Ausgewählte Briefe und Dokumente / Selected Letters and Documents (review)

August Weismann. Ausgewählte Briefe und Dokumente/Selected Letters and Documents. Edited by Frederick B. Churchill and Helmut Risler, with an essay by Frederick B. Churchill. Schriften der Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg im Breisgau, no. 24. 2 vols. + CD-ROM. Freiburg: Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg im Breisgau, 1999. 859 pp. Ill. DM 100.00 (paperbound, 3-928969-09-9); DM 20.00 (CD-ROM, without illustrations).

The publication of these letters and documents is a major event in scholarship on August Weismann (1834-1914), the most provocative writer on evolution, development, and heredity in the decades when genetics was being created. A prominent member of the generation that, as they engaged with Darwin's theory, occupied the first independent chairs of zoology at most German universities, Weismann was forced by an eye disorder to abandon microscopy for long periods, and turned to theoretical problems. His doctrine of the continuity through the generations of the "germ-plasm," a hereditary substance separate from the cells of the body, underwrote a fierce campaign against the inheritance of acquired characters. He then drew on the new studies of chromosomal cytology to elaborate a speculative theory of heredity that explained differentiation as a consequence of unequal nuclear division. This won little support but continued for decades to inspire experiments to disprove it, while among "neo-Darwinians"—a term coined for Weismann—the separation of germ and soma became an article of faith. Yet though we may see in him a chief promoter of twentieth-century biology, recent historical writing on Weismann (no less than that on those other heroes of the modern evolutionary synthesis, Darwin and Mendel) has sought also to place his work among the often very different concerns of nineteenth-century zoology and botany. These volumes do much to deepen that effort.

The edition is the outcome of a collaboration over thirty-five years between the late Helmut Risler, a great-grandson of Weismann and himself a zoologist, and Frederick Churchill, the leading historian of nineteenth-century German life sciences. It has taken so long because of the difficulty as well as the size of the task. Risler inherited a set of notebooks in which Weismann had copied by blotting about four thousand letters he wrote between 1885 and 1911. Donated to Freiburg University Library, this unusually large and important collection posed a paleographic challenge far beyond the usual deciphering of old German script. The irony is that we can read the letters, with their frequent references to the eye troubles that made Weismann desire deep black type and matt paper, thanks only to editorial decades of poring over the fading ink he blotchily transferred to the copybooks' very thin leaves. Published here is a generous selection of the letters judged most informative (but all have been microfilmed), supplemented with correspondence from other libraries that extends the period covered back to 1872 and forward to 1914. In addition, we have three autobiographical sketches, recommendations of students' dissertations to the faculty, extracts from files of the university administration, and an occasional piece on zoology around 1900. The letters and documents are mostly in German, the editorial apparatus and an interpretative essay in English; there is an expanded bibliography of Weismann's published works; and everything is searchable through a fine index and CD-ROM. Historians of biology and medicine owe the editors and Freiburg University Library an enormous debt of gratitude for this labor of love.

A good place to start is the Vita propria of 1913. Weismann recalls an educated-middle-class upbringing and a young manhood in which National Liberal and vehemently anti-Catholic attitudes were formed; finding a way via a position as personal physician of an exiled archduke (in which capacity he did his pioneering studies on insect embryos) to the University of Freiburg in the liberal Grand Duchy of Baden, where he remained for the rest of his career; courting Mary Gruber, the daughter of a...