Jonathan Smith
Humanities Department
University of Michigan-Dearborn
Dearborn, MI 48128-1491
jonsmith@umich.edu
And so my purpose here today is to begin that work of examination by focusing on Gould's most popular books, his monograph on hummingbirds, published between 1849 and 1861, and his monumental Birds of Great Britain, published between 1862 and 1873. These books, I suggest, provide a visual challenge to Darwinian theory, and its perceived political implications, for an audience that consisted primarily of aristocrats and the more conservative, anti-materialist elements of the scientific community.
When Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage, he recruited Gould to identify his bird specimens and to provide the bird illustrations for the Zoology of the voyage. It was Gould who identified Darwin's Galapagos finches as separate species, thus providing one of the crucial insights in the development of Darwin's theory. Although Gould and Darwin were never really friends, they knew each other quite well professionally. It therefore comes as quite a surprise when those who have written on Gould declare that he was silent about Darwin's theory. In a sense, this is true: Gould was a descriptive rather than a theoretical ornithologist, and his published and unpublished writings contain no overt declarations about natural selection. But his books nonetheless offer clear if unpolemical evidence of his dissent from Darwin, and his contemporaries had no trouble recognizing it.
Take, for example, the monograph on hummingbirds. Although most of it had appeared before the publication of the Origin, Gould did not write the separate introduction to it until 1861, when the work was completed. In it, Gould notes that despite the many different species of hummingbirds, they are easily distinguished. "I mention this fact," he says, "to show that what we designate a species has really distinctive and constant characters. . . . I have never observed an instance of variation which would lead me to suppose that it was the result of a union of two species. I write this without bias, one way or the other, as to the question of the origin of species." Despite his disclaimer, Gould is clearly challenging the very basis of Darwin's views. Putting aside his misunderstanding of Darwin, who of course does not see new species or even individual variations as resulting from the interbreeding of two species, to affirm that species are "distinctive and constant," and that variation does not lead to new species, are hardly neutral claims.
Gould sent presentation copies of his introduction to both Darwin and Richard Owen, the latter a powerful and conservative member of Britain's scientific elite, a staunch opponent of Darwin's theory, and a close friend of Gould's. Neither man had any trouble recognizing the impact of Gould's work. Owen, in his letter of acknowledgement to Gould, currently in the Natural History library at the British Museum, told his friend that the work provided valuable evidence of the fixity of species.
Darwin's letter of thanks is even more striking, for Darwin announces to Gould his intention to appropriate Gould's work for his own purposes. After gently correcting Gould for his misunderstanding of natural selection, Darwin tells him that "one of the points which has interested me most (which you will not approve of) is the number of doubtful species. I think I shall extract all their cases, as it will show that the determination of species is not a simple affair." Where Gould and Owen saw evidence of the fixity of species and the power of the Creator, Darwin saw evidence of the instability of species and the importance of variation. Indeed, my examination of Darwin's annotations to his copy of Gould's Introduction, currently at the Cambridge Library, suggests that Darwin read the work with an eye toward those passages that could be used to support his theories in subsequent editions of the Origin and in The Descent of Man.
It seems significant in light of this that Gould's next work was The Birds of Great Britain. His descriptive text for this work--which was, not coincidentally, his most successful--continues to signal differences with Darwin and to stress more strongly his natural theological beliefs. Gould's text is peppered with natural theological and hence implicitly anti-Darwinian comments. If it were not for "the constancy of species," says Gould, "ornithology would no longer be a science." The naturalist sees "evidences of a power and skill immeasureably superior to those ever originated by man" and is "deeply impress[ed] . . . with a sense of the wisdom, power, and the beneficence of his Creator." And when Gould discusses the relationship between two closely allied species of crossbills, he complains that "to go into the origin of species would be entering the region of speculation, without obtaining any satisfactory proofs," a declaration that does not prevent him from also proclaiming that it requires "little philosophy" to see that the bill of this bird "has been designed for some special object" (my emphasis).
Gould's visual language, the plates themselves, far from being simply pretty pictures of birds, translate this response to Darwin into pictorial terms. Here, too, Gould is working within a visual tradition of British natural theology, but his emphases and innovations seem to be conditioned by the threat posed by materialist evolutionary thought.
To clarify this, I want to use the work of two bird illustrators with whom Gould was very familiar, and who are probably familiar to you as well: Thomas Bewick and John James Audubon. This first slide is the opening vignette from the introduction to Bewick's History of British Birds, first published in 1797. Notice the rural, agrarian scene and the harmonious intermingling of human beings at work with a veritable barnyard of animals, most of them birds paired two-by-two in Noah's ark-fashion. The opening words of the introduction, which appear immediately below this vignette, declare the work's natural theological assumptions: "In no part of the animal creation are the wisdom, the goodness, and the bounty of Providence displayed in a more lively manner than in the structure, formation, and various endowments of the feathered tribes." In this next slide, I have chosen a typical Bewick woodcut of a bird, in this case the bearded tit. Notice the way Bewick places the bird against a fairly detailed background designed to provide a sense of the bird's natural habitat, but notice, too, that the bird is not really integrated into that habitat, and that no other animal life and no other bird life, even of the same species, are present.
