thomas Taylor for determination of his lichen collections 

from the southern zone (Hooker & Taylor 1844), and Taylor later described several 

new species from Darwin’s Beagle collections (Taylor 1847 – see below). 

Taylor’s lichens, which include duplicates of some Darwin collections, are held in 

the Farlow Herbarium of Harvard University (FH), but the bulk of Darwin’s lichens 

are to be found scattered through the General Collection, and in the unincorporated 

collections of the Lichen Section of the Natural History Museum in London (BM). An 

additional, and as yet untapped, source of Darwin lichens is also in the Natural History 

Museum. On Darwin’s rock specimens held in the basement corridor drawers of the 

Department of Mineralogy, many of them from remote places never visited (or likely 

to visited) by a lichenologist, there are sometimes mosaics of lichens present. These 

Darwin specimens would richly repay a lichenologist’s attention. Notes on the various 

Darwin lichen collections that I was able to find in the BM between 1973 and 1994, 

supplemented with relevant accounts from the literature are given below. 

1. Fernando de Noronha: On 19 February 1832, the Beagle was off Fernando de 

Noronha, Darwin noting in his Diary “... An hour before sunset Fernando was clearly 

visible – it appears an extraordinary place, – there is one lofty mountain that at a 

distance looks as if it were overhanging…”. The next day Darwin spent a few hours 

on the island, commenting his Diary “…I spent a most delightful day in wandering 

about the woods. – The whole island is one forest, & is so thickly intertwined that it 

requires great exertion to crawl along….I am glad that I have seen these islands, I 

shall enjoy the greater wonders [of the tropical rainforest] all the more from having a 

guess what to look for…” (Keynes 1988: 39). And in his Journal he noted “…The 

whole island is covered with wood; but from the dryness of the climate there is no 

appearance of luxuriance…” (Darwin 1845). From the highest peak he collected the 

basidiolichen Dictyonema glabratum (Berkeley 1842: 445 – recorded as Cora pavonia 

– see also Porter 1987: 158). 

2. Brazil: on 5 April 1832 the Beagle landed at Rio de Janeiro and stayed there 

until 5 July. Darwin’s Brazilian lichen collections [the specimens seen in BM have a


printed label “from J.S. Henslow” to which Henslow has added in pencil “Rio Jan . . 

May 1832” and a collection number] include the following taxa: Coenogonium, 

Diploschistes, Pseudocyphellaria aurora (Galloway 1993b), Ramalina usnea [Henslow 

No. 493] and Teloschistes flavicans [Henslow No. 486]. 

3. Uruguay: On 28 July 1832, Darwin wrote in his Diary of a visit to Monte 

Video, “…Landed early in the morning on the Mount. This little hill is about 450 feet 

high & being by far the most elevated land in the country gives the name Monte 

Video. – The view from the summit is one of the most uninteresting I ever beheld. – 

Not a tree or a house or trace of cultivation give cheerfulness to the scene…yet there 

is a charm in the unconfined feeling of walking over the boundless turf plain…” 

(Keynes 1988: 85-86). 

From Monte Video Darwin collected two lichens. Both were later described by 

the Irish lichenologist, Thomas Taylor (1847 – see also Sayre 1982, 1987) as Parmelia 

fistulata Taylor and Usnea densirostra Taylor, and are well-known taxa in the Uruguyan 

lichen mycobiota (Osorio 1972, 1992, 2009). Parmelia fistulata has had a somewhat 

complicated nomenclatural life, subsequently being transferred to the genera 

Everniastrum and Concamerella before being recently assigned to Parmotrema (Blanco 

et al. 2005: 157). Usnea densirostra, a saxicolous lichen, is the only species of Usnea 

to have a common name in Uruguay (Osorio 1982), being known there as “Yerba de la 

Piedra” (Stone Grass, or Herb of the Rock). In 1987 for the Sesquicentenary of the 

National Museum of Natural History in Montevideo, the Government of Uruguay 

issued the first postage stamp commemorating a lichen, none other than Usnea 

densirostra, the Yerba de la Piedra first collected by Darwin 155 years before. The 

same species is also used as a monitor of heavy metal pollution in semi-arid 

environments in Argentina (Bernasconi et al. 2000), something Darwin would never 

have dreamed of! 

4. Tierra del Fuego: The Beagle anchored in Good Success bay off the coast of 

Tierra del Fuego on 16 December 1832 and left for the Falkland Islands on 26 February 

1833 (Burkhardt & Smith 1985: 540). It was here, among the channels and islands of 

the uttermost south of South America that lichens made their biggest impact on Darwin 

since they are often conspicuous elements of both the coastal and alpine vegetation. 

Darwin would also have been conscious of the fact that Tierra del Fuego had seen a 

succession of botanists for at least 60 years preceding him, from Commerson through 

Banks and Solander to the Forsters, Sparrman, Anderson and Menzies (Moore 1983) 

– it was not at all “terra ingonita” even for lichens. But it was undoubtedly stimulating, 

dangerous and exciting country to be exploring. In his Diary, writing of the dense 

Fuegian coastal forest Darwin noted “…Their curved & bent trunks are coated with 

lichens, as their roots are with moss…” (Keynes 1988: 126), and further, “…The 

appearance of these forests brought to my mind the artificial woods at Mount 

Edgecombe: the greenness of the bushes & the twisted forms f the trees, covered with 

Lichens, in both places are caused by strong prevalent winds & great dampness of 

climate…” (Porter 1987: 166). 

All of Darwin’s lichen collections so far seen, are labelled from “South part of 

Tierra del Fuego 1833. C. Darwin”. His collections comprise the following: Cladia 

aggregata, Pseudocyphellaria berberina [Henslow Nos 472 pr.p., 473, 474 pr.p.], P.

42 


freycinetii [Henslow No. 472 pr.p., 474 pr.p.] (Galloway 1992a) from the forest, and 

Usnea auratiaco-atra from rocks. This last lichen (Fig. 2), is characteristic of exposed 

rocks above treeline in southern South America (Walker 1985), where it often forms 

extensive swards. It was vividly described from the Falklands and southern South 

America by Joseph Hooker (1847: 520-521) whose perceptive comments are still 

well worth reading, and it was undoubtedly the lichen that Darwin referred to in his 

Diary entry for 20 December 1832, when he wrote: “…I was very anxious to ascend 

some of the mountains in order to collect the Alpine plants & insects. – The one which 

I partly ascended yesterday was the nearest, & Capt. FitzRoy thinks it is certainly the 

one which M r Banks ascended, although it cost him the lives of two of his men & very 

nearly that of D r Solander… I had imagined the higher I got, the more easy the ascent 

would be, the case however was reversed…I hailed with joy the rocks covered with 

Lichens & soon was at the very summit. – The view was very fine, especially of 

Staten Land [where Menzies had made a rich collection of lichens in 1787 (Galloway 

& Groves 1987; Galloway 1995b)] & the neighbouring hills; Good Success Bay with 

the little Beagle were close beneath me…” (Keynes 1988: 126). 

5. Falkland Islands: The Beagle visited the Falkland Island twice, in 1833 from 1 

March until 6 April, and again in 1834 from 10 March until 8 April (Darwin 1845; 

Godley 1965; Keynes 1979, 1988; Burkhardt & Smith 1985). Darwin described the 

country in his Journal as “…An undulating land, with a desolate and wretched aspect, 

is everywhere covered by a peaty soil and wiry grass, of one monotonous brown 

colour…” (Darwin 1845), and in his Diary for 3 March “…Took a long walk; this side 

of the Island is very dreary… The whole landscape from the uniformity of the brown 

color, has an air of extreme desolation…” (Keynes 1988: 145). From a stay on the 

Fig. 2. Darwin’s 1833 collection of Usnea aurantiaco-atra from Tierra del Fuego (BM)


islands of 66 days, Darwin collected only two lichens, both from Berkeley Sound [the 

labels give as locality data “Berkley [sic] Sound, Falkland Island, March 1833, C. 

Darwin”], Pseudocyphellaria crocata [Henslow No. 498], growing in grassland, and 

Ramalina terebrata from coastal rocks. 

6. Punta Tres Montes and the Chonos Archipelago: In a letter to his sister Catherine, 

from Valparaiso on 8 November 1834, Darwin wrote “…Hurra! Hurra! It is fixed the 

Beagle shall not go one mile South of Cape Tres Montes (about 200 miles South of 

Chiloe) & from that point to Valparaiso will be finished in about 5 months. We shall 

examine the Chonos archipelago, entirely unknown, & the curious sea behind Chiloe. 

