W.B. Clarke's Scientific Correspondence

Ann Moyal, The Web of Science. The Scientific Correspondence of the Rev. W.B. Clarke, Australia’s Pioneer Geologist, 2 vols (Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing: 2003)

Essay Review by Julian Holland

Originally published in Prometheus, Vol. 23, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 356-263 and reproduced with permission.

Correspondence has been a vital aspect of scientific advance since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.  With the spread of printing, personal scientific correspondence provided the basis for scientific publication in journals such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.  In the nineteenth century, letters evolved into formal (and impersonal) scientific papers being written for increasing numbers of specialist scientific journals.  Yet, this did not supersede personal scientific correspondence.

With the quickening pace of scientific discovery and the codification of new techniques and disciplines, the nineteenth century saw a massive expansion in the number of people (nearly all of them men) engaged in scientific activities and sharing their thoughts and skills on paper.  The establishment of regular forums for direct interaction, such as the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, only increased the scope for written communication.  The spread of colonisation opened new fields for scientific endeavour and stimulated parallel studies in many disciplines.  Networks of correspondence underpinned the elucidation and interpretation of scientific evidence in disparate parts of the world and provided fuel for argument between colonial and ‘home’ scientists over their relative fitness for providing those interpretations and the accompanying rewards of priority.

Indeed, between the introduction of regular pre-paid postal services – the ‘penny post’ began in England in 1840 – and the advent of the telephone in the late 1870s, the letter was the sole means for long distance scientific correspondence.  This is exactly the period in which the Rev. W.B. Clarke (1798-1878) built up an extensive web of scientific correspondents which spanned the globe from his base in Sydney.

William Branwhite Clarke was born in Constable’s village of East Bergholt, Suffolk, the son of the local school master.  Following his schooling Clarke went to Cambridge to take holy orders.  His active mind drew him to literature and the classics, leading to the production of volumes of poetry and contributions to literary magazines.  This habit of writing served him subsequently in his correspondence and his scientific journalism, and no doubt in the preparation of sermons.

By the 1820s geology was developing as a vigorous discipline in England.  Clarke fell under the spell of geology in Cambridge guided by the mineralogist Edward Daniel Clarke and the newly appointed Woodwardian professor of geology, Adam Sedgwick.  Both professors were ordained Anglican ministers so despite the wilder religious hostility to the claims of geology concerning the antiquity of the earth and processes of change, young Clarke had models for a liberal and harmonious view of the relations between religion and geology.

There is a breathless enthusiasm in the hand-written election certificate which Clarke took to London in 1826 to become a fellow of the Geological Society of London.[1]  He had by then conducted several geological excursions, including visits to continental Europe, and over the following years produced numerous geological papers.

In the absence of connections and patronage, his career as an Anglican minister was a modest one.  A growing family and considerations of health (as he later asserted) led him to emigrate to Sydney in 1839.  He remained a practising minister throughout his career but undertook extensive geological fieldwork in New South Wales as opportunity arose, and conducted official mineralogical surveys for the government.  He also contributed numerous articles on scientific topics, especially exploration and meteorology as well as geology, to the local press.  He was long associated with the Australian Museum in Sydney, as secretary in the early 1840s and later as a trustee, and was a founder and active participant in the Royal Society of New South Wales.  And amid everything else, he maintained a vigorous and wide-ranging correspondence.  It is the scientific component of his correspondence that has now been published.

