CHAPTER 15

The Monkey’s Skull

Leicester Square, London

1788

Anticipation among the distinguished visitors arriving at 28 Leicester Square was intense. Ushered through the house and into the new extension, they pressed impatiently forward. As well as members of the Royal Society, the Royal Antiquarian Society, and the Royal College of Physicians, the guests included writers and several important foreign visitors. Shepherded up to the first floor, they arrived at the tall doors and stepped into the great skylit room, where they gazed around, incredulous. All had heard the rumors and speculation about the famous anatomist’s collection. Some of the stories detailing exotic animals he had obtained sounded more like the stuff of fiction, while the reports of human curiosities he had procured seemed equally fabulous. What they found, as they stared in wonder at the bottles filled with fleshy substances, the cases of dried organs, and the skeletons positioned around the large galleried room, and what they now heard from the lips of their illustrious host, was more surprising than any of them could have expected.

It was five years since Hunter and his young family had moved into Leicester Square, three years since he had supervised the transfer of his already large collection into its custom-built accommodation. Only now, after he and his several assistants had spent many months sorting, arranging, and cataloging the ever-growing number of exhibits, was Hunter ready to reveal his museum to the outside world. This was not just the happy conclusion of five years’ planning; it was the culmination of his life’s work. A small figure in the lofty room, though recently grown a little more rotund through his enforced lack of exercise, Hunter waited as his guests perused the displays, preparing to deliver his opening words.

By anyone’s standards, it was a remarkable scene. None of the guests could have failed to be amazed at the sight of the huge stuffed giraffe, captured in 1779, hacked in half to fit the Jermyn Street hall, and now reunited with its legs, as it loomed above their heads. One journalist, invited to record the opening, was plainly overwhelmed, noting that “from the report of its size and other circumstances, it was hitherto much doubted by naturalists whether such an animal did really exist or not.”¹ Finally convinced that the giraffe was not a work of fiction, he wrote, “In point of size, it is above eighteen feet high, with an erect neck and long feet, and in many respects partaking of the species of the common camel. From the stiffness of its joints, it can neither stoop, nor lie down; but as nature is ever provident for its creatures, it receives its food from the leaves of trees, which from its extreme height it can readily do by putting his head in among the branches.”

There were more sights, equally remarkable. Staring apprehensively around, the visitors could glimpse massive bones belonging to elephants, camels, and whales; body parts from a zebra, a leopard, a pelican, and a hyena; and entire preserved bodies of rare creatures such as an aardvark fetus, a Surinam toad carrying its young in pockets on its back, and a baby crocodile frozen at the point of emerging from its egg, the umbilical cord still intact. There were scarcely credible human curiosities, too. Few could have failed to be moved by the five pitiful bodies of quintuplets, lined up stiffly in a row. Born two years earlier, four months prematurely to a young mother in Lancashire, three had been stillborn and two born alive, though they survived only briefly. The physician who delivered the babies, all girls, had preserved their emaciated bodies in spirits, tied a label to each wrist indicating their order of birth, and sent them to the Royal Society, which promptly gave them to its foremost anatomist.² Just as unusual was the skeleton of a man reduced to less than five feet tall by a rare disease, myositis ossificans, which had progressively turned his muscle into bone. Hunter had purchased the skeleton at an anatomical auction in 1783 for the considerable sum of eighty-five guineas.³ But most stunning of all, as they raised their eyes, the visitors came face-to-face with the magnificent skeleton of Charles Byrne, the acclaimed Irish giant, grinning down grotesquely in death at the spectators he had once enthralled in life. Revealing his prize trophy to London society for the first time, Hunter claimed he had paid 130 guineas for the body. Whether this was the genuine price, colossal in itself, or whether he was simply too embarrassed to reveal the cost of five hundred pounds that he was reputed to have spent, would remain his secret.⁴

