No More Learning

In fact, in the early part of the
nineteenth century, repeated improvements in the microscope
and in histological technique were demonstrating very clearly that
all living organisms, whether plant or animal, consist either of
a single cell or a complex of cells, and that they all began life
as a single cellular unit.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, men of science
specialised less than now. Each branch of science was smaller,
and more than one branch could be grasped and studied by
the same observer. Among such men were J. S. Henslow and
Adam Sedgwick, the prime movers in the founding of the Cam-
bridge Philosophical society. Henslow, at first, devoted especial
attention to conchology, entomology and geology. He was a
professor of mineralogy at twenty-six, and with that power of
quick change of chair, once more prevalent than now, he became
professor of botany the following year. He was succeeded
in the chair of mineralogy by Whewell, which recalls the fact
that Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, one of the
19
E, L, XIV.
CH. VIII.


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290
[Ch.
The Literature of Science
wellknown Bridgewater treatises, played a large part in the
thought of our great-grandparents. Henslow was among the
first to insist upon practical work in his botanical classes. His
class dissected living plants, and investigated and recorded such
structure as they could make out. He provided them with
proper apparatus for dissections, and he saw that they studied
the physiology and the minute anatomy of plants as well as
external features.
Another striking feature of the British botanists of a hundred
years ago was their determined and steady effort to replace the
artificial Linnaean system by a more natural one. Prominent
among the men who gradually evolved a sounder view of the
interrelationship of plants were the elder Hooker, Robert Brown,
Sir Joseph Banks (“the greatest Englishman of his time'), Bentham
and, especially, John Lindley. Lindley was professor at the newly-
founded university college in Gower street; and this institution
took a very prominent part in the science of the century, being
untrammelled by restrictions which sorely retarded the advance-
ment of science at the older universities.
Plant pathology was, also, coming to the fore, and Miles
Joseph Berkeley was establishing a permanent reputation as a
systematic mycologist. He has, indeed, been called the origi-
nator and founder of plant pathology, and was the first to
recognise the economic importance of many fungoid plant
diseases. His work on Phytophthora infestans—the potato fungus
-(1846) is still a classic.
Another branch of science, of less economic but of more
academic interest, was plant palaeontology, which, under Witham,
Binney and Williamson—the last named was elected, in 1851,
professor of natural history, anatomy and physiology at the
newly-founded Owens college, Manchester—was rapidly forging
ahead, at any rate in the north of England. Here, chiefly, the
foundations were being laid for the very remarkable advances
which have been made in this branch of the subject since the
last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Modern geology, in Great Britain, might be said to begin with
James Hutton, who, after taking the degree of doctor of medicine
at Leyden, devoted himself to the cultivation of a small estate,
inherited from his father, and to practical chemistry. The lucrative
results of the latter employment enabled him to give himself up
wholly to scientific pursuits. His agricultural studies, especially
during his residence with a farmer in Norfolk, interested him in


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VIII]
Geology
291
the various sediments deposited either by rivers or seas, and he
recognised that much of the present land had once been below
the sea. But he also investigated the movements of strata and the
origin of igneous rocks, and especially the nature and relations
of granite. The great and distinctive feature of Hutton's work
in geology is the strictly inductive method applied throughout.
He maintained that the great masses of the earth are the same
everywhere. He saw no occasion to have recourse to the
agency of any preternatural cause in explaining what actually
occurs,' and he remarks that, the result therefore of our present
enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect
of an end. '
John Playfair, a pupil and friend of Hutton, issued, in 1802,
a volume entitled Iustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the
Earth. Playfair, to quote Sir A. Geikie's words, was 'gifted with
a clear penetrating mind, a rare faculty of orderly logical arrange-
ment, and an English style of altogether remarkable precision and
elegance. ' He was an able exponent of his master's views and
capable of adding many observations and contributions of his own
to his convincing sketch of the Huttonian theory.
William Smith, whom Sedgwick called the 'father of English
Geology,' became interested in the structure of the earth's crust,
at first, from a land-surveyor's and engineer's point of view. He
was one of the earliest to recognise that each of the strata he
studied carefully contains animal and plant fossils peculiar to
itself, by which it can be identified. In 1815, he published his
geological map of England and Wales; and, between 1794 and
1821, he issued separate geological maps of many English counties.
Further he is responsible for introducing many terms—'arbitrary
and somewhat uncouth,' as Sedgwick remarked-which have
become the verbal currency of British geology.
Adam Sedgwick, whose personality made a deep impression
on his university, was appointed Woodwardian professor of
geology in 1818, and threw himself, with surprising vigour, into a
subject which, to him, at that time, was almost new.
He was
great as a teacher and as an exponent of his science, being gifted
with eloquence, and, as founder of the Sedgwick museum, he
greatly enlarged the collection got together by John Woodward,
who established the professorship. From 1819 to 1823, he worked
chiefly in the south and east of England ; then, he turned his
attention to Lake-land and, afterwards, in 1827, to Scotland (with
Murchison). In 1829, he went abroad with Murchison, visiting
19-2


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292 The Literature of Science [CH.
parts of Germany and the eastern Alps, the result being an
important joint paper on the latter (1829-30). In the long vaca-
tion of 1831, he attacked the problem of the ancient rocks in the
northern part of Wales, which, owing to the absence of good
maps or easy communication, the complicated structure of the
country and the frequent rarity or imperfect preservation of its
fossils, presented exceptional difficulties. In that and the follow-
ing summer (as well as in some later visits), he ascertained the
general succession of the rocks from the base of the Cambrian to
the top of the Bala, or of the whole series afterwards called Cam-
brian and lower Silurian (more recently Ordovician). Laborious
fieldwork became more difficult after an illness in 1839; but he
continued to extend and publish the results of his investigations
in Wales, in the Lake district and in the Permo-Triassic strata
of north-eastern England. Though he was a liberal in politics,
his inclinations as a geologist were conservative.
George Julius Poulett Scrope, by his studies of volcanic dis-
tricts in Italy, Sicily and Germany, and especially by his memoir
on the volcanoes of central France, and by his observations on the
erosion of valleys by rivers, did much to extend and confirm the
views of Hutton and Playfair. His remarks, also, on the lamination
and cleavage of rocks were highly suggestive; in fact, but for the
interruptions of politics, he would have hardly fallen behind his
friend Charles Lyell.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the belief in a
universal deluge was widely held by geologists. William Buckland,
in his Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823), supported his belief by his
'Observations on the Organic Remains contained in Caves, Fissures
and Diluvial Gravel. ' But, both he and Sedgwick, without giving
up the view of a universal flood, abandoned, to some extent, the
evidence on which, at one time, they had based their belief.
Another geologist of great eminence was H. T. de la Beche,
whose ancestors really did come over with the Normang. His
Geological Manual was spoken of, at the time, as the best work of
its kind which had appeared in our country; and his Report on the
Geology of Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset (1839) is a
masterly production. He occupied himself for a long time in
a
making a geological survey of parts of Devon and Dorset on
one-inch ordnance maps, and was appointed, in 1832, by govern-
ment to conduct the geological survey of England, in which posi-
tion he superintended the erection of the Jermyn street museum.
The interest of (Sir) Charles Lyell in geology was aroused by


