Education or degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H. G. Wells and The outline of history

Studies in Historynd Philosophy of
a
Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 203–229

www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc

Biological andBiomedical Sciences

Education or degeneration: E. Ray Lankester,H. G. Wells and The outline of history

Richard Barnett

Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London,

210 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK

Received 17 May 2005; received in revised form 14 November 2005

Abstract

This paper uses the friendship and collaboration of Edwin Ray Lankester (1847–1929), zool-ogist, and Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), novelist and journalist, to challenge the currentinterpretation of late Victorian concern over degeneration as essentially an intellectual movementwith little influence in contemporary debates over social and political problems. Degenerationtheory provided for Lankester and Wells the basis both for a personal bond and for an activeprogramme of social and educational reform. I trace the construction of Lankester’s accountof degeneration, initially as empirical ‘fact’ and later as ideologically inflected theory, and thereciprocal relationship between this theory and his critique of the British university system. Iuse Wells’s Outline of history (1920) to illustrate the profound influence of Lankester’s degener-ationist worldview on Wells’s scientific and socio-political thought. Lankester’s synthesis of histheory and his critique led the two men to reject eugenics as an unscientific and ideologicallyincompatible solution to the problem of national deterioration. Instead, they campaigned forthe reform of scientific education as a means of keeping mankind from physical, intellectualand cultural degeneration.� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Darwinism; Degeneration; Education; E. Ray Lankester; Eugenics; H. G. Wells

1369-8486/$ - see front matter � 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2006.03.002

E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Barnett).

mailto:[email protected]

204 R. Barnett / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 203–229

1. Introduction

On 5 January 1901 E. Ray Lankester, then Director of the British Museum NaturalHistory Collections at the Natural History Museum, wrote to his friend and former stu-dent, the writer H. G. Wells. Lankester’s tone was gloomy:

1 Onliterarycontain

2 On(1985)

I fear that a great catastrophe must come up in England—an utter defeat andbreakup—before the rotten crusts of conceit, imbecility, and self-indulgence whichdominate us, will be got rid of, and the rottenness may have spread too far belowthe crust before that happens. (Lankester to Wells, 5 January 1900, in Wells,1998, p. 371)

Wells was no stranger to this bleak outlook on mankind’s future. In The time machine:

An invention, published six years earlier, he had imagined the disintegration of civilisedhuman life, the dissolution of humanity into two distinct species—the childish yet beauti-ful Eloi, and the powerful but bestial Morlocks—and the end of all life on Earth with theburning out of the Sun.

This apparent sense of pessimism and inertia is reflected in the prevailing historiograph-ical attitude to degeneration theory in late Victorian culture. In the last two decades dis-courses of degeneration have become a staple of medical, scientific and literary histories ofthe fin de siecle.1 Though they can be found in many different cultural contexts thesediscourses were, in Daniel Pick’s (1989, p. 2) words, framed in ‘medico-psychiatric andnatural-scientific language’, and it is the formation of degeneration theory as a ‘natural-scientific’ discourse that concerns me here. Pick and others have described the huge andinventive range of interpretations of degeneration theory developed by British and Euro-pean scientists including Henry Maudsley, Cesare Lombroso, Benedict Morel and HenryHavelock Ellis.2 These accounts have tended to view scientific discourses of degenerationas principally intellectual phenomena: they reflected a pervasive cultural interest in thesubject and possessed a certain influence in British and European psychiatry, but werein effect theories without praxis. It is as if the degenerationists, like Prufock in T. S. Eliot’spoem a generation later, were paralysed by the horror of their visions.

This view has not been universally accepted. Turner (1980) identified a ‘third period’ ofBritish public science—between 1875 and 1920—as a time of profound disenchantment inthe scientific community. After the Paris Exhibition of 1867 British scientists felt increas-ingly under threat from their European counterparts. Despite spirited campaigning they‘confronted frustration on all sides’ when ‘national endowment for research was not forth-coming’ (ibid., p. 592). In response to what they saw as a public failure to recognise thevalue of ‘natural knowledge’ scientists turned for explanations to their own theoreticalcosmologies. In this respect degeneration, with its evidential basis in embryological reca-pitulation, possessed obvious political value. It was used to ‘castigate cultures whichappeared to have lost part of their motivation, following a belief that since one mustassume a force of some sort informing development, any failure in the developmental

the historiography of degeneration see Chamberlin & Gilman (1985); Pick (1989); Burrow (2000). Forrepresentations of degeneration see Greenslade (1994); Hurley (1996); Childs (2001). Neve & Jay (1999)s a useful sample of degenerationist writings.Maudsley, see Pick (1989), pp. 203–213. On Lombroso, see ibid., pp. 110–152. On Morel, see Carlson

, pp. 121–124. On Havelock Ellis, see Greenslade (1994), pp. 97–99.

R. Barnett / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 203–229 205

program must indicate a corresponding deficiency of the informing force’ (Chamberlin1981, p. 699). In a more ideological interpretation Chamberlin (ibid., p. 691) placed degen-eration—‘the opposite of the theory of progressive evolution’—at the heart of late Victo-rian ‘cultural melancholy : : : the instinct to turn to what is wrong in order to clarify, if notto define, what ought to be right’. Degeneration thus became a progressive force, inspiringaction in Victorian intellectuals from Ruskin to Huxley.

Though I borrow aspects of both Turner’s and Chamberlin’s work—particularly Turn-er’s placing of degeneration theory in the context of international scientific competition—I reject their broadly based approach to the subject and instead give a detailed account ofone interpretation of degeneration common to two scientifically minded intellectuals at theturn of the nineteenth century. In doing so I do not seek to overturn the historiographicconsensus on degeneration theory but merely to expand it. For Lankester and Wellsdegeneration theory was both an expression of their feelings at the state of science, societyand the world and—crucially—the ideological underpinning for a programme of action.

As part of this work Wells’s scientific and political thought must be integrated:nowhere is their interrelationship better expressed in his writings than in his concernsover degeneration and his advocacy of scientific education (Wells, 1996, p. 3). AlthoughLankester and Wells’s views converged over the twin subjects of degeneration and edu-cational reform, the two men differed over many other questions. This one theoreticaland ideological continuity must not be permitted to overshadow their many differencesof opinion. To this end I bring out the differences between Lankester’s ‘planless progres-sive individualism’ and Wells’s ‘liberal Fascism’ as expressed in their publications andletters in this period.3 In recent accounts of late Victorian life science Lankester has gen-erally been portrayed as a hot-headed foot soldier in ‘Pope’ Huxley’s crusade for scien-tific education.4 Lankester repeatedly expressed his great respect for Huxley, the man hecalled his ‘father in science’.5 He modelled his science classes at University College Lon-don on Huxley’s laboratory-based teaching programme at the Normal School of Sci-ence.6 Once again this close connection must not be permitted to eclipse Lankester’sown views on science and educational reform. The only biography of Lankester—Lester(1995)—provides a useful ‘life and letters’, but Lankester’s life and work remainestranged from the social and intellectual contexts of late-nineteenth century life sciencewhich have emerged in recent scholarship.7

3 See Wells (1912), pp. v, 23; Coupland (2000).4 When Lankester was interviewed for the post of Director of the Natural History Museum, Archbishop

Temple began his examination with the phrase ‘I hear you’re a very troublesome man’. Lankester’s character hasfrequently been made the dominant theme in descriptions of his career, often to the detriment of more judiciousanalysis of his work, thought and writings. See Anon. (1905), p. 9; Goodrich (1929); Anon. (1929), p. 15;Desmond (1998), pp. 396, 418, 418, 455, 518. Janet Howarth has argued that the ‘talented but quarrelsome andintemperate’ Lankester’s election to the Linacre chair of comparative anatomy at Oxford in 1891 did great harmto the cause of scientific education there: see Howarth (1987), p. 347.

5 See Lankester (1895), pp. 120–121; University College Council Minutes, 7 November 1874, University CollegeLondon Archive; Lester (1995), p. 65.

6 The Normal School of Science, formerly the Royal School of Mines, opened in South Kensington in 1881under the direction of T. H. Huxley. In 1890 it was renamed the Royal College of Science, and in 1907 wasincorporated into the new Imperial College. See Forgan & Gooday (1996), pp. 435–468; Desmond (1982), pp. 22,107–112, 122–123.

7 See Nyhart (1997), p. 351.


In their most active period of friendship and collaboration (1900–1920) Lankesterand Wells shared the view that two processes—the physical degeneration of individualorganisms in response to the absence of a challenging environment, and the intellectualdegeneration of social groups in response to a lack of cultural stimulation—were com-parable in nature. The character of this connection, with its relation of individual andcollective fates, led them to claim that scientific education, rather than eugenics, wasthe most useful response to the threat of degeneration. Anyone who could see the worldin ‘objective’ terms—that is to say, anyone who had received a scientific education in theBaconian tradition—would perceive the problem of degeneracy and would also be intel-lectually equipped to deal with it.8 Scientific education was thus both a prophylactic anda treatment, working at individual and collective levels. It could awaken society to itsimpending crisis, and in doing so create a challenging, progressive culture that wouldarrest and reverse the process of intellectual and physical decline by teaching individualsto engage critically with the world around them.

This paper is divided into three sections. In the first I trace Lankester’s tandem devel-opment of his concept of degeneration and his critique of the English system of educationin the period 1870–1900, and Wells’s application of biological degeneration in his earlyjournalism and The time machine. In the second I examine Lankester’s and Wells’s writingson educational reform, eugenics and degeneration between 1900 and 1918, using thesesources to elucidate the similarities and differences in their thought and the applicationsof degeneration theory in their campaign for educational reform and against eugenics.In the third I consider Wells’s Outline of history, published in 1920 (and for which Lank-ester was a major advisor), to show the extent and nature of Lankester’s influence onWells’s account of world history and mankind’s future.

