Agnes Arber was a British botanist and historian of her subject. In 1946 she became the first female botanist – and the third woman overall – to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, one of the oldest and most esteemed scientific institutions in the world. Not only did this acknowledge Arber’s pioneering research and keen intellect, but it represented a milestone in the recognition of women in science.

Arber’s research focused upon the monocotyledons (often called the ‘monocots’), one of the two major groups of flowering plants (the other being the dicotyledons, also known as ‘dicots’). Arber’s first break-through was in 1912 with the award of a one-year research fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge where she was given space in the Balfour Laboratory to conduct her research. It was then that she published what has become her best known work Herbals: Their origin and evolution. The book – which is now regarded as a classic and is still in print today – was a reflection of her interest in the history of botany, something that was also manifest in a number of fascinating biographical papers that she wrote on early botanists and naturalists such as Nehemiah Grew (1906), Guy de la Brosse (1913) and John Ray (1943). It should also be noted that Arber was a highly skilled artist, illustrating the majority of her books and papers.

Arber also conducted research into the morphological differences of aquatic plants. This became the subject of her second book Water Plants: A Study of Aquatic Angiosperms which was published in 1920. After the publication of her third book The Monocotyledons in 1925, Arber turned her research interests to the Gramineae, that is the grasses and so of central importance to us. This work resulted in her fourth and final book The Gramineae in 1934.

Arber continued to work in the Balfour Laboratory until its closure in 1927. With no space for her to continue her work in the University’s Botany School, she set up a small laboratory in a bedroom of her own house. As an aside, there is an echo of Ronald Fisher in this behaviour, the renowned evolutionary biologist (also at Cambridge) who similarly used a bedroom in his home as a make-shift laboratory. From that point onward, Arber’s house became the centre of operation for her academic research, and aside from a few small research grants, her work was undertaken without financial support from a professional institution. During World War II, the supply situation was so dire that it became too difficult for Arber to maintain her home laboratory so she turned her intellectual pursuits to philosophy and history of science.

Maura Flannery (2005, p.14) sums up the importance that Arber placed upon philosophy: “She sees philosophical reflection as important work because only when the larger implications of research are understood can its real value be appreciated and the scientific endeavour truly enriched.” This statement is all the more powerful when one considers that Arber, a botanist, had written her finest philosophical works at a time when philosophy of science was dominated by physicists.

One reason that many ‘forgotten heroes’ of science drifted into obscurity is not because their work lacked scientific merit, but because their writing style was largely inaccessible to a lay audience. The palaeontologist Richard Owen is a good example of a scientist who produced some fine pieces of research, but whose writing style was, arguably, so tedious to read that people often did not bother. However, this is certainly not the case with Arber. Arber wrote with an effortless fluidity, intelligent and concise, along with a succinct and accessible style. Her work remains a pleasure to read. Indeed, Arber’s original works can still be read and enjoyed by a modern audience, which makes her obscurity all the more puzzling. So, what is the reason that so few people have heard of Agnes Arber?

In her eloquent overview on Arber’s contributions to science, Flannery (2005) suggests that it is because she has for so long been labelled as ‘anti-evolutionary’. This is all the more unfortunate because it is incorrect. As Flannery (2005, p.15) explains, Arber was not anti-evolutionary and did not refute the fact that species change over time, rather, she questioned “..the idea that natural selection is the dominant mechanism for that change”. Specifically, Arber believed that parallelism – today more commonly known as ‘convergent evolution’ – had a substantial impact on biological form that wasn’t taken into account by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

It should be remembered that the 1940s and 1950s were a time when natural selection was widely embraced as the overarching answer to every question about biological life, when in reality there were many scientists, including the eminent biologist D’Arcy Thompson, pointing out that the evolutionary process was more complicated than could solely be accounted for by natural selection alone. Yes, natural selection is a critical factor, but there are other biological, genetic and physical processes at play too. None of these ideas refute the role of natural selection, rather, they are complimentary to it.

However, for a scientist to be branded ‘anti-evolutionary’ is often a nail in the coffin with regards to historical visibility. Once forgotten, the possibility is that it may have been an unjustly driven nail in the first place and so it becomes all the more difficult to acknowledge and thus remove.

