Henry Ravenel (1814?1887): Views on evolution in social context

Abstract

Americans of the nineteenth century could take pride in the accomplishments of Asa Gray, whose work on American flowering plants was respected throughout the scientific world. Also widely respected by their scientific colleagues, if less well known to the American public, were several other gifted botanists who in the mid-nineteenth century contributed greatly to the elucidation of America's flora. Henry William Ravenel (1814-1887) was one such scientist. By the mid 1850s his pioneering work among the fungi of South Carolina was well known to American and European botanists through his collaboration with England's foremost mycologist, Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803-1889), and through his five-volume set of fungus exsiccati, the Fungi Caroliniani Exsiccati the first such set issued in America.' Gray is remembered today for his botanical work and also for being one of the earliest and most influential of Charles Darwin's American disciples. Ravenel's views on evolution were similar to Gray's, but while Gray felt compelled to formulate and publish a definite stance on evolution, Ravenel was not so compelled. He maintained to the end of his life an open-minded, balanced perspective on evolution, refusing either to condemn it or to applaud it publicly. Ravenel's open-mindedness contrasts with both the strong views of many of his scientific contemporaries and the bigotry usually attributed to the southerners of his time. This paper will address three topics: the nature of Henry Ravenel's ideas on evolution, the social milieu that contributed to these ideas, and the reasons why he so long refrained from public commitment to one outlook or another. Ravenel was born May 19, 1814, in St. John's, Berkeley, in the tidewater area of South Carolina. He was the eldest of physician and planter Henry Ravenel's numerous children. Like many other