2. Degeneration as fact and as theory

At the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) summer meeting inAugust 1879 Lankester, then Professor of Zoology at University College London (UCL),gave a paper entitled ‘Degeneration: A chapter in Darwinism’.9 This was not, of course,the first use of the term in a scientific context, nor was it the first application of a notionof physical deterioration to humanity. Lankester’s paper was part of ‘an enormous outputof medical and natural scientific writings on social evolution, degeneration, morbidity andperversion’, European in origin, that began to appear around 1850 and continued up tothe end of the century (Pick, 1989, p. 20). Physicians, biologists and other practitionersof the new life sciences sought to extract debates over morality, morbidity and perversionfrom their typically political, religious or philosophical contexts and to redescribe them interms of new biological knowledge, fusing scientific theory and social criticism. Theappearance of Darwin’s Origin of species Darwin (1859) radically altered the terms of thisdiscussion. Earlier theories of degeneration were predicated on some form of physical ormental change over time: organisms could not otherwise degenerate. From 1859, however,all degenerationists—whether they accepted or rejected evolution by natural selection—

8 Lankester and Wells repeatedly expressed their admiration for Francis Bacon. See, for example, Lankester(1907), p. 37; Wells (1920), pp. 758–759. Wells cited his studies on ‘Huxley’s course in Comparative Anatomy atthe school in Exhibition Road’ as a major Baconian influence on his scientific thought: see Wells (1904), p. 382.

9 Reprinted in Lankester (1890), pp. 1–60.


were at least responding to Darwin’s theory. In the 1870s Cesare Lombroso, an Italianpsychiatrist and anthropologist, combined the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel’s bio-genetic law—ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—with the French physician Benedict Mor-el’s notion of environmentally initiated degeneration to construct a theory of ‘atavism’.10

Physical development could be arrested and reversed by various environmental ‘toxins’,and the individuals thus affected would be ‘fixed’ at an earlier, more bestial stage in humanevolution.

How is the influence of this ‘enormous output’ of texts reflected in Lankester’s ownconstruction of degeneration? At this stage in his intellectual history Lankester’s accountof degeneration fitted well with the views of his European contemporaries. He had pre-sented a summary of his opinions on evolution in a short monograph, On comparative

longevity in man and the lower animals, published in 1870 (only two years after his grad-uation from Christ Church, Oxford, with first-class honours in Natural Sciences). Herehe proposed that the life span of an organism was inversely proportional to its ‘gener-ative expenditure’: the amount of effort it put into finding food, protecting itself andreproducing:

10 LatranslaFor L11 Th

‘incapa(1974)

Echinoderms, being exceedingly sluggish, living on the most easily obtainable food,in many cases, viz. the organic matter diffused in sand, live longer than would beexpected from their comparatively low place in the scale of life. (Lankester, 1870,p. 79)

For an illustration of the converse position, Lankester turned to the transatlanticbranch of the human race:

To use their own expressive phrase, Americans are a ‘go-a-head’ people, and theearly ageing of both male and female inhabitants of the States is an example of anindividual tendency to travel fast as regards age, which is strictly dependent on, orcorrelated with, activity. (lbid., p. 124)

He was careful to explain that Homo sapiens was, by virtue of its large brain and asso-ciated capacity for intellectual and cultural life, not as subject to environmental demandsas were sea-urchins or jellyfish. One generation’s collective knowledge and experience wasa form of ‘acquired characteristic’ that could be transmitted to the next generation via edu-cation. This ‘inheritance’ represented a unique form of adaptation that enabled its posses-sor consciously to respond to the demands of any environment and hence to reduce thepressure of natural selection on their physical form (Lankester, 1870, p. 89). Much ofLankester’s mature theory of degeneration is present in this text: the role of environmental‘challenge’ as a factor in the evolved complexity of an organism’s structure and behaviour;mankind’s ability to ‘escape’ natural selection by virtue of the intellect; and the concept ofhuman inheritance as operating on two levels—the physical and the cultural.11 However,in On comparative longevity Lankester deployed a progressive, Spencerian interpretation

nkester studied under Haeckel at the University of Jena in 1871. In the early 1870s he supervised ation of Haeckel’s Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte, titled The history of creation. See Lester (1995), Ch. 3.

ombroso’s theory of atavism see Pick (1989), pp. 109–152, and Greenslade (1994), pp. 88–119.is last feature distinguished Lankester’s view of evolution from that of Herbert Spencer, who wasble of separating changes in a group’s learned repertoire from hereditary modifications’. See Freeman

, p. 220.


of Darwinism.12 Humanity was in a period of transition and the intensified challenges thatmodern life posed would, he believed, lead to rapid improvement in the species (Lankester,1870, p. 127).

After 1870 Lankester began to discard his Spencerian progressivism. In a letter toLankester in March 1870 Darwin, dry as ever, noted Spencer’s superiority in ‘the masterart of wriggling’, and suggested that ‘if [Spencer] had trained himself to observe more, evenif at the expense, by the law of balancement, of some loss of thinking power, he wouldhave been a wonderful man’ (Darwin to Lankester, 15 March 1870, in Darwin, 1888,p. 120). In October 1871 Lankester used his Radcliffe travelling fellowship to study underthe biologist Anton Dohrn at the Stazione Zoologica, Naples. He had met Dohrn a yearearlier on a similar trip to the University of Jena and under his tutelage began to questionthe concept of evolution as inherently progressive.13 In later life he cited his work at theStazione on the evolutionary status of marine parasites as a major influence on his intel-lectual development.

Meanwhile, Darwin was quoting Lankester with both approval and ambivalence in The

descent of man (Darwin, 1871). Lankester’s observations were a proof that civilisationcould have positive effects on the human physique, but Darwin (ibid., p. 209) worried thatit acted against natural selection to preserve ‘the weak in body or mind’. Progress—whether in Bromley or the depths of the abyssal plain—was ‘no invariable rule’:

12 Lanprogreintellec13 See14 Lan

Collegsumme

It is very difficult to say why one civilised nation rises, becomes more powerful, andspreads more widely, than another; or why the same nation progresses more quicklyat one time than another. We can only say that it depends on an increase in theactual number of the population, on the number of men endowed with high intellec-tual and moral faculties, as well as on their standard of excellence. (lbid., p. 216)

These men were, for the established, educated and wealthy Darwin, central to the‘material progress’ of civilisation:

The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who do not have to labour for theirdaily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be over-estimated; as all highintellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work, material progress of allkinds depends. (lbid., p. 207)

In Lankester’s view dons with private incomes tended to obstruct rather than facilitate‘material progress’. As a student on a scholarship to Christ Church he had railed againstthe ‘disgusting toadying and aristocratic system’ he found there.14 Although he won twotravelling scholarships after graduating (the Burdett-Coutts in 1869 and the Radcliffe,mentioned above, in 1870) Lankester failed to obtain a Readership at Oxford. His father,the microscopist Edwin Lankester, cited his son’s ‘advanced’ views (signified by his friend-ship with Darwin and Huxley), his ‘want of complaisance [his italics] with things as they

kester praised Spencer in his introduction to this text: see Lankester (1870), p. 9. For Spencer’sssivist account of evolution see Spencer (1887). For Spencerian evolution in its socio-political andtual contexts, see Freeman (1974); and Gay (1999), pp. 56–59.Lester (1995), Ch. 3.kester to his parents, undated, quoted in Lester (1995), p. 19. Lankester began his studies at Downing

e, Cambridge, in 1864, but transferred (unwillingly and at his parents’ insistence) to Christ Church in ther of 1866 to take advantage of the higher quality of science teaching there.


are’ and the ignorance of natural science shown by the College authorities in their deci-sion.15 In 1870–1871, as Lankester junior moved from one European research centre tothe next, he began to remark on the differences between English science, poorly funded,misunderstood and misapplied, and the large purpose-built and well staffed institutionshe saw at Vienna, Jena and Naples (Lester, 1995, Ch. 2).

On his return to England in the summer of 1871 Lankester worked for a year as a dem-onstrator in Huxley’s Normal School, and in June 1873 returned to Oxford as a Fellow ofExeter College. Here he began to agitate in earnest for the reform of the English universitysystem. In a short article for Nature in 1873 he set out a characteristically straightforwardreading of the problem:

15 Diaarticlecomm

Are Oxford and Cambridge to remain as institutions exclusively for the elegant edu-cation—the ‘culture’ of the upper classes who may choose and can afford to allowtheir sons to while away certain years there? or are they to be made engines ofnational education where a poor man may go with as much reason as a rich one;and profitably spend his time in acquiring knowledge and training which have a realvalue in the world and place their possessor in the position to earn his bread and hisstanding amongst men? (Lankester 1873, p. 61)

Lankester criticized what he saw as the prevailing trend to separate ‘technical’ and ‘cul-tural’ education, the banishment of scientific education to small colleges in provincial citieswhile ‘the Universities in their academic seclusion can administer that smattering of omni-science, dilettantism and good manners which it is so important for persons of a certainincome to possess’ (ibid.). In his view the main barrier to the opening up of Oxbridge edu-cation was its high cost:

Men who are intending to work hard in life cannot afford to pass through such acourse after leaving school; and hence our University students are, with a few excep-tions, drawn from the richer classes; hence, too, the amount of luxury and rarity ofearnest study amongst them, which reacts on many of their teachers. (lbid.)

The intellectual environment at Oxford and Cambridge was not challenging its inhab-itants and they were declining into a pleasant, but wasteful, stupor. Lankester’s solutionwas radical: he proposed that the entire annual incomes of the universities be taxed at arate of 50%, and the resulting windfall be diverted into higher salaries for the professoriatand the construction of European-style laboratories for scientific teaching and research. Itis scarcely surprising that his Oxford colleagues were coming to regard Lankester with amixture of shock and disdain (Howarth, 1987, p. 348). Several factors informed Lank-ester’s critique of the English universities: his self-perception as a ‘scholarship boy’ tryingto make good in a culture dominated by wealth and networks of social contacts; his expe-rience of superior European teaching and research facilities; a desire to improve the stand-ing of his own speciality; and, not least, his forceful personality and sense of ambition. Buthe found his theme only when he brought together his views on educational reform andbiological degeneration.

ry of Edwin Lankester, 25 December 1869, quoted in ibid., p. 23. Lankester senior also worried whether anhe had written the previous June, in which he had derided ‘the ignorance displayed by our legislators of theonest facts known to the scientific man’, had affected the College’s decision: see Lankester (1869), p. 381.