Audubon offers a rather different model. Even a cursory glance at The Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, confirms that Audubon's drawings are not simply dynamic or dramatic, but violent. In this slide a male and female red-tailed hawk fight over a hare, whose blood drips down the female's talons. Audubon's birds, even the small ones, are almost always captured in the act of seizing prey, as in this slide of the red-eyed vireo. Depictions of interspecies acts of destruction, as in these blue jays destroying the eggs of another species, are not uncommon. Nests are rarely depicted in Audubon's plates, but when they are, the emphasis is usually on the look of the nest, as with this drawing of the marsh wren, rather than on the domestic scene of parent birds nurturing their young, as here with the house wren. I do not want to get into the cultural implications of Audubon's depictions--although my hunch is that they have to do with America's reputation as a violent, frontier nation--I offer them, rather, to make the point that how Gould depicts his birds, what he chooses to include and what to omit, is significant.
Gould's plates develop the tradition of Bewick's natural theology--he praises Bewick in his Introduction to The Birds of Great Britain--but with greater emphasis on the relationship between species and environment, and with an innovative focus on the domestic. The depiction of one species per plate had obvious advantages, but it is important to recognize that its obviousness was at least in part rooted in a conception of species as fixed, natural entities, and that it was in turn ideal for depictions rooted in more specifically natural theological assumptions. In this plate from Gould's early Birds of Europe, which appeared between 1832 and 1837, we can see both the affinities with Bewick and the emerging emphases of Gould: although Gould depicts male and female golden orioles, his single species appears in a static pose; the accompanying flora does not attempt to conjure up a habitat but does attempt to associate the birds with a particular tree. Over the years Gould's backgrounds became more and more detailed, his birds more dynamic, and, especially in the hummingbird volume and in The Birds of Great Britain, his focus more on domestic scenes. Notice here, in a depiction of the fiery topaz hummingbird, the nesting female and the detailed flora; here, of the crimson topaz, the detailed flora and the habitat, like Bewick's, bereft of other birds; here, of the saw-billed hermit, the combination of all three: the egg-filled nest, detailed foreground flora, and elaborate background habitat.
The emphasis on the domestic is especially pronounced in The Birds of Great Britain. In his Preface, Gould justifies his return to birds already depicted in The Birds of Europe a generation earlier by noting that his inclusion of young birds is "a thing almost entirely neglected by authors." Indeed, in contrast to the seemingly endemic and possibly random or gratuitous violence of the natural worlds of Audubon or Darwin, Gould domesticates violence, invariably presenting it in the form of parents feeding their young. In these paradigmatic scenes of small birds, the long-tailed tit and the European robin, we see the development of the mature Gould plate: elaborate domestic scene in the foreground, complete with nest and young birds, supported, in the robin plate, by a detailed rural background in which human beings and other animal species are absent. And this domestic emphasis is present even with the birds of prey. Notice the contrast between this depiction of an eagle owl (by Edward Lear) from The Birds of Europe with the same species in The Birds of Great Britain. The hare that for Audubon was the cause of strife between adult red-tailed hawks is here food for baby owls. Even in the extremely rare case of inter-species destruction, as in this scene, the parent Merlin has killed a bird of another species only to feed it to its young.
Perhaps the most fascinating example of Gould's efforts, and of the instability of those efforts, appears in his treatment of the cuckoo. The cuckoo conjured up complex associations for the British, as Gould himself acknowledged. On the one hand it was a harbinger of summer and thus raised "joyous emotions"; on the other hand it was of course notoriously parasitical, laying its eggs in the nests of other birds, whose unhatched eggs and fledglings were later ejected by the young cuckoo. This complexity is registered textually by Gould's devoting twice as much space to the cuckoo as to virtually any other bird. We can immediately see the similarity between Bewick's woodcut of the cuckoo here, and Gould's original plate of the bird, for both avoid depiction of nest ejection entirely. But we can also see the difference: in the background of Gould's plate he depicts a scene in keeping with his domestic emphases--the much larger young cuckoo being fed by its foster parent. His textual description of the bird explicitly dissents from the view that the young cuckoo ejects its foster-siblings, arguing instead that this is accomplished by the foster parents in their inexplicable but fierce protection of the cuckoo rather than their own young. Even here, in other words, what Gould calls "the unseemly cruelty" of ejecting "the rightful possessors" is ascribed to an excess of nurturing and love.
