Bolton and Darwin

• John Pennington Thomasson (1841 to 1904)
• Charles Clement Coe (1830-1921)
• Dr. Philip Brookes Mason (1842-1903)

John Pennington Thomasson (1841 to 1904)

John Thomasson was born 19 May 1841. The Thomasson’s were a well-respected family of Bolton Quakers and his father, Thomas Thomasson, was a great philanthropist (a philanthropist is a person who gives their own time and money to try and benefit society as a whole).

Around 1862 he joined the cotton spinning firm founded by his grandfather at Mill Hill, Bolton. From 1871 he ran No. 3 mill under the old name of John Thomasson and Son. In 1873 he was asked to stand as Member of Parliament for Bolton. He declined, but in 1880 he stood with John Kynaston Cross in the double member constituency of Bolton. They were both successful, and for the first time in 28 years two liberals had been elected. He served for 5 years, losing his seat in 1884 when the party was split over the issue of the Irish Home Rule.

Thomasson was an early supporter of Bolton’s Museums. He gave £1,000 to the borough to allow the completion of the Chadwick Museum in Queen’s Park. This was the predecessor of the current museum. In 1890 he gave Mere Hall, formerly the residence of Sir Benjamin Dobson, to the town as a gallery and public park, along with a further £5,000 for alterations. This became the original Bolton Art Gallery. Over his lifetime he made regular purchases for the museum, often advised by his cousin John Rooke Pennington, a local solicitor who ran a museum at Castleton, Derbyshire. The contents of this museum were later purchased by Bolton Museum.

Thomasson was also a keen natural historian, with a particular interest in the nesting behaviour of birds. In 1875 he wrote to Charles Darwin, correcting some information on flycatcher nests. In 1876 his father died. In his will he left £1,000 to Thomas Henry Huxley. In writing to Huxley, JP Thomasson said this was 'a token of [my father’s] great appreciation of your services in the causes of truth & progress'. Thomasson and his wife, Katharine, later dined with Huxley in London.

John Thomasson was made a Freeman of the borough in 1902 and died 16 May 1904 aged 62.

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Charles Clement Coe (1830-1921)

When we think of religious opposition to Darwinism, it is all too easy to characterise it as biblically literal creationists denying science. But this does not reflect the thinking of the time and does great disservice to the many critics who were educated and capable scientists. Their objections were drawn from valid scientific concerns. One such man was the Reverend Charles Clement Coe.

Born in King’s Lynn on the 8th February 1830, Coe was educated at University College, London and Manchester College, Oxford (at that time based in London). Manchester College was a 'dissenting academy' founded 1786 and prided itself on religious independence. However, there is no record of Coe graduating from Manchester. Records show he was there up till his final year, but he is not listed as being in the final class.

He became a Unitarian minister shortly after leaving Manchester College, and served until 1909, dying in 1921 aged 91. From 1874 to 1895 he was minister at Bank Street Chapel, Bolton. While here, he wrote many anti-Darwinian essays, culminating in 1895 in the 600 page Nature vs Natural Selection: An Essay on Organic Evolution.

This was not a knee-jerk reaction. It represented at least 15 years research and thought. Though very religious, Coe was certainly no literalist. In fact, he abhorred the very idea, saying: 'The authority of an infallible bible... (avoids) the duty of forming opinions'. This is an approach to theology that has it’s roots in the very earliest Christian scholarship. He hated superstition and once commented that he was staggered that, in the mid-1800s, anyone could possibly still believe in astrology.

He was eloquent and intelligent. Unitarians like to include philosophy, poetry, science and ideas from other religions in their teachings, not just the bible. Coe was no different. His writings quote the romantic poets and Shakespeare. He seems to have had a particular taste for Hamlet. Many of his ideas bucked the trend of established natural science, not least the notion of love between animals (something that is still not widely accepted today, although support for the idea is growing). He wasn’t a trained naturalist, but he keenly believed that any reasonable, intelligent man, armed with the facts, was as well qualified as any 'expert' to comment.

'Who would think of demanding the judge and the barristers and the jury should undergo an elementary course of chemistry before they took part in the trial of a reputed poisoner?'.

He believed the skills needed to observe and record were different from the skills needed to interpret, which meant great accumulators of evidence would not necessarily be any good at developing a theory.

Coe thought science needed a 'Devil’s Advocate' to critically examine theories and argue from a contrary position. He enjoyed this self-appointed role and believed researchers would appreciate his efforts. It was in this way he decided to take on Darwinism. But what started out as an exercise in critical assessment developed into genuine dissent. His problem wasn’t with evolution. It was with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. He saw it as: 'as unreliable as it is certainly merciless and cruel' and considered it 'one among many possible ways of explaining the fact of evolution'. Coe was quite clear that the evidence for the 'transmutation of species' was strong, and that the idea of species as fixed entities had been satisfactorily disproved.

Essentially, his problem was that he didn’t see how natural selection could select anything in the first place. Because artificial selection is undone by interbreeding, Coe believed the same would be true with Natural Selection. This is what’s called the 'the average of the race' or the 'tendency to mediocrity'. He was very clear in his objection: 'Natural Selection cannot select. Still less can it create'

He hated the necessity of random chance in natural selection. Just because an organism was weak in one regard, it may be as strong or stronger on others (this is of course missing the point). He also thought 'Survival of the Fittest' was a scientifically deficient term (a point on which Darwin actually agreed). In addition to survival of the fittest, you need destruction of the weakest and he couldn’t accept this meaningless progression of death; salt for the evolutionary mill. God wouldn’t allow such a bleak and destructive process. In fact he believed that the acceptance and promotion of such an idea would crown Satan as the 'Omnipotent Demiurge, the merciless artist of the organic world' (demiurge is a word for a creator god).