‘Degeneration: A chapter in Darwinism’ echoed to the clatter of evolutionary common-places being violently overturned. Gone was the notion that all simple organisms, ‘beinghappily fitted to the conditions of life in which they were long ago existing, have continueddown to the present day to exist in the same, low, imperfect condition’ (Lankester, 1890,p. 23). Some might (as the fossil record showed), but others had more exalted antecedents.Gone, too, was any hint of Lankester’s former belief in natural selection as an inherentlyprogressive force. He may have written friendly notes inviting the aged Karl Marx to tea,but Lankester was no Hegelian.16 In place of optimistic inexactitudes he outlined a theoryof almost algebraic simplicity. For any species at any time in its development, naturalselection could produce three outcomes. No change might take place and the organismwould remain in ‘balance’ with its environmental pressures. It might be ‘elaborated’ andundergo an increase in structural complexity. Or it might degenerate and become structur-ally simpler. And these processes were not fixed at the level of the individual: one organsystem might be elaborated while another degenerated and a third did not change. Lank-ester deprecated the tendency in evolutionary thought to consider only the former twopossibilities and disregard the latter. Only Dohrn, his former tutor, had raised the thirdpossibility, and had succeeded merely in establishing it as an aspect of parasitic evolutionunder the vague label of ‘retrogressive metamorphosis’ (Lankester, 1890, p. 24). Structuralcomplexity was Lankester’s acid test:

16 See17 Th

‘degen

Degeneration may be defined as a gradual change of the structure in which theorganism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life : : : InDegeneration there is suppression of form, corresponding to the cessation of work.(lbid., p. 27)17

What were the specific environmental conditions that could lead to degeneration? Inanswering this question Lankester reconfigured his earlier notion of an inverse relationshipbetween lifespan and ‘generative expenditure’, relating the complexity of an organism toits struggle for survival and, in the process, drawing his first direct connection between bio-logical and cultural deterioration:

Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safetyvery easily obtained, seem to lead as a rule to degeneration; just as an active healthyman sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or asRome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit ofparasitism clearly acts upon animal organisation in this way. Let the parasitic lifeonce be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes and ears; the active, highly-gifted crab,insect or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs.(lbid.)

His audience can scarcely have failed to notice that their ‘active’ and ‘highly-gifted’speaker was giving them a lecture on morality as well as zoology. His examples of degen-eration within the animal kingdom were fragmentary: the slow-worm (a degenerate sand-lizard); the ascidian or sea-squirt (a structurally simplified vertebrate, perhaps a frog) andthe barnacle (which Cuvier had mistakenly classified as a mollusc but which Lankester

Feuer (1979) for an account of this remarkable episode.e first sentence of this paragraph was quoted in the 1880 Oxford English dictionary as a definition oferation’ in its biological sense. It may, incidentally, still be found in the most recent edition.


showed to be a crustacean) (ibid., pp. 26, 33–46). He invoked embryological evidence,based on Haeckel’s recapitulation analogy, to support his theory: the larva of the ascidian,for example, passed through a ‘vertebrate’ stage with a recognisable notochord and limbroots before passing on to its simpler adult form.

After constructing a biological basis for degeneration Lankester moved on to its impli-cations for the human race. The theory could be applied to the development of languagesand artistic representations, and he cited the Fuegian and aboriginal Australian tribes asexamples of cultures known to be less structurally complex than their predecessors (ibid.,pp. 46–47). In the closing paragraphs of his address he set out what he saw as the full andhorrific repercussions of his discovery:

18 Lacharacand WLankeinherit19 Re20 Fo

Does the reason of the average man of civilised Europe stand out clearly as an evi-dence of progress when compared with that of the men of bygone ages? Are all theinventions and figments of human superstition and folly, the self-inflicted torturingof mind, the reiterated substitution of right for wrong, and of falsehood for truth,which disfigure our modern civilisation—are these evidence of progress? In suchrespects we may at least have reason to fear that we may be degenerate. (lbid.,p. 48)

Here is Lankester’s denial of his youthful progressivism, his belief in an ‘almost perfectcivilisation’ resulting from the action of natural selection on mankind.18 And here too, inthe final words of his speech and couched in Baconian rhetoric, is Lankester’s answer:

The full and earnest cultivation of Science—the Knowledge of Causes—is that towhich we have to look for the protection of our race—even of this English branchof it—from relapse and degeneration. (Lankester, 1890, p. 49)

This homily on the future happiness of humanity was, from 1879 onwards, repeatedat every possible opportunity. In his presidential address to the Biological Section of theBAAS at Southport in 1883 Lankester underlined the importance of paying scientificresearchers enough to ensure that they were not distracted by the necessity of havingto teach.19 In order to facilitate this he recommended that £160,000 per year be set asideby the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the establishment of junior assistantships in thelife sciences. Such a dramatic proposal was not merely a vague plea for reform onhumanitarian grounds. Scientific research was for Lankester the principal mark ofnational prestige in a period dominated by European industrial, imperial and militaryexpansionism. Newly unified Germany, Britain’s great competitor, was the benchmarkfor Victorian educational reformers from Arnold to Huxley, and praising German sci-ence was another way in which Lankester followed his ‘father in science’.20 Degeneratesocieties neglected their scientists, and when compared to Germany Britain appearedbackward indeed:

nkester later attributed his final rejection of progressivism to August Weismann’s work on acquiredteristics. At the 1887 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Manchester Lankestereismann led a seminar entitled ‘Are Acquired Characteristics Inherited?’ According to one witness

ster said ‘I believe Weismann is right. I have always doubted the statement that acquired characters areed’: see Poulton (1919), p. 348.printed in Lankester (1890), pp. 61–118.r the use of the German example by Victorian educational reformers, see White (2005).

21 LanWells22 We23 Fo


Whether you ask the zoologist, the botanist, the physiologist, or the anthropologist,you will get the same answer: it is to German sources that he looks for new informa-tion; it is in German workshops that discoveries, each small in itself, but graduallyleading up to great conclusions, are daily being made. (Lankester, 1890, p. 74)

The extent of Lankester’s impact on his scientific audiences, much less on the wider pub-lic, is difficult to estimate. His work certainly exerted great influence over one person—theyoung H. G. Wells. After studying under Huxley at the Normal School and graduating inNatural Sciences from UCL in 1890 Wells worked as a tutor on a correspondence course.21

To supplement his meagre income and gain writing experience he wrote for the popularscientific press. In 1891 he produced a short article summarising Lankester’s account ofdegeneration.22 Wells’s tone was less bombastic and more figurative than Lankester’s.He rejected, in vague terms, the notion that ‘the great scroll of nature has been steadilyunfolding to reveal a constantly richer harmony of forms and successively higher gradesof being’ and emphasised the complementary nature of degenerative and progressivechange within the Darwinian paradigm (Wells, 1891, p. 246).23 Although Wells borrowedLankester’s embryological evidence and his account of degeneration in the ascidian hewent far beyond Lankester in claiming that some degree of degeneration was universal:

[E]vident and indisputable present instances of degeneration alone would form avery large proportion of the catalogue of living animals. If we were to add to thislist the names of all those genera the ancestors of which have at any time sunk torise again, it is probable that we should have to write down the entire roll of the ani-

mal kingdom [his italics]! In some cases the degeneration has been a strategic retro-gression—the type has stooped to conquer. (Wells, 1891, p. 251)

This account of species falling to rise seems perilously close to a teleological view ofevolution, something that Wells rejected emphatically in the introduction to his article.Unlike Lankester, Wells resisted Weissman’s germ-line theory of inheritance when it firstcame to his attention in 1894, and for principally ideological reasons. He believed thatWeissman’s concept of ‘germ-plasm’ was too teleological (dependent on quasi-mysticalnotions of embryonic preformation) and that it left no room for ‘acquired’ characteristicssuch as education (Wells, 1975, pp. 9–10). Instead he borrowed Lankester’s two-levelmodel of human inheritance:

In civilised man we have (1) an inherited factor, the natural man, who is the productof natural selection, the culminating ape, and a type of animal more obstinatelyunchangeable than any other living creature; and (2) an acquired factor, the artificialman, the highly plastic creature of tradition, suggestion and reasoned thought. In theartificial man we have all that makes the comforts and securities of civilisation a pos-sibility. That factor and civilisation have developed, and will develop together : : : Ifthis new view is acceptable it provides a new definition of Education, which obvi-ously should be the careful and systematic manufacture of the artificial factor inman. (Wells 1896, reprinted in Wells, 1975, pp. 211–219)

kester had been one of Wells’s examiners for the B.Sc., and Wells recalled this in his correspondence. Seeto Lankester, 14 July 1900, quoted in Lester (1995), p. 199.lls (1891), reprinted in Wells (1975), pp. 158–168.r Wells’s concept of ‘complementarity’ in his early journalism see Wells (1975), p. 6.


More ambitious was Wells’s application of his ‘strategic degeneration’ to the higherland vertebrates and to Man. He argued that during the ‘upper Silurian’ period a genusof bony fishes had become adapted, through degeneration, to a sedentary life on or justbelow the seabed. In this sequestered environment they had survived the extinction ofthe dinosaurs and had re-emerged to evolve once more, this time via primitive reptiles,birds and mammals to become ‘the last of the mud-fish family, man, the heir of the ages’(Wells, 1975, p. 254). Wells drew, in a more light-hearted vein than Lankester, a parallelbetween biological degeneration and cultural decline:

24 AnJourna

encoun

Every respectable citizen of the professional classes passes through a period of activ-ity and imagination, of ‘liveliness and eccentricity’, of ‘Sturm und Drang’ [his italics].He shocks his aunts. Presently, however, he realises the sober aspect of things. Hebecomes dull; he enters a profession; suckers appear on his head; and he studies.Finally, by virtue of these he settles down—he marries. All his wild ambitions andsubtle aesthetic perceptions atrophy as needless in the presence of calm domesticity.He secretes a house, or ‘establishment’, round himself, of inorganic and servile mate-rial. His Bohemian tail is discarded. Henceforth his life is a passive receptivity towhat chance and the drift of his profession bring along; he lives an almost entirelyvegetative excrescence on the side of a street, and in the tranquillity of his callingfinds that colourless contentment that replaces happiness. (lbid., p. 250)

But while Lankester criticised the degenerate idleness of the aristocracy and intellectualestablishment Wells took aim at the mindless atrophy of middle-class life, satirizing thebarnaclesque existence of his peers. Unlike the older, ‘respectable’ and ‘professional’Lankester, the youthful Wells (who saw himself, even if no one else did, as ‘lively’ and‘eccentric’) was content for the moment to edify and entertain. Four years later, in The

time machine, his tone had grown immeasurably darker. Daniel Pick has cited The time

machine as ‘an exemplary blue-print’ of late-nineteenth century concerns about degenera-tion (1989, p. 157). In my view Wells’s narrative is actually too pessimistic to be situatedentirely within this genre. One significant characteristic of degenerationist literature wasthe presupposition that degeneration, though dangerous, was not irrevocable: it couldbe halted, reversed, eliminated. Degenerationist writers constructed their accounts ofdegeneration in such a way that the solution would be congruent with their particular con-cerns (be they scientific, social or purely parochial). In Lankester’s case, for example, thevalue of linking biological and cultural degeneration was precisely that it enabled him toinvoke his other great interest—educational reform—as a universal response. His problemand its solution were complementary, and constructed so to be. In The time machine Wellsinverted this happy dialectic: the final and inevitable heat-death of the universe would ulti-mately render all such discussion absurd.