As they stared around, few of the spectators could disagree with the journalist’s description of “Mr Hunter’s very curious, extensive, and valuable museum.”⁵ By sheer volume alone, the collection was nothing less than spectacular. Ultimately, it would total nearly fourteen thousand individual items, and it was not far off that number already. Almost certainly it was the largest collection of its kind in Britain at the time. The range, too, was incredible. Eventually, it would encompass more than fourteen hundred animal and human parts preserved in spirits; over twelve hundred dried bones, skulls, and skeletons; more than six thousand pathological preparations showing the effects of injury and disease; and more than eight hundred dried plants and invertebrates, as well as assorted stuffed animals, corals, minerals and shells.⁶ In all, more than five hundred separate species were represented. In addition, there were nearly three thousand fossils, comprising one of the largest such collections in the country.⁷

The accumulation of such a vast and varied hoard had cost Hunter a fortune—more than twenty thousand pounds, according to the journalist attending the open day, “beside a very accurate and industrious collection of near thirty years.” But this, too, was probably a gross underestimate. Hunter at one point told his former assistant William Lynn that he had spent seventy thousand pounds on the collection; Hunter’s will, written in 1793, would put the total outlay at more than ninety thousand guineas.⁸ Whatever the true cost, the continual expenditure explained why, despite earning upward of five thousand pounds a year in the early 1780s and an estimated six thousand thereafter—about £360,000 in modern terms— Hunter was invariably short of money. He was never out of debt to animal dealers, friends, and money lenders, while his properties at Earls Court were forever being remortgaged in order to drum up more cash for new acquisitions. Lynn knew this better than most. Once, when Lynn was ill after wounding his hand during a postmortem, Hunter had offered to lend him two hundred pounds. When Lynn recovered and called to thank his former boss for the offer, Hunter had completely forgotten the promise, exclaiming, “I offer you money! That is droll, indeed; for I am the last person in this town to have money at command.”⁹ With the considerable expense of running two large households, plus his wife’s extravagant lifestyle, it was a wonder indeed that Hunter never ended up bankrupt. Nonetheless, he was quite prepared to stand by his offer to Lynn.

Hunter was himself the recipient of extraordinary generosity. The donors who had helped him to form his remarkable collection spanned every area of Georgian life. He had received a hog deer from Lord Clive, and a gibbon, a baboon, and an albino macaque from the former prime minister, the earl of Shelburne. Queen Charlotte herself, of course, had donated the carcasses of two elephants that had died in her menagerie, as well as the little bull that had almost gored him. Explorer friends had been equally forthcoming. As well as the antipodean finds from Banks, Hunter had been given several animals by Captain Constantine Phipps, later Lord Mulgrave, from his voyage toward the North Pole in 1773. Julius Griffiths, a former pupil from St. George’s, had brought Hunter back an aquatic snail and the entrails of a pangolin from his expedition to Sumatra. Sadly, Griffiths noted on his return to England, the entrails had been “entirely spoiled from their long detention at the India House.”¹⁰ Indeed, although Hunter never ventured beyond British shores after his brief military career, he managed to foster contacts around the globe in his efforts to secure creatures from every corner of the world. In a typical letter to an acquaintance in Africa, he urged, “If a foal camel was put into a tub of spirits I should be glad. Is it possible to get a young tame lion, or indeed any other beast or bird?”¹¹ He was never coy about his requirements. Even his servants were drawn into the mission. Hunter gave orders that when mowing the meadows, his Earls Court staff should preserve every dormouse nest and beehive they stumbled upon.¹²

Now the fruits of this tireless quest were open to public scrutiny. As the last guests bustled in, Hunter began the first guided tour—“a kind of peripatetic lecture,” according to the newspaper columnist—of his startling museum. It lasted between two and three hours. But this was scarcely surprising, for the collection encapsulated Hunter’s entire career. As well as the handful of preparations he had held on to from his years in Covent Garden, there were bones displaying gunshot wounds from his spell in the army, the tooth grafted into the cockerel’s comb from his period studying teeth, and tissues showing venereal infections from his research into sexual diseases. There were preparations demonstrating his surgical prowess in operations at St. George’s, organs harvested from innumerable autopsies, and cabinets showing results of experiments conducted at his Earls Court laboratory. It was nothing less than a record of John Hunter’s life. More significantly, it was a representation of life itself. For, as Hunter made clear to his rapt entourage, the collection was no haphazard assortment of curiosities such as any number of eighteenth-century amateur enthusiasts had acquired, but a carefully ordered series of human and animal parts arranged expressly to investigate and illustrate fundamental principles about life on earth. Nothing else like Hunter’s museum existed, or ever would exist.