For me it is glorious; Cape Tres Montes is the most Southern point where there is 

much geological interest, as there the modern beds end…” (Barlow 1945: 110; Keynes 

1979: 243; Burkhardt & Smith (1985: 418). From an anchorage close to Punta Tres 

Montes on the western tip of the Taitao Peninsula at latitude 47ºS, Darwin wrote in 

his Diary “…the land in all these islands is next thing to impassable; the coast is 

rugged & so very uneven that it is one never ceasing climb to attempt to pass that way; 

as for the woods, I have said enough about them; I shall never forget or forgive them; 

my face, hands, shin-bones all bear witness what maltreatment I have received in 

simply trying to penetrate into their forbidden recesses…” (Keynes 1988: 274). Here 

he collected Stereocaulon ramulosum [Henslow No. 471 – recorded by Hooker (1847: 

529)]. This was the first lichen collection from this remote part of southern Chile, and 

it was to be another 156 years before lichens were collected from this area when, in 

1990, Raleigh International investigated the Taitao Peninsula and Laguna San Rafael 

and a specific regional lichen collection was made (Galloway 1992b). 

From anchorages further north among the islands of the Chonos Archipelago 

Darwin collected the following lichens: Leifidium tenerum [Henslow No. 485 – 

recorded as Sphaerophoron tenerum by Hooker (1847: 530)], Menegazzia magellanica 

[Henslow No. 477 – recorded as Parmelia diatrypa by Hooker (1847: 533)], 

Pseudocyphellaria divulsa (Fig. 1) [Henslow No. 476 – (this collection is the type of 

Sticta divulsa (Taylor 1847; Galloway 1991a: 236; 1992a: 97-98; 2008: 443. Recorded 

as Sticta billardieri by Hooker (1847: 527], P. flavicans, P. nitida and Usnea chilensis 

[recorded as U. florida by Hooker (1847: 522)]. From what he called Midship Bay, 

Darwin noted, “…Here Cryptogamic flora reached its perfection… All the Cryptogamio 

were gathered in 5 minutes and within a space of 210 yards square. A most wonderful 

profusion…” (Porter 1987: 179). 

7. Iquique: On 12 July 1835, the Beagle anchored at the then Peruvian port of 

Iquique, Darwin noting in his Diary “…The coast was here formed by a great steep 

wall of rock about 2000 feet high; the town containing about a thousand inhabitants, 

stands on a little plain of loose sand at the foot of this barrier. The whole is utterly 

desolate… At this season of the year, a heavy bank of clouds parallel to the ocean 

seldom rises above the wall of coast rocks. – The aspect of the place was most gloomy…” 

(Keynes 1988: 344). The following day Darwin wrote “… On the coast mountains at 

about 2000 ft elevation, the bare sand was strewed over with an unattached greenish 

Lichen, in form like those which grow on old stumps: this in a few spots was sufficiently 

abundant to tinge the sand when seen from a little distance, of a yellowish color. I also 

saw another minute species of Lichen on the old bones. And where the first kind was

44 


lying, there were in the clefts of the rocks a few Cacti. These are supported by the dense 

clouds which generally rest on the land at this height… This is the first true desart I 

have ever seen; the effect on me was not impressive…” (Keynes 1988: 345-346). 

Darwin’s unknown soil lichen is most likely Vermalicina tigrina (Spujt 1995, 

1996), described by Gerhard Follmann as Ramalina tigrina (Follmann 1966), 131 

years after its initial discovery, although no specimen of it has been found attributable 

to Darwin. His observations on the relationships of cloud, cacti and lichens, are the 

first I know of, of the “camanchaca” (the South American vernacular name for the 

cold coastal fog that sweeps in from the Pacific to drape the coastal ranges and their 

“cactus forests”) and its influence on lichen distribution in these fascinating fog-oases 

that are characteristic of the north of Chile and found also in Peru, Baja California and 

Namibia. Although in recent years, the characteristic North Chilean coastal lichen 

mycobiota has been in alarming decline (Follmann 1995), Darwin’s “lichen oasis” 

was rediscovered by Gerhard Follmann in the early 1990s when a few SW-facing 

clefts of the outer ridges of the coastal cordillera between 800 and 900 m, revealed 

large mats of soil lichens developed between sparse skeletons of the columnar cactus 

Eulychnia iquiquensis. Here, Darwin’s greenish lichen, V. tigrina, associates with 

Heterodermia leucomela, Ramalina celastri, R. cochlearis, R. peruviana, R. pilulifera, 

Roccellina suffruticosa and Xanthomendoza mendozae (Follmann 1994). 

8. Peru: The Beagle anchored at Callao on 19 July 1835 and Darwin stayed in 

Lima for 6 weeks (Burkhardt & Smith 1985: 541), during which time he visited the 

island of San Lorenzo. In a letter to Joseph Hooker on 16 April 1845 he wrote “…The 

enclosed little lichens, came from near the summit of most barren isl d of San Lorenzo 

off Lima: what on earth made me think them worth collecting I know not – please 

throw them away…” (Burkhardt & Smith 1987: 177). To this Hooker replied on 28 

April 1845 “…The St Lorenzo Lichen I can make nothing of but have sent it to D r 

Taylor, with no hopes however: as I could not find fructification. You notice somewhere 

a blown-about-Lichen on the Andes, at Quillota is it? – it is an Usnea perhaps the 

Antarctic U. melaxantha but the specimens are very imperfect …” (Burkhardt & Smith 

1987: 183). This refers to the lichen Ramalina tigrina, that Darwin had found on sand 

above Iquique (see above). 

9. Galapagos Islands: The Beagle stayed at the Galapagos Islands from 15 

September until 20 October 1835 (Burkhardt & Smith 1985: 541). In his Journal Darwin 

noted “…The tortoises which live on those islands where there is no water… feed 

chiefly on the succulent cactus. …and likewise a pale green filamentous lichen (Usnea 

plicata), that hangs in tresses from the boughs of trees…” (Darwin 1845). Joseph 

Hooker lists three lichens from the Galapagos all collected by Darwin viz. Usnea 

plicata [= U. articulata], Borrera leucomelos [= Heterodermia leucomela] and Sticta 

aurata [= Pseudocyphellaria aurata] (Hooker 1851). 

Darwin’s place in South American lichenology 

The great South American traveller and observer, Alexander Humboldt (1769- 

1859), makes a fascinating comparison of Darwin with George Forster as a gifted 

observer of nature as shown in the following extract from Cosmos, “…I have here 

attempted to indicate the direction in which the power possessed by the observer of 

representing what he has seen, the animating influence of the descriptive element, and


the multiplication and enlargement of views opened to us on the vast theatre of natural 

forces, may all serve as means of encouraging the scientific study of nature, and 

enlarging its domain. The writer who in our German literature, according to my opinion, 

has most vigorously and successfully opened this path, is my celebrated teacher and 

friend, George Forster. Through him began a new era of scientific voyages, the aim of 

which was to arrive at a knowledge of the comparative history and geography of 

different countries. Gifted with delicate aesthetic feelings, and retaining a vivid 

impression of the picture with which Tahiti and the other then happy islands of the 

Pacific had filled his imagination, as in recent times that of Charles Darwin, George 

Forster was the first to depict in pleasing colours the changing stages of vegetation, 

the relations of climate and of articles of food in their influence on the civilisation of 

mankind, according to differences of original descent and habitation. All that can give 

truth, individuality, and distinctiveness to the delineation of exotic nature is united in 

his works…” (Humboldt 1849: 436-437). 

Darwin has an established place in the annals of South American lichenology both 

for his collections, and for the observations that he made upon some of these, from 

Brazil, Uruguay, Tierra del Fuego and the west coast of Chile from the Taitao Peninsula 

to the Atacama Desert. It is the Chilean mycobiota especially to which Darwin’s 

collections are foundational (Galloway 1993a). Indeed, Darwin’s lichen collections 

from the Chonos Archipelago, Chiloe and from the Atacama are amongst the first from 

these regions and were not repeated until the 1960s and 1970s with the work of the 

lichenologists Gerhard Follmann in the north, and Henry Imshaug in the south. 