The nature and extent of Lankester’s influence on The time machine is debatable.24

Early in his friendship with Wells he wrote that he had taken ‘the keenest delight in your‘time and space’ stories, because I know them to be not only products of a fine imagina-tion, but really determined by adequate and large knowledge of science’ (Lankester toWells, 12 July 1900, quoted in Lester, 1995, p. 198). In a strange twist The time machine

early version of The time machine, entitled The chronic argonauts, was published in the Science Schools

l (the magazine of the Normal School) in April–June 1888. It is possible that this was Lankester’s firstter with Wells’s writing. See Smith (1986), pp. 50–60; Pick (1989), pp. 157–159; Bowler (1989).


appears to have exerted a modicum of influence over Lankester’s choice of imagery, if nothis thought, in his later writing. In one of his short popular pieces, published in the Tele-

graph in 1908, Lankester (in an aside that owes at least something to Wells’s Eloi) specu-lated on the possibility that:

25 WeWells’scorresp

Man, if one could poison him universally with a mind-destroying microbe, wouldbecome a beautiful, healthy, silly, creature, dying at first by millions annually, andat last represented by a hundred thousand unvarying specimens, inhabiting the warmbut healthy corners of the Earth, aimlessly happy, free from disease, neither increas-ing nor decreasing in number. (Lankester, 1910, p. 56)

3. Nature’s insurgent sons

Joseph Lester has dated the beginning of Lankester and Wells’s friendship to July 1900.Lankester wrote to Wells, inviting him to visit the Natural History Museum and then to joinhim for dinner. He cited his great admiration for Wells’s stories and the ‘special bond’ of theNormal School as a strong basis for friendship (Lankester to Wells, 12 July 1900, quoted inLester, 1995, p. 198). Wells wrote back within the day, enthusiastically accepting Lank-ester’s offer. He was ‘really exceedingly proud of your approval of my work; I only wish thatI had earned it more thoroughly. There is much in the spirit of scientific investigation that isas easy to caricature, as it is difficult to grasp and interpret, and which I feel very strongly isin need of explicit interpretation’ (Wells to Lankester, 14 July 1900, quoted in ibid., p. 199).From Wells’s own correspondence we can see that he had been well aware of Lankester’swork, and possibly acquainted with him, a decade or so before this exchange.25 In July1891 he wrote to A. T. Simmons that ‘Howes has been trying to get me a special job atOxford (museum) but E. R. Lankester says he is in treaty with another man, but promisesto keep my name in mind’ (Wells to A. T. Simmons, 6 July 1891, in Wells, 1998, p. 168). Andin 1897, when the editor of the Academy suggested the establishment of an English versionof the Academie Francais, Wells wrote to insist that Lankester be considered for nomina-tion (Wells to the Editor of Academy, 10 November 1897, in ibid., p. 292).

What did these two men, so different in upbringing, education and position, find toappreciate in one another? Some insight into Lankester’s side of the friendship can begained from his review of Wells’s first non-fiction book, Anticipations (1903). As one mightexpect, it was Wells’s appreciation of the power and grandeur of science (acquired, ofcourse, at the Normal School) that made his worldview so inspiring:

This is a profoundly interesting and suggestive book by a very remarkable man. MrWells was educated at the Royal College of Science; this course of study operated, inthe case of Mr Wells, upon a mind naturally gifted with an extraordinarily vividimagination and the aptitude for true literary art : : : The really wonderful rangeof knowledge shown in his stories : : : lend a special charm to Mr Wells’ writingswanting in those of all other masters of this kind of literary craft from Swift to JulesVerne. (Lankester 1903, p. iii)

lls’s papers, including his letters from Lankester, are held in Illinois University Library. A selection ofletters has been printed in Wells (1998). Lankester’s personal papers, which include his side of this

ondence, are held privately by his descendants.


The author of Gulliver’s travels might have been set spinning in his grave: Lankester,though, was warming to his theme. He commended the citizens of Wells’s ‘New Republic’for ‘not punish[ing] criminals by inflicting pain, but apply[ing] Nature’s own method ofimproving her stock—the method of killing’ (Wells quoted in ibid, p. v). He praisedWells’s ‘wholesome contempt’ for ‘the modern democracy or democratic quasi-monarchy: : : [and] the mode of Government it has produced and the conduct of affairs by party rep-resentatives’. Such an administration could never ‘organise and control public education’.Without a (scientific) revolution in the structure of authority universities would remain‘merely dens of the higher cramming : : : a happy fastness’ for the ‘mumbling senility’ ofclassical studies (Wells quoted in Lankester, 1903, pp. iv–v). Wells had moved on fromthe ‘cosmic pessimism’ of The time machine, and Lankester could now share fully his visionof a scientific republic. Anticipations was:

an unsparing indictment of existing government, society, education, religion andmorality, but it contains also a confession of faith and is full of a spirit of hopeand a belief in future development. It is a truthful statement of the outlook of aman who has grasped thoroughly the teachings of modern science and who stillkeeps hope alive in his breast. (Lankester 1903, p. v)

Lankester’s criticism of democracy and praise for eugenic methods in this review sitrather awkwardly with his widely expressed hatred of the ‘disgusting toadying’ inherentin aristocratic society and his desire for collective and individual improvement througheducation. What form of government did he have in mind to oversee the response todegeneration and the transition to a progressive society: Coleridgean clerisy? Meritocratichegemony? A dictatorship of inductivists? He certainly had no faith in democracy alone asa progressive force:

I greatly fear that [scientific education] is a case in which it is useless to address thedemocracy. Germany did not acquire its admirable education system by populardemand, nor does England owe such institutions as the College of Chemistry, theSchool of Mines, the Royal College of Science and the national art schools andschools of design to political agitators : : : The crowd cannot guide itself, cannot helpitself in its blind impotence. Here is the opportunity, the duty, of the greatest in theland. (Lankester 1901, p. iii)

This statement suggests that Lankester’s views on education and degeneration were deeplyimplicated in his politics: the degenerate crowd could be led to recovery only by the edu-cated, intelligent scientist. But equally his self-description as a ‘planless progressive indi-vidualist’ and his contempt for the ‘half-hearted meddler in great affairs’ seem to rejectWells’s notions of a highly organised, centralised ‘Great State’ (Wells, 1912, p. 23; Lank-ester, 1907, p. 17). Unlike Wells, Lankester never wrote at length on the subject of govern-ment and we are left with the problem of having to reconstruct his views on this subjectfrom notes and asides in his writings. To seek complete internal consistency in these dis-parate statements would be to impose a finality of expression that they and their authormay never have possessed. There is, though, a strange sense in which the claims of late-nineteenth century English ‘progressives’ were deeply and inherently ‘Toryish’ (in bothsenses of that inelegant word). This consisted firstly in their looking back, as well asforward, to a better time (before industrialisation or degeneration or the widening ofthe franchise); and secondly in their wish to conserve and expand a core set of ‘absolute


values’—in Lankester’s and Wells’s case, the moral primacy of inductive epistemology—asthe framework for future improvement.26 Lankester was not the only late Victorian scien-tist to criticise both democracy and aristocracy as methods of government; neither was hethe only one to fudge the question of an alternative. It is perhaps a more fruitful approachto examine the ways in which Lankester’s political views emerged in his and Wells’s re-sponses to a particular challenge: that of eugenics.27

As Lankester’s review of Anticipations makes clear, neither he nor Wells were opposedto the principle of scientific intervention in human reproduction. The eugenics movementas it stood was simply not, according to their interpretation of the term, a scientificresponse to the problem of degeneration: its principles were not empirically verifiable. Itwas also ideologically at odds with their account of degeneration. Eugenicists conflatedthe (related but distinct) physical and cultural elements of human inheritance and, by fail-ing to see that degeneration was a reversible process, they could only conceive of elimina-tion, not education, as a solution. In his review of a 1901 address by Karl Pearson (whohad by this time supplanted Francis Galton as the semi-official spokesman of the Englisheugenics movement) Lankester outlined his objections to eugenics.28 He agreed, he said,with the underlying claim of Pearson’s speech: ‘the importance to a nation of the posses-sion by its constituent individuals of good strong brains as well as good strong muscles,and of a well directed training of those brains’ (Lankester 1901, p. iii). Naturally heapproved of Pearson’s emphasis on scientific education as the appropriate form of ‘braintraining’ and the role of a scientific elite in its provision:

26 HuBrogan27 Som

For thtreatmPaul (128 On

gold mMacLe

Not only in our warfare in South Africa, but in commerce and manufacture, westand in need of trained ‘scouts’, men who have learned to keep their eyes openand to apply common sense, men trained to observe and reason [his italics]. Our edu-cational system fails to train the youth of the country in this way: it does not aim atit. (lbid.)

