E. Ray Lankester and the Making of Modern British Biology (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: E. Ray Lankester and the Making of Modern British Biology Lynn K. Nyhart Joseph Lester. E. Ray Lankester and the Making of Modern British Biology. Edited by Peter J. Bowler. BSHS Monographs, no. 10. Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1995. 220 pp. $17.00; £9.00 (paperbound). This welcome volume is, astonishingly, the first biography of E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929), one of the leading British biologists of his generation, and it nearly was not published. When Joe Lester completed it some two and a half decades ago, he was unable to find a publisher, and the manuscript languished until the historian of biology Peter Bowler offered to help out. Bowler has edited it for style, updated its footnotes, and rewritten some sections (most notably the chapter on Lankester’s evolutionism) to reflect more recent scholarship, including his own original research. Drawing heavily from the privately owned Lankester family papers, this biography harks back to the late-Victorian genre of “life and letters,” with its numerous long quotations from letters, diaries, and notes, and a narrative stance that generally lets the material “speak for itself.” Yet despite this apparent neutrality toward the material, certain repeating themes emerge. [End Page 350] Most prominent is that of a perennially disappointed personality: if brilliant as an investigator, Lankester was also uncompromising, caustic, and blunt, which did not serve him well in a society notorious for understatement. He certainly achieved the greatest trappings of success available to a British biologist who lacked independent means—university scholarships and fellowships, subsidized study on the Continent, a professorship at University College, London, and, beginning in 1890, the Linacre Professorship of Comparative Anatomy at Oxford. In 1898 he became director of the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington, where he remained until his retirement in 1906. Yet these external signs of success were illusory, at least in Lankester’s eyes: every position he won required the corralling of powerful friends and mentors such as T. H. Huxley, rather than being conferred simply on the basis of his scientific merit. To Lankester, Oxford was dominated by snobbish classicists unsympathetic to science, members of a social elite with whom Lankester, himself from a modest background, never felt comfortable. At the British Museum his authority was never as great as he thought his due, and eventually he was forced out at the age of sixty, under a retirement statute that had not been exercised with either of his predecessors. Though Lankester’s difficult personality accounts for some of his troubles, his life also illustrates the bleak situation facing biological researchers in late-nineteenth-century Britain. From his visits to France and (especially) Germany, Lankester learned what could be done with greater state support of biology, and his career can be seen as a relentless (if not wholly successful) campaign to garner that support. He wrote innumerable speeches, letters to the Times, and magazine articles, and served on countless committees to further the cause. Indeed, another theme emerging from this volume is Lankester’s continued appeal to the public for support—whether he was trying to raise money for a marine station, protesting his presumed ill-usage at the hands of the British Museum trustees, or arguing for reforms in university science. In his retirement years his efforts to engage the broader public took the form of popular science writing, at which he was remarkably successful (and which also supplied an important supplement to his meager pension). In illuminating Lankester’s life, then, this volume opens up important avenues for research on late-nineteenth-century British biology. One critical place for further work concerns Lankester’s scientific contributions. As is often the case with “life and letters” works, this one offers so few scientific details, and so little of the broader intellectual map of biology, that it is hard to tell just what it was about Lankester’s work in evolutionary morphology that brought him such wide recognition as a great scientist in his day. (Not surprisingly, perhaps, the sections that offer us the most information about Lankester’s science have been supplied by Bowler, an expert on evolutionary biology in this period.) It is to...