John Burroughs and the Scientific Imagination
By Warren, James Perrin
Writing in Time and Change (1912), John Burroughs expresses his growing sense of wonder at the world as seen through the eyes of the geologist, the miracle of life as seen against “a background of a vast aeon of geologic and astronomic time, out of which the forces that shaped it have emerged, and over which the powers of chaos and darkness have failed to prevail” (87). For Burroughs, this near- biblical rhetoric arises from imagining the evolution of life on Earth, which he figures as “developing and ripening for millions upon millions of years, a veritable apple upon the great sidereal tree, ameliorating from cycle to cycle, mellowing, coloring, sweetening” (87). A remarkable aspect of this passage and of Burroughs’s literary career is the vitality of his imagination, especially in old age.1 Perhaps even more noteworthy is the particular form that his imagination takes after he reads two theoretical works by Charles Darwin in 1883. In “Through the Eyes of the Geologist,” Burroughs defines that particular form as the “scientific imagination” and develops his idea of its epic power:
The modern geologist affords us one of the best illustrations of the uses of the scientific imagination that we can turn to. The scientific imagination seems to be about the latest phase of the evolution of the human mind. This power of interpretation of concrete facts, this Miltonic flight into time and space, into the heavens above, and into the bowels of the earth beneath, and bodying forth a veritable history, a warring of the powers of light and darkness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, makes Milton’s picture seem hollow and unreal. The creative and poetic imagination has undoubtedly already reached its high-water mark. We shall probably never see the great imaginative works of the past surpassed or even equaled. But in the world of scientific discovery and interpretation, we see the imagination working in new fields and under new conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new epoch in the history of the race. Nature, which once terrified man and made a coward of him, now inspires him and fills him with love and enthusiasm. (Time and Change 87-88)
Burroughs’s willingness to pronounce the end of “great imaginative works” on the epic scale of Milton recalls Walt Whitman’s constant penchant for ringing the knell of priests and feudal poets. In both cases, the vision of the new-the “imagination working in new fields and under new conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new epoch in the history of the race”-depends upon the death of the old. Thus the “evolution of the human mind” produces a new species of imagination, parallel to Whitman’s “well- shaped heir” in the famous opening paragraph of the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass: “America does not repel the past [...] perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house… perceives that it waits a little while in the door… it was fittest for its days … that its action has descended to the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches … and that he shall be fittest for his days” (616).
The combined influence of Darwin and Whitman may be of deeper significance than a shared post-Miltonic rhetoric. Although Burroughs read Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) early on and repeatedly, he came to read both On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) in the summer and autumn of 1883. Burroughs read Descent in July and August. In his journal entry for 6 August, he comments that Darwin is “a model of patient, tireless, sincere inquiry” and that his “tone and habit of mind is always that of the master.” So far as the theory is concerned, Burroughs notes that “the book convinces like Nature herself” and that he has “no more doubt of its main conclusions than … of my own existence” (Life and Letters 1:255). He turned to the Origin in September, while vacationing at Ocean Grove, New Jersey. In late September, Whitman joined him for a week of beach rambles, and Burroughs’s journal records the companionship of Whitman along with the wonders of Darwin’s masterpiece.
The influence of Darwin’s writings on Burroughs’s imagination is profound, but most remarkable in the journal of 1883 is the powerful immediacy of Darwin’s effect. Here Burroughs records his response after finishing the Origin:
A true wonderbook. Few pages in modern scientific literature so noble as those last few pages of the book. Everything about Darwin indicates the master. In reading him you breathe the air of the largest and most serene mind. Every naturalist before him and with him he lays under contribution, every competent observer in any field. Only the greatest minds can do this as he does it. He furnishes the key to every man’s knowledge. Those that oppose his theory unwittingly bring some fact or observation that fits into his scheme. His theory has such a range, accounts for such a multitude of facts, easily underruns and outruns the views of all other naturalists.
He is in his way as great and as remarkable as Shakespeare, and utilizes the knowledge of mankind in the same way. His power of organization is prodigious. He has the candor, the tranquility, the sincerity, the singleness of purpose that go with and are a promise of the highest achievement.