He even applauded Pearson’s classic eugenicist analysis of the impending crisis in Eng-lish society. The idle rich ‘produce and rear large families without regard to the qualitiesof the inheritor’ and ‘a still more dangerous condition arises from the breeding of thehopelessly poor and unsuccessful members of the community’, but ‘the class whichhas the greatest mental endowment and is serving the nation best in all directions [theeducated middle class] marries late and produces few children’ (ibid.). In Lankester’seyes Pearson had doomed his claim to scientific authority by committing the only Lan-kesterian mortal sin: he had built taller than his empirical foundations could bear.Eugenics had ‘no warrant in our present state of knowledge of the laws of developmentof animal societies or of human communities’. Rather, it was ‘a hasty attempt to gener-alise from certain preliminary results of biology to conclusions in regard to an enormous

gh Brogan has identified a similar paradox in the American ‘progressive’ movement at this time: see(2001), p. 466.e key texts of the English eugenics movement may be found in Galton (1889, 1909); Pearson (1900, 1912).

e popular response to Galton’s work, see Gakyigit (1994). English eugenicists have received a variety ofents at the hands of many authors. See, for example, Blacker (1952); Farrall (1969); MacKenzie (1975);984); Kevles (1995); Thomson (1998); Burrow (2000); Gillham (2001).the only occasion in which Lankester and Galton were in direct competition—for the Royal Society’s 1885edal in biology—Lankester received the award and Galton had to wait until the following year. Seeod (1971), p. 97.


unexplored field of human phenomena’ (ibid., p. iv). Pearson had correctly identified‘struggle’ as the motor of human progress. He had, though, mistaken competition be-tween different forms of political and social organisation for the physical conflicts forindividual survival seen in Nature:

29 OnPearsodepart

It has yet to be shown that there is any strict analogy between the struggle for exis-tence of the countless individuals in each generation of a non-social species and thecompetition of great nations of great races of mankind. In the former case animmense number of variations is continually presented and a remorseless destructionof all but the elected few takes place. In the latter there is no variation among thecompetitors on a given area and there is no destruction and consequent removalfrom reproductive perpetuation of the less successful community. (lbid.)

In his review of Pearson’s speech Lankester made explicit the theme pervading ‘Degen-eration: A chapter in Darwinism’—that mankind had, through its intellectual and so-cial development, escaped natural selection altogether. Lankester’s own views on the‘struggle’ at the centre of human existence were far from clear. Although he claimedthat natural selection was no longer operating in modern human society, he continuedto describe the (presumably social) stimuli that scientific education could provide inDarwinian terms. It appears that he sought to resolve this apparent contradiction withreference to his dualist conception of human inheritance. Natural selection had indeedceased to operate on the level of physical inheritance, but it remained a major force inthe determination of cultural inheritance (albeit in ways that Lankester himself nevermade explicit).

In Pearson’s account the loss of selection pressure would lead inevitably to stagnationand decline, and he proposed to recreate the ‘struggle for survival’ artificially throughcontrolled breeding. Lankester, on the other hand, viewed mankind’s escape from natu-ral selection with a guarded sense of equanimity: degeneration was indeed one possibil-ity, but universal scientific education could replace the missing stimulus and hence arrestand reverse any deterioration. More than this, ‘those splendid individuals who haveblessed their race by great discoveries in science and by great creations in art’ and whosecontributions to culture were as important a part of human inheritance as ‘good strongmuscles’ were far more prolific when their work was not hindered by the sort of nationalor international disturbances that a programme of eugenics might provoke (ibid.). Pear-son had been unable to express himself clearly because he had not seen the problemclearly:

Prof. Pearson, like other prophets of things to come, uses terms of convenientlyvague significance. He should tell us more clearly what he means by ‘human pro-gress’ before he asks us to accept it as the end which justifies human warfare. (lbid.,p. v)29

In his later, popular writing Lankester continued to insist that the question of humanheredity remain open. In another Telegraph piece on ‘The feeble-minded’ he referred obli-quely to what he saw as the eugenicists’ tendency to focus on the reproduction of the poor:

e subject on which Lankester’s and Pearson’s views coincided was the superiority of German Kultur.n Germanised his own name (from Carl to Karl), and gave his children (Egon and Helga) and hismental journal (Biometrika) Germanic names. See Porter (2004), pp. 84, 91, 289.

30 See


There has grown up a belief that feeble-minded offspring are more frequently pro-duced by mentally sound parents who are poor than by those who are rich orwell-to-do, though there are not facts or figures which establish that conclusion. Ithas further been maintained that this supposed large proportional rate of productionof feeble-minded among the poorest, ill-fed, ill-housed and vicious dregs of the com-munity is due to the action of defective nutrition, alcoholism, and lack of fresh airand healthy occupation upon the parents : : : In reply to this somewhat hasty butat first sight plausible conclusion we maintain (1) that the definite defect called fee-ble-mindedness is as common in well-nourished, well-to-do families as in the poorest;(2) that it is not proved that lack of food and good air can act upon the germs con-tained in a parental animal, so as to alter it in such a way that the brain of offspringbegotten by that parent will not develop in normal structure and proportion; and,moreover, that ‘it has not been shown’ (that is the important clause of the statement)that defective food and air can so alter the germs in a parent as to cause other defor-mation or structural defect in the young which grow from these germs. (Lankester1910, pp. 276–277)30

Galton, by then in his eighties, defended his theories in a letter to the The Times:

Sir E. Ray Lankester maintains it to be almost unthinkable that ‘definite belief, orwhat we call specific knowledge’, could be transmitted organically from one gener-ation to another, and that very much of what is commonly ascribed to organicinheritance is really acquired through education. The question, in short, refers tothe parts played respectively by Nature and by Nurture : : : Much more is inheritedthan educability—namely, the propensity to act in the same way under similar cir-cumstances which characterises all animals of the same race, whether they havebeen reared from eggs and had no maternal teaching, or otherwise. (Galton 1910,p. 9)

Lankester carried on regardless. It was ‘the better-provided and well-fed, well-clothed,protected classes of the community in which cessation of selection is most complete : : : theconsequent degeneration of the race would, therefore, seem to be more probable in thehigher propertied classes than in the bare-footed toilers whose ranks are thinned by star-vation and early death’ (Lankester 1910, pp. 106–107).

Wells’s critique of eugenics was more respectful in manner, but followed a similarline of argument. In his early journalism he had noted the brutality implicit in mucheugenic thought, its ‘clamour for the Systematic Massacre of the Unfit’ (Wells, 1896,p. 595). In a 1905 Sociological Society seminar entitled ‘Eugenics: Its definition, scopeand aims’ Galton gave a paper and Wells responded. After some pleasantries on the‘living and contemporary tone’ of Galton’s ‘admirable address’ Wells (1905, p. 59) sug-gested that if, as Galton had proposed, ‘superior persons must mate with superior per-sons’ and ‘inferior persons must not have offspring at all’, then the main challenge layin the identification of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ types. Galton had, Wells claimed, failedto provide a scientific solution to this basic requirement. He had also overlooked theproblem of distinguishing inherited biological characteristics from acquired culturalones:

also Thomson (1998) on ‘feeble-mindedness’ in Edwardian culture.

31 Fo32 Th

retiremDesmoLanke


The fact that the sons and daughters of a distinguished judge or great scientific manare themselves eminent judges or successful scientific men, may after all be far moredue to a special knowledge of the channels of professional advancement than to anydistinctive family gift : : : Many eminent criminals appear to me to be persons supe-rior in many respects, in intelligence, in initiative, originality, to the average judge.(lbid.)

Wells’s tongue might have been edging into his cheek with this last comment, but hepressed home his attack. Eugenics was ‘premature’ and based on an analysis of human fac-ulties ‘entirely inadequate for the purpose of tracing hereditary influence’. Even the term‘eugenics’ had in it ‘something of that same lack of a fine appreciation of facts that enabledHerbert Spencer to coin those two most unfortunate terms, Evolution and the Survival of

the Fittest’ [his italics] (ibid., p. 60). It displayed ‘a fundamental misunderstanding of whatindividuality implies’—that ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ were not absolute terms but rather asubjective blur of shades and nuances—and it was destined to remain in this state, unlessthe ‘valuable work of the Abbe Mendel that Mr. Bateson has recently revived’ could pro-vide a new framework for the analysis of human heredity (ibid., p. 59).31

Lankester’s and Wells’s account of degeneration as a physical and cultural phenome-non led them to reject eugenics as unscientific. In the same manner it informed their con-demnation of the classics-obsessed English education system. Once again Lankester led theway in characteristically strident style. He had been invited to give the 1905 Romanes Lec-ture in Oxford and it was here, in the very citadel of educational conservatism and on theday that he received an honorary D.Sc., that he delivered his most radical assault on thestatus quo.32 His chosen title was ‘Nature’s insurgent son’, and before the end of his lec-ture student wits in the audience had already dubbed Lankester ‘Oxford’s insurgent son’(Anon., 1905, p. 9). Lankester began the lecture with his customary theme—the uniqueplace of man in nature:

Civilised man has proceeded so far in his interference with extra-human Nature, hasproduced for himself and the living organisms associated with him such a specialstate of things by his rebellion against Natural Selection and his defiance of Nature’spre-human dispositions, that he must either go on and acquire firmer control of theconditions or perish miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the half-heartedmeddler in great affairs. (Lankester, 1907, p. 17)

Such a precarious position could scarcely be jeopardised by squandering time and efforton non-essential activities, least of all ‘the study of two dead languages and of the story ofthe deeds of great men in the past’ (Lankester 1905a, p. 14). Standing on the proscenium inthe Sheldonian Theatre, clad in the scarlet and grey robes of a Doctor of Science andaddressing an audience of dons and students, Lankester claimed that university educationin its present, degenerate state was ‘mistaken and injurious’. The chief subject of educationfor all students at all levels should be ‘a knowledge of nature as set forth in the sciences:

r the impact of Mendel’s rediscovery on English eugenics, see Farrall (1975).is annual public lectureship was endowed by the Oxford zoologist Professor George J. Romanes on hisent in 1892. Previous recipients of the lectureship included T. H. Huxley and William Gladstone. Seend (1998), p. 591. The text of Lankester’s lecture is reprinted in Lankester (1907), pp. 1–36, and in

ster (1905a).


physics, chemistry, geology and biology : : : All education should consist in the first placeof this kind of knowledge on account of its commanding importance both to the individualand to the community’ (ibid., p. 14). He concluded his address on a conciliatory note, reas-suring his audience that he ‘would not wish to remove the acquirement of the use of lan-guages, the training in the knowledge and perception of beauty in literary art, and thefeeding the mind with the great stories of the past, from a high and necessary positionin every grade of education’ (ibid., p. 14). He had made his point forcefully, though.The Times’s review of his lecture (Anon., 1905, p. 9), published the next morning, charac-terised Lankester’s ‘conception of the classical and historical scheme of education’ as‘crude, defective in sympathy and not overfurnished with insight’. On one hand, he hadraised some valid points in relation to man’s place in nature. On the other:

33 See

it is by no means certain that the way to efficiency lies through the pursuit of naturalknowledge in the more restricted sense. It lies through a fuller perception of the ideaof science and of the necessity of applying it thoroughly to all branches of humanactivity : : :We must not compare the assumed degeneracy of one scheme or methodof education with the assumed perfection of another. We must put both on the samelevel and then consider which is the better. (lbid.)