He was, however, not the first 19 th century collector of Chilean lichens. The Italian 

physician and traveller, Carlo Guiseppe Bertero collected lichens in 1827 from Chile 

and from Juan Fernández in 1830, while the enterprising Devonshire sail-maker, 

naturalist, explorer and merchant Hugh Cuming who had settled in Valparaíso in 1819, 

collected lichens on a trip to Chiloé in 1827, among them the type of Sticta nitida 

(Taylor 1847), a distinctive Valdivian lichen epiphyte now known as Pseudocyphellaria 

nitida (Galloway 1992a). Nevertheless, Darwin’s South American lichen discoveries 

are important in the history of South American lichenology in that they form a bridge 

between the earliest collectors in the region; Handisyd in the 17 th century (Moore 

1983; Galloway 1985, 1991a, 1998b, 2008); and Commerson (Galloway 1985, 1992a, 

1998b, 2008), Banks and Solander (Galloway 2008), George Forster (Galloway & 

James 1977, Galloway 1985, 1991a, 1992a, 1998b, 2008) and Archibald Menzies 

(Galloway & Groves 1987; Galloway 1995b) in the 18 th century, and the period of 

intense interest and collection that came 20 years after Darwin’s visit, with the work 

of Joseph Hooker, Claudio Gay, Willibald Lechler and others. Moreover, Darwin was 

generations ahead of his time in his observations on biodiversity of cryptogams, made 

in his journal, diary and notebooks (Darwin 1845; Keynes 1979, 1988, 2000; Porter 

1980, 1982, 1985, 1987), a point that should be stressed. 

Darwin’s lichen collections were of vital importance to Joseph Hooker in his studies 

on the southern zone, and he used several Darwin specimens as illustrations for the 

second part of his Flora Antarctica (Hooker 1847). One such, is the glorious coloured 

engraving of Pseudocyphellaria freycinetii made by Walter Hood Fitch from Darwin’s 

collection from Tierra del Fuego (Fig. 3). As a small digression, the pattern plate used

46 


for this illustration I found in the reprint storeroom of Wheldon & Wesley in the early 

1980s in one of the outbuildings of Lytton Lodge. The late Howard Kirke Swann gave 

me the key to the barn where the reprints were housed and told me “to have a fossick”. 

Beside finding a number of very useful lichen reprints, I came across several brown 

paper parcels, one of which was untied and had a coloured engraving, which I 

recognised, projecting from it. On further examination, these proved to be the original 

“pattern plates” for J.D. Hooker’s The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage. When I told 

Howard about these, he told me that they were undoubtedly part of the bankrupt stock 

of Lovell Reeve that had come into their possession when their business was established. 

I suggested that the then Botany Department Librarian, Judith Diment, should look at 

the plates with a view to purchasing them for the British Museum (Natural History) 

Fig. 3. W.H. Fitch’s hand-coloured engraving (pattern plate) of Darwin’s 1833 

collection of Pseudocyphellaria freycinetii from Tierra del Fuego 

(original in BM, Botany Department Library)


and so, one memorable autumn afternoon, Judith and I went through the parcels and 

discovered the complete collection of pattern plates, which Howard offered to the 

Museum at a very favourable price. As far as the lichen plates go, many of them have 

marginal annotations by both Joseph Hooker and Churchill Babington the author of 

the lichen sections of Flora Novae Zelandiae and Flora Tasmaniae (Galloway 1991b), 

as directions to the colourists for getting just the required shading or colour for a 

particular lichen. The pattern plates are now boxed and held in the Botany Library of 

the Natural History Museum. 

The mycologist Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803-1889) who had earlier studied 

Darwin’s fungi (Berkeley 1842), wrote of Darwin “…a writer whom I have no 

hesitation, so far as my own judgement goes, in considering as by far the greatest 

observer of our age…” (Berkeley 1869). Darwin’s natural successor as an observer of 

southern South American cryptogams and their habitats was Carl Skottsberg (1880- 

1963) who followed Darwin 70 years later (Moore 1983; Marticorena & Rodríguez 

1995; Tibell 1999). 

Interestingly, and by way of conclusion, one of Darwin’s schoolboy friends in 

1817 at Mr Case’s primary day school in Shrewsbury, William Allport Leighton (1805- 

1889), also a Botany student at Cambridge under Henslow, later became the leading 

British lichenologist of his day, publishing a Flora of Shropshire in 1841, which he 

dedicated to Henslow, and later his magisterial Lichen Flora of Great Britain (Leighton 

1871) which ran to three editions. Leighton appears early in Darwin’s autobiography 

in the following remembrance “…One little event during this year [1817] has fixed 

itself very firmly in my mind, and I hope that it has done so from my conscience 

having been afterwards sorely troubled by it; it is curious as showing that apparently 

I was interested at this early age in the variability of plants! I told another little boy (I 

believe it was Leighton, who afterwards became a well-known Lichenologist and 

botanist) that I could produce variously coloured Polyanthuses and Primroses by 

watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, 

and had never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much 

given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of 

causing excitement…” (Barlow 1958: 23). 

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Obituaries 

Leaford Patrick FLS (1934-2009) 

Member of Council of the Linnean Society of London 1999-2003 

It is with great sadness that we report the death of biologist and museum curator 

Leaford Patrick on Friday 6 th February 2009. Pre-deceased in December 2008 by his 

devoted wife Jeanne, Leaford is survived by his beloved daughters Anne and Kay, 

grandchildren Joe, Marcus, Jed and Cleo, niece Sonia and older sister Norma. 

Leaford was born on 4 th October 1934 in Kingston, Jamaica, to George and Adeline 

Patrick. Precociously concerned to explore the world of science and culture, Leaford 

aged seven often visited the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston to use the library and 

admire the museum collections. His pleasant, bright and enquiring nature captured 

the attention of Deputy Director Mr. Ron Bengey and Assistant Director Mr. Verity, 

both of whom became academic mentors. Leaford boldly questioned his first biology 

teacher, Father Arthur Hennessy of St George’s College, over perceived biological 

issues relating to the virgin birth of Jesus, thus beginning what was to become a lifelong 

personal debate over ‘science versus faith’. 

Family funds to advance Leaford’s education remained scarce and, while a teenager, 

he found work as a fisherman, developing a wide interest in marine life. Despite 

demands of work, he maintained his close association with the Institute; gladly stepping 

in to voluntarily assist Conservator and Picture Restorer Ann Clapp in combating 

devastation to the collections resulting from hurricane ‘Charlie’ in 1951. This inspired 

ambitions for a career in museums involving artefact and specimen preservation. An 

early leaning towards botany was evident, with visits to botanical gardens including 

Castelton, Chinchona Plantation and Hope Garden. A Botany Department was 

established at the Institute under George Proctor and Leaford eagerly assisted in its 

development and in expeditionary fieldwork, where he had a passion for the study of 

indigenous grasses. This led to the production of a work on The Grasses of Jamaica 

and Leaford became a Member of the Geological Society of Jamaica in 1953. 

In 1956 Leaford travelled to Britain to pursue his thirst for knowledge, where he 

gained a post in the University of Oxford’s Zoology Department as a trainee Technical 

Assistant. Leaford worked for the Linacre Professor, Sir Alister Hardy FRS (1896- 

1985) and other eminent Oxford zoologists including entomologist Dr Edmund Brisco 

Ford FRS (1901-1988) and Dr Arthur J. Cain FRS (1921-1999). The relationship with 

Hardy prospered, re-kindling Leaford’s interest in the sea, fish and fisheries which 

was Hardy’s specialism. Leaford remained in Oxford for two years, returning in 1958 

to work in the Institute of Jamaica under Director Bernard Lewis and becoming 

progressively more interested in zoology. Between 1961 and 1962 he visited the 

University of Georgia where he studied ichthyology. In 1962 he returned to Oxford, 

where he worked in the University’s Museum of Zoology, curated by Arthur Cain. 

There he prepared exhibits on Darwinian evolution and gained the Technical Certificate 

of the Museums Association. 

Leaford was recruited by the Horniman Museum & Gardens in 1963, eventually 

becoming Deputy Keeper of Natural History. He remained here until his retirement in


1999. Leaford spent many years 

curating the collections and preparing, 

installing new natural history exhibits, 

utilising his great breadth of skills 

acquired in geology, palaeontology, 

botany, zoology, physical anthropology 

and educational interpretation. 

I first met Leaford when I joined the 

Horniman Museum in 1985. We 

became close colleagues and personal 

friends, collaborating on curious and 

interesting projects including the 

refurbishment and redisplay of the 

famous Horniman Walrus. This was 

created in Victorian times without full 

knowledge of the appearance of the 

live animal, resulting in a comically 

over-stuffed but much-loved 

taxidermy mount! We worked 

together on many temporary public 

exhibitions such as Leeches to Lasers 

Leaford Patrick c. 2001. 

– a bio-medical display run in 

conjunction with King’s College Medical School. Much to the excitement and 

amusement of local schoolchildren, this featured an animated gin-swilling Victorian 

nurse and living leeches (Hirudo medicinalis). 