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VII]
Geology
293
a
the fascinating lectures of Buckland. He was trained, at first, for
the law; but his legal studies were arrested by a weakness in his
eyes, which, for a considerable time, prevented any continuous
reading, and troubled him more or less throughout life. But this
enforced rest enabled him to devote himself to geology, and, in
1824, he began systematic travel for that purpose. About 1827,
his future book—The Principles of Geology-began to take a
definite shape in his mind. In the spring of that year, with the
Murchisons, he visited Auvergne, passing to the south of France and
to the north of Italy as far as the Vicentine and the Euganean hills.
Thence he went to Naples and Sicily, studying not only their
volcanic districts, but, also, the tertiary fossils of other parts of
Italy, returning to London after an absence of more than three-
quarters of a year. The first volume of The Principles appeared
in 1831, while he was travelling in France and studying the extinct
volcanoes of Olot in Spain, the second volume early in 1832 and
the third in 1833. At a later date, the book was divided, the first
two volumes retaining the title Principles, and the third appearing,
in 1838, as The Elements of Geology. During these years, he con-
tinued his studies of European geology, extending his journeys to
Denmark and Scandinavia. In 1841, he began a twelvemonth's
journey in Canada and North America, an account of which is
given in Travels in North America, published early in 1845. The
same year he revisited that continent, making a much more
extended journey in the United States, which is recounted in his
Second Visit etc. , published in 1849. He returned, for shorter visits,
in 1852 and 1853, and, in 1854, went to Madeira and the Canary
islands. During the years between 1842 and 1859, he continued
his work in various parts of Europe, and, in the latter year,
appeared Darwin's Origin of Species. The study of this book
completed Lyell's conversion to the views expressed by Darwin',
and he also investigated the evidence in favour of the early
existence of man.
The results of these studies, with an account of the glacial
epoch, form the 'trilogy' entitled The Antiquity of Man, which
appeared early in 1863. After this time, his journeys, necessarily,
,
became shorter, though his interest in geology continued to be
as keen as ever, till, after a period of increasing weakness, he
died in February 1873.
Henry Clifton Sorby made his mark in more than one depart-
ment of science, to which a sufficiency of income enabled him to
| Prior to that he had been sceptical. See Darwin, Life and Letters, vol. 11, p. 229.


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294
[CH.
The Literature of Science
devote his life ; but he will always be remembered as the father
of microscopic petrology. Thin slices of hard bodies had already
been made for examination under the microscope; but Sorby was
the first to perceive the value of this method for the examination
of rocks in general. In 1849, he made the first transparent section
of one with his own hands, publishing his first petrographical
study in 1851. In a few years, his example had been followed
both in England and in other countries, and the result has been
a vast increase in our knowledge of the mineral composition
and structures of rocks, and of many difficult problems in their
history.
Sir Roderick Impey Murchison was descended from a well-
known Scottish clan living in Ross-shire. He was brought up in
the army and took part in several of the engagements under
Wellesley in Portugal and Moore in Galicia. He was a man of means,
and having, at an early date, retired from the army, he occupied
himself at first with the active sports of a country gentleman. But,
his attention having been turned to science by Sir Humphry Davy,
he very soon became an eager and enthusiastic geologist. At first,
he especially devoted himself to the rocks of Sussex, Hants and
Surrey. Later, he explored the volcanic regions of Auvergne
and other parts of France, and of Italy, the Tyrol and Switzerland,
and, together with Sedgwick, published much on the geology of
the Alps. But it was not till 1831 that Murchison began his real
life's work, which was a definite enquiry into the stratification of
the rocks on the border of Wales. The result of his labours,
published in 1839, was the establishment of the Silurian system
and the record of strata older than and different from any that had
hitherto been described in these islands. In 1837, he and Sedgwick,
by their work in the south-west of England and the Rhineland,
established the Devonian system; and, in 1840, he extended his
investigations from Germany to Russia. In the following year, at
the desire of the Tsar, he travelled over a considerable part of
that country as far as the Ural mountains on the east and the sea
of Azov on the south. In 1855, he was appointed director general
of the geological survey and director of the museum in Jermyn
street, in both of which posts he succeeded Sir Henry de la Beche.
Towards the end of his life, he founded a chair of geology and
mineralogy at Edinburgh.
William Buckland was, perhaps, better known as a teacher
and as an exponent of his science than for any very outstanding
original investigation carried on by him in geology. Unlike
i