To most outsiders, this peculiar arrangement was simply perplexing. For his friend Horace Walpole, for example, the museum was just “Mr Hunter’s collection of human miseries.”¹³ To Hunter, its organization was entirely logical. Always scornful of the written word, he had created a museum that functioned both as a teaching aid, graphically displaying fundamental facts about anatomy and physiology to his pupils, and as a research tool, helping Hunter to investigate the general principles of life. As one contemporary report explained, “The main object which he had in forming his Museum was to illustrate as far as possible the whole subject of life, by preparations of the bodies in which these phenomena are presented.” ¹⁴ No static display of inanimate objects, such as Walpole’s own magpie hoard, this was a dynamic and vibrant exposition of Hunter’s theories on organic life. Not only did the museum attempt to explore the physiology of all life-forms; it also aimed—as he explained to visitors on his guided tour—to reveal the connections that existed among every kind of life. It was these unorthodox views that captivated his guests, as the newspaper report made plain: “What principally attracted the attention of the cognoscenti was Mr Hunter’s novel and curious system of natural philosophy running progressively from the lowest scale of vegetable up to animal nature.”

The system was indeed novel, although entirely in keeping with all Hunter had taught and written. His collection was divided into three main sections. The first two—the greatest proportion—illustrated normal life: One part exhibited the anatomical structure of individual animals in order to display their physiology; the other elucidated the preservation or reproduction of entire species. The third section, the pathological series, showed examples of normal life gone wrong because of disease or injury, although most of these preparations were stored in the lecture theater, where they could be brought out during class to underline Hunter’s teachings. In the main museum, Hunter had organized the healthy human and animal parts according to bodily systems, as he previously had at Jermyn Street. So organs of digestion or elements of the respiratory system were grouped together, running from the simplest animal structures to the most complex. But now he went further than ever, even placing vegetables and plants alongside analogous animal parts. The similarities between the tendrils of climbing plants and the prehensile tails of sea horses and chameleons were displayed in one series illustrating parts of locomotion; in the series demonstrating circulatory systems, sap was compared to blood.¹⁵ In all, fifteen series demonstrated the principal anatomical systems—digestion, bone structure, nervous systems, and so on—through a staggering range of species. Not only did the museum present uncompromising proof that humans, animals, and even plants shared similar structures—a common makeup—which varied only in its complexity; it also demonstrated precisely how each life-form was suited to its own particular circumstances.

If his guests were in any doubt of the potentially heretical implications of this arrangement, Hunter was quick to disabuse them. Drawing up in front of a row of skulls positioned in what he considered to be an ascending order of complexity, Hunter bracketed the human species along with monkeys. Betraying the classic eighteenth-century European belief in white superiority, which would prevail for at least the next century, he had placed the skulls of Europeans through to Africans in descending order. More significantly, and more shockingly to Georgian minds, he had included a monkey—most probably a chimpanzee—in this ordered series of skulls. Sparing no religious sentiments, Hunter explained, “There is a regular and continued gradation of these from the most imperfect of the animal, to the most perfect of the human species. The most perfect human skull is the European; the most imperfect of this species is the Negro. The European, the Negro, and the Monkey form a regular series.”¹⁶ Plainly unable to resist scandalizing his guests still further, Hunter then came out with his pièce de résistance. “He also remarked,” the newspaper reported, “that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were indisputably black. This is quite a new idea; but Mr Hunter observed it might be proved without difficulty.” The idea that the first humans were black—and since they were created in God’s image, by implication God was therefore black—was startling. Whether or not he did indeed possess proof that human beings had originated in Africa, a notion that would be confirmed only in the latter half of the twentieth century, the radical ideas he expressed at this first public viewing of his extraordinary collection plainly demonstrated that he had moved far beyond conventional eighteenth-century dogma.