Personal letters provide key evidence for the elucidation of an intellectual life.  This is reflected in nineteenth century biographies in the mode of ‘life and letters’.  In the twentieth century, there have been a number of major projects to publish the complete correspondence of intellectual figures in numerous volumes.  These are often extended over lengthy periods.  It was decided in 1901 to publish an edition of Leibniz’s works, including letters, the first volume appearing in 1914.  Despite the political upheavals of the century, volumes continued to appear into the 1990s.[2]  The Charles Darwin Correspondence Project is a prominent example in the late twentieth century, having reached volume 13 in 2002.[3]  The internet offers an alternative to hardcopy publishing with the added advantage of scope for revision.  The correspondence of the photographic pioneer Henry Fox Talbot has been prepared to high scholarly standards and published on the Web.[4]

The preparation of an edition of intellectual correspondence is a significant enterprise, usually undertaken with extensive institutional backing.  It is therefore remarkable that Ann Moyal, as an independent scholar, has had the wherewithal and stamina to locate and transcribe the nearly 900 letters that make up this two-volume edition of W.B. Clarke’s scientific correspondence.  Dr Moyal has made a diverse and significant contribution to the unearthing and interpretation of Australia’s scientific and technological history over some forty years, Clarke having been with her in a sense for much of that period.  Clarke featured prominently in Moyal’s 1976 book Scientists in Nineteenth Century Australia.[5]

The first volume of The Web of Science provides an extensive biographical introduction which emphasises a number of themes that emerge from the correspondence.  This is followed by 402 letters spanning the years 1836 to 1863.  In the second volume, the correspondence from 1864 to 1878 is followed by a geological table, a glossary, a list of manuscript sources, a very substantial ‘scientific bibliography of W.B. Clarke’, a bibliography of secondary sources, a register of the 895 letters giving their sources, and two indexes, one general and one of people.  Pagination is continuous across the two volumes.

Clarke’s outward letters are transcribed either from the repository of the recipient’s correspondence or from drafts or copies preserved in Clarke’s own papers.  Very occasionally some of the letters were published in newspapers or periodicals.  The majority of the letters are those sent to Clarke.

The task of transcribing such letters confronts several difficulties.  The original manuscript can be fragile, torn or incomplete.  The context of a letter may be obscure, particularly where only one side of an exchange is available.  And then there is the handwriting!  So often the letters end with an apology for the hasty scrawl, but the next mail was just about to go, when missing the boat (literally) could mean a delay of weeks.  Clarke’s handwriting was a trial to his correspondents.  Adam Sedgwick in England, gouty and disgruntled, complained repeatedly of the difficulty of reading Clarke’s letters:

            By the way [Sedgwick wrote in 1846 in reply to several letters from the previous year], it is no easy task to read them, & it will employ me the whole morning.  I punish all my correspondents with my abominable scrawl: but you pay me back with interest: for your hieroglyphics are most formidable & I have given up on some of your letters in absolute despair of making them out completely (letter 70).

Moyal has dealt with such difficulties with occasional insertions of ‘[word obscured]’.  For the most part these instances do little to interfere with an understanding of the discussion.[6]

In support of the letters Moyal has provided extensive notes at the conclusion of each.  An often substantial biographical sketch is given the first time a correspondent writes to Clarke.  Other notes provide diverse explanatory background on people, events or publications mentioned.

The original letters contain numerous sketches of fossil specimens and geological strata.  These have been entirely omitted from the published edition.  This was probably governed by considerations of cost but it is regrettable.  The sketches would have enlivened the printed text and in some instances enabled the reader to make sense of relevant passages.  There is, however, a stronger reason from regretting the omission.  The sketches are an integral part of the process of communication of ideas.  As John Macculloch remarked in the early nineteenth century, ‘To the geologist, this art [of drawing] is invaluable, since there is much that words can never convey; while it prevents endless circumlocutions and details, which, even when given, leave much in obscurity and doubt.’[7]  The sketches are part of the cognitive content of Clarke’s correspondence and not merely an embellishment.

The publication of Clarke’s scientific correspondence is likely to reveal more letters than Moyal has traced.  The possibility of a second edition, perhaps on the Internet, would provide an opportunity to incorporate these letters and to amend various errors in proper names and scientific terms.

The letters reveal much about Clarke’s geological interests and activities as one would expect, especially the long-running issue of the dating of the coal strata in New South Wales and matters relating to gold and Clarke’s role in its discovery.  Meteorology is another prominent theme, especially in the correspondence with the retired naval captain Phillip Parker King.  As the recording of topography was important to geological surveying Clarke took great interest in the advent of the aneroid barometer as a more convenient means for determining altitude than the mercurial mountain barometer.[8]  The correspondence shows several responses to the aneroid.

