Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 2]

Note: This is the second of the 10 transcribed Wavertree Letters from Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie (of the Patrick Matthew Trust)


Wavertree 22.9.94

Dear Ian,

Thanks for your letters of 13.9 and 23.9. …

Your letter of the 13.9 brought a cloud over the horizon. A cloud as ancient as patronage itself. You write “We feel that to succeed it should not be too confrontationist re the Darwin lobby…” this is the problem of “He who pays the piper calls the tune”. I don’t know what you and Mrs Hunter mean. Does it mean that the present book is too confrontationist? If so then you must exclude me from funds out of your trust because that is my style. I found in reading the literature that from Darwin onwards there was a gang up on PM and Lamarck. If by countering their unfair, dismissive remarks I was or am going to be confrontationist I can only bow myself out.

I presume you and Mrs Hunter are familiar with the Darwin Lobbyists. They would not give a tinker’s curse for what I say. When I presented the evidence contained in the Appendix to Jay Gould of Harvard he dismissed PM with “He buried his head in his trees and saw no forest.” In actual fact PM as soon as he had finished his book went into the political aspect of the Appendix, joined the Chartist movement… He was elected the candidate for east Fife and Perth for the Great Convention of 1839. So – do we let Gould’s stupid and ignorant remark go by for fear that the sale of the book will suffer?

The “We feel” sentence continues “… and should set Patrick Matthew in the context of his era… etc”

If you turn to page 19 of my book you will see the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph does exactly that. Throughout the book I have taken the approach of the contextual historian and this is what I am continuing to do with the work I have been engaged on. If by this approach I am to confrontationist I can only say – that’s me.

You see “The man who pays the piper calls the tune” has led to tears in the end over the whole history of patronage. If the piper remonstrates he is unfairly accused of being churlish and looking a gift horse in the mouth. I had hoped this situation would not arise.

 I have mentioned several times to you that the cost of another edition would be high. …

 If you turn to my book you will see the name of Edward Blyth. I have a chapter relating him to PM and Darwin. Another chapter deals with Darwin’s Historical Sketch which includes PM. This Sketch is the most dishonest piece ever Darwin wrote. He makes PM look ridiculous but as I present it now Matthew’s approach is completely modern with all those catastrophes and disappearance of the dinosaurs. There is another chapter on Darwin who learned nothing during five years at University. When he was in Edinburgh for two years he came under the care of Robert Grant who taught him about the fauna of the Firth of Forth, encouraged him to collect invertebrate specimens and demonstrate them to the Pliny Society and since Grant was an enthusiastic Lamarckian Darwin got grounded in that too. Darwin’s comment: the whole thing was a bore and learned nothing. He then went to Cambridge for three years. There he collected beetles and other specimens, went on geological trips with Sedgwick the professor of Geology. Darwin’s comment : the whole thing was a bore and learned nothing. So why did Henslow recommend him as naturalist for the Beagle?

PM comes in for a bit of stick from me over his colonial policy which could not be more brutal and inhuman – but in the “Survival of the fittest” sense exactly what became social Darwinism. If you read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’ the same inhuman conclusions are drawn i.e. the savages will be annihilated and in time to come there will be a hoped for, improved Caucasian people and below them the chimp and gorilla. All other humans would be eliminated.

So I suppose you will designate this contextual approach as confrontationist. So be it. I have found another letter from PM to Darwin which I knew must be around because the reply is in my book. This letter accompanied a review of the Descent of Man by Matthew in the Scotsman newspaper. The central library dug out the review which could have been more critical. Many people were dismayed at the time because Darwin had now changed his mind and says he now realised he stressed natural selection too much in the Origin!

So that’s it for the moment.

Sincerely,

 Jim Dempster

~~~

Notes and commentary by MIke Sutton

Dempster reveals he personally informed the famous Darwinist Professor Gould (Stephen Jay Gould) of exactly what was in the appendix of Matthew's 1831 work, On Naval Timber, regarding the first full hypothesis of macro evolution by natural selection, and that Gould merely dismissed the evidence with an off-the cuff propagandising unevidenced dismissal.

We see here also the first evidence in writing (it is clearly and prominently included in Dempster's 1996 book) that Dempster was first to note that Matthew had in fact been correct and Darwin wrong regarding catastrophic meteorological and geological extinction events. Note: Jim Dempster was way further ahead in this regard than Michael Rampino (Rampino 2011), who is generally misattributed with this important discovery - and who attributes Dempster by way of a mere cursory footnote in his famous article on the topic.

In this letter, Dempster refers to Min (Mrs) Hunter - who was a friend of John Matthew (who was a descendant of Patrick Matthew) . The book Dempster is writing at the time of the Wavertree Letters  is  his 1996 'Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century'. The Patrick Matthew Trust was financially assisting Dempster's work. Later in 2005 Dempster published his third book on the topic 'The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwins'.

It is notable that in the letter Dempster outlines that his approach to the topic is deliberately critically confrontational, because he felt that the so called "Darwin Industry"- so as to foster and maintain their impression of Darwin's original genius - was incredibly biased in its effective propagandising  against Darwin's intellectual forbears Lamarck and Matthew.   I have taken the same strategically objective, honest and open stance in my work (Sutton 2014a; Sutton 2014b and 2016). Indeed, feeling that Dempster's superb groundbreaking work on Matthew and Darwin has been for the most part cannily ignored by Darwin scholars my own approach goes further with zero regard for any undue reverence to Darwin, the Darwin lobby, or their credulous Darwin worshipping misplaced sensitivities, poor and pseudo-scholarship, and irrational thinking.