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VIII] Geology. Zoology
295
Sedgwick, however, he had made a systematic study of his subject
before he was appointed, in 1813, reader of mineralogy at Oxford.
In this post, he so aroused the interest of his students that a
readership in geology was specially endowed by the Treasury six
years later, of which he was the first holder. He was a man of
many accomplishments, and he by no means confined his attention
to geology. He entered with great zest into many practical
questions of the day, especially such as affected agriculture and
sanitary science. In 1845, he was appointed dean of Westminster,
and, shortly after this, his health began to decline.
We have mentioned above that men of science were less
specialised at the earlier part of our period than they have now
become. It is a peculiar feature of British science that many of
its most successful researchers were amateurs-gifted not only
with brains but with wealth. Many of those whose names we
mention held no kind of professional or academic posts. Even
the holding of professorial chairs in the earlier part of the nine-
teenth century usually involved teaching in more than one science.
To the year 1866, the professor of anatomy at Cambridge was
responsible for the teaching of zoology as well as for that of
anatomy. In many other places, the professorship of zoology was
responsible for what teaching there was in animal physiology, and,
in the London hospitals, strictly scientific subjects were then
taught by doctors in practice who were on the staff of the hospital.
It was not till the year 1883 that Michael Foster was appointed to
the professorship of physiology at Cambridge, though, as praelector
in that subject at Trinity college, he had been building up a great
physiological school for several years.
On the zoological side, one of the most productive morpho-
logical anatomists of the nineteenth century was Richard Owen,
Hunterian professor and, later, conservator of the museum of the
Royal college of Surgeons. In 1856, he became superintendent
of the natural history branch of the British Museum, and this post
he held until 1884. He added greatly to our knowledge of animal
structure by his successful dissection of many rare forms, such as
the pearly nautilus, limulus, lingula, apteryx and others, and,
following on the lines of Cuvier, he was particularly successful in
reconstructing extinct vertebrates. Another considerable advance
he made in science was the introduction of the terms 'homologous'
and 'analogous. ' His successor in both his posts, Sir William
Flower, an authority on cetacea and on mammals in general, took
an active part in arranging the contents of the museums under his
6


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296 The Literature of Science
[CH.
charge in such a way as to teach the intelligent public a lesson in
morphology and classification.
Throughout the century, repeated attempts had been made to
classify the members of the animal kingdom on a natural basis,
but, until their anatomy and, indeed, their embryology had been
sufficiently explored, these attempts proved somewhat vain. As
late as 1869, Huxley classified sponges with Protozoa, Echino-
derms with Scolecida and Tunicates with Polyzoa and Brachio-
poda. By the middle of the century, much work had been
done in sorting out the animal kingdom on a natural basis, and
Vaughan Thompson had already shown that Flustra was not
a hydroid, but a member of a new group which he named
Polyzoa. Although hardly remembered now, he demonstrated,
by tracing their development, that Cirripedia are not molluscs ;
he established the fact that they began life as free-swimming
Crustacea; he, again, it was who showed that Pentacrinus is
the larval form of the feather-star, Antedon.
Among marine biologists of eminence was Edward Forbes,
who was the first to investigate the distribution of marine
organisms at various depths in the sea; and he it was who de-
fined the areas associated with the bathymetrical distribution of
marine life, and pointed out that, as we descend into depths below
fifty fathoms, vegetable life tends to fade away and that aquatic
organisms become more and more modified.
The custom of naturalists to go on long voyages was still main-
tained. The younger Hooker accompanied Sir James Ross in the
'Erebus' on his voyage in search of the south magnetic pole; Huxley
sailed on the Rattlesnake' with Owen Stanley, and, on this voyage,
laid the foundation of his remarkable knowledge of the structure
of marine animals; Darwin sailed on the ‘Beagle' (1831—6) and,
among the many results of this memorable voyage, was his theory
of the structure and origin of coral-reefs. The invention of
telegraphy indirectly brought about a great advance in our know-
ledge of deep-sea fauna. It was necessary to survey the routes
upon which the large oceanic cables were to be laid, and, by the
inventions of new sounding and dredging instruments, it was
becoming possible to secure samples of the bottom fauna as well
as of the sub-stratum upon which it existed.
Other names
that occur in connection with deep-sea dredging are those of
Sir Wyville Thomson, of W. B. Carpenter and of J. Gwyn Jeffreys.
But by far the most important and, up to the present time,
unrivalled attempt to solve the mysteries of the seas was that of


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6
VIII] Zoological Exploration 297
H. M. S. 'Challenger,' which was despatched by the admiralty at
the close of the year 1872, the results of whose voyage have
appeared in some eighty quarto volumes. The results of the
exploration of the sea by the Challenger' have never been
equalled. In one respect, however, they were disappointing. It
had been hoped that, in the deeper abysms of the sea, creatures
whom we only know as geological, fossilised, bony specimens,
might be found in the flesh; but, with one or two exceptions-
and these of no great importance—such were not found. Neither
did any new type of organism appear. Nothing, in fact, was
dredged from the depths or found in the tow-net that did not fit
into the larger groups which already had been established before
the 'Challenger' was thought of. On the other hand, many new
methods of research were developed during this voyage, and
with it will ever be associated the names of Wyville Thomson,
mentioned above, Moseley, John Murray and others who, happily,
are still with us.
During the nineteenth century, many other expeditions left
Great Britain to explore the natural history of the world, some
the result of public, some of private, enterprise. They are too
numerous to mention. But a word must be said about the
wonderful exploration of central America which has just been com-
pleted, under the auspices of F. D. Goodman and 0. Salvin. The
results are incorporated in a series of magnificently illustrated
quarto volumes which have been issued during the last thirty-six
years. Fifty-two of these relate to zoology, five to botany and
six to archaeology. Nearly forty thousand species of animals
have been described, of which about twenty thousand are new,
and nearly twelve thousand species of plants. There are few
remote and partially civilised areas of the world whose zoology
and botany are on so secure a basis, and this is entirely owing
to the munificence and enterprise of the above mentioned men of
science.
With regard to our own shores, one of the features of the
latter part of the nineteenth century has been the establishment
of marine biological stations, the largest of which is that of the
Marine Biological association at Plymouth. The Gatty laboratory
at St Andrews, the laboratories at port Erin in the isle of Man,
and at Cullercoats, have, also, for many years, being doing ad-
mirable work. All these establishments have devoted much
technical skill and time to solve fishery and other economical
problems connected with our seas.