Rather than emphasizing the content of Clarke’s correspondence as such, however, it is perhaps of interest to readers of Prometheus to examine what the letters reveal about the processes of communication in the nineteenth century.  That Clarke preserved so much of his correspondence shows that it was very important to him and reflected his sense of the significance of his scientific work.  Although Clarke was not one of the major figures of Victorian science, he built a network which drew together such prominent scientists as Sedgwick, Murchison and Darwin as well as many minor figures and numerous others in between.  The correspondence thus serves to show the complexity of scientific engagement among a great variety of people.

That Clarke was operating in a colony remote from the imperial centre gave him certain advantages in building such a network.  Had he been in London so much of what was put on paper would have been said face to face at meetings of the Geological Society.  Like Darwin in self-imposed exile in Downe, Clarke was reliant on correspondence for most of his scientific dialogue.  While he did not have Darwin’s scientific pre-eminence or focus of intellectual purpose he did have a geographical and intellectual advantage for his work based in Sydney.  His extensive geological knowledge was of considerable advantage to New South Wales and adjacent colonies, and the knowledge he gained from his own fieldwork and the collating of information from the other Australasian colonies made him a worthwhile correspondent for savants in Britain.

Although by the 1850s Clarke’s prominence made him a target for people seeking advice, it is clear that he initiated many of the exchanges with scientifically minded men in other Australasian colonies and further afield as well, men such as Ronald Campbell Gunn and Charles Gould in Tasmania, Thomas Burr in South Australia Frederick Barlee in Western Australia and James Hector among others in New Zealand.  Clarke drew local geological knowledge from such people while also providing advice and encouragement along with copies of his own publications.  In the 1860s Victoria maintained a Geological Survey, the most vigorous geological campaign in the country, and Clarke engaged in an active correspondence with several of the scientific staff.  When the survey was terminated – ‘ruthlessly swept away’ says George Ulrich (letter 487) – in 1868, Clarke was instrumental in getting one of the Victorian geologists, Christopher D’Oyly Aplin appointed to a post in Queensland, as he had done earlier for Richard Daintree.  Similarly he seems to have been instrumental in getting Charles Gould (the ornithologist’s son) a geological post in Western Australia when funds dried up in Tasmania.

Clarke had a knack of developing warm friendships, even with much younger men such as Daintree and the Sydney University geologist Alexander Morrison Thomson.  ‘My dear Clarke’, Daintree wrote in 1863, ‘I think we might manage to drop the Mr for I shall have to write to you rather often for the future I’m afraid’ (letter 378).  Even with men he had not met, the correspondence provided opportunities for the exchange of fellow feeling with a sympathetic colleague.  Henry Piddington in Calcutta bemoaned the lack of scientific support in 1848:

            The penalty one pays for all scientific research in India is to be thought ‘fit for nothing else’.  The road to preferment is to be a first rate tiger or hog hunter and to be grossly ignorant of the language, manners and customs of the people – to be notoriously in debt – & be the editor of a scurrilous newspaper (letter 98).

Such was the venting of feelings that this global network of correspondence made possible.

In order to keep informed in geological and other scientific developments Clarke needed to obtain journals and other publications.  Rather than having them sent willy nilly through the post, Clarke had an agent in London who accumulated material to send as a parcel from time to time.  This was the bookseller Richardson of 23 Cornhill who is mentioned over a long period of years.  James M. Richardson was not only a prominent bookseller – he was chairman of a committee of booksellers seeking to maintain restrictive trade practices in the 1830s – but also a stockbroker.[9]  There were presumably commercial advantages in provided such a shipping agency service but the published letters shed no light on Clarke’s financial arrangements with Richardson.

