Abstract
The German paleontologist H. G. Bronn is best remembered for his 1860 translation and critique of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and for supposedly twisting Darwinian evolution into conformity with German idealistic morphology. This analysis of Bronn’s writings shows, however, that far from being mired in an outmoded idealism that confined organic change to predetermined developmental pathways, Bronn had worked throughout the 1840s and 1850s on a new, historical approach to life. He had been moving from the study of plant and animal forms in the abstract towards placing them into geological and biogeographical context, analyzing patterns of progress and adaptation, explaining species diversity and individual variation, and applying biological insights to practical problems such as artificial breeding. Even though Bronn never fully accepted the idea of species transformation, he saw Darwin’s theory as a bold new move toward his own goal of establishing a comprehensive, historical science of life, and he presented it as such in his translation and commentary. Thus Darwin’s ideas gained a quick and generally favorable hearing in Germany not because of their easy assimilability into an older tradition, but because of their appeal to the innovative Bronn.
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Acknowledgments
My research on Bronn was supported in part by a postdoctoral fellowship from the program in Science in Human Culture at Northwestern University and by a Summer Faculty Fellowship from Indiana University. I thank the many colleagues, students, and colloquium participants at both universities for critical discussion of my work. Thanks also to Robert Kargon for asking inspiring questions about Bronn and scientific translation, and for an invitation to the workshop “Subverting the Text” at Johns Hopkins University in 2001, where I presented my preliminary answers.
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Gliboff, S. H. G. Bronn and the History of Nature. J Hist Biol 40, 259–294 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-006-9114-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-006-9114-4