Leaford and I steadily catalogued and helped conserve the large specimen 

collections in ‘Dreadnought’, a vast Greenwich storehouse. It pleased us that we 

managed to rescue significant collections that had been ‘at risk’ and incorporate these 

in the Horniman Collections. We also worked in partnership with the Greater London 

Ecology Unit, London Wildlife Trust and the Manpower Services Commission to 

establish a large Horniman-based team of university graduates to survey wild animals, 

Leaford Patrick c 1961 with the staff of the Zoology Department, 

University of Oxford.

54 


plants and natural habitats south of the Thames. From this survey, we identified areas 

of ‘social cum environmental deprivation’ and acted to protect the scientifically 

important Sydenham Hill Wood from building development. In 1990 we collaborated 

on our last project: Living Waters – an Aquarium for the Future, the first in the world 

to be dedicated entirely to issues in aquatic conservation. This was a complete reworking 

of the original Horniman Museum Aquarium & Vivarium established under 

the aegis of Victorian naturalist and marine biologist Philip Henry Gosse FRS (1810- 

1888), who actually invented the word ‘aquarium’ and founded the first ever public 

aquarium at Regents Park Zoo, 1854. 

Leaford met his future wife Jeanne Pruce in 1962, while he was volunteering at 

the Camberwell Association with Robin Guthrie who convened a Board on Race 

Relations. Jeanne was Secretary to the Association and looked after the welfare of 

overseas students and visitors. Leaford was a handsome, well-dressed, polite young 

man and on meeting Jeanne there was instant mutual attraction. Jeanne’s father was 

Labour Party Councillor Ernest Pruce, a distinguished political figure in south London. 

Leaford told me that he proposed marriage to Jeanne on a visit to her family house. 

She was keen to accept but he would have to first seek the approval of her father, who 

was at that moment in the garden chopping wood with a large axe. Inter-racial marriages 

were at that time uncommon and Leaford was naturally apprehensive in approaching 

Ernest, not quite knowing what to expect. Plucking up courage he said “Sir, I would 

like to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage … and, of course, help you chop 

wood.” Ernest looked at him closely, handed him the axe and then, with a beaming 

smile, enquired if they had set a date. The couple married in April 1965 and, before 

the wedding, Leaford formally converted to Roman Catholicism but continued his 

lifetime struggle in balancing religious and scientific convictions, particularly in relation 

to Darwinian evolution. 

Always hugely public spirited and generous with his time, Leaford gave voluntary 

service to many boards from 1970 onwards, to which roles he brought a calm dignity 

and natural gravitas, which earned respect. These notably included The Inner London 

Executive Council, The South East Thames Regional Health Authority, The Lambeth 

Southwark and Lewisham Area Health Authority and Family Planning Clinic, The 

Camberwell Health Authority Community Board and Trust and the Family Health 

Service Authority. He was elected as an Associate Member of King’s College Hospital 

Healthcare (1991-1992) and as a Mental Health Act Manager for West Lambeth 

Healthcare (1995-1999). He served alongside Dr Keith Maybury VPLS and Professor 

Brian Gardiner PPLS as a Member of Council of the North of England Zoological 

Society (2000-2001). Following his longstanding contributions to natural history, he 

was elected as a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London on 6 th February 1997 and as 

a Council Member 1999-2003. 

Leaford was a keen artist and his paintings demonstrate a certain genius, charm 

and spirituality. Particular favourites of mine are his endearing rendition of a ‘White 

Horse’ and, above all, his ‘Brotherly Love’, which shows the two of us under the 

famous portrait of Charles Darwin in the Linnean Society’s Lecture Room. 

GORDON MCGREGOR REID PPLS


Margaret Elizabeth Varley FLS (1918-2009) 

An appreciation of the life of Peggy Varley (née Brown) 

Decades ago a visiting American zoologist wanted to photograph ‘Dr ME Brown’ 

reputed to have tutored 70% of the UK Professors of Zoology earlier in their careers, 

either at Cambridge, London or Oxford Universities. Expecting to find an elderly 

man, he was very surprised to be introduced to the ever-smiling Peggy Brown. Peggy 

Brown, as she was then known, was born in India in 1918, where safaris on elephants 

with her father, a District Officer in the Indian Civil Service, sparked her interest in 

wildlife. From six years old she was sent to live in England where, from Malvern 

Girls College, in 1937 with a scholarship to Girton College Cambridge, she went to 

the Zoology Department to study Natural Sciences under Dr Sidnie M. Manton FRS, 

who became a lifelong friend and fellow enthusiast for breeding cats. Her professor, 

James Grey, had an experimental approach to solving biological problems and Peggy’s 

PhD on the growth of brown trout – an early study on how fish behaviour affects 

growth – led her to a lifelong interest in fish physiology and behaviour and established 

her reputation in these fields. 

Several junior teaching jobs in Cambridge enabled her to complete her PhD. During 

that period, in 1941, when the Freshwater Biological Association was exploring ways 

in which the yield of edible fish from freshwater sources could be used to augment 

wartime food supplies, Barton Worthington engaged Peggy to carry out tank 

experiments on eels at the FBA laboratory in Wray Castle on Lake Windermere. In 

1942 I was appointed to 

continue this work, and thus 

began a lifetime friendship and 

travels to study fishes with 

Peggy. In 1950-51 she spent her 

sabbatical year working at the 

East African Fisheries Research 

Organization, living with me in 

Jinja, Uganda. Here she 

Peggy Varley with a tray of 

haplochromines aboard the 

RV Ethelwyn Trewavas on 

Lake Malawi in 1991.

56 


researched growth rates of Lake Victoria’s haplochromine cichlid fishes, and also 

advised on the trout stocked in the highland steams of Kenya and Uganda. En route to 

the Kenya coast to look at tilapia ponds and marine fishes we climbed Mount 

Kilimanjaro. Years later we continued our cichlid studies on Lake Malawi (1991) and 

in Brazil (1995) when attending the International Limnological Congress. 

In 1951 Peggy moved to Kings College London as Lecturer in Vertebrate Zoology 

until her marriage in 1955 to entomologist Professor George Varley prompted a move 

to Oxford. Here she was welcomed as Demonstrator in the Zoology and Comparative 

Anatomy Department at the University from 1959 to 1964 and in 1962 joined the 

teaching staff at St Hilda’s College, becoming a supernumerary Fellow in 1963. In 

Oxford the Varleys lived in an ionic house designed by former professor of zoology 

Walter Garstang, later the home of Alastair Hardy. This remained Peggy’s base, with 

many visitors, until she died at home in July 2009 aged 90. 

Peggy’s research into tilapia as a food fish continued during the 1960s. Her busy 

life, in addition to teaching zoology and producing a daughter and son, included editing 

the two volume treatise The Physiology of Fishes. She also wrote books on The Trout 

with Winifred Frost of the Freshwater Biological Association (Collins New Naturalist, 

1967) and another on British Freshwater Fishes and, in collaboration with Manton, a 

widely used dissection manual. As an authority on fish growth and culture she was an 

active consultant to the Salmon and Trout Association, which brought a stream of 

fishes for autopsy to their home. She also assisted George Varley with his entomological 

work until he died in 1983. 

In 1969 Peggy was appointed Senior Lecturer, then Reader in Biology, at the 

newly formed Open University, Milton Keynes. This OU team designed the pioneer 

courses for the ‘university of the air’ and their television programmes on ecology and 

other aspects of biology, with excellent accompanying texts, showed Peggy’s 

communicating skills to a whole new audience of students. A wider public also 

appreciated the TV programmes – for example a memorable one on Sidnie Manton’s 

genetic work to produce the new ‘colour point’ breed of cats, enlivened by kittens 

scampering all over the studio. The job involved presenting TV programmes at 

Alexandra Palace in North London and frequent travel to Milton Keynes, where she 

trained many new recruits in the art of writing OU courses. An example of her work 

with the OU’s dispersed and very disparate students was the study of melanism in 

peppered moths developed for the first science foundation course in 1971. Discoveries 

by students were of sufficient importance to merit publication in the US journal Science 

(1986). 

Peggy was a long time member of the Linnean Society, a very active Chairman of 

the Berks, Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust (BBOWT), a member of the Natural 

Environment Research Council, The Freshwater Biological Association and many 

other bodies. Her greatest legacy was from her excellent teaching skills and with her 

happy disposition she greatly enriched the lives of a wide circle of friends and 

colleagues. 

RO LOWE-M C CONNELL FLS


Christopher John Humphries 

(1947-2009) 

With Chris Humphries’ death on 31 st July 2009, systematics in general, and the 

Linnean Society in particular, has lost one of its most influential personalities. As 

demonstrated at his funeral, his passing has been mourned, and he is greatly missed. 

