Richard Bellon

Inspiration in the Harness of Daily Labor: Darwin, Botany, and the Triumph of Evolution, 1859–1868

Charles Darwin hoped that a large body of working naturalists would embrace evolution after the Origin of Species appeared in late 1859. He was disappointed. His evolutionary ideas at first made painfully little progress in the scientific community. But by 1863 the tide had turned dramatically, and within five years evolution became scientific orthodoxy in Britain. The Origins reception followed this peculiar trajectory because Darwin had not initially tied its theory to productive original scientific investigation, which left him vulnerable to charges of reckless speculation. The debate changed with his successful application of evolution to original problems, most notably orchid fertilization, the subject of a well‐received book in 1862. Most of Darwins colleagues found the argument of the Origin convincing when they realized that it functioned productively in the day‐to‐day work of science—and not before. The conceptual force of the Origin, however outwardly persuasive, acquired full scientific legitimacy only when placed “in the harness of daily labour.”

Charles Darwin Solves the “Riddle of the Flower”; Or, Why Don't Historians of Biology Know about the Birds and the Bees?

A frontispiece in Paul Knuth’s multivolume Handbuch der Blütenbiologie (1899) features Charles Darwin surrounded by Friedrich Hildebrand, Severin Axell, Federico Delpino and Fritz Müller (Figure 1). The shining star immediately above Darwin’s head and the ornate bush winding between the photographs unmistakably depict Darwin as both the sun around which these acolytes orbited and the trunk from which their work sprung. This iconography captures a key development in the history of nineteenth-century

A Sincere and Teachable Heart

Richard Bellon’s A Sincere and Teachable Heart: Self-Denying Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736-1859 analyzes how principles of conduct and duty grounded in self-discipline pervasively influenced British intellectual life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Introducing In Vivo

Endeavour has taken many forms over the years. Most recently, our predecessors Henry Nicholls and John Waller transformed it into a vibrant forum for historical and philosophical work that is scholarly, engaging, accessible, and richly illustrated. Before we assumed the editorship last year, we were already impressed with the opportunities their editorial vision had created to showcase scholarship that resonates beyond its disciplinary confines and speaks to issues of larger social, cultural, and political importance. We inherited a publication that is pioneering new opportunities for authors to experiment. A remarkable three-part essay by Mary P. Winsor that appeared in Endeavour last year illustrates the promises of experimentation. She drew upon extensive historical research to craft a fictional ‘‘dialogue’’ held in the afterlife between Charles Darwin and his contemporary, the zoologist Hugh Strickland. In this imaginative work, with its echoes of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, the protagonists wind through debates on taxonomic theory, scientific practice, and religious faith. Winsor’s unique approach allows her to evoke the emotional as well as the intellectual intensity that naturalists like Darwin and Strickland brought to their practice of taxonomy. Winsor’s posthumous dialogue—fanciful but also intensely rigorous—invests the history of Victorian systematics with a personal immediacy unmatched by standard scholarly accounts (many of the best written by Winsor herself). This is not to suggest that dialogue is inherently better than the standard forms of peer-review scholarship. But it is different and this difference allows Winsor to capture something real about the past that largely eludes standard scholarly accounts. We want make Endeavour a home for this type of innovation, not to compete with the standard academic article but to juxtapose it with different and complementary approaches. With that in mind, we introduce In Vivo, a new section of the journal that allows historians and philosophers of science, technology, and medicine to build upon their academic work to address recent social and cultural developments or inform contemporary policymaking. In Vivo, we hope, can do a small part to resolve a persistent tension in our profession. Although external factors—universities’ administrative priorities, the National Science Foundation’s broader impact criterion, repeated attacks on the relevance of the humanities—give us ample reason to connect our scholarship to the needs of non-professional audiences, internal professional pressures provide scant incentive to do so. At its worst, professional rewards flow most freely to work accessible only

The Oxford Movement: Faith and Obedience in a Tumultuous and Shifting World

John Henry Newman dated the start of the Oxford Movement to July 14, 1833. On that Sunday John Keble delivered an impassioned sermon before a large congregation in St. Marys. He responded furiously to a planned reform of the established Church of Ireland winding its way through Parliament. The ultimately successful Irish Temporalities Bill abolished ten of twenty-two Irish bishoprics to rationalize church finances and reduce the rates levied to support a wealthy church that served only a tenth of the population. Newman and his allies explicitly sought a second reformation. In their view, the reformed English church had freed itself from the corruptions of Rome only to fall under the yoke of the state. The Oxford Movement injected the High Anglican tradition, represented in an earlier generation by men like Bishop Samuel Horsley, with angry energy and intellectual depth.Keywords: Church; John Henry Newman; Liberalism; National Apostasy; Oxford Movement; Rome