Moreover, in this particular case, Owen’s refutation of a racist argument did not arise accidentally from a claim advanced entirely for other reasons. I honor Owen even more because he knew exactly what he was doing—as he directly quoted the few egalitarian sources of his time, and explicitly advanced his claim in the service of racial melioration (though not equality—an option that, sadly, did not exist in Owen’s intellectual framework).
By identifying human racial variation as both small in extent and fully encompassed within an indivisible species—in other words, as something different from the gaps between species—Owen refuted Huxley’s second crucial point, that the gap from highest ape to lowest man did not exceed the space between lowest and highest men. In the key passage, he writes:
The extent of differences in the proportion of the cerebrum . . . in the different varieties of mankind is small, and with such slight gradational steps as to mark the unity of the human family in a striking manner.
But the most important sentence occurs two pages earlier:
Although in most cases the Negro’s brain is less than that of the European, I have observed individuals of the Negro race in whom the brain was as large as the average one of Caucasians; and I concur with the great physiologist of Heidelberg, who has recorded similar observations, in connecting with such cerebral development the fact that there has been no province of intellectual activity in which individuals of the pure Negro race have not distinguished themselves.
Owen then appends an interesting footnote:
The University of Oxford worthily conferred, in June 1864, the degree of Doctor of Divinity on Bishop Crowther, a member of pure West African Negro race, who was taken from his native land as a slave, and recaptured in the middle passage. I record with pleasure the instruction I have received in conversation with this sagacious and accomplished gentleman.
(Samuel Adjai Crowther, 1812–1891, was captured from a slaving ship by a British man-of-war in 1822 and returned as a free man to Sierra Leone. Baptized in 1825, he attended mission schools in Africa, and then traveled to England, where he was ordained in 1842 and consecrated in 1864. He then served as bishop of Niger territory, where he translated the Bible into Yoruba.)
Owen’s passage surely reeks with paternalism by irrelevant modern standards, but we should honor his decency at a time when some colleagues wouldn’t ever deign to socialize with a black man. Owen’s most revealing words, however, refer to “the great physiologist of Heidelberg”—for here we do grasp his unconventional allegiances. Friedrich Tiedemann, professor of anatomy at Heidelberg, was the only genuine egalitarian among early-nineteenth-century European scientists of eminence. He measured skulls of all races and wrote several treatises on the putative intellectual equality of all people. He submitted a major article in English to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1836, the document quoted by Owen. If Owen explicitly cited Tiedemann, we can be confident that he chose to refute Huxley’s argument on race, at least in part, by defending the high intellectual achievement and capacity of all human groups.
From 1859 until his death in 1870, Charles Dickens published a weekly miscellany of literature and current events entitled All the Year Round. He did not write each piece himself, but he exercised such a strong editorial hand that the Encyclopaedia Britannica remarks: “He took responsibility for all the opinions expressed (for authors were anonymous) and selected and amended contributions accordingly. Thus comments on topical events may generally be taken as expressing his opinions, whether or not he wrote them.” Dickens published his major commentary on Darwin in the July 7, 1860, issue of All the Year Round. The closing paragraph reads:
Timid persons, who purposely cultivate a certain inertia of mind, and who love to cling to their preconceived ideas, fearing to look at such a mighty subject from an unauthorized and unwonted point of view, may be reassured by the reflection that, for theories, as for organized beings, there is also a Natural Selection and a Struggle for Life. The world has seen all sorts of theories rise, have their day, and fall into neglect.
Owen’s theory fell and died; Huxley’s views prevailed, both by virtue of essential truth and possession of the right to tell history. But amalgamations usually forge our best solutions in a complex world—and I wish we had preserved Owen’s correct and principled argument on race in proper integration with Huxley’s evolutionary perspective. Such a conjunction, if incorporated into political and social policy as well, could have spared human history from most major horrors of the past century. We must still struggle to craft the conjunction, a tale of two worlds—for, in so doing, we might convert the “worst of times” to “the best of times, an “age of foolishness” into an “age of wisdom,” and the “season of Darkness” into a “season of Light.”
7
MR. SOPHIA’S PONY
IF A STOLEN PURSE COUNTS ONLY AS TRASH COMPARED WITH A GOOD NAME lost, how shall we judge the happily expiring custom of addressing a married woman by her husband’s name? Perhaps I was an incipient feminist from my cradle, but I do remember wondering, at a very early age, why my mother, Eleanor, often received letters addressed to a Mrs. Leonard Gould.
Among several possible redresses, the game of turning tables in favorable circumstances surely has appeal. Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876) did good work as an educator of the blind, but I once took great pleasure in identifying him as Mr. Julia Ward Howe to acknowledge his more famous wife, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
We do not often encounter such an opportunity among married scientists, given the virtual exclusion of women before our current generation. Mme. Curie stands among the greatest scientists of all time, but her husband, Pierre, was also no slouch, and must therefore remain Pierre, not Mr. Marie. But I do know one scientific couple subject to this strategy of inversion for pairing an eminent wife with an obscure husband—and I do feel quite protective, for Mr. Sophia Kovalevsky was a paleontologist, and a damned fine (if forgotten) scientist in his own right.