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298 The Literature of Science [CH.
By far the most important event in the history of biology in
the nineteenth century was the publication, in 1859, of The Origin
of Species. This statement might be strengthened, for the publi-
cation of this book changed the whole trend of thought not only
in biology, not only in other sciences, but in the whole intellectual
outlook of the world. There were, of course, many British
evolutionists before Darwin, amongst whom may be mentioned
Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, Wells, Patrick
Matthew, Pritchard, Grant, Herbert-some of these writers even
hinted at natural selection. Above all, Robert Chambers, whose
Vestiges of Creation remained anonymous until after his death,
strongly pressed the view that new species of animals were being
evolved from simpler types.
During the incubatory period of Darwin's great work, as Alfred
Newton has remarked, systematists, both in zoology and botany,
had been feeling great searchings of heart as to the immutability
of species. There was a general feeling in the air that some light
on this subject would shortly appear. As a recent writer has
reminded us,
In studying the history of Evolutionary ideas, it is necessary to keep in
mind that there are two perfectly distinct lines of thought. . . . First. The
conviction that species are not immutable, but that, by some means or other,
new forms of life are derived from pre-existing ones. Secondly. The con-
ception of some process or processes, by which this change of old forms into
new ones may be explained 1.
Now, as we have seen, the first of these lines of thought had been
accepted by many writers. Darwin's great merit was that he
conceived a process by means of which this evolution in the
ganic kingdom could be explained.
After his return from the voyage in the ‘Beagle,' and after a
short residence in London, Darwin, in 1842, settled at the village
of Down in Kent, and here it was, he says, 'I can remember the
very spot on the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the
solution occurred to me. ' The 'solution' was natural selection
'
by means of the survival of the fittest. ' Darwin had written out
his views so early as 1842, but he had confided them only to
a few, and were it not for a strange coincidence, they might have
remained in manuscript even later than 1858.
For, in the spring of 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace, a traveller
and explorer who made his living as a collector, was lying
sick of fever at Ternate, and his thoughts turned, as Darwin's
had done years before, to the writings of Malthus? , of Jesus
The Coming of Evolution, by Judd, John W. , Cambridge, 1912.
: On Population.
>


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VIII] The Origin of Species 299
college, Cambridge. The idea of natural selection flashed across
his mind. He lost no time in setting it down in writing and in
sending it to Darwin by the next post. The story is too well
known to repeat here with what mutual magnanimity Wallace and
Darwin behaved. Each always gave the other the fullest credit
of the inspiration.
The publication of The Origin of Species naturally aroused
immense opposition and heated controversy. But Darwin was no
controversialist. Patient and entirely unresponsive under abuse,
he was, at the same time, eager for criticism (knowing that it might
,
advance the truth). His views offended, not only old-fashioned
naturalists, but theologians and clerics. Huxley wrote shortly
after Darwin's death,
None have fought better, and none have been more fortunate, than Charles
Darwin. He found a great truth trodden underfoot, reviled by bigots, and
ridiculed by all the world; he lived long enough to see it, chiefly by his own
efforts, irrefragably established in science, inseparably incorporated with the
common thoughts of men, and only hated and feared by those who would
revile, but dare not. What shall a man desire more than this 1 ?
Darwin, also, was fortunate in his supporters, though some of
the leading biologists of the time conspicuous among them was
Owen-rejected the new doctrine. In Hooker, on the botanical side,
in Huxley, on the zoological side, and in Lyell, on the geological
side, he found three of the ablest intellects of his country and
of his century as champions.
None of these agreed on all points
with his leader; but all three gave a more than general adherence to
his principles and a more than generous aid in promulgating his
doctrine. Lyell was an older man, and his Principles of Geology
had long been a classic. This book inspired students destined to
become leaders in the revolution of thought which was taking
place in the last half of the nineteenth century. One of these
writes :
Were I to assert that if the Principles of Geology had not been written,
we should never have had the Origin of Species, I think I should not be going
too far: at all events, I can safely assert, from several conversations I had
with Darwin, that he would have most unhesitatingly agreed in that opinions.
Sir Joseph Hooker, whose great experience as a traveller and a
systematic botanist, and one who had in his time the widest know-
ledge of the distribution of plants, was of invaluable assistance to
Darwin on the botanical side of his researches. Those who
1 Huxley, T. H. , Collected Essays, vol. II, p. 247.
? Judd, J. W. op. cit.


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300 The Literature of Science [CH.
remember Hooker will remember him as a man of ripe ex-
perience, sound judgment and a very evenly balanced mind. But
all these high and by no means common qualities were combined
with caution, and with a critical faculty which was quite invaluable
to Darwin at this juncture. Huxley was of a somewhat different
temperament. He was rather proud of the fact that he was
named after the doubting apostle; but, whatever Huxley doubted,
he never doubted himself. He had clear-cut ideas which he was
capable of expressing in the most vigorous and the most culti-
vated English. Both on platform and on paper he was a keen
controversialist. He contributed much to our knowledge of
morphology. But never could he have been mistaken for a
field-naturalist. In the latter part of his life he was drawn away
from pure science by the demands of public duty, and he was,
undoubtedly, a power in the scientific world. For he was ever
one of that small band in England who united scientific accuracy
and scientific training with influence on the political and official
life of the country.
It is somewhat curious that the immediate effect of the publi-
cation of The Origin of Species and of the acceptance of its
theories by a considerable and ever-increasing number of experts
did not lead to the progress of research along the precise lines
Darwin himself had followed. To trace the origin of animals and
plants and their interconnection was still the object of zoologists
and' botanists, but the more active researchers of the last part
of the nineteenth century attacked the problem from standpoints
in the main other than that of Darwin. The accurate description
of bodily structure and the anatomical comparison of the various
organs was the subject of one school of investigators : Rolleston's
Forms of Animal Life, re-edited by Hatchett Jackson, Huxley's
Vertebrate and Invertebrate Zoologies, and Milnes Marshall's
Practical Zoology testify to this. Another school took up with
great enthusiasm the investigation of animal embryology, the
finest output of which was Balfour's Text-book of Embryology,
published in 1880. Francis Maitland Balfour occupied a chair,
especially created for him at Cambridge university, in 1882,
and, for a time, Cambridge became a centre for this study, and
Balfour's pupil, Sedgwick, carried on the tradition. Members of
yet another school devoted themselves to the minute structure
of the cell and to the various changes which the nucleus under-
goes during cell-division. Animal histology has, however, been
chiefly associated with physiology; and, as this chapter is already


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VIII] Schools of Biological Thought 301
greatly overweighted, we have had to leave physiology on one
side. The subjects of degeneration, as shown by such forms as
the sessile tunicata, the parasitic crustacea and many internal
parasitic worms, with the last of which the name of Cobbold
is associated, also received attention, and increased interest was
shown in the pathogenic influence of internal parasites upon
their hosts.
Towards the end of our period, a number of new schools of
biological thought arose. As Judd tells us :
Mutationism, Mendelism, Weismannism, Neo-Lamarckism, Biometrics,
Eugenics and what not are being diligently exploited. But all of these
vigorous growths have their real roots in Darwinism. If we study Darwin's
correspondence, and the successive essays in which he embodied his views at
different periods, we shall find, variation by mutation (or per saltum), the
influence of environment, the question of the inheritance of acquired
characters and similar problems were constantly present to Darwin's ever
open mind, his views upon them changing from time to time, as fresh facts
were gathered.
Like everything else, these new theories are deeply rooted in
the past.


