‘A right feeling’

Extinction was a Victorian idea. While the concept has a longer history, it assumed its modern form during the 1860s and 1870s in Britain. It was then, in the wake of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and in the context of mid-Victorian anxieties about the natural world and human impacts on it, that the process of extinction became an object of both natural-historical research and widespread alarm. These two aspects of extinction evolved together: naturalists' understanding of ‘the exterminating process’ was crucially intertwined with concerns that those naturalists shared with the wider public. In what follows, the complex arc of this concept is traced through the work of its chief proponent: Alfred Newton, the University of Cambridge's first professor of zoology and comparative anatomy. Newton's understanding of extinction – which, in its basic form, we share today – coalesced out of a particular moment in Victorian thought, shaped by his early adoption of Darwinian natural selection as well as his complex views on the proper relationship between science and sentiment.

It is no small irony that the man who framed our modern concept of extinction is largely unknown today. However, to the extent that this essay plucks Newton from obscurity, it does so neither to restore his status as an acknowledged expert on extinction nor to highlight the positive impact of the legislative acts he helped to write. Instead, Newton's life and work reveal a particular moment in the history of Victorian Britain and in the history of science. It was a moment in which the boundaries between science and sentiment, and between those who did and those who did not have the authority to speak for nature, were being redrawn. The relationship between science, sentiment and cultural authority was a point of interest for many Victorians, a fact reflected in the expansive historical literature on the topic.Footnote ¹ Newton, like many of his contemporaries, was ambivalent about this relationship: sentiment – whether a feeling, a passion or the whole of public opinion – was neither entirely good nor inevitably pernicious. Rather, it was viewed as a necessary element of social life, one that Newton sought to channel, in the context of animal protection, in a direction established by scientific study.Footnote ²

To this end, Newton distinguished between two types of sentimentalist, ‘the difference between which’, he argued, ‘has not been so clearly recognised’. There were those, on the one hand, who were opposed to the killing of birds for almost any reason, the ‘mere sentimentalists’ to whom ‘times and seasons are of no account’. On the other hand, there were those who acknowledged the dominion of man over nature, but asked only that it not be abused; they allowed their ‘sentiment to be governed by common-sense’, and constrained killing only because they felt ‘bound not to exterminate or to extirpate’.Footnote ³ Newton deemed the latter sense of sentiment ‘a right feeling – a feeling sanctioned by humanity, by Science, and by our own material interests’. Too much of the former type, he feared, would leave animal protection in the hands of the ‘humanitarians and sentimentalists, whose efforts are sure to be brought to nothing through ignorance and excess of zeal’.Footnote ⁴ The existence of sentiment was a given – its control, on both an individual and a societal level, was what was essential to Newton's vision of successful nature protection and the proper place of knowledge possessed by naturalists like himself in such a movement.

The particular kind of preservation Newton advocated grew out of a particular understanding of extinction. Newton's concept of extinction, like his sense of sentiment, was bifocal: it could occur naturally, as a consequence of Darwinian natural selection, or artificially, as the result of wanton destruction by humans. The former, if not good, was at least natural; the latter was neither good nor natural. Rather, it was, in Newton's view, the evil product of human ignorance against which the only assured prevention was the proper application of the expert judgement of scientific naturalists. Darwin's theory both folded extinction into the order of things and gave Newton something against which to define the abrupt destruction of humans. For him, a feeling against extinction was a feeling on behalf of a class of organisms as a whole – usually a species – whereas a feeling against cruelty, typical of existing agitation on behalf of animals, was a feeling on behalf of individual organisms. The latter was, in his words, ‘hardly connected with the preservation of birds and animals’.Footnote ⁵ By turning extinction into an object of scientific study and reorienting animal protection around it, Newton was intervening in an ongoing conversation about the value of science in wider society.

For Newton, science and sentiment were not necessarily opposed – indeed, for animal protection to succeed they would have to work in tandem. Still, we have to remind ourselves of his ambivalence so that we do not miss the cautionary tone in his public pronouncements. When, for example, he told the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1876 that ‘there is happily a strong disposition, which grows stronger day by day, to preserve our wild animals’, he was both optimistic and wary about the situation.Footnote ⁶ Such a disposition, though necessary for the success of the protective measures he sought, was also dangerous – ‘sentiment’, as Newton himself referred to it, was a double-edged sword that, if wielded unwisely, could cleave public policy from the expert science upon which he felt it depended.Footnote ⁷ Significantly, Newton shared this ambivalence, as well as his more general sense of the relationship between knowledge and politics, with many of his peers.Footnote ⁸ In Newton's scientific work and the advocacy he based on it, we see a delicate balancing act of ideas and values in action; through the lens of extinction, we gain a window onto the wider cultural authority of science in the Victorian period.