The Dictionary of Scientific Biography begins its entry on Sophia Kovalevsky (1850-1891) by calling her “the greatest woman mathematician prior to the twentieth century.” She studied abroad, for women could not obtain degrees from Russian universities. In Berlin, she received four years of private tutoring from professors, for women could not attend university lectures. In 1874, she earned her doctorate in absentia from the University of Göttingen in Germany. Despite the acknowledged excellence of her research, and solely for reasons of her gender, Kovalevsky could not obtain an academic position anywhere in Europe. She therefore returned to Russia—to a life of odd jobs, failed business ventures, and stolen hours for mathematical study. In 1883, following the death of Mr. Sophia—we shall come to him shortly—she again tried to obtain an academic post, this time successfully. She enjoyed several years of productive work as a professor of mathematics at the University of Stockholm, but died of influenza and subsequent pneumonia at age forty-one, at the height of her accomplishments and fame.
Sophia Kovalevsky published only ten papers on mathematical subjects during her brief life (she also attempted, less successfully, a simultaneous career in literature, writing several novels, a play, and a critical commentary on George Eliot, whom she had met on a trip to England). But these substantial works on diverse problems in mathematics brought her much renown. She studied the propagation of light in a crystalline medium, the rings of Saturn, and the rotation of rigid bodies around fixed points; she wrote several papers on technical matters (that I do not pretend to understand) in integral calculus. In 1888, she won the Boudin Prize of the French Academy of Science for her memoir on the rotation of rigid bodies (which generalized the work of her French predecessors Poisson and Lagrange). The judges were so impressed by her research that they raised the award from three thousand to five thousand francs to express their gratitude.
Vladimir Onufrievich Kovalevsky (1842-1883)—Mr. Sophia—entered his wife’s life in a most unromantic, b
ut eminently practical, manner integral to this tale of Sophia’s career. Single women of intellectual bent languished in Catch-22 in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. They could not study at Russian universities, but they could not travel abroad as independent persons, either. To escape this bind, freethinking women often arranged sham marriages with men of similar persuasions. The technically married couple could then travel abroad for foreign study. Sophia wed Vladimir for emancipation and the right to travel. The newlyweds then left for Germany, to live in different apartments and study in different cities.
Sophia and Vladimir belonged to the culture of freethinking Russians who, in pre-revolutionary times, gave their name to one of the few English words with a Russian etymology—the intelligentsia. The men and women of the intelligentsia tended to radicalism in politics, Bohemianism in lifestyle (in stark contrast to the proclaimed asceticism of later Bolshevism), and—in a striking difference from American and Western European versions of the same phenomenon—fascination for science and confidence in its power to transform the world for good. These men and women sought scientists for their idols, rather than the literary or philosophical intellectuals who fronted for similar movements in other lands. Darwin, in particular, became their icon—and for this reason (and as a historical curiosity rarely acknowledged or appreciated), most Russian intellectuals were strict Darwinians while, to Darwin’s own frustration, other European scientists, although convinced of evolution’s truth by the Origin of Species, tended to reject Darwin’s favored mechanism of natural selection.
As a literary prototype of this movement, we must nominate the hero Bazarov of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, published in 1862, just three years after Darwin’s Origin of Species. This revolutionary nihilist denies all laws except those of the natural sciences. When not engaged in political schemes, he dissects frogs to build his knowledge and center his life. Vladimir and Sophia Kovalevsky were not nearly so colorful, or extreme in their sentiments and actions. But their lives surely included sufficient adventure for a Hollywood biography. I was particularly struck by the story of Vladimir’s skullduggery in fostering the escape from France, following the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871, of the imprisoned and politically radical lover of Sophia’s sister.
Sophia and Vladimir began their marriage as a sham, but as the world turns, birds fly, and bees buzz, the best-laid plans of mice and men often depart from original intentions. When Sophia could not find employment in Europe, and Vladimir wished to go home (where he could work as a paleontologist), they returned to Russia together. They had always been fond of each other, and when Vladimir showed special tenderness to Sophia following the death of her beloved father, they did consummate their marriage and eventually had a daughter, who later studied medicine, worked as a translator, and became quite a heroine herself within a very different Soviet system.
Their life together in Russia produced little but tension, much of their own making. Vladimir had some family money, and Sophia obtained a good sum after her father’s death. As neither found remunerative work within science (and since they had chosen a lifestyle far above their means), they invested their cash in a variety of ill-considered business schemes, mostly in real estate and public baths—and quickly became flat broke. Vladimir then had a stroke of good fortune that eventually became his undoing. He obtained a position—at decent compensation—as spokesman for a firm that manufactured naphtha from petroleum. The Ragozin brothers, owners of the company, wanted the prestige of Vladimir’s academic degrees, and his recognized verbal skills (arising, in part, from his efforts as a formidable soapbox orator in his political past), to lure customers and investors.