John Perry, Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the Royal College of Science anda fellow campaigner for educational reform, approved of Lankester’s aim but thought hehad made ‘a tactical mistake’ in failing to stress the importance of ‘the study of intellectualand emotional man through history, biography, novels and poetry : : : the most importantthing in a child’s education is to make him fond of reading in his own language, for thisleads to a future power to make use of books and self-education for the rest of his life’(Perry 1905, p. 156). And William Ridgeway, President of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute, claimed that Lankester had not demonstrated humanity’s final escape fromthe pressure of natural selection (Ridgeway 1910, p. 16).

Lankester responded vigorously to his critics. He wrote a series of obdurate letters toThe Times and used his presidential address to the BAAS at York in August 1906 to ini-tiate a campaign to counteract the ‘neglect of science’ in public life.33 Once again he blamed‘the defective education, both at school and university, of our governing class’ for what hewas coming to see as an institutionalised contempt for science at the highest levels:

Whole departments of government in which scientific knowledge is the one thingneedful are carried on by ministers, permanent secretaries, assistant secretaries andclerks who are wholly ignorant of science, and naturally enough dislike it since itcan not be used by them, and is in many instances the condemnation of their officialemployment. (Lankester 1906, p. 235)

After his (enforced) retirement from the directorship of the Natural History MuseumLankester continued his campaign in popular journalism (Anon., 1906). His RomanesLecture seems to have captured the fifty-eight-year-old Lankester at the height of his inno-vative and synthetic powers, and his subsequent writings merely repeated with emphasisthe themes he had already identified. German administrators were far more sympatheticto the needs of scientists, and hence German science was superior:

, for example, Lankester (1905b,c).

34 LaSchoo35 In

Ch. 3.36 In

fascina‘angeliHis adneed oand ke1911,


Every department of government in Germany has its thoroughly-trained, well-taught, well-paid body of scientific experts and investigators and, moreover, thewhole official world, from the Emperor downwards, has a real understanding ofwhat science is, of the folly of trying to proceed without it, or allowing personswho are ignorant of it to act as administrators. (Lankester 1910, p. 8)

English universities, and hence the English ruling classes, remained obstinately blind tothe benefits of science, and this created a vicious circle of underfunding and negligence:

The inefficiency of the old universities is to a large extent the cause of the neglect andignorance of science in the well-to-do class, who furnish the men who become Gov-ernment officials of all kinds and members of professions which influence publicopinion. (lbid., p. 10)

He even invoked ancient history to ‘prove’ that scientists, rather than classicists, werethe heirs of the ‘true Hellenism’. Ancient Greek education had consisted of ‘the naturalsciences’ and literature, not ‘the worship of Greek texts by the united pedagogues of Eur-ope’.34 Moreover, the emphasis on Greek at Oxford was a relic of Renaissance natural phi-losophy, when a working knowledge of Classical languages was a practical necessity forany prospective experimentalist.35 Few of his opponents seem to have felt the need torespond. Those that did, such as the American educationalist Paul Shorey (Shorey,1910, p. 606), had their own self-promotional agendas in mind, and took Lankester to taskover his grasp of Plato’s dialogues, his vulgarity of style and his wish to ‘intoxicate his neo-phytes with science’.

Meanwhile, Lankester’s friendship with Wells was growing closer. He had stayed withWells and his family in Normandy in the spring of 1911 while Wells’s home at EastonGlebe was being renovated (Wells, 1998, p. 300). At this time the two men began a discus-sion, lasting for more than a year and continued in a series of letters, on their respectiveopinions on the opposite sex.36 In between exchanges on polygamy and ‘professionalladies’ they collaborated on a collection of essays, ‘a review of our general ideas on socialorganisation from the constructive standpoint’, entitled The great state (Wells, 1912, p. v).In his essay, ‘The past and the great state’, the mature and (at this stage in his career) opti-mistic Wells was clearly in his element. His role was to provide an historical context for theproject, and he set about this task with vigour. He presented human history as a perpetualstruggle between two opposed, but complementary, modes of living. The earliest form, the‘Normal Social Life’, was:

nkester made these comments in his presidential address to the annual meeting of the Association of Publicls Science Masters in January 1911: see Anon. (1911), p. 7.claiming a Hellenic ancestry for modern science Lankester was again following Huxley: see White (2003),

his letters Lankester bemoaned his difficulties in finding a wife. He was deeply attracted to ‘naughty butting’ women, but knew that to maintain his social position he would have to meet and settle down with anc creature’ or ‘angeloid’, destroying any opportunities for ‘temporary amusement or a passionate outburst’.vice to (the married but adulterous) Wells is revealing: ‘If I were in such a case [as yours] and in naturalf the relief and nervous rest given by ‘‘naughtiness’’—I would seek it from the best type of professional ladyep it a dead secret. That is, I imagine, what hundreds of men do’. See Lankester to Wells, 13 September

in ibid., p. 302.


a type of human association and employment of extreme prevalence and antiquity,which appears to have been the lot of the enormous majority of human beings as farback as history or tradition or the vestiges of material that supply our conceptions ofthe Neolithic period can carry us. Essentially this association presents a localisedcommunity, a community of which the greater proportion of the individuals areengaged more or less directly in the cultivation of the land. (lbid., p. 4)

The ‘Higher Culture’, in contrast, was ‘the story of a minority and their peculiar andabnormal affairs’ as expressed in the written and printed word. It represented ‘an accountof a series of attacks and modifications and superfluous forces engendered within the com-munity on the Normal Social Life’ (ibid., p. 8). Following the scientific and industrial rev-olutions, in which the Higher Culture had become ‘detached’ from the Normal Social Life,the two modes had become ossified as the modern Leisure Class and Labour Class respec-tively. With this account of world history in mind Wells invoked scientific education as ameans of passing through present difficulties to the establishment of the ‘Great State’,defined as:

a social system no longer localised, no longer immediately tied to and conditioned bythe cultivation of the land, world-wide in its interests and outlook and catholic in itstolerance and sympathy, a system of great individual freedom with a universalunderstanding among its citizens of a collective thought and purpose. (lbid., p. 32)

In his conclusion Wells aped Lankester’s method and terminology in ‘Degeneration: Achapter in Darwinism’:

a. Leisure Class degenerates into a waster class [and] Labour Class degenerates into asweated, overworked, violently resentful and destructive rebel class [which leads to] aSOCIAL DEBACLE.b. Leisure Class becomes a Governing Class with waster elements [and] Labour Classbecomes the controlled, regimented and disciplined Labour Class in an unprogressiveBureaucratic SERVILE STATE.c. Leisure Class becomes the whole community of the GREAT STATE workingunder various motives and inducements, but not constantly, not permanently, notunwillingly [and] Labour Class is rendered needless by a general labour conscriptiontogether with a scientific organisation of production [and so] reabsorbed into the Lei-sure Class of the GREAT STATE. (Transcribed from Wells’s notes and diagram inibid., p. 45)

Degeneration, stagnation, elaboration: these were the choices that Lankester hadoffered humanity in 1879, and in 1911 Wells still found himself able to use them in anovertly political context. His anxiety that humanity might still divide and end in a‘SOCIAL DEBACLE’, remained, but it was tempered by a complementary belief in thepower of ‘scientific organisation’. A few pages on from Wells’s brave new world Lankesterwas, ironically, beginning to admit defeat. In the preface to the collection he was charac-terised as an ‘individualist’ and his strategy here was, if nothing else, individual. In hisopening paragraph he dismissed the job at hand—‘The Making Of New Knowledge’ inthe ‘great state’—and announced that he was going to concentrate on the present (dismal)state of British science:

37 InSee An


I confess that after spending the best part of my energies during nearly fifty years inendeavouring to increase the number of my fellow-citizens who have arrived at a justestimate of the value of new knowledge and of the consequent need for the organi-sation of its pursuit by the expenditure of public funds, I am disappointed with theresult. (Lankester in ibid., p. 123)

Lankester rehearsed his arguments with a palpable lack of enthusiasm. The Kaiser wasto be praised and, if possible, emulated in his gift of half a million pounds sterling and anannual income of £140,000 to the University of Berlin’s research institutions; the Britishestablishment was chronically incapable of recognising the value of pure scientificresearch; the expansion of democracy was futile—‘at present the ‘‘masses’’ are, if possible,more ignorant of the meaning of science than are the ‘‘classes’’ ’. The only solution was toendow twenty or so research institutions in London, each dedicated to a different scientificspeciality and each led by the ‘outstanding man in the field’ (Lankester ibid., pp. 130–131).The advocate of educational stimulus as the antidote to degeneration was slipping bydegrees into tired periphrasis of his earlier thought.

The outbreak of war in August 1914 seems for a time to have revivified Lankester’sinterest in educational reform. In 1914 Wells had suddenly conceived a violent hatredof the Kaiser’s regime and ‘disappeared into a semi-governmental haze’, composing jingo-istic journalism and propaganda (Lester, 1995, p. 201). In addition to their personal feel-ings on the righteousness or otherwise of the conflict, war (and particularly a Europeanwar) would fit neatly into the rhetoric of their campaign for scientific education. It dem-onstrated the importance of political struggle in human society, and the technological ele-ments of the conflict provided lurid examples of the centrality of scientific progress tonational survival. Like many of his colleagues Lankester immediately reconsidered hispraise for German science: in a letter to The Times on Boxing Day 1914 he sketchedout a compromise that might enable him to preserve both his intellectual integrity andhis sense of patriotism:

As a matter of fact the Germans’ organisation for advanced study is excellent andabundant, as it is in other departments undertaken by the State, but there are,and have been, fewer men in Germany than in either France or Britain or Russiagifted with initiative and the power of starting an original investigation of impor-tance or of bringing it through to a clearly established result. The Germans areremarkable for adopting the lines of research started by English and French discov-erers. (Lankester 1914, p. 7)

How convenient that scientific originality happened to fall along the lines of the Entente

Cordiale. Lankester found another patriotic cause in the wartime closure of the NaturalHistory Museum in January 1916. This was ostensibly for reasons of economy, but Lank-ester discovered that the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum were to bekept open. In his customary letter to The Times on the subject he noted the ‘thousands ofour soldiers and other visitors from remote parts’ who were ‘particularly attracted’ to theNatural History Museum, and the ‘classes of men from the Royal Army Medical Corpswho will be hindered in their work by the closure’ (Lankester 1916, p. 9).37

aid of this cause Lankester joined a scientific deputation and visited the Prime Minister in February 1916.on. (1916a), p. 5.


