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| Hooker and Darwin had a Meeting of Minds. Only Men Such as They Should be Allowed to Handle the Subject of the Mutability of Species. |
(Joseph Hooker 1845 - Letter to Charles Darwin):
"And now for species. To begin, I do think it a most fair & most profitable subject for discussion, I have no formed opinion of my own on the subject, I argue for immutability, till I see cause to take a fixed post… I still maintain, that to be able to handle the subject at all, one must have handled hundreds of species with a view to distinguishing them & that over a great part,—or brought from a great many parts,—of the globe."
In an earlier blog post, I discuss how this fitted in with the scientific conventions of the time regarding the taboo of deductive reasoning.
Unsurprisingly, both Hooker and Darwin did fulfil all of Hooker's gleeful self-selecting criteria for who could be considered eligible to handle to subject of mutability of species.
In his 1845 letter to Darwin, Hooker's arrogant self aggrandizing prescriptive proselytizing on who could and could not discuss the topic of the origin of species clearly excluded Patrick Matthew! Because, unlike Hooker and Darwin, Matthew was not a routine species comparison naturalist, and he had not collected many of them from parts of the globe - excluding his role in first importing giant Californian redwoods, the rightful glory for which Hooker's father's friend John Lindley slyly stole. On which note, significantly, Lindley - like his friend and co-author John Loudon - was well known to believe in the mutability of species. And it was Loudon who wrote in 1832 that Matthew appeared to have something interesting to say on the topic of species.