He is the father of a new generation of naturalists. He is the first to open the door into Nature’s secret senate chambers. His theory confronts and even demands the incalculable geological ages. It is as ample as the earth, and as deep as time. It mates with and matches, and is as grand as, the nebular hypothesis, and is in the same line of creative energy. (Life and Letters I: 256)
This is the kind of superlative assessment Burroughs reserves for Emerson or Whitman, and it suggests that Darwin embodies the “latest phase of the evolution of the human mind,” the scientific imagination (Time and Change 87). But Darwin’s mastery is not strictly scientific, since Burroughs compares him favorably to Shakespeare. Like that perennial figure of literary genius, Darwin becomes the empowering “father” of new generations, and the theory of natural selection becomes the gigantic, orb-like embodiment of the earth itself, demanding “the incalculable geologic ages.” Burroughs even compares Darwin’s theory to the “nebular hypothesis,” which has remained the prevailing theory for the formation of the solar system since the eighteenth century. In both geological and astronomical terms, moreover, Burroughs already seizes upon the “vast aeon of geologic and astronomic time” that he uses to define the scientific imagination in “Through the Eyes of the Geologist.”
Darwin’s “wonderbook” awakens in Burroughs a host of reflections on the relationship between science and literature. Those reflections take a variety of forms, and they persist for the entire second half of Burroughs’s life, ending with the posthumous essay, “A Critical Glance into Darwin,” published in The Last Harvest (172- 200). For readers of Burroughs, the intellectual and artistic relationship to Darwin affords a fascinating combination of responses. One immediate response would be to interpret Darwin’s influence on Burroughs, charting the role that Darwin’s theory of natural selection plays in Burroughs’s nature writing and philosophical essays during the last forty years of his long career. This approach accords perfectly well with the prevailing current of scholarship relating to science and literature, a current that is building in power every year.2
A second response-one I admit to being more tempted to take- would interpret Burroughs as a perspicacious reader of science and one of the earliest practitioners of ecocriticism. This means, first, that Burroughs reads Darwin accurately and perceptively, even if he does not always read him scientifically. Second, it means that modern readers should give Darwin’s writings the kind of literary attention we pay to Burroughs or Whitman. That could lead to new ways of interpreting Darwin’s achievement in a book like The Voyage of the Beagle, which Burroughs read four times over the course of his life and which he asserted would “outlast all [Darwin's] other books” (Last Harvest 189). Although an extended reading lies beyond the bounds of this essay, Burroughs’s perennial interest in The Voyage of the Beagle suggests that further ecocritical readings of the book wait on the horizon.
Yet a third interpretive approach could merge the first two in a sketch of the scientific imagination, both in Darwin and in Burroughs. For example, Burroughs’s immediate response to Darwin leads to five essays in Indoor Studies (1889): “Science and Literature,”"Science and the Poets,”"The Biologist’s Tree of Life,”"An Open Door,” and “The True Realism.” The “Tree of Life” essay most directly pertains to Darwin’s Origin, for it clearly echoes the famous last paragraph to Chapter 4, “Natural Selection”:
The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life. The limbs divided into great branches, and these into lesser and lesser branches, were themselves once, when the tree was small, budding twigs; and this connexion of the former and present buds by ramifying branches may well represent the classification of all extinct and living species in groups subordinate to groups. Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear all the other branches; so with the species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few now have living and modified descendants. From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these lost branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only from having been found in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin straggling branch springing from a fork, low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications. (Origin 532-33) Darwin carefully develops the analogy in its several parts, and the power of the analogy resides in the ways he exposes its particular aptness. Perhaps even more powerfully, the “great Tree of Life” evokes a perpetual, unifying generation of new buds and branches. For Darwin, the analogy also develops a strong sense of “long-past geological periods,” the point that Burroughs formulates as “demanding] the incalculable geological ages.” The tree may be a “Tree of Life,” but it reveals the long-past life in fossils of extinct species: “From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these lost branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only from having been found in a fossil state.” The tone of the entire passage reveals the traits that Burroughs sees in Darwin’s work: “the candor, the tranquility, the sincerity, the singleness of purpose that go with and are a promise of the highest achievement.” The sense of sincerity may account for Darwin’s offhand use of scientific nomenclature to represent the platypus and South American lungfish as evolutionary survivors. Though we may not be prepared to call this lengthy paragraph Shakespearean in its poetry, it is a fair example of what Burroughs eventually defines as the scientific imagination.
