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Jeffries Wyman |
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| b. Chelmsford, Middlesex, Massachusetts,
11 August 1814; d. Bethlehem, New Hampshire, 4 September 1874 He graduated in medicine from Harvard University in 1837 and studied under George Cuvier and Richard Owen (Gifford 1967). Wyman helped to lay the foundations of comparative anatomy in the U.S. He was responsible -together with Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray- for making Harvard the most important center for the study of natural history in the United States. He is little remembered today mostly because he was a very modest man who avoided generalizations. Together with Agassiz and Gray, he embraced the philosophical, or transcendental anatomy, i.e., the search for ideal patterns of structure in nature (Appel 1988). Thus, the discovery of a blind cave fish attracted Wyman’s attention and he described A. spelaea in great detail (Wyman 1843), to the point that some have mistakenly referred to him as the first person who described a blind cave fish (e.g., Gurnee 1992). In his first paper on A. spelaea, he reported that ‘On the most careful dissection no traces of eyes were found’ (Wyman 1843: 96). Later he wrote that ‘The optic lobes existed; according to the general rules of physiology these should not exist; as they bare strict relation to the sense of sight, which receives its nerve from them (...) Here the optic lobes were not so large as the allies fishes, but yet they were of good size, and nearly as large as the cerebral lobes’ (Wyman 1851: 349). He later re-examined three specimens and found imperfect eyes covered by tissue and, hence, unable to see. He proposed that this imperfection of the eyes ‘might be owing to a want of stimulus through a series of generations’ and that the organ of vision, however imperfect, ‘it is more like the eyes of other vertebrates’ (Wyman 1854a: 19). He also pointed out numerous structures without evident functions, organs that were of morphological rather than physiological value (Wyman 1854b). He produced very detailed drawings of the internal anatomy of A. spelaea (Wyman 1872). |
For Wyman, A. spelaea was an excellent subject of study in his quest for evidence of a common plan underlying the differences caused by adaptive modifications. Although he quickly converted to evolutionism, he did not accept natural selection as its mechanism. He even regarded Agassiz as backwards for his refusal to accept evolution (Appel 1988). Yet, all of his papers on A. spelaea were devoid of evolutionary speculations, something that characterized most of his writings. |
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