Christopher John Humphries was 

born in Derby on 29 th April 1947. He 

attended grammar school in Etwall, 

but left at 16 to work at Bass’s 

brewery. Encouraged by their chief 

scientist, he studied at Derby 

Technical College and then 

University of Kingston-upon-Hull, 

graduating in 1969 with BSc Honours 

in Botany. He studied for his Ph.D, 

awarded in 1973 for “A taxonomic 

study of the genus Argyranthemum”, 

with Vernon Heywood at Reading. In 

1969 Chris met Marilyn Shephard, 

and they married in 1971. They had 

two children, Ben, now an architect, 

and Marie, a photographer. 

In 1972 Chris joined the British 

Museum (Natural History) as an 

assistant curator in the Botany 

Department. He remained with the NHM London throughout his career, receiving 

several promotions, and retiring in 2007 after eleven years as a Merit Researcher. 

Before that he had been Head Curator of the European Herbarium, Head of the General 

Herbarium, and Division Head for Flowering Plants Research. 

Chris’s early research concentrated on Asteraceae and their distribution in 

Macaronesia, and a fascination with the North Atlantic islands remained to the last. 

However, his interests in empirical botany widened considerably, including popular 

works and field guides but, most significantly, he became enthralled by the flora of 

the southern hemisphere – notably Nothofagus and the eucalypts. This key element in 

his research œuvre was triggered by his involvement in the great “Banks’ Florilegium” 

project, completed in 1989 and comprising 100 sets of 738 plates, each individually 

coloured, published by Alecto Historical Editions. The idea emerged from an informal 

conversation between Chris and his friend Nigel Frith (of Alecto) over a decade earlier 

- and Chris was involved in developing the texts, as well as checking the colour fidelity 

of all the plates. 

Chris held leading positions with the Systematics Association, the Willi Hennig 

Society, and the Flora & Fauna Preservation Society. For the Linnean Society, Chris 

was Member of Council (1981-1984), Botanical Secretary (1990-1999), and Vice

58 


President (1996-1997). He helped organise meetings sponsored by the Society and 

the Systematics Association, including several presented at Burlington House, the 

NHM, and at Kew. An associate editor for BJLS (1981-1983), he was founder and 

editor of Cladistics, and served on the editorial boards of Australian Systematic Botany, 

Journal of Biogeography, Oryx and Journal of Comparative Biology. His teaching at 

Reading’s Department of Plant Sciences was recognised by appointment as Visiting 

Professor. Abroad he taught short courses at Melbourne, Copenhagen and Cape Town. 

However, his most important contribution to teaching came through his key role in the 

Systematics Association sponsored course Cladistics: Theory and Practice, which 

ran for several years in the 1990s, and was then absorbed into the Imperial College/ 

NHM course Advanced Methods in Taxonomy and Biodiversity, which continues to 

this day. 

From a scientific perspective his most important contributions were to developing 

the theory of cladistics, and applying it, for example, to conservation (which took him 

and eight other scientists to the Wissnschaftskolleg in Berlin, 1994-95), developmental 

biology (“Ontogeny and Systematics”, 1988), and most importantly of all, to 

biogeography (the second edition of “Cladistic Biogeography”, with Lynne Parenti, is 

a standard work). His numerous honours included the Bicentenary Medal of the Linnean 

Society (1980; for promising biologists under 40), Honorary Fellowship of the Willi 

Hennig Society (1998), Honorary Research Fellow of the American Association for 

the Advancement of Science; Senior Research Fellow University of Melbourne, and 

the Linnean Medal for Botany, awarded by the Society in 2001. He will be recognised 

by a festschrift, “Beyond Cladistics”, and a more extensive appreciation in Cladistics, 

to appear in 2010. 

Chris Humphries was remarkable not just for the quality and quantity of his 

published research, but for his connection with the wider systematics community 

through his involvement with societies, students and personal contacts - amateurs, 

historians, artists, conservationists and, above all, other researchers interested in the 

theory and practice of systematics. But to those who knew him well, Chris was much 

more than just an outstanding academic. His interests in food, art, modern literature, 

and above all music, made him huge fun to be with. As the Irish might say, he was 

good crack. As a result, he is not only missed for his intellectual ability, but also his 

great warmth as a human being. 

R.I. VANE-WRIGHT FLS


221st Anniversary Meeting 

of the Linnean Society 

held at 

Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BF 

at 4.00 pm on Thursday 21 st May 2009 

1. The President took the Chair and welcomed 56 Fellows and their guests to the 

meeting. 

Apologies were received from: 

Professor William Chaloner Professor Michael Claridge 

Mr Alastair Driver 

Dr Jennifer Edmonds 

Dr I Keith Ferguson 

Mr Jeremy Franks 

Mrs Katerina Heldring-Morris Dr Pamela Le Couteur 

Dr Ro Lowe-McConnell 

Dr Sylvia Phillips 

Dr Brian Rosen 

Ms Elaine Shaughnessy 

Dr Frederick Skinner 

Mr Wim Snoeijer 

Professor Jean-Jacques Symoens Ms Diane Tough 

Professor Dick Vane-Wright Mr Peter Wilberforce 

2. Admission of Fellows. The following signed the Obligation in the Roll and Charter 

Book and were admitted Fellows: 

Jennifer Arthur 

Patricia Eckel 

Michael Engel 

Felix Forest 

Allan Hart 

Colin Hindmarch 

Jan Kresten Nielsen 

John Thompson 

Paolo Viscardi 

3. The Minutes of the Meetings held on 16 th April 2009 and 30 th April 2009 were 

accepted and signed. 

4. The Executive Secretary read for the third time the Certificate of 

Recommendation for the election of a Fellow honoris causa, Ms Gina Douglas. 

The citation is reproduced below: 

Gina Douglas’s outstanding knowledge of all the collections held by the Society 

has ensured that many research workers, both Fellows and visitors have been helped 

to produce greatly improved research papers or books by her timely support as the 

many acknowledgements in these works attest! 

Her constant and strong support of all the Society’s activities has greatly helped to 

make the Society the dynamic and forward-looking structure it is today. Based on the 

strength of its collections and the knowledge which has been made public through the 

CARLS programme and the Society’s website, Gina’s voice can be discerned, 

promoting and explaining what treasures there are, what yet there is to do and how 

they can be used to help with the modern challenges we face. 

For outstanding service to the Society and the study of Natural History for over 26

60 


years as Librarian and Acting Executive Secretary, we the undersigned propose Ms 

Gina Douglas as a Fellow honoris causa. 

Gren Lucas, David Cutler, Vaughan Southgate 

5. Appointment of Scrutineers. The following were appointed as scrutineers; 

Dr Alan Brafield, Dr Mary Morris and Professor David Pye. 

6. Ballots. As a result of the ballots: 

a. The following were elected to Council: Dr N Keith Maybury (Z), Mr Terence Preston 

(Z), Dr Sylvia Phillips (B), Dr Mark Watson (B) Dr David Williams (B). Professor 

Patricia Willmer (Z). 

Details of these new Council members can be found in The Linnean Society of 

London Anniversary Meeting 2009 Council Agenda and Council Nominations, 

circulated with The Linnean in January 2009. , These nominations, all made by the 

Council, were for Fellows to replace Professor David Cutler (B), Dr Joe Cain (Z), Dr 

Shahina Ghazanfar (B), Mr Alastair Land (Z), Dr George McGavin (Z), Professor 

Mark Seaward (B) The President thanked outgoing Council members for their services 

to the Society. 

b. The following was elected a Fellow honoris causa: Ms Gina Douglas. 

c. The Officers elected were: President Dr Vaughan Southgate, Treasurer, Professor 

Gren Lucas OBE; Editorial Secretary, Dr John Edmondson; Botanical Secretary, 

Dr Sandy Knapp; Collections Secretary, Mrs Susan Gove and Zoological 

Secretary, Dr Malcolm Scoble. 

d. The Fellows were elected as on the accompanying list. 

7. Citations and Presentations of Medals and Awards: 

a. The President presented the 2009 Linnean Medal for Botany to Professor Peter 

Ashton FLS, formerly Charles Bullard Research Professor of Forestry and Director 

of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, and the Editorial Secretary, Dr 

John Edmondson read the citation: 

“Professor Peter Ashton is internationally renowned for his research on the flora of 

tropical Asian forests. His six books and numerous papers on this subject, including a 

major monographic work of the family Dipterocarpaceae, based on extensive field studies 

and containing many major timber trees, have helped not only in increasing the 

understanding of the ecology and population biology of lowland tropical rainforests but 

in addressing applied conservation issues, particularly relating to these lowland forests 

in Malaysia and Borneo. 