In “The Biologist’s Tree of Life,” Burroughs develops the “great Tree of Life” metaphor in much the same way as Darwin, but he adds two aspects that show his conservative understanding of evolutionary theory. First, he clearly subscribes to an older, more Lamarckian version of evolutionary morphology, assuming a hierarchy of forms and species, with human beings as the most highly developed form: “No higher form is to succeed man, as he has succeeded the lower. Monkeys and ourangs are left behind; they will not give birth to a being superior to themselves; they are twigs that have been outstripped by other and more favored branches. Man is the last of the series” (Indoor Studies 212). Burroughs’s interpretation of the “Tree of Life” indicates how carefully Darwin develops the metaphor, for the teleology of Burroughs’s understanding differs markedly from Darwin’s descriptive analysis of the analogy and its “branching and beautiful ramifications.”3
The second difference between the two writers relates to the future of evolution and speciation. Burroughs interprets the “Tree of Life” as growing rapidly at first and then “sobering down” into a mature rate of speciation into “higher forms.” He therefore figures the earth as having “reached the maturity of her powers” and being “like a ripe apple upon the bough.” He argues, “no new developments remain, no new species on any extended scale, as in the past, are to appear. The bird has been evolved from the reptile, but the bird is doubtless the top of that branch of our tree of life” (210-11). On the other hand, Darwin’s final sentence suggests instead the endless processes of speciation, for the “great Tree of Life … fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.” For Darwin, the analogy of the “Tree of Life” figures the processes of diversification and speciation as he schematically renders them in the branch diagram he provides with Chapter 4 (fig. 1).
For Burroughs, the “Tree of Life” is like real trees in their individual existences-sprouting, budding, fruiting, branching, but eventually dying. Thus he ends “The Biologist’s Tree of Life” with the analogy of the earth as like an individual human being: “Why should it not be so? We know any and every single form perishes; why should not the earth itself grow old and die? The life of a man is typical of the life of the earth. The stages of an orb’s life, say the astronomers, are stages of cooling. So are the stages of man’s life. It is a process of cooling and hardening from youth to age. Think of the gaseous, nebulous youth out of which the man is gathered and consolidated! Fiery, stormy, vapory, at first, then cold, hard, sterile at last” (212-13). In Burroughs’s hands, analogy reveals a common morphological narrative, unifying cosmic and organic processes in a common-sense story of growth and development. Burroughs understands science, finally, in a fundamentally metaphorical, literary way.
In the important essay “Science and Literature,” Burroughs clearly figures Darwin as embodying the scientific imagination. He begins the theoretical argument by drawing a sharp distinction between the scientific and literary approaches to nature. Science is concerned with knowledge and is democratic and materialist; literature is concerned with enjoyment and is aristocratic and sensual (50-51). But Burroughs argues that the two approaches should merge, for “the final value of physical science is its capability to foster in us noble ideals, and to lead us to new and larger views of moral and spiritual truths” (52-53). Value, for Burroughs, necessarily entails emotion and imagination: “Until science is mixed with emotion, and appeals to the heart and imagination, it is like dead inorganic matter; and when it becomes so mixed and so transformed, it is literature” (53). Given the premise and movement of the argument, Burroughs employs Darwin as a figure of transformation, the scientist who reaches toward literary writing in his work. He therefore praises Darwin for his “lively conception of things,” opposing a “mechanical conception of the universe” (58, 54). Darwin, he claims, is “full of what we may call the sentiment of science,” an early formulation for the scientific imagination, and “all his works have a human and almost poetic side. They are undoubtedly the best feeders of literature we have yet had from the field of science” (62). In a two-page paragraph that echoes the journal of September 1883, Burroughs finds “a literary or poetic substratum” to Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and he praises the writer for his “candor,”"mastery,”"faith, insight, imagination, prophecy, inspiration,” and “love of truth” (63-64). By the end of Burroughs’s essay, Darwin becomes a completely heroic figure: “Both his poetic and religious emotions, as well as his scientific proclivities, found full scope, and his demonstration becomes almost a song. It is easy to see how such a mind as Goethe’s would have followed him and supplemented him, not from its wealth of scientific lore, but from its poetic insight into the methods of nature” (64). Darwin is no Goethe, but he could easily be mistaken for a Goethe, a Humboldt, or a Shakespeare.