It was little wonder that Hunter’s museum now attracted widespread interest from across the Continent. Keen to share his insights, Hunter opened the museum twice a year—in May to aristocrats and gentlemen, in October to fellow medical practitioners and natural philosophers.¹⁷ Fellow anatomists from the Continent hastened to see the fruits of Hunter’s laborious research for themselves.¹⁸ Yet he was choosy about whom he invited. After the storming of the Bastille on July 14 the following year, Hunter carefully scrutinized prospective visitors’ allegiances. While Hunter’s approach to medicine was decidedly radical, he was a staunch conservative and royalist in public life. He told an acquaintance who wanted to bring a French friend to see the museum, “If your friend is in London in October (and not a Democrate), he is welcome to see it; but I would rather see it in a blaze, like the Bastile, than show it to a Democrate, let his country be what it may.”¹⁹

Undeterred by the political climate, from about 1792, Hunter began to commit to paper his daring and potentially dangerous thoughts on the development of life on earth. As antirevolutionary fervor spread to Britain, and sympathizers such as the chemist Joseph Priestley had to flee when their homes were gutted by furious mobs, John Hunter spent his evenings dictating blasphemous views that could potentially shake the world. For although he would never use the term evolution, he now set out to make plain that he believed all animals, including humans, were descended from common ancestors.

John Hunter was not the first to express controversial ideas about the origins of life, and he would certainly not be the last. But to challenge the traditional biblical story, that God had created the earth and all life over a period of six days, was still highly contentious toward the end of the eighteenth century, and would remain so for some time to come.²⁰ Many in Georgian society still accepted unquestioningly the precise calculation by James Ussher, the seventeenth-century archbishop of Armagh, that the world had been created on the morning of October 23, 4004 B.C. This prevailing doctrine denied the possibility of any significant time lapse between the creation of the earth and the appearance of human beings, while it also supposed that all life had been formed in a state of perfection—no creatures had since changed or died out. Where evidence contradicting this doctrine turned up, such as the discovery of bones belonging to animals that no longer appeared to exist, or fossils of marine creatures found on mountaintops, often convoluted theories were proposed to suit the traditional orthodoxy. The remains of unknown animals simply meant the creatures had not yet been discovered, while evidence of sea life in high places had been deposited there during the Flood. Such a fixed and hierarchical order was often expressed as the “chain of being”—an idea developed in ancient Greece but still widely supported in the eighteenth century—which imagined a single ladder leading neatly upward from rocks, to plants, to the simplest animals, and ultimately to humans and even divine beings.

Naturally, there were notable rebels who wrestled with this religious straitjacket. In the seventeenth century, Robert Hooke, the eccentric stalwart of the fledgling Royal Society, had raised doubts that a single flood could have caused all the earth’s diverse features or that the world could have existed for only six thousand years. Only a long period of continual change by natural forces—earthquakes, volcanoes, and sea erosion—could have wrought such forms, he argued, while he maintained that fossils were the impressions of living organisms, some of which had become extinct. ²¹ But Hooke’s was an isolated voice.

The pattern—lone mavericks contesting predominant theological opinion—was set. Although the spirit of scientific scrutiny fostered by the Enlightenment opened the door to further questions about the biblical worldview, those daring to query the accepted ideology remained firmly on the fringes of intellectual society. So James Burnett, the Scottish judge known as Lord Monboddo, was mercilessly ridiculed for suggesting in 1774 that orangutans were members of the human species.²² Another Scot, the pioneer geologist James Hutton, was similarly the butt of society’s scorn when he concluded that the earth had been formed over a vast period of time, through a gradual process of climate change, terrestrial movement, and water erosion—just as Hooke had earlier proclaimed. Yet even while denying the biblical account of the Creation and the Flood in his theories, published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, Hutton still insisted on God’s role as a divine designer.²³

On the Continent, the origins of life were just as hotly debated. Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who had developed the system of classifying plants and animals in the middle of the century, had gradually revised his view that all species were fixed. Proposing that new species might occasionally be produced by interbreeding, he argued that God had simply created the head of each genus, or class of species, and this produced local varieties—effectively, new species.²⁴

The Dutch anatomist Peter Camper, an early visitor to John Hunter’s museum, had likewise ranked his skulls in a hierarchy ranging from monkey through African to European, but he still insisted on a distinct gap between humans and animals.²⁵ Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a young professor of medicine at Göttingen, who visited Hunter’s museum in the early 1790s, was similarly preoccupied with collecting and ranking skulls. He advanced the theory of a hierarchy of human “varieties,” descending from the Caucasian down to the Ethiopian.²⁶ Yet even though the French polymath Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis had proposed as far back as 1745 that life-forms had changed over time and that similar species shared common ancestors, both Blumenbach and Camper stuck resolutely to the idea of fixed, unchangeable species.