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CHAPTER IX
ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE
THE early classical culture of Ireland, her literary technique
in her native Gaelic and the equipment of solid learning that
enabled her missionaries to evangelise much of western Europe,
have always been a source of puzzled surprise to the modern
historian.
Only quite recently has the veil been lifted from this perplexing
historical problem. For Zimmer has proved that the remarkable
early Irish erudition was due to an exodus of Gaulish scholars
into Ireland owing to the devastation of their country by the
Huns, Vandals, Goths and Alans. They avoided England, which,
at the time, was suffering from continental invasions; they sought
Ireland because it was known, through the traders plying between
the mouths of the Loire and Garonne and the south and east
coasts of Ireland, to be not only a fertile and prosperous country
but, also, to be already favourable to the Christian religion. Two
circumstances conspired to establish the success of the influx of
Gaulish scholars and divines with their precious manuscripts. For
they reached Ireland with a learning that, as has been said,
was still to the full extent the best tradition of scholarship in Latin Grammar,
Oratory and Poetry, together with a certain knowledge of Greek-in fact
the full classical lore of the 4th Century.
They arrived, also, at a time when the Irish were most ready to
receive them. For they found native schools of Irish oratory and
poetry in which their Brehons or jurists and Filidh (Filé) or poets
were being laboriously trained. To use Bede's expression, it was
not book-Latin but a living speech and a literature in the making
that was now heard in many parts of Ireland. '
No wonder, then, that a fusion of Gaelic and classical literature
began to take place. Thus, Irish bards fell into the metres of
Latin hymns sung in the churches, and introduced final and
internal rime, and a regularly recurring number of syllables, into


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CH. IX
]
Gaelic Poetry
303
their native poetry from the Latin; though Sigerson and others
would have us believe that rime came into Latin from the Gaels
or their kinsmen the Gauls, and that Cicero's famous O fortunatam
natam me Consule Romam shows this Celtic influence on Latin
poetry. Moreover, there was drawn into the Gaelic tongue a form
of rhythmic prose to be found in very early Gaelic writings,
notably the incantation of Amorgen, known as rosg, which still
has its counterpart in the Welsh preachers' hwel or rhetorical
cadence.
So complete a removal, westward, of classical scholarship
was thus made in the fourth century that, at the end of the fifth
century, Sidonius Apollinaris declares that he knew of but one
scholar at Trèves, Argogastis, who could speak and write pure
Latin. But the lucky Irish, all this while, were enjoying the full
gift of classical learning, and that at a time before scruples had
arisen in the minds of professors of Christianity against the study
of classics, owing to the pagan doctrines which pervaded them.
They, therefore, gave themselves up whole-heartedly to it, and when,
as missionaries and scholars, they carried back this classical
learning to the continent at the end of the fifth century, they
were amazed to find that they and their fellow-countrymen were
almost its sole possessors.
The interfusion of the Gaulish classical and Christian and the
Gaelic schools of literature, thus early in Irish history, not only
made for a singular forbearance towards such pagan themes as are
to be found in The Colloquy of St Patrick with Oisin (Ossian),
but, also, gave to the religious poems of the Irish saints and the
curiously free Gaelic translations from Vergil and other classical
writings a picturesque individuality which makes them delightful
reading.
Gaelic poetry resolves itself roughly into fairy poetry or
pagan supernatural poetry, early and later religious poetry, nature
poetry, war poetry, love poetry and what may be termed official
poetry, i. e. that of the bards as court poets, and as poets
attached to the great chieftains whose exploits and nuptials they
celebrated and whose dirges they sang; while, here and there,
specimens of Irish satirical poetry are to be met throughout the
three periods of ancient, middle and later Irish, into which
leading scholars are agreed in dividing the works left to us in
Irish Gaelic.
The early war poetry does not call for special comment beyond
this; as
as was to have been expected, it largely consists of


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304
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
6
6
laudations of chieftains of a fiercely barbaric kind, and abounds with
picturesque descriptive phraseology. Thus, in Deirdre's Lament
over the Sons of Usnagh, they are variously described as 'three lions
from the Hill of the Cave,' 'three dragons of Dun Monidh' and
three props of the battle-host of Coolney. ' But, running through
the savage and demonic incidents that characterise the early
Irish epics, there is a vein of generosity of one heroic combatant
towards another, the desire to fight fair and even to succour
a failing enemy, strangely anticipatory of the spirit of medieval
chivalry.
Of official poetry, it may be said that its technique is extremely
elaborate and, since it was necessary to put as much thought as
possible into each self-contained quatrain, its condensations often
make very hard sayings of these early ranns. A love of, or
tendency towards, the supernatural permeates early and middle
Irish poetry, as, indeed, it also pervades The History of Ireland
by Geoffrey Keating, the Irish Herodotus, who wrote as late as
1634; and much of the fascination of Gaelic verse is due to the
intrusion of the glamour of the other world' into its pages.
Love poetry, among the earliest of its kind in Europe, not
only finds poignant expression in such an early Irish poem as What
is Love? -an expression as definite in its description of the
sufferings of a lover as can be found even in Shakespeare's Sonnets
a
- but the love lyrics interspersed among Irish prose romances are
generally uttered by famous women whose adventures are there
described with a passionate purity and tender, delicate feeling
rarely met with in the heroines of the Arthurian cycles.
One other characteristic distinguishes old Gaelic poetry from
that of contemporary European writers—that love of nature
described by Matthew Arnold as natural magic and, according
to him, specially characteristic of early and medieval Irish and
Welsh poetry. This feature of Gaelic poetry is not only to be
noticed in the open air Fenian Sagas, but, even in an early hymn
to the Virgin, we find her described as:
Branch of Jesse's Tree, whose blossoms
Scent the heavenly hazel wood!
and
Star of knowledge, rare and noble,
Tree of many blossoming sprays!
Indeed, the love of nature suffuses all Irish Gaelic poetry.
The bard of early days felt it even among the icy rigours of winter,
while the cheerful companionship with nature of the Irish monk