Burroughs represents Darwin as a masterful writer because he combines science and literature in the Origin, and for that same reason the Origin is a “wonderbook” or masterpiece. As he notes in the 1883 journal, “Few pages in modern scientific literature so noble as those last few pages of the book. Everything about Darwin indicates the master. In reading him you breathe the air of the largest and most serene mind.” The last pages of the Origin justify Burroughs’s enthusiastic response. Darwin’s final chapter, “Recapitulation and Conclusion,” first takes the reader through the main arguments supporting the theory of natural selection and then turns to the large conclusions that result from the “one long argument” (741). In that final section, Darwin casts his eyes toward the future, where “we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history” (757). Repeatedly employing the image of “opening,” Darwin looks across biological fields to geology, psychology, and anthropology, predicting that fields will open “for far more important researches” (759). He insists upon the main argument of the Origin, that species do not arise as special creations, but that their lineal descent from previous species ennobles them and secures their future in a perpetual process of transformation. Then he reaches the final, famous concluding paragraph: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Origin 760)
The “entangled bank” fittingly evokes the complex but familiar natural world around us. We experience it always, but we rarely reflect on the laws governing it. Darwin provokes our capacity for reflection by capitalizing the laws that act around us, taking on the largest sense of the laws and his own reflections on them. Then he formulates his vision of transformation: war, famine, and death lead to conception, production, and life. The vision is one of power and grandeur, but Darwin’s formulation is equally grand and powerful. The transforming style of the passage in effect passes from “so simple a beginning” to “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.”
The other scientific essays in Indoor Studies suggest that Burroughs, like Darwin, resists anthropomorphic visions of the origin of life. It is true that in the 1876 edition of the Origin, Darwin strategically inserted “by the Creator” after “breathed,” thereby avoiding the charge of atheism, and it would be fair to read the imagery of war and famine as anthropomorphic, at least to a degree. But there is no question in Darwin’s writings whether the theory of special creation is invalid. Similarly, in “An Open Door,” Burroughs argues against the “pretty little anthropomorphic views of things” and opens himself to what he calls “the cosmic chill” (242,243). Burroughs does not deny the existence of God, but he defines God as a power that “is not an attendant of our lives; we are an accident of it; it is imminent [sic] to us, because it is imminent [sic] everywhere. Light was not made for the eye, but we have eyes because there is light” (246). Burroughs argues for an immanent God, a God that is coexistent with-perhaps synonymous with- nature. Moreover, he ties that force to his understanding of Darwinian theory: “The balance, the adjustment, the equipoise which we see in the physical world, and which we see in the world of man, too, was not brought about by any guidance or principle of action that bears the slightest resemblance to human methods and aims, but is the result of eons upon eons of conflict, of clashing, of waste and destruction, the fittest or the luckiest surviving” (249). Indeed, Burroughs sounds much like Darwin as he closes the essay:
What remains, then, for those who cannot pray; who cannot look upon God as a being apart from themselves, a supreme parent, seated somewhere in the universe, and withholding or bestowing gifts and goods upon man? This alone, and this is enough: To love virtue, to love truth, to cherish a lofty ideal, to keep the soul open and hospitable to whatsoever things are true, to whatsoever things are beautiful, to whatsoever things are of good report. (251-52)
Darwinian science opens the soul to the cosmic chill, for we are no longer “cozily housed” in our anthropomorphic religious convictions. Still, neither Darwin nor Burroughs is willing to shut out the concept of God from the imagination. For even the scientific imagination seeks a power or force in which “we live and move and have our being” (246).
