Abstract
Evidence for the transformist ideas espoused by Henry H. Cheek (1807–33), a contemporary of Charles Darwin's at the University of Edinburgh, sheds new light on the intellectual environment of Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Cheek was the author of several papers dealing with the transmutation of species influenced by the theories of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and the Comte de Buffon (1707–88). Some of these were read to student societies, others appeared in the Edinburgh Journal of Natural and Geographical Science, which Cheek edited between 1829 and 1831. His writings give us a valuable window onto some of the transformist theories that were circulating among Darwin's fellow medical students in the late 1820s, to which Darwin would have been exposed during his time in Edinburgh, and for which little other concrete evidence survives.
Highlights
As the pages of most scholarly biographies of Charles Darwin will attest, the Plinian Natural History Society of Edinburgh is often considered to have been a forum in which radical ideas about the natural world and humanity’s place in it could be debated by its largely student membership
Cheek was the author of several papers dealing with the transmutation of species influenced by the theories of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772 –1844), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 –1829) and the Comte de Buffon (1707– 88)
Some of these were read to student societies, others appeared in the Edinburgh Journal of Natural and Geographical Science, which Cheek edited between 1829 and 1831
Summary
As the pages of most scholarly biographies of Charles Darwin will attest, the Plinian Natural History Society of Edinburgh is often considered to have been a forum in which radical ideas about the natural world and humanity’s place in it could be debated by its largely student membership. Adrian Desmond and James Moore have stated that the society’s ‘meetings could be electric, while some topics bordered on the indictable.’[1] Desmond and Moore recount the story of John Coldstream, an Edinburgh medical student and member of the society, as evidence of just how shocking the views expressed in the society’s meetings could be. According to Desmond and Moore, the ‘Plinian debates on mind and matter threw him into a crisis’, leading to a complete mental breakdown during a visit to Paris after his graduation.[2] Janet Browne is more measured in her assessment of the Plinian Society in her biography of Darwin. 155 q 2014 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society
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