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IX]
Translations from Irish Poetry
305
or anchorite is in marked contrast with the fakir-like indifference
to her influences of a St Simeon Stylites or the voluntary with-
drawal from them of the enclosed Orders of later days. Enough
has been said here to suggest that there is much in Irish Gaelic
literature, which, if well translated into English verse or prose,
might have a stimulative effect upon English letters. Stopford
Brooke set himself to prove this by an instructive essay entitled
The Need and Use of getting Irish Literature into the English
Tongue, written three and twenty years ago, in which he showed
that there is a vast body of that literature untranslated or in-
adequately translated, and that very much of it, in good hands,
might be so rendered as to prove a substantial gain to English
literature.
There has been a considerable response to his appeal, and it
is not a little remarkable that, more than a hundred years ago,
an early scion of the same literary stock, Charlotte Brooke, daughter
of Henry Brooke, the dramatist, had conceived the same view of
the importance of recruiting English literature from Irish Gaelic
sources, and put it into practice by her own volume of translations
from Irish poetry.
Unfortunately, however, the artificial, not to say affected,
English verse of her day was about the worst vehicle for the
reproduction of the best Gaelic poetry, and the contributors to
Hardiman's Irish Minstrelsy, which followed her volume, and even
later writers in the nineteenth century, were found wanting as
effective translators from the Irish. But a new impulse to, and
pleasure in, the study of Gaelic poetry was contributed by the
vivid versions in kindred English forms of the great Irish prose
epics, and of the lyric passages with which they are studded,
as well as of the poems of the earlier and later bards wrought by
such writers as Edward Walsh and Sir Samuel Ferguson, Mangan
and Callanan, Whitley Stokes and Standish Hayes O'Grady, and
the editors of the Ossianic society's publications.
A band of contemporary authors, some of whom had already
translated many poems, have further answered to the call. This
became more easy, owing to the impetus given to the study of Irish
by the foundation of the Gaelic league. The Irish Text society was
started, and more than a dozen volumes of important English
translations from Irish classics have been issued by it. Many
translations have been the work of Irishwomen, while further
translations of Irish lyric poetry, Irish heroic tales and myths and
Irish dramatic poetry have been made. It is only during the last
20
E. L. XIV.
CH. IX.


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[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
twenty-five years that the language of this poetry has been
carefully studied, and later scholars have had the advantage
over their predecessors in being able to introduce with great
effect reminiscences of the characteristic epithets and imagery
which formed a large part of the stock-in-trade of the medieval
bard.
We have indicated that the interesting individual character of
early Irish literature makes it worth while getting that literature
more fully represented in the English language through translation,
adaptation and the use of Irish themes in original English writings.
It may be desirable to point out here that, when Irish literature
had a wider recognition in Britain and on the continent than it
now commands, it thus found its way into European and Welsh and,
therefrom, into English literature. The Anglo-Norman conquerors
of Ireland, no doubt, clung to their French prose and verse
romances, and the native Irish chieftains were as conservative of
their native hero tales and poems. Yet, as E. C. Quiggin well puts it,
few serious scholars will be prepared to deny that the Island contributed in
considerable measure to the common literary stock of the Middle ages. In
the literature of vision, very popular in Ireland, a chord was struck which
continued to vibrate powerfully until the time of the reformation, and The
Vision of Tundale (Tnudgal), written with striking success by an Irishman
named Marcus at Regensburg about the middle of the twelfth century, was
probably known to Dante, and, in addition to the numerous continental
versions, there is a rendering of its story into middle English verse.
Apart from its visions, there is a section of Irish Gaelic literature
known as that of imrama or voyages. The earliest romance of the
kind is the voyage of Maeldun, to Joyce's translation of which, in
his Old Celtic Romances, the writer of this chapter called Tenny-
son's attention. Hence the appearance of Tennyson's wellknown
poem. A still more famous Irish imram is The Voyage of
St Brendan, which passed through all the Christian continent and,
therefore, as Quiggin points out, 'figures in The South English
Legendary. ' "The episode of St Brendan and the Whale, moreover,
was probably the ultimate source of one of Milton's best known
similes in his description of Satan. But the legend of St Brendan,
as told in Irish literature, differs both from the Latin version and
from those of France and Germany. Matthew Arnold's poem is
based on these foreign versions and introduces the incident of
Judas Iscariot being allowed out of hell for one day in the year,
because of an act of humanity when on earth.
The question is still vexed as to how far the characteristics of
Arthurian legends are due to their being possessed in common by


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IX]
Celtic Influence
307
6
the Irish and the Welsh, or to Irish influences over Welsh romantic
literature dating back to the days of Gruffydd ap Cynan. He was
the son of an Irish princess, who had spent much of his life as an
exile in Ireland and, on his return to Wales, undoubtedly brought
with him Irish bards and shenachies, who through their superior
literary knowledge and technique and musical skill, greatly
advanced the Cymric culture of his day.
But it now seems fairly certain, in the opinion of Windisch and
other Celtic scholars, including Quiggin, that
some of the Welsh rhapsodists apparently served a kind of apprenticeship
with their Irish brethren, and many things Irish were assimilated at this time
which, through this channel, were shortly to find their way into Anglo-French.
Thus it may now be regarded as certain that the name of the 'fair sword,'
Excalibur, by Geoffrey called Caliburnus (Welsh Caletfwlch) is taken from
Caladbolg, the far famed broadsword of Fergus Mac Roig. It does not
appear that the whole frame-work of the Irish sagas was taken over, but, as
Windisch points out, episodes were borrowed as well as tricks of imagery.
So, to mention but one, the central incident of Syr Gawayn and the Grene
Knyght is doubtless taken from the similar adventure of Cuchulain in
Bricriu's Feast. Thus, the share assigned to Irish influence in the matière
de Bretagne is likely to grow with the progress of research1.
Matthew Arnold considers Shakespeare full of Celtic magic in
his handling of nature, and makes a fine discrimination between
his Greek and Celtic nature notes; but whence did he come by the
latter? Was it, at second hand, through Edmund Spenser, or his
friend Dowland the lutenist, who, if not an Irishman, had an Irish
association, or was his mother, Mary Arden, who came from the
Welsh border, and whose distant kinsfolk were connected with
the Welsh Tudor court, of Cymric blood ? Yet the Celtic note
is there. But, while Shakespeare describes Welsh character
brilliantly, in three special types, those of Glendower, Fluellen
and Sir Hugh Evans, he only sketches one feather-headed Irish-
man, records not a single Irish incident in any of his plays and only
makes a few passing allusions to kerns and gallowglasses, and to
the marvellous powers of prophecy and of riming rats to death
claimed by Irish bards, weaving into his musical and lyrical
framework half a dozen Irish airs and a couple of references to
Irish folk-lore-if, indeed, his queen Mab is the Irish queen Medb
—
and his Puck is the Irish Puca, whose gambols and appearance are
very similar to Puck's.
Probably, Shakespeare was not unnaturally prejudiced against
the Irish, with whom, for much of his life, his country was at war,
and whom Spenser had described in unflattering terms, and at
1 'Irish Influence on English Literature,' Quiggin, E. C. , in The Glories of Ireland.
20—2