The quotation from the Bible alludes to Paul’s address to the crowd at Mars’ Hill in Athens, and Burroughs uses it three times in his essays on scientific doubts about the existence of an anthropomorphic God. Paul declares to the “men of Athens” that their ignorant altar inscribed “To the Unknown God” should actually worship the God who “dwelleth not in temples made with hands” but who “giveth to all life, and breath,” who abides “not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17: 22-28). In addition to the allusion at the end of “An Open Door,” Burroughs paraphrases Paul in “Science and Literature”: “We are embosomed in nature; we are an apple on the bough, a babe at the breast. In nature, in God, we live and move and have our being” (71). The interpretation Burroughs gives to the passage emphasizes the immanence of God and suggests that the “Tree of Life” is another name for nature and for God alike.
The third time Burroughs uses the passage from Acts occurs in the posthumous essay, “A Critical Glance into Darwin,” and it comes after he asserts the existence of “something immanent in the universe, pervading every atom and molecule in it, that knows what it wants-a Cosmic Mind or Intelligence” (Last Harvest 182). The name we give this “something immanent” does not change what we mean by it, for “when we deny God it is always in behalf of some other god. We are compelled to recognize something not ourselves from which we proceed, and in which we live and move and have our being, call it energy, or will, or Jehovah, or Ancient of Days. We cannot deny it because we are part of it” (182).
Rather remarkably, in “A Critical Glance into Darwin,” Burroughs accuses Darwinism of being “entirely an anthropomorphic view of NatureNature humanized and doing as man does. What is called Natural Selection is man’s selection read into animate nature” (Last Harvest 185). Of course, it is hardly wrong to note that the artificial selection of traits in domestic species such as pigeons provides Darwin with the analogy for natural selection of species in the wild. Perhaps more interestingly, Burroughs’s terminology recalls the arguments of “An Open Door” in its focus on anthropomorphism and the cosmic chill: “Nature is non-human, non-moral, non-religious, non-scientific, though it is from her that we get our ideas of all these things” (186). Throughout the “Critical Glance” essay, Burroughs is at pains to distinguish his own view of nature from Darwin’s, and he uses Henri Bergson’s theory of creative evolution as a major alternative to the theory of natural selection. Bergson provides a vital, immanent power as the underlying principle of change, and Burroughs embraces the theory as an anti-mechanistic philosophical approach to the evolution of organic life. A full account of Burroughs and Bergson would require readings in The Breath of Life (1915) and Under the Apple-Trees (1916), as well as Bergson’s masterpiece, Creative Evolution (1912). For now, it is enough to note that in “A Critical Glance into Darwin” Burroughs finds the theory of natural selection “of only secondary importance” and a “weeding-out process” (193), not the fundamental explanation for the great “Tree of Life” or speciation. As Peter Bowler’s histories of evolutionary biology suggest, Burroughs in fact echoes many other anti-Darwinian scientific voices of his time.
Ultimately, Burroughs is less interested in Darwin’s science than he is in Darwin himself as a figure of the scientific imagination. He suggests, both in his reading of The Voyage of the Beagle and in the concluding section of the “Critical Glance” essay, that “Darwin shorn of his selection theories” is still “the most impressive figure in modern biological science” (198). Echoing the journal entry of September 1883 and the “Science and Literature” essay of 1889, Burroughs asserts that “the best thing about Darwinism is Darwin-his candor, his patience, his simplicity, his devotion to truth, and his power of observation” (199). While he seems no longer willing to claim Darwin as a master equal to Shakespeare or Goethe or Humboldt, he still figures him as belonging “to the class of monumental men” and makes large claims for Darwin’s achievements: “He showed man once for all an integral part of the zoologic system. He elevated natural history, or biology, to the ranks of the great sciences, a worthy member of the triumvirateastronomy, geology, biology. He taught us how to cross-question the very gods of life in their council chambers; he showed us what significance attaches to the simplest facts of natural history” (198-99). By joining biology to the fields of astronomy and geology, Burroughs effectively glosses the definition of the scientific imagination with which I began this essay: “This power of interpretation of concrete facts, this Miltonic flight into time and space, into the heavens above, and into the bowels of the earth beneath, and bodying forth a veritable history, a warring of the powers of light and darkness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, makes Milton’s picture seem hollow and unreal” (Time and Change 87). Darwin provides the “veritable history” that replaces the Miltonic, Christian picture, but Burroughs continues to “cross-question the very gods of life.”
