Fascinated by the term ‘missing link’, I began to wonder about its origin. When was the term first used? That’s when I called on my friends by sending a message into the twittersphere, and thanks to the magic of teh intawebz, I was soon deluged with a letter from Professor Trellis of North Wales informative replies from my friends and relations colleagues. Here, by way of saying ‘thank you’, and also as a way of archiving these notes in the cybersphere for future reference, is a record of the replies I received.
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
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One Of Our Links Is Missing
- Date:
- Tuesday, 02 Jun e 2009 - 10:06 UTC
First off the blocks was Bob O’Hara’s cat, who sent me the full OED entry. The OED’s first use is from Charles Lyell – Chuck D’s geological mentor – in Elements of Geology, in 1851. Significantly, before the publication of The Origin:
A break in the chain implying no doubt many missing links in the series of geological monuments which we may some day be able to supply.The next record is Thomas Henry Huxley in ‘Further Remarks Human Remains [from] Neanderthal’ in Nat. Hist. Rev., in 1864 (after the Origin).
It by no means follows that he should have supposed the philosopher to be the ‘missing link’.Neanderthal Man was discovered in 1856, three years before The Origin was published. I believe the ‘philosopher’ here is Neanderthal Man himself.
The OED entry lists several other instances, mostly referring to a form intermediate between apes and man – though it’s interesting to see that the ad-men soon co-opted the imagery to suggest improvement and progression. For example, an advert in Collier’s magazine in 1904:
O'Sullivan Rubber Heels are now described as the missing link between wings and shoes. Their buoyancy is due to the elasticity of new rubber.… by which time the term was current in popular culture. In 1930, D. H. Lawrence wrote of a distasteful item in his postbag.
One woman ... wrote to me out of the blue: ‘You, who are a mixture of the missing-link and the chimpanzee, etc.’ and told me my name stank.Back on Twitter, @easternblot sent this fascinating find:
Earliest I can find in Google Books is 1873, a book called 'Caliban: The Missing Link'showing just how quickly the term had come into common usage after Lyell’s and Huxley’s usages. Meanwhile, @microecos pointed me to the use of the term in Chapter 6 of Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which, like Lyell’s citation, antedates the Origin (if not the Origin). Here Chambers is talking of ‘lowly’ clubmosses, once the giants of Coal-Measures forests:
The internal structure of the stem, and the character of the seed-vessels, shew them to have been a link between single-lobed and double-lobed plants, a fact worthy of note, as it favours the idea that, in vegetable, as well as animal creation, a progress has been observed, in conformity with advancing conditions. It is also curious to find a missing link of so much importance in a genus of plants which has long ceased to have a living place upon earth.Vestiges was published in 1844, so antedating Lyell by several years. Notably, it shows that evolution, or more properly ‘transformation’, (in the pre-Darwinian sense) was already thought to have had a progressive, improving character – something that Darwin’s theory ought to have abolished, but plainly hasn’t.
Finally, I received letters from those Fabulous Zimmer Brothers. No, not, as you’d be forgiven for imagining, a circus troupe specializing in wrestling hagfishes with their bare hands, but my friend Carl, the distinguished commentator on matters evolutionary, and his brother Ben, who is to lexicography what Sam Spade was to the Maltese Falcon. Ben took up the tweet and wrote about the term ‘missing link’ here, and goes into great detail about how Lyell used the term, both before and after the Origin.
So, many thanks, one and all, and if you find out any more ancient sources, particularly before Vestiges, do let me know at the usual address: Third Park Bench on the Left, the Esplanade, Cromer, Norfolk. In the Town Hall if wet, while stocks last.
Last updated: Tuesday, 02 Jun 2009 - 10:06 UTC
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Comments
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You might also look through A. O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being. I suspect the term would have been used (in Latin or French) in the 18thC; most likely Bonnet, the best exponent of the scala naturae. A missing link included the link between plants and animals (so-called “zoophytes”. See Peter Simon Pallas around 1766, who roundly attacked the chain and Bonnet.
Thanks John – I will take a look. I am an admirer of Bonnet – precocious, utterly brilliant, practically blind (from squinting at too many aphids) and virtually deaf from an early age, he became the Stephen Hawking of his day. Pallas, though – he was the first to describe the amphioxus, which he thought was a kind of slug, Limax lanceolatus.
S’all very interesting HG. One always dozes into the fallacy that Darwin alone had this flash of insight and accidentally launched a whole new sphere of scientific enterprise (launched a sphere? Seriously? -1pt for shocking waste of metaphor. Ed).
Instead, exercises like this show he was, if you will, or indeed if you won’t, the apotheosis of generations of diligent and careful observational scientists from different branches of Natural Philosophy.
Great stuff. and thank you Sir., Your &co….
Dr Brooks – you’re welcome. But I always thought Darwin did it deliberately.
Just to clarify, stephenjaygould.org is not officially associated with Gould, but rather is something of a fan site, compiling the writings of Gould and other evolutionary thinkers. I do not know that Gould himself ever noted Chambers’ use of “missing link.” For the record.
@Neil – thanks for the clarification. I have edited the post accordingly.
Fascinating stuff, Henry.
In Vestiges, is the word ‘progress’ to be taking as how we would understand the word today? There is talk in that snippet of ‘advancing conditions’, and maybe the sense is simply one of going forward in time?
A good question. Part of the problem is that Darwinismus is now so much a part of our
bacterialculture that it’s hard to understand what people meant by words such as ‘progress’ before the Origin. My speculation (and it is only speculation – the Big Ol’ Silverback would certainly have a view on this) is that it would have been meant in a transcendental rather than a transformational sense. In the nature-philosophic view – which was all the rage when Darwin was a young man – each rung on the ladder of creation was meant to indicate a striving towards ultimate perfection, even if the creatures on each step didn’t actually transform, themselves.Paging the Big Ol’ Silverback… (checks watch). Ah, he’s probably down the pub.
Isn’t he always? He is in Queensland, after all.
I went to a hippy university, and our biology profs frowned on the usage of “higher” and “lower” forms. We had to say “ancestral” and “derived”.
Actually Henry, he’s now in Sydney. Unless he moved back. I had beer with him once. So did Audra, actually.
Jenny, that’s fantastic. I keep telling people off for saying ‘higher’ and ‘lower’. In this context, of course.
Oberlin had it almost right. The PC (paleontologically correct) terms are primitive (rather than ancestral) and, yes indeed, derived.
‘Primitive’ is loaded though, isn’t it?
Your primitive weapons are no match etc.
By the time I got to Oberlin we were learning “basal” and “derived.” The neontologists I know however, bristle at these terms because every node on a cladogram is symmetrical: on a three-taxon tree humans can easily be illustrated as “basal” or “primitive” (ha) with respect to turtles and crocodiles. If you are a hard-core Hennigian (and aren’t we all these days) you can instead go with “plesiomorphic” and “apomorphic”—often referring to character states but not infrequently metonymically applied to taxa as well.
On a different note, I stumbled across a 19th C. book entitled The missing link; or, Bible-women in the homes of the London poor by Ellen Henrietta Ranyard. Obviously the sense of the phrase here is rather different than what we have been discussing, but the publication date is interesting: 1859.