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[CH.
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whose hands he and Essex and other Englishmen with whom
Shakespeare must have been in intellectual sympathy had suffered
much. Spenser's own writings, also, suggest that, although his
Faerie Queene, largely written on the banks of the southern
Blackwater, has its scenery as a background in book y and else-
where, the bardic poetry which he had caused to be translated
for him, and which, in his opinion, was 'of sweet wit and good
invention,' made no personal appeal to him. Indeed, considering
how savagely hostile it was to his countrymen, as he declares, it
was not likely to have had any further effect upon him.
To what must we attribute the literary silence of the English-
speaking settlers in Ireland from the end of the twelfth to the
close of the sixteenth century? The causes are threefold. Irish
and Latin, for the mass of the inhabitants of Ireland, were their
written and spoken languages, and writers in English would have
had a very small hearing. Constant wars with the native Irish,
and a very precarious hold upon their property, made the pursuit
of English letters almost out of the question with the Anglo-Irish
of the Pale. Finally, the remarkable tendency of the Anglo-Norman
and Englishman to become, in course of time, more Irish than the
Irish, owing to intermarriage and fosterage and separation from
their kinsfolk in England and Wales, drew them away from
English and Welsh into Irish-Gaelic literature.
With the exception, therefore, of merely technical books such
as John Garland's Organum, a musical treatise in Latin, and
Lionel Power's first English treatise on music, in 1395, no Anglo-
Irish literary works are to be noted till we reach Stanyhurst's
Description of Ireland, together with part of a history of Ireland,
written, under the direction of Edmund Campion the Jesuit, for
Holinshed's Chronicles, published in 15781.
Works by Anglo-Irish writers of the seventeenth century are
largely in Latin and, therefore, are not dealt with here. A reference
to the bibliography of this chapter will, however, show that
a few of these have been rendered into English and should be
consulted, in this or in their original form, by students interested
in Irish history, archaeology and hagiology, secular and religious,
and in the treatment of these subjects by such distinguished con-
temporary writers as John Colgan, Sir James Ware—whom arch-
bishop Ussher had educated into an interest in Irish history and
antiquities--Luke Wadding and Philip O'Sullivan Beare. These,
too, were the times of Geoffrey Keating, the first writer of modern
1 See, ante, vol. II, p. 319.


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IX]
James Ussher.
The Sheridans
309
Irish who can claim to possess literary style, and of the O'Clery
family. Keating was a poet as well as a historian, and his lyric
Geoffrey Keating to his Letter on its way to Ireland is one of the
most charming of Irish patriotic poems. Keating's History of
Ireland has been recently issued by the Irish Text society, with
an excellent English translation facing the original Irish, and
Annals of the Four Masters may also be consulted in a satis-
factory English version.
But the first seventeenth century writer whose works are
familiar to contemporary Englishmen was James Ussher, one of
the first students of Trinity college, Dublin, afterwards archbishop
of Armagh and primate of Ireland, who, without doubt, was one
of the most remarkable of Irish scholars, being, according to
Selden, ad miraculam doctus. He wrote in English as well as in
Latin, and, moreover, was an Irish scholar. He discovered the
long lost Book of Kells, a MS of the four Gospels, the finest
specimen of Irish illuminated art in existence, and, indeed,
unparalleled for beauty by any other work of the kind, and he
bequeathed it, with the rest of his books and MSS, to Trinity
college, Dublin, in 1661. His writings are mainly concerned with
theological or controversial subjects, which had a great vogue
in his days. But his opus magnum is Annales Veteris et Novi
Testamenti, a chronological compendium in Latin of the history
of the world from the Creation to the dispersion of the Jews
under Vespasian, which brought him European fame. Ussher's
specially Irish works are mentioned in the bibliography.
&
а
Passing to later centuries, we shall find few instances of a here-
ditary talent so persistent as that of the Sheridan stock. Richard
Brinsley Sheridan himself inherited poetic tastes from his mother,
born Frances Chamberlaine, from his father Thomas Sheridan, a
noted actor and playwright, his dramatic bent, and from his grand-
father, Thomas Sheridan, Swift's intimate, a classical style. His own
brilliant wit descended to his son Tom Sheridan, father of Caroline
Sheridan, afterwards Mrs Norton-(the supposed prototype of George
Meredith's Diana of the Crossways), and, also, of Helen Sheridan,
lady Dufferin. From the Sheridan stock, too, descends the Le Fanu
talent; for Alice, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's sister, a clever
writer of verse and plays, was grandmother of Joseph Sheridan
Le Fanu, while Sheridan Knowles, the popular actor and dramatist,
was, also, of the Sheridan-Le Fanu stock. Caroline Norton does
See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. VI.