Following his undergraduate study at the University of Cambridge, he was appointed 

Forest Botanist to the Brunei Government; he retained this position whilst undertaking 

postgraduate study. He completed his doctorate in 1962, the same year in which he was 

appointed as Forest Botanist to the Sarawak Government. Following four years in this 

post, in 1966 he took up an appointment as a Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and 

was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1972. In 1978, he moved to the United States of 

America to take up the prestigious appointment of Director of the Arnold Arboretum 

and Arnold Professor of Botany at Harvard University, becoming Charles Bullard 

Professor of Forestry in 1991. He is currently Charles Bullard Professor of Forestry 

Emeritus, a Faculty Fellow in the Centre for International Development in the Kennedy


School of Government at Harvard University and a Research Associate at the Royal 

Botanic Gardens, Kew. 

Alongside these academic roles, Professor Ashton’s expertise has led to his appointment 

as a consultant to a wide range of national and international committees. He has been 

President of the International Association of Botanical Gardens, a governor of the U.S. 

Nature Conservancy, and recently completed a five-year term as a consultant in 

biodiversity to a Forest Research Institute Malaysia/ITTO/UNDP (World Bank-GEF) 

research project on Biodiversity conservation in productive rain forests. He is currently 

a consultant to the Highstead Foundation, to the TROPENBOS Foundation for Tropical 

Forestry in the Netherlands, a regional advisor (Asia) to the Centre for Tropical Forest 

Sciences of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and a member of the Trees 

Advisory Group of the Species Survival Commission of IUCN. His current research 

projects include the preparation of a field guide to trees in the Brunei region of Borneo, 

contributing to the world checklist of Myrtaceae and he is providing editorial assistance 

for the Tree Flora of Sabah and Sarawak. 

For his seminal contributions to ecology, particularly relating to tropical lowland forestry 

Professor Ashton has received the Award for Environmental Achievement of the U.S. 

Environmental Protection Agency and the Sultan Qaboos Prize for Environmental 

Conservation of UNESCO. There is no doubt that he is a most deserving recipient of the 

prestigious award to be presented to him today - the Linnean Medal for Botany in 2009”. 

Professor Ashton responded by thanking the Society for the award of the medal. 

He highlighted his work with scientists in developing countries with a small scientific 

base and expressed the hope that their ideas and situations would be given adequate 

consideration, when international biological objectives were being developed. 

b. The President presented the 2009 Linnean Medal for Zoology to Professor Michael 

Akam, Director of the University Museum of Zoology at the University of 

Cambridge and the Zoological Secretary, Dr Vaughan Southgate read the citation: 

“Professor Michael Akam is currently Director of the University Museum of Zoology at 

the University of Cambridge. Described by colleagues as “a reference figure in the evodevo 

field” and an “exceptional developmental biologist”, Professor Akam was one of 

the pioneers of evolutionary developmental biology and continues to be an exemplary 

leader in this field. 

Professor Akam completed a BA in Natural Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge in 

1974 and a DPhil in Genetics at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1978. He was a College 

Lecturer in Zoology at Magdalen College, Oxford during 1978 before moving to an 8- 

year appointment as a Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge; during this period 

he also held a Fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University 

from 1979-1981. He was a Founder member of the Wellcome/CRC Institute of Cancer 

and Developmental Biology at Cambridge, now the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research 

UK Gurden Institute, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000. 

Much of his research has concerned the role of the ‘Hox’ family of developmental 

regulatory genes which control the basic layout of the body in most animals including 

man; his early research in the 1980s is considered to be groundbreaking and formed the 

foundation of work which still continues over 20 years later. In the early 1990’s Professor 

Akam recognized the potential application of detailed comparative developmental biology 

to understanding natural diversity, and so his “evo-devo” work, particularly relating to

62 


insects began. He has developed his work on Hox genes, and in particular how their 

regulation and expression leads to the range of different segment morphologies in 

Drosophila to address how changes in the role of these genes may be related to the 

pattern of segment diversity in other insects, in crustaceans and in myriapods. Professor 

Akam and his group have described not only developmental differences between species, 

but abstract general rules about evolution and development and his laboratory continues 

to generate critical data to push evo-devo forward and tackle difficult questions. Their 

work involves the use of a range of genetic and embryological techniques, including 

transgenesis, the analysis of cell lineage and descriptive molecular embryology. DNA 

sequences and genomic organisation play an increasingly important role, providing the 

phylogenetic framework against which to test hypotheses of evolutionary mechanisms. 

In recognition of his exceptional contribution to the field of zoology and to evolutionary 

biology, we are delighted to present the 2009 Linnean Medal for Zoology to Professor 

Michael Akam”. 

Professor Akam expressed his thanks to the Society for the medal which he 

considered a tribute to the renaissance of evolutionary-developmental biology. He 

commented that it was his biology teacher who had inspired him to pursue a career in 

biology and paid tribute to biology teachers who inspire the next generation of 

biologists. 

c. The President presented the 2009 H H Bloomer Award to Mr Markku Hakkinen. 

The citation, was composed and read by the Editorial Secretary, Dr John 

Edmondson: 

“Mr Markku Anton Häkkinen is a remarkable self-taught botanist and natural historian. 

Mr Häkkinen’s interest in natural history and botany was stimulated by the travel 

opportunities offered to him in his “first” career as a sea captain – he gained his master’s 

certificate in 1976. His main research interest is in the study of wild bananas, the genus 

Musa. His work on this genus is based on field observations from China and South East 

Asia, and on the herbarium material, and literature from across the world. This has 

resulted in 55 publications, with more currently in press. His excellent photographic 

work aids the identification and description of many new species within this confusing 

taxonomic group. 

Although he has no formal taxonomic training, Mr Häkkinen is now considered to be 

one of the world’s leading authorities on the taxonomy of Musa. He is currently a visiting 

researcher at the Natural History Museum, University of Helsinki, a visiting scholar at 

the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences and, 

through the Biodiversity Taxonomic Advisory Group, a Musa specialist adviser for many 

institutions all over the world. Mr Häkkinen is a member of the International Association 

for Plant Taxonomy and an Emeritus Member of the Botanical Society of America. 

Bananas are one of the world’s most important dessert fruits. They are threatened by 

many diseases, and new genes need to be identified to facilitate the breeding of “diseasefree” 

crops. Wild banana populations are themselves, however, under threat of extinction 

in many areas, due to mass land-clearance. Through his research, Mr Häkkinen has 

sought to emphasise the importance of the study and conservation of wild Musa species 

to the wider public, through newspaper, radio and television coverage in West and East 

Malaysia, China and Finland. He has personally collected many ex-situ collections from 

Borneo, China and Malaysia, and has donated his wild Musa collection of 50 taxa to the 

ITC Gene Bank in Louvain, Belgium for the benefit of the international community.


Most recently, his research collaboration with molecular systematists has taken his 

taxonomic insights to a higher level, which will enable him to further develop and test 

his ideas and hypotheses. 

Mr Häkkinen’s standing within the scientific community is recognised by the support he 

receives from research organisations in Finland and many other countries. We are 

delighted to acknowledge his significant achievements today by awarding him the H.H. 

Bloomer Award of the Linnean Society of London”. 

On receiving his medal, Mr Häkkinen thanked the Society for the honour of 

receiving this award which had come as a surprise to him. He commented that the 

award recognised his work with the Musacae family and his hope that his work would 

continue to draw attention to the need to conserve wild populations of the genus Musa. 

d. The President presented the 2009 Bicentenary Medal to Professor Michael Engel. 

The citation was read by the Zoological Secretary, Dr Vaughan Southgate as 

follows: 

“Professor Michael Engel is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Senior 

Curator at the Natural History Museum, University of Kansas. From his initial interest 

in Apoidea (bees), Professor Engel has extended his work to other insect families, giving 

him a diverse knowledge which he applies to the broad issues of insect distribution, 

speciation and evolutionary divergence. 

Born in 1971, Professor Engel pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of 

Kansas, receiving a BS in Cellular Biology and a BS in Chemistry in 1993. He then 

undertook postgraduate studies in entomology at Cornell University and was awarded 

his doctorate in 1998. He then took up a post as a Research Scientist at the American 

Museum of Natural History before returning to his alma mater, the University of Kansas 

in 2000 as Assistant Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Assistant 

Curator at University’s Natural History Museum. Following promotion to Associate 

Professor and Associate Curator in 2005, he was appointed to his current roles (Professor 

and Senior Curator) in 2008. 