Other figures also played a personal role in the maintenance of the extended networks of communication.  In 1846 Adam Sedgwick advised Clarke that if he had a packing case to send – presumably containing fossils or other specimens – it should be addressed care of the porter of the Geological Society in London.  Sedgwick had a running account with the porter who would settle the fees.  Without such a person on the spot such shipments could languish interminably:

            If any delay occurs for want of an agent [Sedgwick advised] the boxes are put in a kind of wharf lumber room & forgotten.  I remember being in this way kept out of a box of specimens from Madeira for two or three years, tho’ I applied for it again and again personally & by agents: and at last it only came to me on the return to England of the friend who had sent it.  He routed it out by a personal application to the Captain who had brought it to England (letter 70).

Given these difficulties it is remarkable how readily Clarke and others were willing to lend books and specimens to people in remote locations.  It was often the case though that parcels were entrusted to friends sailing between the ports of the correspondents.

Among those habitually at sea, the officers of the Royal Navy had a special role in linking the scattered intellectual elite of the British Empire.  On arriving in a colonial port the naval officers were a source of news from other parts of the empire as well as information on scientific matters such as curious meteorological phenomena encountered on the voyage.  And the resident scientists provided intellectual stimulus to punctuate the isolation of the years at sea.  While naval officers were at times prevailed upon to courier parcels they could also look to the residents for support.  Frederick Evans, master of HMS Acheron stationed in New Zealand, wrote to Clarke in 1850.  He had heard that HMS Rattlesnake was to return to home and thought he might be able to swap with Rattlesnake’s master as his absence from England ‘has caused much affliction in my little domestic circle’.  It was a delicate matter and Evans wished Clarke to talk to Owen Stanley, Captain of the Rattlesnake: ‘I am sure you will pardon my apparent liberty in soliciting your good offices on a matter so foreign to your ordinary occupation’ (letter 114).

In addition to the sketches which form a part of the original letters, other illustrations accompany them. When in May 1845 Clarke asked Sedgwick for a spare copy of his portrait ‘that Australians may take cognizance of your visage!’, Sedgwick grumbled that ‘I have had at least 20 similar applications, & I am beginning to be tired of them for the print is not my property ... I am compelled (rather against my will) to go to a shop & pay for it’. Eventually Sedgwick sent the ‘lithograph of my own Phis.’ which Clarke acknowledged in June 1847: ‘You are in an Australian wood frame over my drawing room mantle-piece and very much you are admired’ (letters 61, 70, 75, 82).

In 1870 though, it is a very different matter, when de Koninck adds a post script: ‘May I be so bold as to request you to send me a photograph of yourself’.  He would send one of himself shortly (letter 525).  In fact there are frequent references to photographs from the early 1860s.  In 1861 Clarke wrote to Charles Darwin enclosing a stereoscopic view of an area under discussion.  The photograph ‘pleased me much;’ Darwin replied, ‘for it has vividly recalled to my mind the views from the Blue Mountains’ (Letters 322, 330).  How Clarke obtained his photographs is not always clear but some of them came from Daintree who is better remembered today as a photographer than as a geologist.  ‘Any photographs you have of mine, or may wish to have are entirely at your service for any purpose you please’, Daintree assured Clarke in 1863 (letter 377).

Publication was of course an essential part of communicating science and much of Clarke’s correspondence touches on publication in various ways.  Reports and papers are sent, advice on the costs of figuring specimens given.  Clarke was an inveterate contributor of articles and papers in addition to the reports he prepared for the government.  He sent papers to the Geological Society in London but he published extensively in Australia also.  The ‘Sydney Herald [is] our only scientific publication in N.S.W.’ he informed Sedgwick in 1842 (letter 33).  Clarke contributed numerous articles, reviews, editorials and letters to the Sydney Morning Herald between 1841 and 1874, covering a broad range of scientific subjects.