Burroughs concludes in the late essay “Literature and Science,” from Under the Apple-Trees, that science “enlarges the field of literature, but its aims are unliterary.” Similarly, the scientific method is limited to “its own sphere, but that sphere is not commensurate with the whole of human life. Life flowers in the subjective world of our sentiments, emotions, and aspirations, and to this world literature, art, and religion alone have the key” (196). As a literary critic, Burroughs looks for writers who combine an eye for concrete facts with a power of visionary transformation. Perhaps for that reason he claims that Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle will “outlast all his other books” and that it shows Darwin as “a naturalist and a philosopher combined” (Last Harvest 189,190). The narrator of the Voyage represents the highest form of the scientific imagination, and Burroughs judges the book to be “a classic among scientific books of travel. Here is a traveler of a new kind: a natural-history voyager, a man bent on seeing and taking note of everything going on in nature about him, in the non-human, as well as in the human world” (191). This is the closest approximation to the union of science and literature, and in old age Burroughs suggests that the Voyage is Darwin’s true “wonderbook,” for it most closely approximates the wonderbook of nature itself: “In all Darwin’s record we see that the book of nature, which ordinary travelers barely glance at, he opened and carefully perused” (193). Washington and Lee University
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Notes
1 Past the age of seventy-five, Burroughs published six separate volumes: Time and Change (1912), The Summit of the Years (1913), The Breath of Life (1915), Under the Apple-Trees (1916), Field and Study (1919), and Accepting the Universe (1920). Clara Barrus added two more posthumous volumes to the Riverby Edition of The Writings of John Burroughs: Under the Maples (1921) and The Last Harvest (1922).
2 The critical literature is vast. Among the many studies of Darwin’s influence on literature, the following are important recent contributions: Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983); Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995); Bert Bender, The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871- 1926 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996); Robert Bernard Hass, Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2002); Lois A. Cuddy and Claire M. Roche, eds., Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2003); Bert Bender, Evolution and “The Sex Problem”: American Narratives during the Eclipse of Darwinism (Kent: Kent State UP, 2004); Tina Gianquitto, “Good Observers of Nature”: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820-1885 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007).
3 For a succinct and careful account of the “Darwinian Revolution” and the late nineteenthcentury anti-Darwinian movement known as “neo-Lamarckism,” see Peter J. Bowler, The Norton History of Environmental Sciences (New York: Norton, 1992), 323-51. In a series of important studies, Bowler details the scientists and the theories of evolution that swirled about from 1859 to 1940. see Evolution: The History of an Idea, Revised Edition (Berkeley: U of California P1989); The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983); The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988); Life’s Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life’s Ancestry, 1860-1940 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996). Bowler’s discussion of the ‘Tree of Life” metaphor in relation to Ernst Haeckel’s theories of evolutionary morphology, with a main “trunk” leading towards humankind, suggests a possible source for Burroughs’s understanding of the metaphor (Life’s Splendid Drama 40- %). Burroughs himself mentions the work of Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries and his mutation theory in “A Critical Glance into Darwin” (Last Harvest 196-97); see Bowler, Eclipse of Darwinism 197-213.
Works Cited
Barrus, Clara, Editor. The Life and Letters of John Burroughs. (2 vols.) Boston: Houghton, 1925.
Burroughs, John. Writings of John Burroughs. Riverby Edition. (23 vols.) Boston: Houghton, 1905-1922.
Darwin, Charles. From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin. Ed. Edward O. Wilson. New York: Norton, 2006.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2002.
JAMES PERRIN WARREN is S. Blount Mason Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where he teaches courses in nineteenthcentury American literature and environmental literature. He also team teaches a course in field biogeography with a colleague in biology. His book John Burroughs and the Place of Nature was published by University of Georgia Press in 2006.
Copyright University of Rhode Island, English Department Dec 2007
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