A distinctly more daring view was advocated by the French naturalist Buffon, who enraged theological opinion in 1749 by suggesting that the earth was 75,000 years old—a dramatic increase on the orthodox 6,000 years, if still considerably short of today’s best estimate of about 4.5 billion years. After being censured by religious authorities, Buffon had tempered his heretical view to suggest that the earth had developed over seven lengthy epochs, correlating with the biblical days of creation.²⁷ Undaunted, however, Buffon declared that similar animals shared common ancestors, although he stuck doggedly to the idea that species were fixed in form by suggesting perversely that the different animals inhabiting the earth were varieties rather than species, all descended from thirty-eight original ancestors, akin to Linnaeus’s genera. Even so, Buffon’s idea of a process of divergence—an original cat ancestor bringing forth lions, tigers, and domestic cats, for example—represented a radical new approach, one that was still heavily resisted by theologians as well as fellow naturalists.²⁸

In 1792, therefore, as John Hunter began to outline his own views on such contentious issues, there had been isolated assaults on orthodox opinion, but there was still no notion of a single common ancestor, no consensus that species had changed over time, and certainly no idea of how such a process might occur. Society in the main held firm to the biblical version of the Creation and the Flood. Any divergence from this view was regarded as heresy. Even the young Charles Darwin still adhered to this version when he set out on the Beagle in 1831. After his own faith in it waned, his theories would be furiously attacked throughout the nineteenth century for their irreligious stance.²⁹

While Hunter may well have kept abreast of the assorted theories being advanced by his contemporaries, the beliefs encapsulated in his museum, and those he now put down on paper, were entirely his own, developed over a lifetime’s inquiry. Hunter had no doubts, on scientific or religious grounds, that life on earth had changed over time. His extensive collection of fossils, in which he placed his trophies side by side with their modern equivalents—“the resent”—was plain proof of that.³⁰ The process by which such life-forms could change had become a vital question for him. He had been preoccupied with deformities and variations within species since the late 1770s. In his study of freemartins, he had even put forward the startling suggestion that animals with separate male and female genders might originally have developed from the accidental occurrence of a natural hermaphrodite with two distinct sexual organs.³¹ “Is there ever, in the genera of animals that are natural hermaphrodites, a separation of the two parts forming distinct sexes?” he pondered. “If there is, it may account for the distinction of sexes ever having happened.” It was clear that he believed species were mutable and capable of gradually developing—evolving—into others. He was aware, too, from his connections with animal breeders, that variations in eye color could become permanent “with respect to the propagation of the animal, becoming so far a part of its nature, as to be continued in the offspring.”³²

By the late 1780s, Hunter had developed a fervent interest in artificial breeding—not only a vibrant eighteenth-century industry but a graphic demonstration of the way in which variations and deviations are passed down. As well as attempting to breed rare animals, including opossums, at Earls Court, he had tried to crossbreed different species. At one point, he successfully mated one of his cows with a buffalo belonging to the late marquis of Rockingham. ³³ This interest had first been sparked by the wolf-dog hybrid he had owned as a young man. Nearly thirty years later, he was still enthralled by the notion of interbreeding dogs and wolves, only now it was not so much experimental curiosity as an attempt to pinpoint whether the wolf and dog belonged, in his words, to the same species.³⁴

In the intervening years, there had been several successful efforts by menagerie owners to mate dogs and wolves. In 1785, Hunter had been promised a puppy bred from a she-wolf and a male greyhound by the animal dealer Gough; to his chagrin, a leopard in Gough’s menagerie killed Hunter’s pup, along with two others. Two years later, Hunter was more fortunate, obtaining a female puppy bred from the same wolf and another dog. Now attempting himself to mate his wolf hybrid with a dog, he pressed his friend Banks to procure testimonies from aristocrat acquaintances who had achieved the same end. In the meantime, Hunter had obtained a puppy born of a female jackal that had mated with a spaniel dog on a ship returning from the East Indies in 1786. He took his trophy to Earls Court, where it mated with a terrier. Hunter was like a delighted father when the jackal hybrid produced five puppies that November. One of its offspring was sent to Jenner, who wrote back, “The little jackal-bitch you gave me is grown a fine handsome animal; but she certainly does not possess the understanding of common dogs. She is easily lost when I take her out, and is quite inattentive to a whistle.”³⁵