A daring and original thinker, Professor Engel has a mastery of a number of different 

groups of insects. Many researchers become specialists on fossil or living taxa; Professor 

Engel is an authority on both. His research has led to the discovery of many new species 

and new diagnostic characters, a seminal contribution to our knowledge of the biodiversity 

of insects and their evolution. In recent years, much of his work has focused on 

determining the phylogeny and evolutionary history of the Isoptera (termites), a 

particularly difficult group of insects; work for which he received the prestigious 

Guggenheim Award. 

An accomplished entomologist, with an international reputation, his entomological and 

paleontological research has taken him to numerous countries, and earned him a number 

of awards, most recently the Charles Schuchert Award from The Paleontological Society 

of America, presented to a person under 40 whose work reflect excellence and promise 

in the science of paleontology. His research has also resulted in a phenomenal publication 

record. He has published more than 275 scientific papers and monographs, and coauthored 

two major books, all before reaching the age of 40! 

Described by a colleague as “far and away the pre-eminent entomologist of his generation, 

with a great potential for future achievements”, we are delighted to present the Bicentenary 

Medal for 2009 to Professor Michael Engel”.

64 


Professor Engel thanked the Society for the honour of receiving the Bicentenary 

Medal, commenting that he was very fortunate to study the astonishing diversity of 

insects. He thanked his mentors, colleagues, students and family for their 

encouragement and support. 

e. The President presented the 2009 Irene Manton Prize to Dr Chris Yesson. The 

citation was prepared and read by the Collections Secretary, Mrs Susan Gove, as 

follows: 

“The winner of this year’s Irene Manton Prize is Dr Chris Yesson. 

A former management consultant, Chris gave up a successful business career in order to 

retrain as a biologist. He began retraining by spending six months doing voluntary field 

work in Vietnamese forests, then went on to obtain an MSc degree in Advanced Methods 

in Taxonomy and Biodiversity at Imperial College and the Natural History Museum. 

Chris conducted his doctoral research under the supervision of Dr Alastair Culham at the 

University of Reading, submitting his thesis entitled “Investigating Plant Diversity in 

Meditteranean Climates”; by the time of the viva, three papers had already been published 

in international journals, and one had been awarded a prize at the BioMed-Central Biology 

awards. Chris integrated ecological niche models and phylogenetic reconstruction to 

investigate the impact of historic climate change on the evolutionary history of plants from 

Mediterranean climates. His studies focussed on Cyclamen (Myrsinaceae) and Drosera 

(Droseraceae), and he found that climatic niches are heritable and most lineages have 

probably persisted for millions of years in their present locations. However, many of these 

species may be at threat from the predicted future climate change. 

Competition for the Irene Manton Prize is always stiff and this year was no exception. 

The members of the assessment committee were so impressed with Chris’s thesis I would 

like to quote from their reviews. “The candidate displays mastery of a range of skills 

well beyond what might be expected from a person just beginning their research career. 

There is sufficient work here for 2 PhDs!” Reading many excellent PhD theses is a 

humbling task, and each one seems excellent – Chris’s however, was truly impressive – 

“I have no doubt that this is THE ONE from my perspective in terms of the general 

importance of its findings, the breadth of the community to which it will appeal and the 

publications already out or in the works. It is also the one that I imagine I’ll go back to 

for a closer read (or at least the papers arising).” 

After finishing his PhD Chris worked on a Darwin-funded project to produce DNA 

barcodes for Mexican cacti and we are delighted to hear that from June he will start 

working at the Zoological Society of London for the EU-funded Coralfish project, where 

he will apply his skills to the problem of deep-sea coral distribution, which are at least 

partly plants! When provided with a choice of art work from which to select his prize, 

Chris chose a very appropriate drawing of Banksia nutans, or Nodding Banksia, a small 

shrub from South Western Australia, a key warm mediterranean climate region featured 

Chris’s thesis. Chris, we are delighted to award you the Irene Manton Prize for 2009”. 

f. The President presented the 2009 Jill Smythies Award for published botanical 

art to Dr Halina Bednarek-Ochyra. The Collections Secretary, Mrs Susan Gove 

read the citation which she had prepared as follows: 

“The winner of this year’s Jill Smythies Award is Dr Halina Bednarek-Ochyra. 

Dr Halina Bednarek-Ochyra is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Botany of the 

Polish Academy of Sciences. An accomplished botanist, her main research interests are


the taxonomy and phytogeography of bryophytes and she counts 158 research papers 

and 12 monographs and books amongst her publications. 

Halina received her MSc in Botany from the Jagiellonian University in 1984 and 

continued her studies as a postgraduate student in the Institute of Botany of the Polish 

Academy of Sciences where she has worked since 1987. In 1995 she gained her PhD; 

her doctoral thesis was based on a taxonomic revision of the moss genus Racomitrium 

in Poland. She was appointed Curator of Bryophytes in 1993 and served as editorial 

assistant for the Fragmenta Floristica et Geobotanica from 1991-1996. Since 1997 she 

has been co-editor of Atlas of the geographical distribution of mosses in Poland. Her 

major scientific achievements include a monograph of the genus Racomitrium in Poland, 

published in 1996 in which she proposed the first detailed infrageneric classification of 

this genus and a world conspectus of its species, and co-authorship of the Liverwort 

Flora of Antarctica published in 2000. She is currently working on a monographic 

study of the genus Bucklandliella, in the extra-Holarctic and on The Liverwort Flora of 

the Prince Edward Islands in the Subantarctic. 

The Jill Smythies Award however, recognises Halina’s exceptional talent, as a botanical 

illustrator, in particular the illustrations within The Illustrated Moss Flora of Antarctica, 

published by Cambridge University Press in November 2008. The first modern Flora of 

mosses of this continent in the Southern Hemisphere, this publication is greatly enhanced 

by the full page of detailed clear line drawings including the habit, stem cross-sections, 

leaves and leaf structures which accompany each taxon. Members of the judging panel 

described her work as “Outstanding. Although many of the other artists works were 

considered by the panel of the highest standard, the consistent high quality, accuracy 

and sheer number of plates produced over the years, made the difficult choice a unanimous 

one”. You will have the opportunity to view some of this work in an exhibition, which 

she has kindly mounted in the Society’s library for this occasion. 

In recognition, therefore, of her significant achievements to botanical illustration, we 

are delighted to present The Jill Smythies Award for 2009 to Dr Halina Bednarek-Ochyra”. 

Dr Bednarek-Ochyra expressed her gratitude to the Society and thanked her 

nominee and collaborators for their support. She presented the Society with an 

illustration of Aloina brevirostris (Hook & Grev.) Kindb, which the President accepted 

on behalf of the Society. 

8. The Treasurer presented the Accounts for 2008. These are to be found in the 2008 

Annual Report. 

a. The Treasurer summarised the Society’s financial accounts as presented in the 

Annual Report previously circulated to all Fellows. He drew attention to the 

dramatic drop in the Society’s Asset value as a result of the stock markets’ severe 

down turn during the year. Despite this situation the Society’s Council agreed that 

all the main projects and the refurbishment programme budgeted for action during 

the year should continue to completion. 

He remarked it was pleasing to report that the income received during the year 

was above budget due in the main to the increased revenue from the joint Journal 

publishing programme with Wiley/Blackwell. It was even more pleasing that through 

the tight control by the staff and officers the expenditure budget had been held below 

budget for the day-to-day activities of the Society, thus leaving a surplus of £61,087 at 

the end of the year.

66 


Project costs totalled £180,278 and Refurbishment costs covering the Library and 

Offices totalled £390,599 with a contribution from the Nora McMillan Fund this was 

reduced to £275,285 to be found from general funds. 

The final Balance Sheet showed that the Society’s Assets at the end of the year 

after paying for the Projects and Refurbishment work along with the major reduction 

in investment losses of £741,214 were £1,596,934, compared with £2,819,553 in 2007. 

The Treasurer drew attention to the problems that the Society had during the year 

with the fraudulent activities being perpetrated to their Lloyds Bank accounts which 

had caused considerable time wasting and worry for the Society’s Financial Controller. 

He warmly thanked Priya for all his hard work and perseverance on behalf of the 

Society. He also drew attention to the success Victoria had in exceeding her target for 

the use of the Society’s rooms despite all the building work. Finally he thanked all the 

staff for their commitment and hard work during a difficult but very successful year! 

He then asked if there were any questions or further information he could provide. 

