Abstract

WhenVestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the anonymous evolutionary work which caused such a furore in mid-Victorian England, was published towards the close of 1844, Richard Owen, by then well-entrenched as the ‘British Cuvier’, received a complementary copy and addressed a letter to the author. This letter and how it should be interpreted have recently become the subject of historical debate, and this paper is directed at resolving the controversy. The question of Owen's attitude to theVestigesargument is central to the larger historical problem of the views of this leading British morphologist and palaeontologist on the contentious issue of the ‘secondary causes’ of species. Owen wrote so little directly on this subject prior to 1858, that the letter in question, together with his two letters of 1848 to the rationalist publisher John Chapman, and the controversial conclusion to hisOn the Nature of Limbs(1849), constitute the major evidence that Owen in this period subscribed to a naturalistic theory of organic change. On the basis of this evidence, historians of biology have generally concurred with Owen's biographer grandson that Owen had a ‘certain leaning towards the theories enunciated by Robert Chambers [the Vestiges' author]’, but that his ‘official’ anti-transmutationist stance of the 1840s did not permit full public expression of his own views. As Ruse most recently summed up this historical consensus: Owen in the 1840s was ‘moving down a path not completely dissimilar from that followed by Chambers’, and he ‘tried to have matters two ways, praisingVestigesto its author and condemning it to its critics’.