The Kingdom of Speech (16 page)

a
 According to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, the word “primitive” can be defined as: “of, belonging to, or seeming to come from an early time in the very ancient past; not having a written language, advanced technology, etc.;…of, relating to, or produced by a people or culture that is nonindustrial and often nonliterate and tribal.”

1
 Thomas Malthus,
An Essay on the Principle of Population
(London: J. Johnson, 1798), chapter 2.

2
 Ibid., chapter 1.

3
 James Hutton,
An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy,
(Edinburgh: Strahan and Cadell, 1794).

4
 Erasmus Darwin,
Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life,
(London: J. Johnson, 1794).

5
 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
Recherches sur l'organisation des corps vivants
(Paris: Maillard, 1802). The book was based on Lamarck's 1800 lecture at Paris's National Museum of Natural History, where he was a professor.

6
 James Secord,
Victorian Sensation:
The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20–21.

7
  Adam Sedgwick, “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,”
Edinburgh Review
(July 1845), 1–85.

8
 Adam Sedgwick to Charles Lyell, April 9, 1845, in
The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick,
ed. John Willis Clark and Thomas McKenny Hughes (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1890), 83.

9
 Quoted in John M. Lynch, ed.,
Selected Periodical Reviews, 1844–54,
vol. 1 of
“Vestiges” and the Debate Before Darwin
(Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2000).

10
 Ibid., 10.

11
  Ben Waggoner, “Robert Chambers,” University of California Museum of Paleontology, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/chambers.html.

12
 Thomas Henry Huxley, review of
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,
10th ed.,
The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review
13 (January–April 1854), 438.

13
 Ibid., 427.

14
 Alfred Russel Wallace,
My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), 361–63.

15
 Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,”
Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology
3, no. 9 (August 20, 1858). Initially read at the July 1, 1858, meeting of the Linnean Society.

16
 Darwin writes that Lyell had praised Wallace's work in a letter to Wallace dated December 22, 1857,
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2192.xml.

17
Mark Rothery, “The Wealth of the English Landed Gentry, 1870–1935,”
Agricultural History Review
55, no. 2 (2007), 251–68.

18
 A record of Charles Lyell I purchasing the estate was published in the December 9, 1887, edition of the
Scottish Law Reporter,
which included his and his successors' professions.

19
 See the Darwin family tree prepared by Charles Darwin in his book
The Life of Erasmus Darwin,
ed. Desmond King-Hele (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141–143.

20
 Ibid., 25.

21
 Michael Shermer,
In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace; A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14–15.

22
 Charles Darwin,
Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships
Adventure
and
Beagle,
1832–1836,
vol. 3 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 95–96.

23
 These stories have been communicated orally for generations, so there are no definitive versions. For more on these creation myths and others, see: www.powhatanmuseum.com.

24
 George Thornton Emmons,
The Tlingit Indians,
ed. Frederica de Laguna (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 34.

25
 David Adams Leeming,
A Dictionary of Creation Myths
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 44–46.

26
 Ibid., 252–53.

27
 George Hart,
The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 3.

28
 Molefi Kete Asante and Abu S. Abarry, eds.,
African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 35–37.

29
 On April 1, 1838, Darwin wrote to his sister Susan about his trip to the zoo. For more on Jenny the orangutan, see Jonathan Weiner, “Darwin at the Zoo,”
Scientific American,
November 5, 2006.

30
 Charles Darwin,
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882,
ed. Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1958), 144.

31
 Ibid., 2.

32
 Janet Browne,
Charles Darwin:
The Power of Place
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 40.

33
 Thomas Bell, quoted in Brian Gardiner's editorial in
The Linnean
13, no. 4, 1997.

34
 Charles R. Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace, “Proceedings of the Meeting of the Linnean Society held on July 1st, 1858,”
Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology
3. The printed publication is available at Wallace Online (wallace-online.org). The entire paper used Wallace's title (without crediting him specifically), but because Darwin was the first author, his name appears first on the title page and in all running heads.

35
 The letter is missing, but Wallace summarizes his thoughts in his autobiography,
My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1905).

36
 Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
(London: John Murray, 1859), 488.

37
 Richard Owen, “Darwin on the Origin of Species,”
Edinburgh Review
(April 1860).

38
 Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin's
Origin of Species,
” the
Times
(London), December 26, 1859.

39
 For more on the X Club, see Ruth Barton, “‘An Influential Set of Chaps': The X-Club and Royal Society Politics, 1864–85,”
British Journal for the History of Science
23, no. 1 (1990); and Browne,
Charles Darwin,
2002.