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[CH.
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a
not escape the influence of the sentimentality which marked the
verse of her time, as her sister lady Dufferin escapes it. The
simplest themes seemed to attract lady Dufferin most. Living a
happy domestic life amid Irish surroundings, her warm heart beats
in such close sympathy with her peasant neighbours that, in I'm
sitting on the stile, Mary, and The Bay of Dublin, she writes as
if she were one of themselves, while her sense of fun floats through
her Irish poems with a delicate breeziness.
A writer of the Sheridan blood nearer to present day literary
tastes than James Sheridan Knowles? was Joseph Sheridan Le
Fanu, Sheridan's great grand-nephew. T. W. Rolleston does not
say too much in Le Fanu's praise as a master of the mysterious and
terrible when he thus writes of him :
In Uncle Silas, in his wonderful tales of the supernatural, such as The
Watcher, and in a short and less known but most masterly story, The
Room in the Dragon Volant, he touched the springs of terror and suspense,
as perhaps no other writer of fiction in the language has been able to do.
His fine scholarship, poetic sense, and strong, yet delicate handling of
language and of incident give these tales a place quite apart among works
of sensational fiction. But perhaps the most interesting of all his novels is
The House by the Churchyard, a wonderful admixture of sentimentalism,
humour, tragedy, and romance.
To this may be added the belief that, in Le Fanu's verse and,
notably, in his drama Beatrice, the qualities above indicated are
often conveyed with a finer touch, and, at times, with extraordinary
directness of suggestion. Again, the lurid terror of his poetical
narratives is happily relieved by interludes of such haunting
beauty of colour and sound, that we cannot but lament the late-
ness of this discovery of his highest artistic self. Indeed, our
literature can ill afford to lose lyrical dramas with such a stamp
of appalling power upon them as is impressed on Beatrice, or
old-world idylls so full of Gaelic glamour as The Legend of
the Glaive, or so terrible a confession by a drunkard of how he
had fallen irrevocably into the toils of the enchantress drink as
The Song of the Bottle and such stirring Irish ballads as Shamps
O'Brien and Phaudrig Crohoore.
William Drennan was one of the founders and the terary
champion of 'The Society of United Irishmen’; for his Letters of
Orellana drew a large number of Ulstermen into its ranks, while
his fine lyrics The Wake of William Orr and Erin, admired by
Moore, earned him the title 'The Tyrtaeus of the United Irishmen,'
1 See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. VIII.


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1x]
National Folk-ballads
311
Mary Tighe, born Blachford-notable, like Mrs Hemans, for her
beauty, poetical talent and unhappy marriage----was the authoress
of Psyche, adapted from the story of Cupid and Psyche in The
Golden A88 of Apuleius—a long, harmonious, fanciful and un-
affected poem, in the Spenserian stanza, which had a wide
circulation in its day, influenced the work of Keats and won
Moore's praise in his lyric Tell me the witching Tale again.
With the later years of the eighteenth century begins that
period in Anglo-Irish literature when the brief but brilliant era
of Irish parliamentary independence gave an impulse to literature,
art and music in Ireland which survived the passing of the Act
of union for quite a generation. Apart from the patriotic poems of
Drennan and such national folk-ballads as The Shan van Vocht, and
The Wearing of the Green, and the brilliant oratory of Grattan,
Flood and Curran—there was a revival of interest in Irish native
poetry and music, evidenced by the publication of Charlotte
Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry, the holding of the Granard and
Belfast meetings of Irish harpers and the consequent issue of
Bunting's first and second collections of Ancient Irish Music,
which inspired Moore's Irish Melodies. Magazines began to
appear in Dublin, Belfast and Cork, which gave employment to
Irish men and women of letters. Learned societies sprang up and
flourished. Schools of art were founded and state-aided popular
education succeeded the hedge-schools. But these movements
were interrupted and marred by intermittent political agitations,
and Dublin lost more and more of its prestige as a capital. The
writers, artists and musicians who would have rallied around the
leaders of an independent Ireland were gradually led to seek their
living in London; and, for the same reasons, the mental vitality
they had showed at the end of the previous century declined
even more decidedly in Belfast, Cork and Limerick.
Two groups of Irish patriots, however, the one more purely
political, the other, owing to race, less actively so, conferred
literary credit upon Ireland even at a time when she was suffering
from unsatisfactory land laws and the imposition of a poor
law contrary to the character of her people.
One of these groups, the Young Irelanders, carried on its
literary propaganda very much as a protest against what they
regarded as the continuous misgovernment of their country; the
other group remained faithful to literary efforts for Ireland in spite
of the existing condition of the country; and, thus, though in
a large measure opposed to one another in politics, the two bodies


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[CH.
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worked side by side, more especially in universities and learned
societies.
George Petrie, a distinguished artist, archaeologist, musician
and man of letters, and a man of as much personal charm as
versatility of talent, drew around him the most eminent of the
non-political group of Irish writers referred to, in association
with Caesar Otway, who, somewhat late in life, discovered literary
gifts of a high order which he employed in writings descrip-
tive of Irish life, scenery and historic remains. He started
The Dublin Penny Journal and conducted it with spirit and
marked ability for a year, and, ten years later, The Irish
Penny Journal, which he carried on, this time as sole editor,
with equal enthusiasm and skill for the same short period.
The physician William Stokes, whose Biography of George
Petrie is a standard Irish work of its kind, is, however, con-
strained to say, that, though, next to politics and polemics, the
subjects treated of in these two illustrated magazines, namely,
the history, biography, poetry, antiquities, natural history,
legends and traditions of the country, were most likely to attract
the attention of the Irish people, yet,
there is no more striking evidence of the absence of public opinion or the
want of interest in the history of the country on the part of Irish society
than the failure of these two works, and it is remarkable that the principal
demand for them was from London and the provincial towns of England.
In literary merit, they were anything but failures and, indeed, it is told of
Southey, that he used to say, when talking of these volumes, that he prized
them as among the most valuable of his library.
The Irish writers who deserved this favourable verdict from
Southey were Carleton and the Banims, Crofton Croker, Mrs S. C.
Hall, Anster, Martin Doyle, Wills, D'Alton and Furlong.
Besides Petrie himself, author of two archaeological works
-Origin and uses of the Round Towers and Essay on Tara
Hill—each a masterpiece of scientific reasoning, and of a series of
descriptive articles relating to Clonmacnoise, the isles of Arran
and other places of Irish antiquarian and other interests, which
possess a charm as delicate and wistful as his Welsh and Irish
water-colour paintings, we find ourselves in the company of Otway,
of whom Archer Butler has well said :
a
Among all the panegyrists of Irish natural beauty, none has ever
approached him. You are not, indeed, to expect much method or system in
his sketches, but he had a higher and rarer gift. He was possessed by what
he saw and felt. His imagination seemed to revel in the sublimities he
described: his sentences became breathing pictures, better, because more
suggestive, than painting itself.


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