‘The exterminating process’

Alfred Newton was born on 11 June 1829, into a relatively well-connected and well-off family.Footnote ⁹ From an early age he was fascinated with nature, and especially birdlife, and fuelled his interests in the country around his family's estate. After taking his degree from Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1853, Newton was awarded a fellowship to pursue the sort of travel still seen, at mid-century, as essential to the development of a good naturalist.Footnote ¹⁰ He made good on these aims by spending the next dozen years travelling and collecting in the West Indies, North America, Scandinavia and Madeira, with occasional stopovers in the rooms he was allowed to keep at Magdalene for the duration of the fellowship. Consciously acting within the established tradition of natural-historical travel, Newton intended his observations and collections to serve as both personal education and social advancement, in his case within the growing community of scientific ornithologists back home. It was a community Newton himself went a long way towards founding: it was in Newton's rooms at Magdalene, for example, that the British Ornithologists' Union first met in 1858.Footnote ¹¹

That same year, Newton went looking for a lost bird. The great auk (Alca impennis), a flightless seabird once spread widely across the North Atlantic, had been rumoured extinct for over a decade. Great auks had once formed huge summer breeding colonies on rocky offshore islets, a strategy common among seabirds but ultimately disastrous for the flightless great auk. Its vast colonies on low-lying rocks were like buffet dinners for hungry sailors who, starved of fresh meat for months, would race ashore during summer stopovers and bludgeon or net as many great auks as they could. Increased transatlantic travel led to diminished great auk populations, and by the nineteenth century encounters had become infrequent. The last confirmed sighting took place off the coast of Iceland in June of 1844, and, despite numerous subsequent sightings, that date quickly became fixed as the ‘precise’ moment at which the species went extinct.Footnote ¹²

According to Newton's account of the voyage, he sailed to Iceland hoping to prove the rumours wrong.Footnote ¹³ Struck by the rapidity of the great auk's disappearance, his mission was part search and rescue and part quest for answers – if he failed to find a living bird, he at least hoped to gather as much information as possible about the process that had led to its demise. Though no living auks turned up, Newton made good on the latter goal – so much so that the collation of those findings would occupy him on and off for the rest of his life. What emerged from Newton's research was puzzling: while naturalists increasingly recognized the impact of indirect pressures like habitat destruction on animal populations, the great auk's demise seemed to have been a product of direct exploitation. That humans could have driven so widespread a species from the world one by one, and done so with such rapidity, seemed impossible.Footnote ¹⁴ Though familiar with human-caused extinctions like that of the dodo, famously extinguished on its native island of Mauritius around the year 1680, naturalists found it harder to comprehend the capacity of human action to destroy a species as widespread as the great auk.Footnote ¹⁵

Naturalists were confused about the great auk in part because they were confused about extinction in general. This confusion stemmed from broader changes in the ways naturalists understood the large-scale processes that structured the natural world. Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, and the uniformitarian philosophy that underlay it, paved the way: by eschewing catastrophes in favour of gradual processes to explain the Earth's past, Lyell helped reorient natural history around dynamic processes (an approach, it bears noting, that proved especially influential on a young Charles Darwin).Footnote ¹⁶ This conceptual shift occurred alongside increasing recognition that extinction, long recognized in the geological record, could take place in the present as well.Footnote ¹⁷ The stage was set for a new conceptualization of extinctions less as past events and more as ongoing processes. It was in this context that speculation about the great auk's fate arose, and it is to this destabilization of naturalists' understanding of natural processes that we can attribute the confusion that accompanied Newton's search.

Some, like the ornithologist James Orton, made the fatalistic assumption that so numerous a species could only have disappeared ‘because time fought against it’.Footnote ¹⁸ Orton's strange statement was part of an ongoing debate over the nature of extinction itself: naturalists disagreed about whether it stemmed from external or internal factors – from environmental forces or from something inherent in the animal itself. As Richard Owen put it in 1859, ‘whether [extinction] be inherent in [creatures'] own nature, or be relative and dependent on inevitable changes in the conditions and theatre of their existence, is the main subject for consideration’.Footnote ¹⁹ A taxonomic mix-up also played a role in the confusion over the great auk's decline: because it had long been mistaken for the penguin of the southern hemisphere (though the two occupy different taxonomic orders), many assumed that great auks were distributed well up into the Arctic Circle based purely on analogy to its antipodean double.Footnote ²⁰ Thus widespread uncertainty – over taxonomy and over the nature of extinction – enabled Newton to remain hopeful that a great auk might turn up as he traversed Iceland interviewing fishermen and coastal residents in 1858.Footnote ²¹