40
 See Leon Wieseltier, “A Darwinist Mob Goes After a Serious Philosopher,”
New Republic
(March 8, 2013), and Thomas Nagel,
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

41
 For Huxley's complete 1889 essay “Agnosticism,” see Thomas Henry Huxley,
Collected Essays,
vol. 5,
Science and Christian Tradition
(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1902).

42
 For more information, see Walter Kaufmann,
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

43
 See Browne,
Charles Darwin
(2002), 104.

44
 Max Müller,
Lectures on the Science of Language
(New York: Charles Scribner, 1862), 354. The lectures were delivered in April, May, and June of 1861.

45
 Max Müller, “On the Results of the Science of Language,” in
Essays Chiefly on the Science of Language,
vol. 4 of
Chips from a German Workshop
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881), 449. This was originally delivered as a lecture at the Imperial University of Strasbourg, May 23, 1872.

46
 Quoted in John van Wyhe and Peter C. Kjaergaard, “Going the Whole Orang: Darwin, Wallace and the Natural History of Orangutans,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
51 (June 2015), 53–63.

47
 Alfred Russel Wallace, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,”
Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection,
2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1871), 370.

48
 Ibid., 334–36.

49
 Ibid., 344.

50
 Ibid., 344–49.

51
 Ibid., 334.

52
 Ibid., 352.

53
 Ibid., 359–60.

54
 Shermer,
In Darwin's Shadow,
161.

55
 Darwin to Alfred Russel Wallace, March 27, 1869. Available from the Darwin Correspondence Project database at https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-6684.

56
For more on how spiritism emerged in Darwin's circle, see James Lander,
Lincoln and Darwin: Shared Visions of Race, Science, and Religion
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 243–44.

57
 Müller,
Lectures on the Science of Language
.

58
 Wallace, “The Limits of Natural Selection,” 335, 359.

59
 Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
(London: John Murray, 1871).

60
 Rudyard Kipling, “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” in
Just So Stories
(New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1912).

61
 Stephen Jay Gould, “Sociobiology: The Art of Storytelling,”
New Scientist,
November 16, 1978.

62
 This is how W. Tecumseh Fitch describes Darwin's theory in “Musical Protolanguage: Darwin's Theory of Language Evolution Revisited,”
Language Log
(of the Linguistic Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania), February 12, 2009, available at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1136. Darwin makes the comparison himself in
The Descent of Man,
55.

63
 See Darwin,
The Descent of Man
, 54.

64
 Ibid., 83. This was an addition to the second edition.

65
 Ibid.

66
 Ibid., 68.

67
 Ibid.

68
 Ibid., 10. The earwigs were also an addition to the second edition.

69
 Ibid., 77–78.

70
 Ibid.

71
 Max Müller, “Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language,”
Nature
1 (January 6, 1870), 256–59.

72
 “Retrospect of Literature, Art, and Science in 1871: Science,”
The Annual Register
(1871), 368. The name of the reviewer was never revealed.

73
 For examples, see note 26. See also “Review of
Descent of Man,
”
Athenaeum
3 (April 1871), and “Review of
The Descent of Man,
”
Edinburgh Review
(July–October 1871).

74
 For more information about the Philological Society, see Fiona Marshall, “History of the Philological Society: The Early Years,” available from www.philsoc.org.uk/history.asp.

75
 Société de Linguistique de
Paris. “Statuts de 1866, Art. 2.” Available at:
http://www.slp-paris.com/spip.php?article5
.

76
 See Barton, “‘An Influential Set of Chaps.'”

77
 Quoted in Paul C. Mangelsdorf, foreword to
Experiments in Plant Hybridisation
by Gregor Mendel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). This note was kept by one of Mendel's fellow monks, Franz Barina.

78
 Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,”
The American Biology Teacher
35, no. 3 (March 1973), 125–29.

79
 See Morris Swadesh, “Sociologic Notes on Obsolescent Languages,”
International Journal of American Linguistics
14, no. 4 (October 1948), 226–35, and Stanley Newman, “Morris Swadesh (1909–1967),”
Language
43, no. 4 (December 1967), 948–57.

80
 Roger Hilsman,
American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines
(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 143.

81
 Morris Swadesh, “Towards Greater Accuracy in Lexicostatistical Dating,”
International Journal of American Linguistics
21, no. 2 (April 1955), 121–37.

82
 Edwin G. Pulleyblank, “The Meaning of Duality of Patterning and Its Importance in Language Evolution,” in
Studies in Language Origins
(Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989), 1:53–65.

83
 See “Celebrating the History of Building 20” on the MIT Libraries Archives, available at http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/building20/index.html.

84
 See Florence Harris, with James Harris, “The Development of the Linguistics Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology” (1974), on the website
50 Years of Linguistics at MIT: A Scientific Reunion, December 9–11, 2011,
available at http://ling50.mit.edu/harris-development.