I have recently been reading a biography of Sir Edwin Ray Lankester (1847-1929). Most biologists never get to grips with the various mechanisms of evolution proposed or pursued in the six decades between Darwin and the Modern Synthesis. This was the era of comparative anatomy, a discipline which reigned triumphant in plotting the directions of evolutionary change and the relationships between organisms. Physiology was also making great progress but largely in isolation from comparative anatomy and evolutionary processes. Lankester, although a morphologist to the end, involved himself in both fields particularly as a young man. However, it is difficult to reconcile the enormous advances made by the comparative anatomists with the muddled thinking of how evolutionary change might occur propounded by those same individuals. Even while recognising the benefit of hindsight it is difficult not to conclude that many skilled anatomists with the ability to recognise homologous or analogous structures in other organisms simply could not get to grips with the implications of evolution or of natural selection. Some ideas propounded by well-established zoologists seem—and may have seemed at the time—nuts. It is for that reason that the era of Lankester is largely irrelevant to modern biologists. The twists and turns of evolutionary thought over the era fall firmly in the domain of the historians of science.
What many present-day biologists do not realise is that their immediate predecessors were brought up under a regimen of teaching the subject devised in the second half of the 19th century. One of the key players in that period was Lankester. The mix of lecture-style teaching with laboratory sessions in which ‘type’ specimens from major animal groups were dissected and drawn became the norm for around a century.
Lankester was a man who did not mince his words, whether inveighing against the clerics who still ran Oxford or his nominal and clearly loathsome superior at the British Museum when the Natural History Museum, of which he was Director, was under its control. He walked away from a chair in Edinburgh after a few weeks when he found there was neither a lecture room or museum and that he would have to lecture throughout the whole year. He gave up this lucrative post (where the professor received the tuition fees) to return to his chair which had not been filled at University College, London. He gave the eugenics movement a mauling on the grounds its proponents were not distinguishing between the effects, in modern terms, of the genotype and the environment on the phenotype of the poor who they wished to stop breeding.
Lankester was a giant in British science, as practitioner, protagonist, promoter of new organisations, propagandist and populariser. He had interesting friends, Karl Marx, H.G. Wells and Anna Pavlova being notable examples, and many enemies. He had a rather sad personal life. Although there is some information on Lankester in books on other people and online (some of it inaccurate or misinterpreted) I had not read a proper biography. For such an important figure I was surprised to find that only one had been written. Few copies can have been printed because I had difficulty finding one to buy.
The biography, E. Ray Lankester and the Making of British Biology was published as a British Society for the History of Science Monograph in 1995. The history of its publication is interesting. Lankester’s papers were preserved by a niece. The author of the draft of the biography, Joseph Lester, contacted the niece in the 1950s. Eventually he was given access with the proviso that he would write an ‘approved’ biography. Initially the family had refused any access because Lankester was, in his time, a controversial figure. Lester worked on the biography in the 1950s and 1960s but could not find a publisher. He was an amateur—a reviewer of the book stated that he was a schoolteacher in Manchester and in his 90s at the time of publication—without the right contacts. Professor Peter Bowler FBA, a proper historian with interest in Lankester and his era of biological science, persuaded Lester that the only way his work would be published would be for it to be edited by a professional. Bowler, after reading the manuscript, decided to tackle the job himself. He paid particular attention to the footnotes and to interpreting some of passages in the light of current knowledge. The title page therefore contains Lester as author and Bowler as editor.
The famous line about Lankester was written by his hero, Thomas Henry Huxley (under posthumous attack at present by the witchsniffers). Lankester need to work for his living and he felt his position at University College London had become precarious as student numbers and, therefore, income, fell. He wondered whether to apply for the job of Assistant Secretary at the British Association. Huxley dissuaded him:
Looking at things solely from the point of view of your interests, I should advise you against taking it—even if it were offered. My pet aphorism, ‘Suffer fools gladly’, should be the guide of the Assistant Secretary—You do not suffer fools gladly; on the contrary, you gladly make fools suffer.
….and having read about Lankester I have just remembered that in the final year at school for the Scholarship Level paper taken in addition to the ‘A’ Level papers I was asked to write about the body cavities and their origins. All that stuff about the coelom and in which phyla it is present came flooding back. It was Lankester who sorted it all out. Oh, and we were told that some examiners liked the blood to be referred to as a tissue, not just as a fluid. Lankester again.
I will though end with a quote from Lankester himself:
Science is no handmaiden, but in reality the master—the master who must be obeyed. The sooner and more thoroughly the people recognise the fact—and insist upon its acceptance in practice by tis representatives and governors—the better for them and their posterity.
Amen to that.
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| Ray Lankester by Leslie Ward, Vanity Fair 1905 The caption read:: ”His religion is the worship of all sorts of winged and finny freaks" |
Lester J. 1995. E. Ray Lankester and the Making of British Biology. Edited by PJ Bowler. British Society for the History of Science Monograph. ISBN 0-906450-11-X
This following obituary notice is rarely quoted because it is not picked up by internet searches, being buried in Proceedings of the Royal Society under a general title: Goodrich ES. 1930. Edwin Ray Lankester—1847-1929. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 106, ix-xv.
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