HENRY H. CHEEK AND TRANSFORMISM: NEW LIGHT ON CHARLES DARWIN'S EDINBURGH BACKGROUND

Evidence for the transformist ideas espoused by Henry H. Cheek (1807–33), a contemporary of Charles Darwin's at the University of Edinburgh, sheds new light on the intellectual environment of Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Cheek was the author of several papers dealing with the tr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Notes and records of the Royal Society of London 2015-06, Vol.69 (2), p.155-171
Main Author:	Jenkins, Bill
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Biological Evolution Charles Darwin Cheek Evolution Geography Henry H. Cheek History of medicine and histology History, 18th Century History, 19th Century Scotland Transformism University Of Edinburgh
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	Evidence for the transformist ideas espoused by Henry H. Cheek (1807–33), a contemporary of Charles Darwin's at the University of Edinburgh, sheds new light on the intellectual environment of Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Cheek was the author of several papers dealing with the transmutation of species influenced by the theories of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and the Comte de Buffon (1707–88). Some of these were read to student societies, others appeared in the Edinburgh Journal of Natural and Geographical Science, which Cheek edited between 1829 and 1831. His writings give us a valuable window onto some of the transformist theories that were circulating among Darwin's fellow medical students in the late 1820s, to which Darwin would have been exposed during his time in Edinburgh, and for which little other concrete evidence survives.
ISSN:	0035-9149 1743-0178