Hunter’s observations on interbreeding, published in a paper to the Royal Society in 1787, had led him to conclude that the wolf, dog, fox, and jackal were indeed the same species. He based this assertion on the grounds that as well as sharing outward appearances, they could mate and produce offspring—a definition of species still commonly applied—although he overlooked the fact that most of the females had to be coerced or restrained in order to mate. Buffon, Hunter knew, had attempted the same trial—without success—in order to test his theory that wolves and dogs were merely varieties of one species, related through a common ancestor. Hunter had plainly come to the same opinion, remarking, “Here then being an absolute proof of the jackal being a dog, and the wolf being equally made out to be of the same species, it now therefore becomes a question whether the wolf is from the jackal, or the jackal from the wolf (supposing them but one origin)?” The fact that he suggested that the animals were different varieties rather than species mattered little. What was significant was an appreciation that similar life-forms were descended from a common ancestor—“one origin”—and had changed, considerably, over time. He shared Buffon’s belief that the different animals had migrated from an original population, in this case from the wolf, and had changed according to environmental and climatic conditions. Unequivocally outlining his belief that similar animals shared a common ancestor, Hunter proclaimed, “To ascertain the original animal of a species, all the varieties of that species should be examined, to see how far they have the character of the genus, and what resemblance they bear to the other species of the genus.”

Within Europe, only Buffon had dared to venture such heretical views. Within Britain, nobody had yet gone so far in challenging religious orthodoxy. Despite the very real risk that he could be condemned as a heretic, Hunter now determined to enlarge his controversial theories in print. In particular, he began work on two documents speculating on the nature of fossils, while at the same time compiling a plethora of essays and notes that ranged over his ideas on the entire animal kingdom.

Given his lengthy study and large collection of fossils, Hunter was the obvious person to be consulted when a hoard of fossilized bones was unearthed in a cave in Germany and sent for examination to the Royal Society in the early 1790s; he duly prepared a paper on his conclusions.³⁶ Studying the fossil bones, he found them curiously similar to those of a polar bear he possessed, yet almost twice the size, with the teeth in similar proportion. He concluded, as he had with the earlier mastodon bones, that the bones belonged to extinct animals akin to their modern-day counterparts. And he made plain that the process by which such life-forms had changed required “a vast series of years”; indeed, he repeated the phrase “many thousand years” several times. Though this careful terminology might just fit the orthodox estimate of the age of the earth, Hunter had no qualms about casting doubt on the story of the deluge. The remains of marine animals buried under several strata of rock indicated that the sea must have invaded the land many times, he declared, and remained there, he repeated again, for “thousands of years.”

If Hunter restrained his wildest calculations in the paper for the Royal Society, he felt no such constraints in the treatise he simultaneously produced to describe his own fossil collection.³⁷ In the slim two-part work, Hunter allied himself with Hutton’s uniformitarian theory, which held that geological features had been formed by the same progressive forces seen in modern times and that these had occurred over a vast period. Although Hunter’s pioneering contributions to geology would never be fully recognized, he gave an expert explanation of the formation of the earth’s key features, describing how rock strata had formed, how fossils had been made, and how the sea had produced gradual changes through erosion and deposition. He even speculated that the Thames valley had once been an arm of the “German Ocean”—the North Sea—which had covered much of the Low Countries, too. Having arranged each fossil in his collection alongside a portion of the rock strata in which it was found, Hunter observed that the same fossils were always discovered in the same strata; Hunter came to this conclusion nearly two decades before William Smith, later dubbed “the father of British geology,” described rock sequences from fossil samples. Most contentiously, Hunter took these assertions to their logical conclusion and denounced the biblical version of the Flood, proclaiming that “Forty days’ water overflowing the dry land could not have brought such quantities of sea-productions on its surface.”³⁸ Supposing that the sea had changed places with the land on several occasions, he remarked, “What number of thousand of years this would take, or how often this has happened, I will not pretend to say.”³⁹ But in speculating how long certain fossils might have existed in any singular state, he boldly proclaimed that “many retain their form for many thousand centuries.”