Coe correctly identified that Darwin lacked a source for the variations necessary to drive natural selection. He also reasoned that if variation could emerge spontaneously, then there was no need for a process like natural selection that was cruel, destructive and wasteful. If variation was true, animals would anticipate change and adapt, rendering selection an unnecessary component (this of course would be a form of natural selection in itself). This idea of evolution as a conscious process is one many religious thinkers turned to in the late 1800s.

While many of Coe’s objections were incorrect, there are elements on which he was right. He identified several points Natural Selection would struggle to explain.
Coe objected to Darwin’s idea of a gradual progressive evolution (even Darwin’s most ardent supporters struggled with this concept). He felt evolution occurred en masse, with environmental changes causing an entire species to change. In fact, he was much closer to the truth than Darwin, although not in the mechanism.
Another problem Coe raised was how to rationalise the cruelty of natural selection with the altruism seen throughout the natural world. This problem bothered Darwin, and plagued biologists into the late 20th Century. It is still debated to this day.
In arguing against creation Darwin raised the point that nowhere in nature existed a feature developed purely for the benefit of another species. Coe correctly showed that this was not a valid line of reasoning in support of evolution or natural selection.

Given Coe was an intelligent and rational man, why did he object so strenuously to natural selection? In many ways he was a victim of his own intelligence. Darwin was trying to write for a wider audience, so used language and terminology that was more concerned with readability and comprehension, not scientific accuracy. Coe didn’t realise this and fixated on a perceived lack of scientific rigour. Coe also had a very narrow definition of natural selection and this ultimately makes much of his logic flawed. Important factors in selection like environmental change, disease and predation were not considered natural selection by Coe. But they are key elements that drive evolution. For Coe, sex was the only selection mechanism so only sexually selected characteristics could be passed on. Today, with our understanding of genetics and heredity, this seems a very naïve definition of natural selection. But we must remember that knowledge only developed in the late 1900s. In Coe’s day heredity itself was theoretical, let alone any mechanism for inheritance.

But in the end, despite his intelligence, his beliefs got in the way. He suspected Darwinists had doubts over their theory, but wanted to push it through in an attempt to deny the authority of God. He saw natural selection as un-godly, and so saw the theory as advancing the cause of Satan. It is hard to escape the conclusion these were the factors that drove his anti-Darwinian views more than any other.

What we should take from Coe is the fact an intelligent man of faith can be a man of science too. There is no need to see the two things as inexorably divided.
He closed his 1895 text with these words (slightly misquoting Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece):

'But none the less am I possessed with the firm conviction that Organic Evolution, apart from Natural Selection, will be universally recognised as a scientific truth long before the 20th Century shall have run it’s course. So, as I believe, Time will perform it’s office, which is ‘to eat errors by opinion bred’ and reveal it’s glory which is ‘to unmask falsehood and bring truth to life’'

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Dr. Philip Brookes Mason (1842-1903)

Philip Brookes Mason was born in 1842 in Burton-on-Trent Staffordshire. He was interested in natural history from a very early age and as a child he had already started collecting plant specimens. He was very well educated and after leaving Burton Grammar School went on to study at Epsom College and in 1858 went to study medicine at Glasgow where he collected plant specimens from the Glasgow Botanical Gardens. At this time a good knowledge of plants was necessary for doctors as many medicines were manufactured from plants. Mason then worked as a surgeon at University College in London where his talents were rewarded with many awards. He later went on to work at Great Ormond’s Street Children’s Hospital, eventually returning to be a doctor at his father’s surgery in Burton-on-Trent.

Philip Mason travelled the country collecting plant specimens from as far as Shetland in the north to the Channel Islands in the south. He also purchased many collections made by many famous botanists of the time. His natural history collection is thought to be one of the largest ever assembled by an individual and included insects, shells, birds and fossils, as well as plants. He purchased many of the insect collections at auction sales and became particularly interested in butterflies and beetles. He collected and added his own specimens of insects to the extensive collections that he purchased.

Mason also had the opportunity to travel further afield and visited Iceland where he collected insects and Spitsbergen where he collected plants.

He lived with his wife Annie at Trent House in the centre of Burton. His natural history collections eventually grew to the extent that he needed an extension to his home. This extension became his private museum and for a while he employed his own curator.

Mason is known to have corresponded with many naturalists and scientists including Charles Darwin. Their correspondence regarded the relative weights of male and female babies; the proportion of male and female babies still-born and the hairiness of new-borns. The pair exchanged several letters on these topics and Darwin asked many questions of Mason.

In 1876 Mason was one of the founder members of Burton-on-Trent Natural History and Archaeology Society, later becoming president of the society. He also published many articles on all aspects of natural history and in 1895 with others published the Flora of Burton-on-Trent and Neighbourhood. Many of these published records are supplemented with pressed specimens which now form important vouchers.

Mason died in 1903 and his natural history collections and library were slowly sold by his widow. Bolton Museum purchased many of the collections directly from Mrs Mason. The first of these were the botanical collections, consisting about 40,000 items, which arrived in April 1907. These cost one hundred pounds which at the time was estimated to be far below their actual value. The purchase money was given by Mrs Katherine Thomasson, widow of John Pennington Thomasson. They were a Quaker family who were mill owners in the Bolton and who had long been benefactors to the museum. Bolton Museum went on to find the money to purchase many of his insect collections; his crustacea specimens and some fossil bryozoa.