Vladimir spent most of his time on business trips to European cities. Sophia, though happy for the cash that gave her some leisure for mathematical work, became increasingly frustrated at his absences and preoccupations—and a serious rift developed. Finally, early in 1881, Sophia boiled over and left for Berlin to pursue her academic dreams. She explained in a letter to Vladimir:
You write truly that no woman has created anything important, but it is just because of this that it is essential for me, while I still have energy and tolerable material circumstances, to position myself so that I may show whether I can achieve anything or whether I lack brains.
(I have become fascinated with Vladimir and Sophia and have read everything I could get my hands on for this essay—including a veiled biography by Sophia’s sister, an even more hagiographical set of Soviet documents, and a fine modern biography, the source of this quote and much else, by Don H. Kennedy: Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky.)
After many heartrending letters, and a few meetings for attempted reconciliation, Sophia decided to remain abroad, and the couple entrusted their daughter to the care of Vladimir’s more famous (and solvent) brother Alexander (the celebrated embryologist who discovered the relationship between vertebrates and the apparently “lowly” marine tunicates).
And the predictable tragedy finally unfolded. Vladimir had been mentally ill for years, and his periods of depression lengthened and deepened. The naphtha firm failed, and the Ragozin brothers, charged with numerous shady dealings, faced judicial proceedings. Vladimir, fearing his own disgrace and prosecution (though he was apparently innocent and not under official suspicion), committed suicide on April 15, 1883, by putting a bag over his head and inhaling chloroform. He had earlier written (but not mailed) a letter to his brother that functioned as a suicide note:
I am afraid that I shall grieve you very, very much, but from all the clouds that have gathered from all sides over me, this was the only thing left for me to do. Everything for which I was preparing has been broken up by this, and life is growing terribly difficult . . . Write Sophia that my constant thought was about her, and how very wrong I was before her, and how I spoiled her life which, except for me, would have been bright and happy.
On learning the news, Sophia was devastated by a complex mixture of grief and guilt. She withdrew to her room and would neither admit anyone nor eat anything. On the fifth day, she lost consciousness. She was then force-fed by her physician and put into bed. Several days later, she sat up, asked for a pencil and paper, and began to work on a problem in mathematics.
Vladimir’s paleontological career was brief and limited, both in quantity and apparent range of material. He worked and studied abroad from 1869 (the year of his marriage) to 1874, attending lectures in several German universities, studying fossil vertebrates at museums in Germany, France, Holland, and Great Britain, and collecting fossils in France and Italy. He wrote six papers in three languages, none his own (a few Russian translations appeared later). All six, published between 1873 and 1877, treated the anatomy and evolution of the two great groups of large, hoofed, herbivorous mammals—the perissodactyls, or odd-toed ungulates (represented today only by the few living species of horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs), and the artiodactyls, or even-toed ungulates (the greatest success story among large mammals, including the highly diverse cattle, deer, antelopes, sheep and goats, pigs, giraffes, camels, and hippos).
In the late 1970s, I edited an ill-fated thirty-volume collection of facsimile reprints in the history of paleontology. (The volumes were lovely, but the press went belly-up—for other reasons, I trust!—soon after the collection appeared. I assume that most printed copies ended up in the shredder.) I decided to collect all of Kovalevsky’s papers together in one volume—his articles in German from the journal Palaeontographica; his English monograph, submitted by T. H. Huxley for publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London; and his famous French treatise on the evolution of horses, published back home in the Mémoires de l’Academie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg (but not in Russian, so that wide readership would be possible. Many nations today—particularly Japan—publish major scientific journals in English for the same reason). The six papers made a substantial, but not particularly hefty, volume.
Such limited output rarely
builds preeminence in a field like paleontology, so identified (however unfairly) as a profession devoted to the detailed description of minutiae. Yet, although Vladimir Kovalevsky may be virtually unknown to the larger intellectual world (except as the husband of a famous mathematician, and brother of a celebrated embryologist), he is treasured within my small fraternity as an important innovator and a particularly careful craftsman. His few published papers created a reputation well beyond their literal heft. For fifteen years, I have stared fondly at my modest volume of his totality.
Kovalevsky has always won warm accolades from aficionados. Darwin greatly admired his work, and singled out a monograph on horses for special praise in a letter that can only make scholars yearn for more in the same (literal) style. (Darwin had the world’s most abominable handwriting, a serious impediment for all historians of science. Some of the most important passages in his writing, and therefore in the history of Western thought, have yet to be deciphered to everyone’s satisfaction. But he wrote to Kovalevsky in a wonderfully clear hand—no doubt laboriously and in deference to a man who usually worked in Cyrillic and might have difficulty with English penmanship. Why didn’t Darwin realize that Englishmen might also stumble over his usual scrawl?)
Darwin had good reason to cultivate Kovalevsky’s favor. Before marrying Sophia, Vladimir had worked as a translator and publisher of scientific books. He translated at least three of Darwin’s most important works into Russian—The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), the Descent of Man (1871), and the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Vladimir worked so feverishly on the 1868 book (Darwin’s longest) that the Russian edition actually appeared before the “original” English version, thereby marking the premiere of this important work. In another tale from their eventful lives, Vladimir and Sophia safely carried the proofs of the Descent of Man through the Prussian lines and into besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Page 14
