Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (16 page)

Owen reports the lurid stories that du Chaillu heard from local people:

But Owen also reports Du Chaillu’s personal dubiety: “There is no doubt the Gorilla can do this, but that he does it I do not believe.”

Du Chaillu’s book of 1861 precipitated one of the greatest fracases in the contentious world of Victorian science.
Many naturalists accused du Chaillu of fabricating tales; some suggested that he had never even visited the habitat of gorillas, but merely bought material shot by others. (Du Chaillu, for example, had written a dramatic account of shooting a large, enraged, and charging male—but the skin, shipped to Owen in London, bore no bullet holes in front.) Debate also raged on du Chaillu’s claim for personal
observation of a stunning habit that has defined our image of male gorillas ever since—pounding on the chest to display threat or anger. Owen reports the claim:

In deference to both sides at once, and maintaining all options in the face of doubt, Owen then commented:

Most lurid legends turn out to be wrong, but du Chaillu was
vindicated, and male gorillas do pound their chests, just like King Kong (but more in bluff than in prelude to battle). In fact, though du Chaillu did not emerge as a paragon of accuracy, he did fare well in the great debate, and he and his mentor Owen clearly won both a palm of victory and the right to thump.

As a curious footnote, du Chaillu’s supporters also included a man so hostile to Owen,
both for irreconcilable views and opposite personalities, that I doubt they ever again shared a common platform: England’s most eloquent naturalist, Thomas Henry Huxley. Although Huxley found du Chaillu’s book full of unintentional errors based on “imperfectly kept notes” and “a rather vivid imagination,” he honored du Chaillu’s courage in visiting dangerous and inaccessible places, and he found
the explorer’s accounts generally reliable. (Huxley later backed off in supporting du Chaillu, for he rankled at the mileage accruing to his enemy Owen, and just couldn’t bear to act as an aide de camp.)

Strange bedfellows do not only inhabit political hotels; science also spawns odd allegiances. Huxley and Owen could work together on du Chaillu’s behalf because both needed information about
gorillas to pursue their own disparate campaigns—based in large part on attempts to slaughter each other.

Owen published his major work on gorillas in the 1865 monograph given to Dickens, and in his Rede lecture of May 1859, ironically published in the same year as Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, for Darwin’s book would so recast the debate to Owen’s disadvantage—“On the classification and geographical
distribution of the Mammalia, to which is added an appendix ‘On the Gorilla,’ and ‘On the extinction and transmutation of Species.’” Huxley featured gorillas in his finest and most influential publication, a landmark in the history of scientific prose: “Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature,” a series of lectures originally given to working men in 1860 and 1862. (Admission supposedly required
proof of blue-collar status, but legend proclaims that Karl Marx managed to sneak in!)

The grand Darwinian debate on evolution may have defined the broad subject of these volumes by Huxley and Owen, but their own excruciatingly bitter personal confrontation about apes and humans forms the controlling subtext for all these documents—and one cannot understand these works today without some background
in “the great hippocampus debate.” (Victorian scientists did pursue activities other than contentious argument, although the three altercations that act as pillars of this essay do form a totality—du Chaillu’s gorilla rhubarb and the Huxley-Owen hippocampus rumpus as stalking-horses for the grandest of underlying issues, Darwin’s brouhaha on the origin of species.)

I write this essay to memorialize
the centenary of Huxley’s death (1825–1895). The hippocampus debate has always been depicted as Huxley’s greatest and absolutely unalloyed victory. I am also an unabashed Huxley fan, as illustrated by numerous essays in this series. As a fierce defender of evolution (“Darwin’s bulldog” in the cliché), and the greatest prose stylist in the history of British science (though one might argue for
a tie with D’Arcy Thompson’s
Growth and Form
), Huxley almost has to be my personal hero. Nonetheless, and following the antihagiographical bent of these essays, I choose the hippocampus debate to memorialize Huxley because I believe that the story has not been fairly told—and that, at one crucial point agonizingly relevant to current concerns, Owen developed an important and valued argument against
a baleful implication of Huxley’s generally admirable stance.

Many advantages accrue to the victors of any dispute, military or cerebral—and chronicling rights must rank among the greatest of perks. In short, the winners write history. How would we interpret the Trojan War if our main account had been written by Hector’s bard; and how would future generations view the history of evolutionary
theory if Duane Gish and Henry Morris (our most vociferous modern creationists) cornered the market for written descriptions?

Richard Owen (1804–1892) was the greatest anatomist and paleontologist of his age. His accomplishments were legion, both in range and excellence (including an early monograph on the chambered nautilus; the initial description of the oldest fossil bird,
Archaeopteryx;
a
series of crucial papers on the moas, extinct giant ground birds of New Zealand; the first description of South American fossil mammals brought back by Darwin from his
Beagle
voyage; coining of the name “dinosaur,” followed by volumes of accurate work on fossil reptiles of all ages). As a pillar of establishment science (and an intimate of Queen Victoria and nearly everyone else who mattered),
Owen also wielded substantial power in the service of zoology, particularly in his long and successful campaign to establish a separate building for natural history within the British Museum. (Owen served as first director, and his edifice still stands, vigorously functioning in South Kensington as both a great monument of Victorian architecture and one of the most important scientific museums in
the world.)