None were forthcoming. 

b. Dr N Keith Maybury read a statement prepared by Dr Sara Churchfield, a member 

of the Audit Review Committee who was unable to attend due to illness. “In 

accordance with Bye-Law 12.6, I confirm that I attended the Audit Review 

Committee of the Linnean Society on 12 March 2009 at which the Accounts for 

2008 were presented. After a thorough review of the written statement of accounts, 

together with accompanying notes and opportunities for discussion with other 

members of the Review Committee (including the Treasurer and a representative 

of the official Auditors), I am satisfied that the Accounts give a true and fair view 

of the Society’s finances as at 31 December 2008. I therefore move that they be 

accepted at the Annual Meeting on 21 May.” This was carried unanimously on a 

show of hands. 

c. The Treasurer moved that the firm of Knox Cropper, of 16 New Bridge Street, 

EC4V 6AX, be appointed as auditors in accordance with Bye-Law 12.5, which 

was accepted unanimously. He then proposed a change in the banking arrangements 

to Barclays Bank, Wembley and Park Royal Branch. Both motions were carried 

unanimously with a show of hands. 

9. 

a. The President gave his address on “Fragmentary Evidence”. In this address he 

discussed how plant anatomy helps people who suspect their houses have been 

damaged by tree roots, detectives looking for forensic evidence in murder cases, 

archaeologists with puzzling plant remains, often of wood or charcoal, antique 

dealers who want to check authenticity of furniture, food manufacturers with strange 

foreign material in their products, pharmaceutical companies who need to be sure 

that the dried herbs they are buying are not adulterated, and those concerned with 

suspected poisoning by plants. 

b. On behalf of the Fellows the President was thanked for his talk. Dr Pat Morris 

moved that the President’s address be published and circulated and the motion 

was passed. 

c. Professor David Cutler then handed over the Presidency to Dr Vaughan Southgate


who thanked the outgoing President for his leadership throughout a very busy 

three years in the Society’s history which had included the Tercentenary 

Celebrations. Dr Southgate named his Vice Presidents for the coming year as Dr 

Mike Fay, Dr Keith Maybury, Dr Sandra Knapp and Dr Malcolm Scoble. 

10. Any other valid business. 

There being no other valid business, the President declared the meeting closed, 

noting the dates of forthcoming meetings. The next Anniversary Meeting will be on 

Thursday 20 May 2010 at 4pm. 

RUTH TEMPLE 

Executive Secretary 

Free Taxonomy and Biodiversity lectures 

‘What’s in a Name? Taxonomy and Biodiversity’: 

Saving our Experts from Extinction 

The Linnean Society of London / 

Ecology and Conservation Studies Society 

Joint Lecture Series in conjunction with Birkbeck Institute of 

Environment, University of London 

This series of lectures focuses on the importance of being able to define and 

identify the natural world with examples of the need and uses of giving species 

a name, and organising them into systems of classification. 

The introductory overview will review uncertainty in the numbers of species on 

Earth and their extinction rates, and survey how resulting problems can be 

addressed for effective conservation action. Following lectures will highlight 

the importance of taxonomy to fungi, forensics, invertebrates, and control of 

illegal use of endangered species. In the final session a panel of experts will 

review how the next generation of naturalists can be inspired and discuss how 

to encourage more people to enter the field of taxonomy, where there is a 

critical shortage. 

Join the debate. All welcome. Free admission but booking is essential. 

The venue on 16 October is the John Snow Lecture Theatre, London School 

of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppell Street, WC1E 7HT. For all other 

dates the venue is Room B04, Birkbeck University of London, 43 Gordon 

Square, WC1H 0PD. 

Email: environmentevents@FLL.bbk.ac.uk for booking details, (or telephone 

020 631 6473) 

All lectures are from 6.30 to 8.30 pm on the following Fridays. Doors open at 

6.00pm Programme overleaf.

68 


· 16 October ‘Taxonomy, Systematics and Conservation Biology’ 

Professor Lord Robert May of Oxford, past President of the Royal Society 

· 23 October ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind: our lives depend on the hidden 

kingdom – Fungi’ 

Professor Lynne Boddy, President of the British Mycological Society 

· 30 October ‘Control of Illegal Use of Endangered Species and Incorrectly 

Identified Species’ 

Professor Monique Simmonds, Jodrell Laboratory, Royal Botanic Gardens, 

Kew 

· 6 November ‘Botany, palynology, and mycology: powerful weapons in the 

forensic armoury’ 

Patricia Wiltshire, Forensic Ecologist 

· 13 November ‘Taxonomy, Natural History and the Digital World’ 

Dr Malcolm J. Scoble, Keeper of Entomology, Natural History Museum 

· 20 November Panel Presentation and Discussion: ‘Inspiring New Naturalists 

and Taxonomists’ 

Working with Children: Gail Bromley, Education Development Manager, 

RBG, Kew 

Higher Education: David Streeter, Reader in Ecology, University of Sussex 

Professional Taxonomy: Dr Mike Fay, Head of Genetics, Jodrell Laboratory, 

RBG, Kew 

Full details of speakers and their lectures can be accessed at 

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/environment/news/lectures 

The Burlington House Lecture 

The New World of Galileo 

Monday 26 October 2009 

A free lecture for the general public. 

In this richly illustrated lecture Professor William Shea, the holder of the Galileo Chair 

of the History of Science at the University of Padua, at which Galileo himself taught for 

18 years, will explain his astronomical discoveries and explain why Galileo saw what 

he saw. “Seeing is believing but not everyone has the same visual experience and we all 

tend to see what we expect to find!” 

• Time: 6pm 

• Venue: The Geological Society of London (Piccadilly entrance) 

• Speaker: Professor William R Shea (University of Padua) 

• Admission: Admission is free but by ticket only, available from Alys 

Hilbourne at the Geological Society. Tel: 020 7432 0981 or 

email alys.hilbourne@geolsoc.org.uk


TH E HISTORY of 

N ATURAL HISTORY 

Second Edition 

G AVIN BRIDSON 

TH E HISTORY O F NATURAL HISTORY (Second Edition) by Gavin 

Bridson, is an essential source of information for scientists, researchers 

and enthusiastic amateurs. This annotated bibliography, the only one to 

encompass the entire subject area, provides a unique key to information 

sources for this wide-ranging subject. This revised and greatly updated 

edition was published by The Linnean Society of London in October 2008. 

Priced at only £65 (+ p&p) 

For more details: Email Victoria@linnean.org 

Tel: +44 (0)20 7434 4479 

or visit www.linnean.org for details.

The Linnean Society 

Programme 

2009 

15 th Oct Thurs A GENERAL NATURALIST IN MODERN TIMES 

6 pm Martin Jacoby FLS Evening Meeting and Book Sale 

26 th Oct Mon The Burlington House Lecture – at the Geological Society 

6 pm THE NEW WORLD OF GALILEO 

Professor William R. Shea, Univ. Padua (page 68 for details) 

28 th Oct Wed Palaeobotany Specialist Group Day Meeting** 

29 th Oct Thurs Palynology Specialist Group Day Meeting ** 

5 th Nov* Thurs THE POETRY OF SCIENCE 

6 pm Kelley Swaine Evening Meeting 

10 th Nov Tues CHARLES DARWIN, LIVE AT THE LINNEAN! (p10 for more info.) 

6 pm Richard Milner FLS .Evening Meeting** 

17 th Nov Tues THE GALAPAGOS ARCHIPELAGO: Day Meeting ** 

A LIVING LABORATORY 

† Sarah Darwin FLS and Sandra Knapp FLS 

19 th Nov Thurs LINNEAN SOCIETY DEBATE Afternoon and 

4 pm † Andrew Sheppy FLS and Sandra Knapp FLS Evening Meeting ** 

2 nd Dec Wed FOUNDERS DAY: NATURAL HISTORY 

6 pm COLLECTIONS AS MODELS OF DIVERSITY Evening Meeting 

Sandra Knapp FLS 

4 th Dec Fri THE DARWIN LECTURE: SCIENCE AND MEDICINE 

6 PM Steve Jones Lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine** 

10 th Dec Thurs EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS 

6 pm Sir Martin Evans Evening Meeting 

2010 

21 st Jan* Thurs RESTORING BRITISH BIODIVERSITY: NATIVE 

6 pm MAMMAL REINTRODUCTIONS AND THE 

SCOTTISH BEAVER TRIAL 

Evening Meeting 

Tony King FLS 

18 th Feb Thurs THOMAS BLAKISTON’S LINE: A VICTORIAN 

6 pm EARLY CONTRIBUTION TO BIOGEOGRAPHY 

Andrew Davis 

Evening Meeting 

* Election of new Fellows † organiser(s) ** Registration required 

Unless stated otherwise, all meetings are held in the Society’s Rooms. Evening meetings start 

at 6.00pm with tea available in the library from 5.30. For further details please contact the 

Society office or consult the website (address inside the front cover). 

Typesetting and layout by Mary J. Morris, West Mains, London Road, Ascot SL5 7DG

Vol 25, no 3, October - The Linnean Society of London

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