In the 1840s the principal scientific periodical in Australia was the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science, founded while Sir John Franklin was governor.  Clarke contributed to this but found it difficult to obtain in Sydney.  ‘It occurs to me also to request whether it would not be admirable,’ Clarke suggested to the editor Ronald Campbell Gunn, ‘to have some agent, say Mr Colman, Booksellers or Mr Ford both of George St. Sydney, from whom the numbers could be procured’.  But as Gunn replied ‘A fair number of all the early Nos were sent to a Bookseller in Sydney for sale, but no acct sales or proceeds were ever received so that I now propose to forward Nos to all applicants direct’ (letters 71, 76).  Here we see the fragility of scientific infrastructure in colonial Australia.  Quite a number of scientific journals were short lived but major newspapers were enduring.

As an increasingly prominent expert, Clarke became a target for people seeking advice on matters of potential economic gain.  Hopeful correspondents sent him mineral specimens to identify.  He was fortunate in being able to pass them on to Dr Thomson for analysis but it was clearly an unwanted burden:  ‘If you can give me your opinion before Monday’, Clarke wrote to Thomson in 1868, ‘it will save me some letter writing, as persons who send such matters for examination write & write if they don’t get answers by return of post’ (letter 478).  This was a common problem for scientific figures.  Sedgwick had grumbled to Clarke a decade earlier:

            Sometimes for many days together, I literally do no work but what is employed in answering the questions of my correspondents–men who have no claim upon me, who can give me no real information; who know absolutely nothing of geology; yet who smother me with questions which they do not know the drift of: cannot or will not understand my answers when I do my best to answer them; and yet are mightily offended if I remain silent (letter 230).

Here we see the gentleman’s dilemma in the ‘moral economies of exchange’.  For scientists like Clarke and Sedgwick, correspondents could be a valuable source of specimens or information.  More generally there was a role in aiding economic development, at least for Clarke.  For every ‘useful’ unsolicited correspondent there were probably several who were merely a burden.  As gentlemen the scientists were obliged to respond. Anne Secord has analysed the rituals of exchange between artisans and gentlemen in scientific correspondence in early nineteenth-century Britain.[10]  In the more fluid social conditions of colonial Australia one might expect less deferential approaches to the gentleman expert.  Either way it is clear that the public recognition which such public experts strove for also brought them an unwanted claim on their time.

The natural sciences have on occasion been stigmatised as glorified stamp collecting. However unfair this may be it is perhaps not surprising that Clarke’s correspondence provides some early examples of interest in stamp collecting.  The Victorian age was an age of things, and stamps by their size, variety and design readily lent themselves to a culture of collecting.[11]  John Edward Gray, keeper of zoology at the British Museum, claimed to have begun collecting stamps on the very day the Penny Black was first issued in 1840.

Stamps reflect the rapidly expanding patterns of postal communication in the mid nineteenth century and became a way of displaying national character and identity.  The first mention of stamps in Clarke’s correspondence comes in a letter from the Belgian palaeontologist Laurent de Koninck who had undertaken to describe some of Clarke’s palaeozoic fossils.  This represents an expansion beyond the English-speaking sphere of Clarke’s previous correspondence and perhaps he had been encouraged to send some stamps to open the exchange of letters:

            I thank you most warmly for the postage stamps that you have had the kindness to send me.  Since you tell me that you have procured some for the children of my learned colleague [James Dwight] Dana [at Yale], I believe that I will give both him and you pleasure by enclosing in my letter some postage stamps which were sent to me by one of my little protégés who hopes to receive in exchange some of the numerous special stamps which are current in the U.S.A. and which have not been defaced there (letter 409).

This was written in February 1864, the year in which Georges Herpin coined the term philatélie in Paris.

These various matters reflecting the nature of communication in the nineteenth century, its processes, difficulties and character, are largely independent of the reasons why many readers would turn to the correspondence of a scientifically active Anglican minister in colonial Australia, but they illustrate the way in which the publication of original documents can reveal aspects of the past that evade the purposes of writers of historical monographs.  The Web of Science is a pleasure to read as much for its incidentals as for its scientific dialogues.

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Uploaded January 2007