Such a blunt denial of religious orthodoxy was too much for Hunter’s Royal Society friends. In France, Buffon had been forced by the church to recant a similar view on the age of the earth; even in 1823, William Buckland would attempt to “prove” the veracity of the deluge. For Hunter to undermine the authority of the church at a time when revolutionary fever threatened the country was unthinkable. Certainly that was the staunch reaction of Maj. James Rennell, a distinguished geographer and RS fellow, who had been asked—either by Hunter or by stalwarts of the society—to peruse the treatise. Writing to Hunter after having read his document “three times,” Rennell urged him to change his time line from “many thousand centuries” to “many thousand years.” Rennell himself had “no quarrel with any opinions relating to the antiquity of the Globe,” he insisted, yet he warned, “There are a description of persons, very numerous and very respectable in every point but their pardonable superstitions, who will dislike any mention of a specific period that ascends beyond 6,000 years.” Evidently, while members of the Royal Society might entertain their doubts about the biblical story in the exalted seclusion of their cosy meetings, such heretical thoughts must not be aired in the public domain, especially at a time of social upheaval, as Rennell made plain. Questioning Hunter’s denial of the Flood and emphasizing his concerns by underlining key phrases, Rennell insisted, “Again in page 8 you have rather questioned the Knowledge of a Certain Person [Moses]; that also is tender ground with some people, and at this time we must not let the Vulgar know how far we believe in the Books of Moses.”⁴⁰

Whether or not Hunter bowed to Rennell’s concerns is unclear. The fact that two surviving manuscripts, both versions of the same document, refer to “thousands of years” rather than to “thousands of centuries” suggests that he did amend his treatise. According to Home, not always a reliable commentator but someone who was working closely at Hunter’s side at the time, Hunter refused to modify his comments and angrily withdrew the paper. Either way, Rennell’s intervention effectively suppressed Hunter’s unorthodox views—on the age of the earth and the deluge at least. The Royal Society never published the treatise, and it would gather dust for almost seventy years before the Royal College of Surgeons finally hurried it into print at the end of 1859, just a month after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published.

Even if he had been induced to amend or withdraw his written views on fossils to suit the Royal Society’s pious misgivings, there was no way Hunter could be persuaded to reform his radical beliefs. In the voluminous notes and essays he furiously dictated each evening, he now set out his controversial theories in their full, unrepentant glory. Ranging over natural history, geology, fossils, and anatomy, Hunter finally sought to lay down the overarching principles he believed governed all life on earth. Whether or not he intended to publish these daring ideas is unclear, although, given his disregard for convention and previous publishing record, it seems likely. Ultimately, they would be published in two lengthy volumes, entitled Essays and Observations on Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology and Geology, more than sixty years later. Together, they expounded the conclusions of a lifetime’s research while classifying the thousands of animals Hunter had studied into families of related species.

Unequivocably, in these assorted notes, Hunter outlined his views on the origins of life. First, he made tacit acknowledgment of the biblical story of the Creation and the Flood; then he proceeded to demolish its veracity step by step. Beyond this perfunctory denial of the accepted ideology he made no further reference to God, the Bible, or any divine mode of creation. It is dubious that Hunter saw himself as a crusading atheist, unlike his erstwhile patient David Hume, but he certainly displayed the opinions of a materialist, rejecting a divine plan of the world in line with his contemporary Erasmus Darwin. Although Hunter conformed to church rituals— he had grudgingly consented to be godparent to Jenner’s first son in 1789 with the comment, “Rather than the brat should not be a christian I will stand Godfather”—he had, of course, declared that any belief system depending on faith rather than fact demonstrated “a weakness of mind.”⁴¹ Some of his disciples would later seek to downplay his irreligious beliefs.

