I’m currently reading Charles Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle” and its raised a few questions regarding this important scientific expedition.
How large, at the time, was the body of knowlege of the natural sciences? The reason I ask is because in the book, he describes rock formations and even animal life using a lot of seemingly modern terms. I’m no geologist so I don’t know the history of the field, but it sure sounds like they had a lot of things figured out by Darwin’s time. Sure, they didn’t have the large theoretical basis that we now have (ie, plate tectonics) but it does seem many natural phenomenon had been observed and documented by this time.
Stemming from the above question, what genuinely new discoveries did Darwin make on the island? He wasn’t the first person to visit that island; to what degree had its wildlife inhabitants already been documented? (Obviously though not to the depth Darwin presented).
I don’t think it was so much discoveries as it was his synthesis of current ideas into a coherent theory.
Among other things, Darwin studied the finches of the Galapagos. They were all related to each other and to the finches along the coast of Ecuador on the mainland. However, they were grouped into different interbreeding groups delineated mostly by the configuration of their bills. And that configuration was determined by their diet, or vice versa. Darwin speculated that, for example, in the struggle for food, some birds had stronger bills and could exploit harder shelled nuts than other birds and so they could exploie a different environmental niche.
With time, a population of strong-billed finches would develop and interbreed with each other which if it went on long enough would produce a new species, while the bird type from which they originated would still be occupying the original environment.
Darwin did make many original discoveries and made important contributions to biology which can be found easily by looking up his biograph in any good encyclopedia.
Sure, evolution is indeed a “new discovery” he developed as a result of his studies on his islanland, but that’s not what I’m looking for. Perhaps I should have clarified that in the OP.
What I’m curious about is how large the body of knowledge was in the field of natural sciences at the time of his journey and what specific observations he made on the island that served to increase that knowledge.
So having said that, Question #1 remains the same. Question #2 is quite trivial - I’m just after a list of creatures he discovered that had not been previously known.
There was a very considerable body of scientific knowledge by Darwin’s time. Relatively modern science had started to develop by the mid-1700s.
Linnaeus established a global system of classification for plants and animals by the 1750s. By illustrating the hierarchical nature of relationships of organisms, it helped influence the development of evolutionary theory.
In Geology, Charles Lyell’sPrinciples of Geology had a major influence on Darwin. Lyell was essentially the founding father of modern geology. He advocated the view that geological features had developed over long periods of time by the action of processes still going on today, rather than through vast castastrophes in the past such as Noah’s flood.
Regarding biological knowledge of South America in general, Alexander von Humbodlt made major contributions in the early 1800s, although he did not visit the Galapagos.
Regarding question 2, I am not sure if other naturalists had visited the Galapagos previously, but certainly Darwin studied them far more thoroughly than anyone had before. Many of his discoveries of species were original.
Well, any attempt to quantify how much was known is bound to come to the conclusion that only a tiny fraction of what we think we know today was available to Darwin. Furthermore, the Origin looms so large in our rear-view from the 21st century that we can tend to minimise what was known before 1859.
But certainly by the end of the 18th century one very recognisably has geology as an organised discipline. So by the time Darwin sailed there had been a generation or two of highly developed geological debate. The arguments over whether the dominant processes in laying down rocks were water or volcanism had ranged back and forth through several cycles. As you’ve noticed, a reasonably-common technical vocabulary had emerged, including systems of geological ages. Virtually everybody was being thinking in terms of the past being long. Certainly tens or hundreds of thousands of years, possibly even millions upon millions. As he sailed, Lyell was in the process of publishing the Principles of Geology, a work that Darwin digested during the voyage. (With the later volumes being posted to him as they came out.)
Paleontologists were already studying the relationships between fossil animals and plants, thus beginning to reconstruct ancient environments. They understood that there were many major species of extinct creatures, though, for instance, Owen’s 1841 announcement of dinosaurs was still a few years away. And, with some dissenters, most researchers still held to the fixity of species.
In a sense Darwin was living through a period where the amount they didn’t know was becoming clearer. As the past became longer, there was possibly more to discover out there. Someone like him came to explicitly realise that he only knew a fraction of what there was to know about the history of life.
If you want a survey of what was known about the natural world in the period, you might like to look at the first volume of the abridgement of von Humboldt’s Cosmos (Johns Hopkins, 1997), particularly the section on paleontology. He was writing just after Darwin returned to Britain (indeed, he had obviously read the Journal and mentions Darwin a few times), but it’s a big contemporary attempt to comprehensively describe the natural world to a popular audience.
Tricky, though this site has lots of stuff on early accounts of the islands. The outlines of the geography and wildlife were already fairly well known, but I’d be mildly surprised if many good specimens had made it back to Europe. It’s this that excited the professionals back in Britain about what Darwin was doing: collecting lots of well-preserved examples. For standards had moved on from people being happy with accounts of big tortoises or whatever. They wanted animals and plants in bottles or rocks that could either become type specimens for scientific classification or which could be dissected and the results written up in formal monographs. Pretty much everything he brought back was exciting to some specialist.
In fact much of the importance of the Beagle specimens depended on Darwin collaborating with others. For the most part he handed them over to the likes of Owen to be written up, though he also published extensively on what he’d seen; most obviously in the Journal, but see also some of the more formal stuff here. The most famous consequence of this process was that it was the ornithologist John Gould who was classifying the birds that had been collected. It’s Gould who realised that the finches from the Galapogos were several different species, thereby alerting Darwin to their possible significance.
This period of the months just after the Beagle’s return has been much argued about, because it’s then that Darwin breaks with the idea of species being fixed. Frank Sulloway’s work, which argues that the finches weren’t important, has been particularly influential. The issues are nicely summarised by Stephen Jay Gould in essay 23 of The Flamingo’s Smile. Even if the finches may not have had much to do with Darwin realising that species could evolve, but the broader process of documenting his specimens from the Beagle certainly seems to have.