Edward Blyth

  Edward Blyth (December 23, 1810 - December 27, 1873) was an English zoologist and chemist. He is known as one of the founders of Indian zoology.

Blyth was born in London in 1810. In 1841 he travelled to India to become the curator of the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. He set about updating the museum's catalogues, publishing a Catalogue of the Birds of the Asiatic Society in 1849. He was prevented from doing much fieldwork himself, but received and described bird specimens from Hume, Tickell, Swinhoe and others. He remained as curator until 1862, when ill-health forced his return to England. His The Natural History of the Cranes was published in 1881.

Species bearing his name include Blyth's Hawk-eagle, Blyth's Reed Warbler, Southern Blyth's Leaf-Warbler and Blyth's Pipit.

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Early life and work

Blyth was the son of a clothier and he initially worked as a druggist but quit in 1837 to seek a living as an author and editor. He was offered a position of curator at the museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1841. He was so poor that he needed an advance of 100 pounds to make his trip to Calcutta. In India, Blyth was poorly paid (the Asiatic Society did not expect to find a European curator for the salary that they could offer) with a salary of pound 300 per year for twenty years and a house allowance of 4 pounds per month. He got married in 1854 and he tried various approaches to supplement his income. He wrote under a pseudonym to the Indian Sporting Review and also was involved in trading live animals between India and Britain to cater to wealthy collectors in Britain and India. In this venture he sought the collaboration of various eminent people including Charles Darwin and John Gould, both of whom declined the offers.^[1]

Although a curator of a museum with multiple areas of work, he contributed largely to ornithology often forsaking other areas of work. His employers were unhappy in 1847 at his failure to produce a catalog of the museum. There were also factions in the Asiatic Society that were against Blyth and he complained to Richard Owen in 1848:

They intrigue in every way to get rid of me; accuse me of being an Ornithologist, and that the society did not want an ornithologist...I could astonish you by various statements of what I have to put up with but forbear.

—quoted in Brandon-Jones, 1997

His work on ornithology led him to be recognized as the father of Indian ornithology a title which was later transferred to Allan Octavian Hume.^[2]

Mr. Blyth, who is rightly called the Father of Indian Ornithology, "was by far the most important contributor to our knowledge of the Birds of India." Seated, as the head of the Asiatic Society's Museum, he, by intercourse and through correspondents, not only formed a large collection for the Society, but also enriched the pages of the Society's Journal with the results of his study, and thus did more for the extension of the study of the Avifauna of India than all previous writers. There can be no work on Indian Ornithology without reference to his voluminous contributions. ...

—James Murray

Blyth's role in the development of Natural Selection

Edward Blyth accepted the principle that species could be modified over time, and his writings had a major influence on Charles Darwin. Blyth wrote three major articles on variation, discussing the effects of artificial selection and describing the process of natural selection as restoring organisms in the wild to their archetype (rather than forming new species). These articles were published in 'The Magazine of Natural History' between 1835 and 1837.^[3][4] He was among the first to recognise the significance of Wallace's paper "On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of Species" and brought it to the notice of Darwin in a letter written in Calcutta on December 8, 1855:

What think you of Wallace’s paper in the Ann. N. Hist.? Good! Upon the whole! Wallace has, I think, put the matter well; and according to his theory, the various domestic races of animals have been fairly developed into species. A trump of a fact for friend Wallace to have hit upon!^[5]

Darwin took little notice of the paper, thinking it typical of ideas which we would now call progressive creationism, though it can now be seen as a precursor to Wallace's essay of February 1858 On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties which finally compelled the much delayed publication of Darwin's theory. There can be no doubt of Darwin's regard for Edward Blyth: in the first chapter of The Origin of Species he writes "...Mr Blyth, whose opinion, from his large and varied stores of knowledge, I should value more than that of almost any one..."^[6]

Loren Eiseley, Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, spent decades tracing the origins of the ideas attributed to Darwin. In a 1979 book,^[7] he claimed that ‘the leading tenets of Darwin's work–the struggle for existence, variation, natural selection and sexual selection–are all fully expressed in Blyth's paper of 1835’.(Eiseley, 1979:55) He also cites a number of rare words, similarities of phrasing, and the use of similar examples, which he regards as evidence of Darwin's debt to Blyth.(Eiseley, 1979:59–62) Blyth had discussed natural selection, but Eiseley didn't realize that most biologists did so in the generations before Darwin. Natural selection ranked as a standard item in biological discourse – but with a crucial difference from Darwin's version: the usual interpretation invoked natural selection as part of a larger argument for created permanency. Natural selection, in this negative formulation, acted only to preserve the type, constant and inviolate, by eliminating extreme variants and unfit individuals who threatened to degrade the essence of created form. The theologian William Paley had earlier presented the following variant of this argument, doing so to refute (in later pages) a claim that modern species preserve the good designs winnowed from a much broader range of initial creations after natural selection had eliminated the less viable forms: “The hypothesis teaches, that every possible variety of being hath, at one time or other, found its way into existence (by what cause of in what manner is not said), and that those which were badly formed, perished”

The way in which Blyth himself argued about the modification of species can be illustrated by an extract concerning the adaptations of carnivorous mammals:

However reciprocal...may appear the relations of the preyer and the prey, a little reflection on the observed facts suffices to intimate that the relative adaptations of the former only are special, those of latter being comparatively vague and general; indicating that there having ben a superabundance which might serve as nutriment, in the first instance, and which, in many cases, was unattainable by ordinary means, particular species have therefore been so organized (that is to say, modified upon some more or less general type or plan of structure,) to avail themselves of the supply.^[8]

Return from India

Blyth returned to London on March 9, 1863 to recover from ill health. He was to get a full year's pay for this sick leave. He however had to borrow money from John Henry Gurney and continued his animal trade. Around 1865 he began to help Thomas C. Jerdon in the writing of the Birds of India but had a mental breakdown and had to be kept in a private asylum. He was a corresponding member of the Zoological Society and was elected an extraordinary member of the British Ornithological Union, nominated by Alfred Newton. He later took to drinking and was convicted for assaulting a cab driver. He died of heart disease in December 1873.^[1]

Other works

Blyth edited the section on 'Mammalia, Birds, and Reptiles' in the English edition of Cuvier's Animal Kingdom published in 1840, inserting many observations, corrections, and references of his own.

References