Certainly Hunter was not held back by religious sensibilities as Darwin would be. In the notes later published as Essays and Observations, he insisted not only that the earth was immensely old but that its life-forms had changed substantially. This process of alteration had been so profound, producing so many variations in species, Hunter declared, that “it becomes a doubt whether they were all original, or whether any one of them are original, or none of them; or, if any one be original, which that one is.”⁴² He made plain, too, that he believed similar species had descended from common ancestors, asserting, “To attempt to trace any natural production to its origin, or its first production, is ridiculous; for it goes back to that period, if ever such existed, of which we can form no idea, viz. the beginning of time. But, I think, we have reason to suppose there was a period in time in which every species of natural production was the same; there then being no variety in any species.”⁴³ The suggestion that there had initially been “no variety” in any species—in other words, only original species existed— pointed to a number of common ancestors, in line with Buffon’s view. Yet the possibility that these early beings had first stemmed from a single common ancestor was certainly implied in his remark that “it will be necessary to go back to the first or common matter of this globe, and give its general properties; then see how far these properties are introduced into the vegetable and animal operations.” Nor did he hesitate to suggest that new life-forms had emerged—another heresy—for he remarked that tail-less, or Manx, cats probably first arose “from a kitten being brought into the world without any tail.”⁴⁴ Equally, he reiterated his understanding that artificial breeding showed how variations in species were passed down through generations.

Going further, Hunter was unequivocal that all living things were interrelated: “We may observe that in Natural Things nothing stands alone; that everything in Nature has a relation to or connexion with some other natural production or productions; and that each is composed of parts common to most others but differently arranged.”⁴⁵ He declared, “Every property in man is similar to some property, either in another animal, or probably in a vegetable, or even in inanimate matter.” This applied most clearly when comparing the early embryo states of humans—“the most perfect animal”—and other creatures, as Hunter explained:

If we were capable of following the progress of increase of the number of the parts of the most perfect animal, as they first formed in succession from the very first, to its state of full perfection, we should probably be able to compare it with some one of the incomplete animals themselves, of every order of animals in the creation, being at no stage different from some of those inferior orders. Or in other words, if we were to take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we should probably find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage of the most perfect. ⁴⁶

So, more complex animals mirrored the most simple forms in their embryonic stages, Hunter argued. Precisely the same observation, noting the similarities between the embryos of a dog and a human, would help Darwin to appreciate the common ancestry of all life.⁴⁷ But if Darwin held back from speculating on the place of humans until his Descent of Man in 1871, Hunter had no such qualms. “The monkey in general may be said to be half beast and half man; it may be said to be the middle stage,” he declared.⁴⁸ Only the fact that the ape possessed toes shaped like fingers differentiated the two, he insisted. Most striking of all, Hunter laid out his views on the origins of different species, asking, “Does not the natural gradation of animals, from one to another, lead to the original species? And does not that mode of investigation gradually lead to the knowledge of that species? Are we not led on to the wolf by the gradual affinity of the different varieties in the dog? Could we not trace out the gradation in the cat, horse, cow, sheep, fowl, etc, in a like manner?”⁴⁹

Plainly, Hunter had not taken that crucial extra step and proposed that all life had developed from a single original ancestor, nor worked out the method by which such change happened, but this was a startling insight nevertheless. Writing almost seventy years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Hunter traversed much of the territory Darwin would later explore to formulate his theory of evolution. Ahead of all his contemporaries, with the possible exception of Buffon, he had appreciated that diverse animals had developed over vast periods of time from common ancestors. And if Hunter’s museum was not, as one devotee would later declare, a “museum of evolution,” certainly it displayed in the most graphic way how different life-forms were perfectly fitted to their environments.⁵⁰

John Hunter’s most controversial conclusions would never see the light of day in his own lifetime. Just as the Royal Society had successfully kept his radical views on the age of the earth under wraps, so his prescient theories on original species would also be concealed from public view—and by someone he regarded as one of his closest allies. Because his farsighted ideas languished unread for decades, Hunter’s contribution to theories of the origins of life would never be recognized. Ironically, when his ideas were finally rediscovered and published in 1861, two years after Darwin’s dramatic revelations shocked society, they were compiled and edited by Richard Owen, the man who had become Darwin’s most vehement critic. It was scarcely any wonder that in his preface Owen dolefully remarked, “Some may wish that the world had never known that Hunter thought so differently on some subjects from what they believed, and would have desired, him to think.” ⁵¹