This was overshadowed by Lankester’s and Wells’s involvement with the Committee onthe Neglect of Science.38 Lankester put his name to a memorandum (Anon. 1916b, p. 10)that appeared in The Times on 2 February 1916 and which claimed, on the basis of Alliedlosses in the war, that ‘people [were] being destroyed for lack of knowledge’. Within a fewweeks an organisation had been established with Lankester as its chairman. At a meetingon 3 May he told an audience which included Wells that ‘the whole subject of chemicalproducts, our reliance on Germany before the war, and our failure to get materials, illus-trates the object of the movement’, and the Committee approved a motion to lobby for theinclusion of a science paper in the Civil Service, Oxbridge, public school and Sandhurstentrance examinations, and for the establishment of a governmental enquiry into the‘neglect of science’ (Anon., 1916c, p. 6).39 By August 1916 Lankester felt he had succeeded:a working group under the chairmanship of Sir J. J. Thompson was investigating the pub-lic support of science (Jenkins 1973). By 1917, however, he had returned to his pre-wardespondency: in his introduction to a collection of lectures by Faraday and others (Lank-ester, 1917, p. 5) he once again bemoaned the treatment of science as ‘a superfluity, an‘extra’, tolerated, but misunderstood and misdirected’.

4. The outline of history

Before the armistice was signed Wells submitted to his publishers a proposal for a newbook, tentatively titled The outline of history. This was accepted (although with less enthu-siasm than he had hoped for) and in early 1919 he began to write. His initial support forthe League of Nations had turned to vocal criticism when he realised that it was ‘merely agame of power politics’ that had left ‘the world just as divided as it had been four poison-ous years earlier’ (Coren 1993, p. 152). His optimistic sense of progress had not, however,entirely deserted him. Mankind had failed on this occasion, but under Wells’s direction itcould (like the lungfish of Zoological regression) fall to rise again. The schoolboy Wellshad discarded the study of history in favour of natural science: now he set out to writea complete history of the world. His narrative would be a manifesto for the ‘great state’.He would ‘show plainly to the general intelligence, how inevitable, if civilisation were tocontinue, was the growth of political, social and economic organisations into a world fed-eration’ (Coren 1993, p. 152).

Wells was truly no historian: academic history lacking a political purpose was ‘indul-gent and unnecessary’ (Wells quoted in ibid., p. 156). He knew that he would be incapableof obtaining sufficient breadth or depth if he worked alone, and assembled an advisoryboard of his academic friends. Lankester advised on the pre-human history of the Earthand on aspects of ancient history. Wells wrote at his typically athletic pace, and by thesummer of 1920 the 1200-page Outline was in print. It received good (if not excellent)reviews and by the end of 1921 had sold over a million copies (Ross, 2002, p. 1).40

Wells’s strategy in the Outline was deeply indebted both to his reading of Lankester’sdegeneration and to Lankester’s conception of the role of science in society. The historical

38 For an account of the activities of this committee, see Mayer (2005).39 See also Turner (1980), p. 605.40 Wells conceived the Outline as the first part of a trilogy that would provide a complete analysis, historical,

scientific and sociological, of human society. The second and third parts (Wells, Huxley, & Wells, 1929; Wells,1931) were published after Lankester’s death in 1929 and are not considered here.


struggle between the ‘Normal Social Life’ and ‘Higher Culture’ in The great state hadbecome something much less ambiguous. Wells’s conception of human history was inone sense cyclical: in all human societies throughout history an elite had come to powerand, for a time, had ruled effectively (their degree of success being in Wells’s view directlyproportional to their understanding of the need for universal education, collectivised agri-culture and so on).41 Wells cited Alexander the Great’s empire as the earliest coherentexample of this admirable tendency. It was:

41 In(1894)pattern42 See

the first germination of the idea of a world policy [his italics]. The rest of the historyof mankind is very largely the history of those three ideas of science, of a universalrighteousness, and of a human commonweal, spreading out from the minds of therare and exceptional persons and peoples in which they first originated. (Wells,1920, p. 232)

Alexander had, like every other ruling elite in history, grown self-satisfied, stagnant inthought and feeling, and his empire had been plunged back into chaos. Some members ofthese elites had contributed more to the current position than others. Herodotus, forexample, was the first of that noble lineage, the middle-class intellectual:

A new sort of people, people of leisure and independent means, were asking ques-tions, exchanging knowledge and views, and developing ideas. So beneath the marchof armies and the policies of monarchs, and above the lives of illiterate and incuriousmen, we note the beginnings of what is becoming at last nowadays a dominant powerin human affairs, the free intelligence of mankind [his italics]. (lbid., p. 233)

Once again, elements of conservatism (perhaps even of Wells’s ‘sentimental Christian-ity’) may be discerned in this superficially radical position.42 Throughout its historyhumanity had glimpsed the possibility of utopian society and intellectual enlightenment,but had so far always failed to hold on to it. For Wells, as for Lankester, the elementsof humanity’s future happiness—scientific knowledge and education—were already inexistence, and it was only by grasping their timeless, universal truth that the final transfor-mation could be enacted. Wells’s most detailed example of this cyclical advance andretreat is worth quoting in full:

Wisdom passed away from [the library at] Alexandria and left pedantry behind. Forthe use of books was substituted the worship of books. Very speedily the learnedbecame a specialised queer class with characteristics of its own. The Museum hadnot existed for a dozen generations before Alexandria was familiar with a new typeof human being; shy, eccentric, unpractical, incapable of essentials, strangely fierceupon trivialities of literary detail, as bitterly jealous of the colleague within as ofthe unlearned without–the Scholarly Man. He was as intolerant as a priest, thoughhe had no altar; as obscurantist as a magician, though he had no cave. For him nomethod of copying was sufficiently tedious and no rare book sufficiently inaccessible.He was a sort of by-product of the intellectual process of mankind. For many

his early journalism Wells explicitly rejected the notion that history was inherently cyclical. See Wells. In the Outline he modified this notion, arguing that history had indeed moved in cycles, but that this

would end with the establishment of the ‘World State’: see Wells (1920), pp. 36–37.Wells (1917) for his (rather vague) views on Christianity as the ‘world religion’.

(a) All


generations the new-lit fires of the human intelligence were to be seriously bankeddown by this by-product. (lbid., p. 380)

In an ingenious yet basically straightforward application of degeneration, Wells hadcharacterised his and Lankester’s classically minded opponents in the dispute over educa-tional reform as themselves degenerate, ‘by-products’ of the true (scientific) mode of ‘intel-lectual progress’.(a) He developed this metaphor in his examination of art and literature inearly modern Europe: ‘a considerable output of pseudo-Classical writing, epics and shamtragedies and comedies in Latin, no doubt very like the poems and rhetorical prose onereceives in English from gifted young Indians’. Dante made ‘extremely dull reading’; Petr-arch ‘arouse[d] the enthusiasm of all those who have been sufficiently cultivated to respondto them’; Spenser’s Faerie Queene was ‘a tedious allegorical work’; and Milton’s ‘earlyclassical studies gave both his prose and verse a proud and pompous gait from which theynever completely recovered’. Even the Pre-Raphaelites were accused of seeking ‘precedentsand methods in the work of those earlier days before painting became elegant’.

In short, no writer or artist who persisted in genuflecting before the Classical canon atthe expense of ‘progressive’ thought could produce anything of worth. Only the empiricistShakespeare, who used his observations of the world around him to ‘break through thedignity and heroics of formal literature to let in freedom and laughter’, saved the ‘essentialspirit’ of English literature from its ‘classical obsession’. In a telling metaphor, Wells (ibid.,pp. 758, 1027) depicted Shakespeare’s characters ‘break[ing] through as Bacon and the sci-entific men broke through the bookish science of the scholars’. ‘True’ science itself had,after its expulsion from Alexandria by the ‘Scholarly Men’, gone underground, into themonastery and the private laboratory. It re-emerged only in the eighteenth century, andnot in glorious triumph:

British science was largely the creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen working out-side the ordinary centres of erudition : : : The only knowledge recognised [in thesecentres] was an uncritical textual knowledge of a selection of Latin and Greek clas-sics, and the test of a good style was its abundance of quotations, allusions and ste-reotyped expressions. (lbid., p. 951)

What emerges most vividly from a reading of Lankester’s and Wells’s writing in thisperiod is this sense of unfairness, the sheer scale of the struggle and the overwhelmingstrength of the opposition. It is banal to point out that the conflicts embodied in their writ-ings—optimism and pessimism, revolution and preservation, profound scepticism andfaith in the scientific method as a way to the truth—were part of broader currents in sci-entific culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Nevertheless they were,and it is the sense of impermanence, of contingency, implied by the synthesis of these bin-ary pairs that best characterises their work and thought. Neither progress nor decline, asLankester had shown, were irreversible, and the choice between degeneration and regen-eration was always at hand to break this ‘cyclical delusion’ and carry mankind to its sec-ular Jerusalem:

All the world over, there must have been myriads of potential first-class investiga-tors, splendid artists, creative minds, who never caught a gleam of inspiration or

the short quotations in this and the following paragraph are taken from ibid., pp. 381–383.


opportunity, for every one of their kind who has left his mark upon the world. In therecent warfare thousands of potential great men died unfulfilled. But a world withsomething like a secure international peace, and something like social justice, willfish for capacity with the fine net of universal education, and may expect a yieldbeyond comparison. (lbid., p. 1187)

Acknowledgements

The origins of this paper lie in a series of conversations with Michael Neve. He, JanetBrowne, Caroline Essex, Anne Hardy and Mike Jay were generous with their guidanceand support throughout the process of researching and writing. A precis of the paperwas presented at a student seminar at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Med-icine at University College London in the autumn of 2004, and I would like to thank Nan-dini Bhattacharya, Stephen Casper, Candice Delisle and Christos Papadopoulos for ourdiscussions then and since. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers from the British

Journal for the History of Science and from this journal for their comments and criticismon various drafts. The staff of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding ofMedicine and Cambridge University Library gave invaluable assistance in locating firsteditions of the texts used in this study.