But Owen ran afoul of the ultimate victors in Victorian natural history—Darwin’s circle. He was, to say the least, not a consistently nice man. He tended to be almost obsequiously genial and accommodating to those more powerful than himself, but arrogant and dismissive toward juniors and underlings, the folks who eventually “grow up” and write later histories! He was not opposed to
evolutionary ideas, despite later legends constructed by Darwinian chroniclers, though he strongly disliked Darwin’s materialistic version of biological change.

The ever-genial Darwin wrote a most uncharacteristic assessment in his
Autobiography
, thus illustrating the off putting power of Owen’s personality:

As a young man, eager to advance, Huxley bridled under Owen’s power—and bided his time. Huxley, twenty years Owen’s junior, often needed letters of recommendation from the purveyor of
maximal patronage in natural history. Owen always complied, and with strong words of praise much to Huxley’s advantage, but he always made Huxley wait, and treated him with condescension, if not contempt. Huxley recalled meeting Owen accidentally on the street after two unfulfilled requests for an urgently needed recommendation:

Huxley and company eventually won rights to tell the official story, and they read Owen out of their
triumphalist account, or (even worse) depicted him as a pompous fool, and an unwitting agent of their victory. But Owen has found modern defenders among historians out to debunk progressivist accounts of science as continuous advance fueled by saintly advocates of factual truth against infidels mired in social prejudice; Nicolaas A. Rupke’s 1994 biography,
Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist
, provides
a splendid account in this corrective mode. Rupke quotes several genuine and warmly enthusiastic accounts of Owen, from many sensible and admirable people (including Charles Dickens). Let us at least acknowledge that Owen was an enormously complex, brilliant, and fascinating man—and that the history of biology in Victorian Britain cannot be told without granting him a long chapter.

The great
hippocampus debate began two years before Darwin published the
Origin of Species
, and did not invoke natural selection as a central subject. But this most famous Victorian scientific wrangle did engage the primary, and perpetually gut-wrenching subject that Darwinism placed into such sharp focus: the uniqueness of humans among other animals. Are we just improved apes, or something entirely different
from all other creatures? Huxley advocated continuity with gorillas; Owen defended sharp separation. The turf of battle, by Owen’s choice and initial proposal, centered upon three structures in the brain. Owen claimed that only humans possessed these features, thus defining our absolute separation from the brute creation. Huxley proved that apes possessed versions of all three structures—sometimes
as prominently expressed as in humans—and that Owen’s marks of separation therefore affirmed our evolutionary unity with other primates.

For the first difference, Owen claimed that only humans possessed a “posterior lobe” of the cerebrum—a backward extension of this traditional location for “higher” mental functions—to cover the cerebellum, or conventional region for control of motor activity.
(The accompanying figure from Owen’s 1859 lecture will clarify his claim. Note that the chimp cerebrum [letter A] stops in front of the underlying cerebellum [letter C], but extends to cover the brain’s entire upper surface in humans. By modern neurological evidence, the traditional attributions of function are as wrong as Owen’s claims for morphological differences, but I cite the older views to
situate the debate in its own time. Obviously, if the “higher” cerebrum covered the “lower” cerebellum only in humans, we might measure our mental superiority thereby.)

Second, Owen stated that only humans possess a posterior cornu in the lateral ventricle. (To explicate this mouthful, ventricles are spaces within the brain, continuous with the central cavity of the spinal cord and formed as
the developing brain undergoes complex bending and folding in embryology.
Cornu
is Latin for “horn”—so the posterior cornu is a horn-shaped rear end to a cavity in the brain.)

Third and last, Owen claimed that only humans developed a “hippocampus minor”—a ridge on the bottom of the same posterior horn of the lateral ventricle, and produced by a deep inward penetration of an adjacent part of the
brain called the calcarine fissure. This “hippocampus minor” is not the same structure as the “hippocampus” itself, an important region of the brain’s old interior, recently identified in a series of elegant experiments as a site for the initial recording of short-term memories, which are then, somehow, transferred to the neocortex for long-term storage. In modern terminology, “hippocampus minor”
has been dropped in favor of the earlier name,
calcar avis
, or “cock’s spur,” in reference to visual similarity with the weapon on a rooster’s leg that potentiated the “sport” of cockfighting. The name
hippocampus
was originally coined in the sixteenth century by Arantius, a student of Vesalius, because the structure reminded him of a seahorse—
Hippocampus
in Latin, and the formal name later chosen
by Linnaeus to designate the major genus of seahorses.

I will not rehearse the details of the hippocampus debate here, for no story in Victorian natural history has been told so often, and the basic facts are not in dispute. (My friend and colleague Charles G. Gross, professor of psychology at Princeton, has recently published a particularly clear and accessible article, notable for its focus
on anatomical details of the brain—for Gross is a celebrated neurologist, not primarily a historian: “Hippocampus Minor and Man’s Place in Nature: A Case Study in the Social Construction of Neuroanatomy,” published in
Hippocampus.
Yes, in our world of specialization, each region of the brain has a journal devoted to its study!)