As succinctly summed up by Flannery (2005, p.13) “The very fact that Arber achieved scientific recognition despite the lack of an academic position speaks highly of her research and also speaks to the place of women in British science in the first half of the 20th century.”

Text copyright © 2015 Victoria Ling. All rights reserved.

References

Arber, A. (1906) Nehemiah Grew and the study of plant anatomy.  Science Progress 1, 150-158.

Arber, A. (1912) Herbals: Their origin and evolution.  Cambridge University.

Arber, A. (1913) The botanical philosophy of Guy de la Brosse: A study in seventeenth-century thought. Isis 1, 359-369.

Arber, A. (1943) A seventeenth century naturalist: John Ray. Isis 34, 319-324.

Flannery, M.C. (2005) Agnes Arber in the 21st century.  The Systematist 24, 13-17.

Packer, K. (1997) A laboratory of one's own: The life and works of Agnes Arber, F.R.S. (1879-1960). Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 51, 87-104.

Schmid, R. (2001) Agnes Arber, nee Robertson (1879-1960): Fragments of her life, including her place in biology and in women's studies. Annals of Botany 88, 1105-1128.

Thomas, H.H. (1960) Agnes Arber. 1879-1960. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 6, 1-11.

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was an English biologist who also carried out research in the fields of palaeontology and marine zoology. He acquired the nickname ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ because of his vociferous defence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

However, Huxley was a pioneering biologist in his own right; he was a leading expert on reptile fossils, an excellent anatomist, a fine illustrator and one of the key intellectual figures of the nineteenth century. He coined the word ‘agnostic’ to describe people such as himself who believed that it is not possible to know whether a deity exists or not. As a child, Huxley received only two years of formal education, and was largely self-taught in the sciences, history, philosophy and German.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, and soon after in June, 1860 the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Oxford. The ensuing debate between Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, became the stuff of legend and – as succinctly described by John Hedley Brooke (1991) – the idea that it represents an absolute polarisation of views is far too simplistic. Nevertheless, all those debating were of high intelligence, saw what was at stake if Darwin’s views proved correct, and were not shy of a rhetorical flourish. Wilberforce was fiercely opposed to the idea that species change through time, although his view was not based on untutored ignorance but rather a view that Darwin’s hypothesis was flawed. Nor, it needs to be emphasised, was Wilberforce alone in this regard.

Significantly, however, this debate was also attended by another opponent to Darwin’s theory of evolution, the eminent palaeontologist Richard Owen. Owen coached Wilberforce prior to the debate in order to strengthen his case against Huxley. Quite what was said in the famous exchange of views is now a matter of legend, but it seems that in an attempt to ridicule Huxley, Wilberforce asked if he was descended from an ape on his mother’s or father’s side. Huxley responded by saying that he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but that he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.

As an afterword to the Huxley-Wilberforce altercation, a little known fact – brought to light in 1980 by Harvard-based biological anthropologist Professor Richard Wrangham  – is that there is evidence to suggest that Wilberforce may have eventually softened his stance towards the concept of evolution.  Specifically, Wrangham discusses a poem written by Wilberforce (and subsequently discovered in his private papers held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) written after his debate with Huxley. It ends with the lines:

“To soothe each fond regret, howe’er I can;

And, at the least, to dream myself a Man!”

In the words of Wrangham, the poem “..implies a man [Wilberforce] too committed to accept the evolutionary argument, yet too honest in the end to deny it. Who knows? Darwin may have had one more convert than he knew.”

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that in terms of science Huxley and Owen remained lifelong opponents. Nowhere were these differences more animated than in the debate over the degree of similarity between ape and human brains (sometimes referred to as the Great hippocampus question). This was significant because at the time, Huxley and Owen were the two leading British authorities on anatomy, yet they held entirely opposing views on the matter.

Owen believed that human beings should be taxonomically assigned to a separate mammalian subclass, thus distancing man from the rest of the animal kingdom. Owen claimed that ape brains were missing three uniquely human components; technically these are the posterior lobe, posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and the hippocampus minor (now called the calcar avis). Their purported absence in the apes Owen took as evidence against Darwin’s theory. Cosans (2009) describes how Huxley was so astonished by Owen’s claims – which he considered contradictory to the facts – that he saw no alternative but to refute them.