By the time The Birds of Great Britain was completed, however, Gould had received a vivid description and a sketch of a young cuckoo's "unseemly" act. To his credit, he worked this sketch into a plate, which he included in the final installment of the work, and in the introduction to the finished volume he issued a retraction, providing two verbatim accounts of the blind, unfeathered, seemingly undeveloped cuckoo forcing its foster-siblings out of the nest. The discomfort of this is registered in the language of Gould's correspondents, who describe the young cuckoo as a "blind little monster" and a "serpent" whose "gruesome" act produces a feeling of "horror" that can only be likened to that felt "at seeing a toothless hag raise a ghost by an incantation." The act, in other words, is controlled by exclusion: it is simply unnatural. Gould's strategy in the plate is somewhat different. Whereas the sketch from which he worked focused on the nest and the act of ejection, Gould widens the scene to include the helpless bodies of two ejected nestlings and a cracked egg, an apparent expansion of the scene's violence and anti-domesticity. But Gould also makes a significant addition that seeks to retain his earlier speculation: the scene is presided over by the foster-parent, implying that this violence, like the violence of the scenes in which parents feed their offspring, is necessary and therefore planned, or at least overseen, by a governing parent and a governing God.
Darwin, not surprisingly, seized this opportunity. In order to accommodate the cuckoo's actions into a natural theological perspective, Gould and others had stressed the wonderful instinctive power of both the parent cuckoo and the young bird, which could only have been provided by a Creator, and had suggested that this arrangement was beneficent in that it insured the survival of the young cuckoo while mercifully bringing death to the foster-siblings before they were old enough to have acquired much feeling. One of Darwin's judiciously placed exclamation points in the Origin conveys his sense of the absurdity of such an explanation. For Darwin, the cuckoo provided a central example in his crucial argument that "instinct" is in fact acquired, the result of natural selection in the struggle for existence. Having previously acknowledged Gould's dissent from the view that the young cuckoo was responsible, Darwin immediately incorporated Gould's admission into the 1872 edition. In light of this, it is evident that we must account not for Gould's silence about evolutionary theory, but for his rather clear dissent from it. The reason, I want to suggest, is at least partly rooted in his audience and its response to the political implications of evolutionary thought.
Gould's works were published serially and by subscription. Although they did receive a much wider circulation through both direct and indirect means, the price of £3 per part meant that Gould's list of subscribers, his primary audience, which reached 1000 in 1866, was dominated by the wealthy. It included 12 monarchs (topped by Victoria and Albert) and numerous members of the aristocracy, those whose land provided haven for many of the British birds and for Gould's researches. Within the scientific community, Gould wrote for descriptive naturalists and for the conservative elite, of which he was a member, those devoted to resisting what they saw as the politically radical and atheistic implications of scientific materialism. As the work of Adrian Desmond and James Moore has shown, evolutionary thought, even Darwin's more middle-class version, was associated in England with all of these specters.
The Birds of Great Britain thus offers his primarily conservative, aristocratic subscribers a nostalgic but reassuring look at a natural world that is not in flux but fixed, not unstable but stable, not wantonly violent but purposefully designed. This Great Britain is an unspoiled rural world made possible by beneficent aristocrats, the noble proprietors of the great landed estates to which Gould's text repeatedly refers. It is a place where human beings and human life, and especially the encroachments of an increasingly urban and industrialized society in a decade of political reform, do not appear, not even in the background. London's existence in the text--and Gould lived and worked in the city--is essentially limited to its markets, which for Gould served as a source of specimens rather than food. The only real villains of the piece are overzealous gamekeepers, who in protecting their lordships' grouse and pheasants destroy too many avian predators--a chastisement that obviously does not challenge the fundamental political order. Although a self-made man, Gould's entire life, from his early apprenticeship as a Royal gardener to his unofficial positions as George IV's taxidermist and Victoria and Albert's bird artist of choice, had been spent in the deferential employ of the upper classes: he had made a living by exploiting the system, not subverting it.
And yet, Gould could not, as the example of the cuckoo shows, fully protect this nostalgic view of nature. Historians of science, who have turned their attention more and more to scientific images in recent years, would not, of course, be surprised by my analysis of Gould's images as rhetorical constructions in a contemporary scientific and cultural controversy. But as a final thought, I want to suggest that these examples do more, that they indicate that these pictures were not, though they tried to be, worth a thousand words. To elicit the "proper" response, they had to be interpreted, but those words, especially in cases of equivocal evidence and controversial cultural implications, rather than bringing the evidence under control, simply exposed its weaknesses, opening the way for those on the other side, as in this case Darwin, to exploit both text and images for their own arguments.