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40 John burroughs’s final thoughts on Darwin (published posthumously in 1921) encapsulate his long struggle with Darwin and his ideas: “The study of Darwin’s works begets such an affection for the man, for the elements of character displayed on every page, that one is slow in convincing one’s self that anything is wrong with his theories. There is danger that one’s critical judgment will be blinded by one’s partiality for the man.” Burroughs (1837–1921) was impressed by Darwin’s powers of observation and ability to describe those observations in prose, yet whereas there were elements of Darwin’s theories about evolution that Burroughs accepted wholeheartedly, there were other elements that he could not accept no matter how hard he tried. This essay will examine the sixty-year evolution of Burroughs’s thoughts on Darwin from the earliest mention in 1862 to his final essay, “A Critical Glance at Darwin.” John Burroughs was one of the most well-known and widely read nature writers at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, he was an important purveyor of scienti fic ideas to the general public. In addition to the conventional nature themes for which he is famous, such as landscape, flora, and fauna (especially birds), Burroughs was particularly fond of writing about geologic time and the evolution of life on earth. Burroughs’s literary heritage is complex. Early in his writing career he was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and from Emerson adopted an idealistic viewpoint, which he later suggested came from the German idealism of Kant and Goethe. The influence of Emerson is important in the context of Burroughs and Darwinism because Emerson was very interested in the idea of evolution, especially as presented in Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (see below), which Emerson read in 1844. Another important influence on Burroughs’s understanding of science was Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830), arguably the first textbook in geology. Lyell j e f f wa l k e r “The Long Road” John Burroughs and Charles Darwin, 1862–1921 “The Long Road” 41 popularized the idea of uniformitarianism, which held that processes observed on earth today have been uniform in kind and degree over the course of geologic time. Natural processes are often imperceptibly slow, occurring over long periods of time, on the order of millions or even billions of years, and they have created the world as we see it now. The slow workings of nature according to uniformitarian principles fascinated Burroughs (as they did Darwin), who wrote about this often. Other important scientific influences for Burroughs included Charles Darwin himself, whom Burroughs admired as a naturalist and scientific investigator, and scientists with whom he was acquainted, such as H. Fairfield Osborn and William Healey Dall, a leading figure in the American neo-Lamarckian movement, with whom Burroughs traveled to Alaska on the Harriman expedition in 1899. In addition , Burroughs was an avid reader of magazines and newspapers—most notably Popular Science—from which he took material for his essays. d e b at e s a b o u t e v o l u t i o n To begin to understand Burroughs’s intellectual trajectory, we need to know something about Darwin and his “dangerous idea,” especially in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Charles Darwin did not invent the concept of evolution. Ideas about changes in organisms over time can be traced from Aristotle through Leonardo da Vinci to the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, including Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Georges Cuvier. And though it was crucial to his hypothesis, it was also not Darwin’s idea that geologic time was much longer than what could be calculated by counting generations in the Bible (the standard measure of ancient time in Western Europe ). That was the work of geologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as James Hutton (1795), William Smith (1815), and Charles Lyell (1830). In fact, ideas about evolution and geologic time “co-evolved,” so to speak, as naturalists such as Cuvier and geologists such as Smith recognized changes in fossil remains found in rock sequences that seemed to have formed over very long periods of time. Geologists and paleontologists refer to the increasing complexity of living organisms over the course of geologic time as the principle of biological succession. Evolution was also apparently supported by the...

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