Huxley’s 1863 publication Evidence on Man’s Place in Nature, presented his definitive stance on the matter. The second chapter (On the relations of Man to the lower animals) was the most controversial, presenting a comprehensive review of the fossil and anatomical evidence for the similarities between man and apes. The debate was brought to a close when Sir Charles Lyell, Britain’s most eminent geologist and one of the era’s leading scientists, threw his support behind Huxley’s stance.

Equal to this contribution was the question of the origin of birds. Today, it is widely accepted that birds are descended from a branch of theropod dinosaurs, but fewer, however, are aware that it was Huxley who first proposed this evolutionary relationship.

In 1861,the German palaeontologist Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer described a fossilized feather discovered the previous year from Upper Jurassic sediments in southern Germany in the famous Solnhofen Limestone. Von Meyer named the fossil Archaeopteryx lithographica (meaning ‘the ancient wing from the lithographic limestone’). Shortly afterwards, the first skeleton of Archaeopteryx with feathers was described. At first its interpretation was rather convoluted, but Huxley made extensive and detailed comparisons of Archaeopteryx with various reptilian fossils and initially found that it was most similar to the small, chicken-sized theropod dinosaur Compsognathus: “Surely there is nothing very wild or illegitimate in the hypothesis that the phylum of the Class of Aves has its foot in the Dinosaurian Reptiles…” (Huxley, 1868, p.74).

Huxley was a great biologist and anatomist, and he played the key role in promoting and defending the theory of evolution by natural selection in the nineteenth century. He was also a pioneering educator, encouraging science students to carry out practical work in addition to book-based research, something which is now standard practice. He was a prolific writer, an articulate communicator and his pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to research was the embodiment of good academic form. He was also a man of high moral purpose and although he was lucky not to have seen the catastrophes of the twentieth century, had he done so he would have been horrified.

Huxley famously remarked that so obvious was Darwin’s hypothesis that he wished he had thought of it. He would not have been alone, and one of the paradoxes of science is that the obvious may stare us all in the face, but only the person with the chutzpah of lateral thinking finds the solution.

The fact remains that when Huxley passed away in 1895, the world was a very different place to the one he was born into; he had played a key role in not only developing our understanding of the natural world, but more broadly speaking, encouraged unbiased, fact-based thinking. He founded a generation of open-minded scientists and his own descendants carried on his chain of perspicacious thinking: most notably, his grandson was the biologist Julian Huxley, who founded the World Wildlife Fund, and his other grandson Aldous Huxley was a writer, most famously known for the dystopian novel Brave New World.

Text copyright © 2015 Victoria Ling. All rights reserved.

References

Brooke, J.H. (1991)  Science and Religion: some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge University Press.

Chambers, P. (2002)  Bones of Contention: the Archaeopteryx scandals.  John Murray.

Cosans, C.E. (2009)  Owen's Ape & Darwin's Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and creationism. Indiana University Press.

Feduccia, A. (1996)  The Origin and Evolution of Birds. Yale University Press.

Gross, C.G. (1993)  Huxley versus Owen: the hippocampus minor and evolution.  Trends in Neurosciences 16, 493-498.

Huxley, L. (1900)  Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley.  Macmillan.

Huxley, T.H. (1863)  Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.  Williams and Norgate.

Huxley, T.H. (1868)  On the animals which are most nearly intermediate between birds and reptiles.  Annals and Magazine of Natural History 2, 66–75.

Huxley, T.H. (1870)  Further evidence of the affinity between the dinosaurian reptiles and birds.  Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 26, 12–31.

Kingsley, C. (1889)  The Water Babies.  Macmillan and Co.

Lyell, C. (1863)  The Antiquity of Man.  Murray.

von Meyer, C.E.H. (1861)  Archaeopteryx lithographica (Vogel-Feder) und Pterodactylus von Solnhofen.  Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie, Geologie und Paläontologie 1861, 678–679.

Wrangham, R.W. (1980) Bishop Wilberforce: Natural selection and the Descent of Man. Nature 287, 192.