An Amphibious Being

How Maritime Surveying Reshaped Darwin's Approach to Natural History

Bibliographic Data

ID4175707
AuthorsAlistair Sponsel (Vanderbilt University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume107
Issue2
Pages254-281
Publication date2016-06-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIsis (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/687218
PMID27439285
OpenAlexW2417850632
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited18

This essay argues that Charles Darwin's distinctive approach to studying distribution and diversity was shaped by his face-to-face interactions with maritime surveyors during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1831-1836). Introducing their hydrographic surveying methods into natural history enabled him to compare fossil and living marine organisms, to compare sedimentary rocks to present-day marine sediments, and to compare landscapes to submarine topology, thereby realizing Charles Lyell's fanciful ambition for a superior form of geology that might be practiced by an "amphibious being." Darwin's theories of continental uplift, coral reef formation, and the origin of species all depended on his amphibious natural history. This essay contributes to our understanding of theorizing in nineteenth-century natural history by illustrating that specific techniques of observing and collecting could themselves help to generate a particular theoretical orientation and, indeed, that such practical experiences were a more proximate source of Darwin's "Humboldtian" interest in distribution and diversity than Alexander von Humboldt's writings themselves. Darwin's debt to the hydrographers became obscured in two ways: through the "funneling" of credit produced by single-authorship publication in natural history and the "telescoping" of memory by which Darwin's new theories made him recall his former researches as though he had originally undertaken them for the very purpose of producing the later theory

Biology · Darwin (ADL · Face (sociological concept · Hydrography · Natural (archaeology · Natural history · Social science · Sociology · Alexander von Humboldt Studies · Computer Science · Ecology · Geology · History · History of Science and Natural History · Oceanography · Paleontology · Polar Research and Ecology

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