References

Anon. (1905). Leader: ‘When the Vice-Chancellor of the University : : :’. The Times, 37734, 9.Anon. (1906). The compulsory retirement of the Director of the British Museum of Natural History. Science, 24,

250–251.Anon. (1911). Sir E. Ray Lankester and compulsory Greek. The Times, 39480, 7.Anon. (1916a). Closing of museums. The deputation tomorrow. The Times, 41085, 5.Anon. (1916b). Neglect of science. A cause of failures in wars. New committee formed. The Times, 41079, 10.Anon. (1916c). Science and Greek. The claim of modern subjects. Civil Service examinations. The Times, 41158,

6.Anon. (1929). Obituary. Sir E. Ray Lankester. The Times, 45283, 15.Blacker, C. P. (1952). Eugenics: Galton and after. London: Duckworth.Bowler, P. J. (1989). Holding your head up high: Degeneration and orthogenesis in theories of human evolution.

In J. R. Moore (Ed.), History, humanity and evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (pp. 329–353). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Brogan, H. (2001). The Penguin history of the USA. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Burrow, J. W. (2000). The crisis of reason: European thought, 1848–1914. New Haven: Yale University Press.Carlson, E. T. (1985). Medicine and degeneration: Theory and praxis. In J. E. Chamberlin, & S. L. Gilman (Eds.),

Degeneration: The darker side of progress (pp. 121–144). New York: Columbia University Press.Chamberlin, J. E. (1981). An anatomy of cultural melancholy. Journal of the History of Ideas, 42,

691–705.Chamberlin, J. E., & Gilman, S. L. (Eds.). (1985). Degeneration: The darker side of progress. New York:

Columbia University Press.Childs, D. J. (2001). Modernism and eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the culture of degeneration. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Coren, M. (1993). Invisible man: The life and liberties of H. G. Wells. London: Bloomsbury.Coupland, P. (2000). H. G. Wells’ Liberal Fascism. Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 541–558.Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection. London: John Murray.Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray.Darwin, F. (Ed.). (1888). The life and letters of Charles Darwin: Including an autobiographical chapter. London:

John Murray.


Desmond, A. (1982). Archetypes and ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875. London: Blond &Briggs.

Desmond, A. (1998). Huxley. London: Penguin.Farrall, L.A. (1969). The origins and growth of the English eugenics movement, 1865–1925. Ph.D. thesis, Indiana

University.Farrall, L. A. (1975). Controversy and conflict in science: A case study—the English biometric school and

Mendel’s laws. Social Studies of Science, 5, 269–301.Feuer, L. S. (1979). The friendship of Edwin Ray Lankester and Karl Marx: The last episode in Marx’s

intellectual development. Journal of the History of Ideas, 40, 633–648.Forgan, S., & Gooday, G. (1996). Constructing South Kensington: The buildings and politics of T. H. Huxley’s

working environments. British Journal for the History of Science, 29, 435–468.Freeman, D. (1974). The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Current Anthropology,

15, 211–237.Gakyigit, E. A. (1994). The reception of Francis Galton’s Hereditary genius in the Victorian periodical press.

Journal of the History of Biology, 27, 215–240.Galton, F. (1889). Natural inheritance. London: Macmillan.Galton, F. (1909). Essays in eugenics. London: The Eugenics Education Society.Galton, F. (1910). Heredity and tradition. The Times, 39286, 9.Gay, H. (1999). Explaining the universe: Herbert Spencer’s attempt to synthesize political and evolutionary ideas.

Endeavour, 23, 56–59.Gillham, N. W. (2001). A life of Sir Francis Galton: From African exploration to the birth of eugenics. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Goodrich, E. S. (1929). Obituary: Sir E. Ray Lankester KCB FRS. Nature, 124, 309–314.Greenslade, W. (1994). Degeneration, culture and the novel 1880–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Howarth, J. (1987). Science education in late-Victorian Oxford: A curious case of failure. The English Historical

Review, 102, 334–371.Hurley, K. (1996). The Gothic body: Sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the fin de siecle. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Jenkins, E. W. (1973). The Thomson Committee and the Board of Education 1916–1922. British Journal of

Educational Studies, 21, 76–87.Kevles, D. J. (1995). In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Lankester, E. (1869). On the teaching of natural science in schools. Quarterly Journal of Science, 6, 381.Lankester, E. R. (1870). On comparative longevity in man and the lower animals. London: Macmillan.Lankester, E. R. (1873). The future of the English universities: An echo from Oxford. Nature, 8, 61–62.Lankester, E. R. (1890). The advancement of science: Occasional essays and addresses. London: Macmillan.Lankester, E. R. (1895). Memoir on T.H. Huxley. Natural Science, 7, 120–121.Lankester, E. R. (1901). Darwinism and statecraft: National life from the standpoint of science. An address

delivered at Newcastle, November 19, 1900, by Karl Pearson FRS. Nature, 63(Suppl. 21 March), iii–v.Lankester, E. R. (1903). The present judged by the future: ‘Anticipations of the reaction of scientific progress

upon human life and thought’ by H.G. Wells. Nature, 65(Suppl. 13 March), iii–v.Lankester, E. R. (1905a). Dr. Ray Lankester on nature and man. The Times, 37734, 14.Lankester, E. R. (1905b). Dr Lankester on man and nature. The Times, 37735, 9.Lankester, E. R. (1905c). Dr Lankester’s Romanes Lecture. The Times, 37737, 7.Lankester, E. R. (1906). Inaugural address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at

York, on August 1, 1906. Science, 24, 234–235.Lankester, E. R. (1907). The advance of science 1881–1906. In idem, The kingdom of man (pp. 1–36). London: A.

Constable.Lankester, E. R. (1910). Science from an easy chair. London: Methuen.Lankester, E. R. (1914). German claims in science. The Times, 40735, 7.Lankester, E. R. (1916). Contempt of science. The Times, 41076, 9.Lankester, E. R. (1917). Introduction. In idem (Ed.), Science and education: Lectures delivered at the Royal

Institution of Great Britain in 1854 (pp 1–14). London: Heinemann.Lester, J. (1995). E. Ray Lankester and the making of modern British biology (P. J. Bowler, Ed.). British Society for

the History of Science Monographs, 10. [S.1.]: British Society, for the History of Science.MacKenzie, D. (1975). Eugenics in Britain. Social Studies of Science, 6, 499–532.


MacLeod, R. M. (1971). Of medals and men: A reward system in Victorian science, 1826–1914. Notes and Records

of the Royal Society of London, 26, 81–105.Mayer, A. (2005). Reluctant technocrats: Science promotion in the neglect-of-science debate of 1916–1918.

History of Science, 43, 139–160.Neve, M., & Jay, M. (Eds.). (1999). 1900: A fin-de-siecle reader. London: Penguin.Nyhart, L. K. (1997). Review of E. Ray Lankester and the making of British biology. Bulletin of the History of

Medicine, 71, 350–351.Paul, D. B. (1984). Eugenics and the Left. Journal of the History of Ideas, 45, 567–590.Pearson, K. (1900). The scope and importance to the state of the science of national eugenics. London: Dulau.Pearson, K. (1912). The groundwork of eugenics. London: Dulau.Perry, J. (1905). Nature and man. Science, 22, 156.Pick, D. (1989). Faces of degeneration: A European disorder, c.1848–c.1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Porter, T. M. (2004). Karl Pearson: The scientific life in a statistical age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.Poulton, E. B. (1919). A hundred years of evolution. Science, 74, 345–360.Ridgeway, W. (1910). Presidential address. The influence of environment on man. The Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 40, 16.Ross, W. T. (2002). H.G. Wells’ world reborn: ‘The outline of history’ and its companions. Selinsgrove:

Susquehanna University Press.Shorey, P. (1910). The case for the classics. The School Review, 18, 605–606.Smith, D. C. (1986). H.G. Wells: Desperately mortal, a biography. London: Yale University Press.Spencer, H. (1887). The factors of organic evolution (2nd ed.). London: Williams and Norgate.Thomson, M. (1998). The problem of mental deficiency: Eugenics, democracy and social policy in Britain c. 1870–

1959. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Turner, F. M. (1980). Public science in Britain, 1880–1919. Isis, 71, 589–608.Wells, H. G. (1891). Zoological retrogression. Gentleman’s Magazine, 271, 246–253.Wells, H. G. (1894). The cyclical delusion. Saturday Review, 78, 505–506.Wells, H. G. (1896). Human inheritance, an artificial process. Fortnightly Review, 60, 590–595.Wells, H. G. (1904). Scepticism of the instrument. Mind, 13, 379–393.Wells, H. G. (1905). Response to Eugenics: Its definition, scope and aims by Francis Galton. In J. Bryce (Ed.),

Sociological papers (pp. 58–62). London: Macmillan.Wells, H. G. (1912). The past and the great state. In F. E. Greville, C. R. S. Taylor, & H. G. Wells (Eds.), The

great state: Essays in construction (pp. 1–45). London: Harper Bros.Wells, H. G. (1917). God, the invisible king. London: Cassell & Co.Wells, H. G. (1920). The outline of history: Being a plain history of life and mankind; written and with the advice and

editorial help of Mr Ernest Barker, Sir H. H. Johnston, Sir E. Ray Lankester and Professor Gilbert Murray.London: Newnes.

Wells, H. G. (1931). The work wealth and happiness of mankind (2 vols.). New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co.Wells, H. G. (1975). Early writings in science and science fiction (R. M. Philmus, & D. Y. Hughes, Eds.). Berkeley:

University of California Press.Wells, H. G. (1996). ‘The time machine: An invention’: A critical text of the 1895 London first edition (L. Stover,

Ed.). London: Everyman.Wells, H. G. (1998). The correspondence of H.G. Wells (4 vols.) (D. C. Smith, Ed.). London: Yale University

Press.Wells, H. G., Huxley, J., & Wells, G. P. (1929). The science of life. London: Amalgamated Press.White, P. (2003). Thomas Huxley: Making the man of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.White, P. (2005). Ministers of culture: Arnold, Huxley and liberal Anglican reform of learning. History of Science,

43, 115–138.

Documents

Education or degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H. G. Wells and The outline of history