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231 Notes  CHAPTER 1 1. Throughout the present book all references to the Origin are to the 1859 edition, unless otherwise indicated. 2. This was indeed a common view of genera in Darwin’s day and before, even though it was not shared by Linnaeus. For example, Bentham, who Darwin explicitly refers to on this topic on p. 419, had long maintained (Bentham 1836) that “A genus . . . has seldom any real existence in nature as a positively determined group, and must rather be considered as a mere contrivance for assisting us in comparing and studying the enormous multitude of species, which, without arrangement, our minds could not embrace” (xlvii; cf. Bentham 1858; cf. also Stevens 1994, 99–109, for references on higher taxa nominalism in Bentham and in other naturalists). In like manner Watson, in a letter to Darwin (March 23, 1858), confided that “I look upon the orders & genera of plants as purely conventional arrangements, not natural groups,—that is, not groups in nature, but only as groups in books & herbaria” (Burkhardt and Smith 1991, 54). Similarly Hooker, in a letter to Darwin (February 25, 1858), stated that “Genera in short are almost purely artificial as established in Botany” (Burkhardt and Smith 1991, 35). That genera and higher tax nominalism was the general view, cf. also Watson (1845a, 142) and Agassiz (1857, 4–5), as well as Stamos (2005). 3. It is sometimes claimed that this was in fact not a common feature of species concepts in Darwin’s day (e.g., McOuat 1996, 511, 515). And yet it is easy to find contemporary sources who agree with Darwin on this point. For example, Watson (1845a) states that “the very definition of the term ‘species,’ as usually given, involves an assumption of nontransition ” (147). He would later repeat this in a letter to Darwin (May 10, 1860), in which he wrote “Until a faith in certain impassable barrier between existent species becomes thoroughly shaken, naturalists will resist your views, & hail difficulties as if conclusive arguments on the contra side. Differently as these unseen barriers are traced or placed, they are believed in about as strongly by almost all” (Burkhardt et al. 1993, 203). More specifically Wollaston (1860), in a critical review of Darwin’s Origin, states that “The opinion among naturalists that species were independently created, and have not been transmitted one from the other, has been hitherto so general that we might almost call it an axiom” (133). 4. Interestingly, Darwin seems to have got more from Watson than just the above strategy . For in his correspondence with Darwin, Watson, in spite of what he says about the variability in species concepts between his fellow naturalists, seems still to have thought that species are in a sense real entities in nature. For example, in a letter to Darwin (October 11, 1855) he wrote “I look upon the words ‘Orders, genera, species (of books), & varieties,’ only as terms to indicate passably well the grades of resemblance between objects” (Burkhardt and Smith 1989, 479). That Watson includes only book species is highly significant. Elsewhere he made explicit his distinction between book species, which he considered arbitrary, and natural species, species found in nature (Watson 1843, 618). Granted, a little later (Watson 1845b), as we shall see below, after focusing on the messy situation presented by primroses and cowslips, and how they lend themselves to evolutionism, he came close to drawing a nominalistic conclusion about species (219). However, he never went all the way, and in later writings, in spite of his evolutionism, he seems clearly to have thought that there are real species in nature, moreover that their reality is only or primarily horizontal in nature, at a given time slice. For example, in a letter to Darwin (November 8, 1855) he wrote “I must confess a pretty strong bias towards the view, that species are not immutably distinct;—altho’ in our time-narrowed observation of the individuals they seem to be so” (Burkhardt and Smith 1989, 499). Similarly, in a later letter to Darwin (December 20, 1857), he wrote “In writing the final volume of my Cybele Britannica, I find myself unable to carry out the ideas or inquiries originally intended. And why?—Mainly, because the limits of species are so uncertain in nature,—so dissimilar in books. . . . This leads me to devote many pages to my own notions about species & classifications,—rather irrelevant in a book on local botany;—and perhaps somewhat limping over that same ground which will...

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