It was a hope Newton clung to for some years after his return. He devoted part of an 1863 account of his travels to a plea to ‘lay’ naturalists to capture alive any auks they might encounter.Footnote ²² Just two years later, though, when he published an essay called ‘The gare-fowl and its historians’, Newton meant ‘historians’ in the full sense of the term. ‘For all practical purposes’, he wrote, ‘we may speak of it as a thing of the past’. While this was a tragic concession, Newton was determined not to let the auk pass into history without some lessons for contemporary naturalists: ‘Regarded in this light’, he continued in the same 1865 essay, ‘the subject becomes even more than interesting, because owing to the recent date of the bird's extirpation (whether completed or not), we possess much more information respecting the exterminating process, than we do in the case of any other extinct species’.Footnote ²³

Newton's language here – ‘the exterminating process’ – affords a crucial insight into his early understanding of extinction. When asked by a Parliamentary select committee in 1873 whether he had ‘observed the habits of birds for a very long time’, Newton focused his answer on extinction:

Whereas naturalists had long studied past extinctions (those evidenced in the geological record), Newton was one of the first to claim expertise on extinction as a process – on ‘the exterminating process’. While Newton's effort to balance science and sentiment was nothing new, his innovation was to insist that the combination of the two called forth by the issue of extinction made naturalists necessary in the policy process. Their special knowledge gave them ‘the power of coping successfully with the difficult questions that [would] arise’ as they tried to steer the public, and its sentiments, toward the proper objects of protection as determined by scientific criteria only they could assess.Footnote ²⁵ Turning extinction into a process to be studied by naturalists had the related effect of turning naturalists into advisers on matters of policy. Now all that remained was to convince the public that they needed the advice at all.Footnote ²⁶

According to his biographer, Newton's search in Iceland sparked a ‘peculiar attraction’ to ‘extinct and disappearing faunas’.Footnote ²⁷ It was this attraction that led Newton to study other extinct and rare birds, including the dodo and the great bustard, a bird extirpated from Britain within living memory. The key point, however, is that Newton moved beyond cataloguing or anatomizing these extinct birds and took up the process of extinction itself as an object of study. This focus on ‘the exterminating process’, combined with his early adoption of Darwinian natural selection, is at the core of Newton's understanding of extinction. As will be explained in the next section, the fact that extinction was central to the dynamics of natural selection was crucial to Newton's evolving sense of it, and especially to his convenient, if not always coherent, binary sense of it as an either natural (Darwinian) or unnatural (human-caused) process. The need to tell the difference between the two – requiring a naturalist to determine when, as in the latter case alone, a policy intervention was necessary – paved the way for an animal protection movement that self-consciously married science and sentiment. Newton's experience with the great auk, and his sense that the recent occurrence and human cause of its extinction made it a valuable window onto the ‘exterminating process’, set the stage for his subsequent scientific work and political advocacy on behalf of endangered animals.

‘Early days of Darwinism’

On his way home from Iceland in 1858, Newton received the issue of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society containing the papers of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection. He was, by his own account, immediately won over to the theory, remaining a staunch Darwinian for the rest of his career.Footnote ²⁸ Both contemporaries and historians have found this fact difficult to square with Newton's apparent intellectual conservatism and his famous resistance to change in his scientific views and practices.Footnote ²⁹ The result has been that when Newton's early Darwinism has been noted, it has usually been as a footnote to the story of his friend and colleague, Henry Baker Tristram, who, while converted to the cause by Newton in 1858, abandoned the theory after witnessing the Huxley–Wilberforce debate of 1860.Footnote ³⁰

Beyond this anecdote about Tristram, Newton's Darwinism has been dismissed as a paradoxical, vaguely interesting wrinkle in the career of an otherwise old-fashioned naturalist. While this is to a certain extent true, it is interesting to note the way Newton reconciled his belief in evolution by natural selection – within which extinction played a central role – with his effort to prevent extinctions resulting from human action by distinguishing between what ‘extinction’ meant in both cases. The extinction central to natural selection was, not surprisingly, ‘natural’ in Newton's view, while human-caused extinction interfered with that natural process in deleterious ways. Newton used this distinction to delineate the boundary between proper and improper objects of protective legislation, which allowed him, in turn, to keep a handle on the fraught relationship between science and sentiment. Newton's ‘conservative Darwinism’ was tied up with his effort to understand the process of extinction in scientific terms and to fight to protect those animals suffering human-caused, rather than Darwinian, pressures.

Newton was famously conservative, in his politics and daily life as well as in his scientific work.Footnote ³¹ When given the chance to arrange his Dictionary of Birds according to a conceptual scheme, Newton restricted himself to alphabetical listing, deeming other systems overly speculative.Footnote ³² That Newton was such an ‘old-school’ zoologist, at a time when the ‘experimental ideal’ was on the rise, has led some to paint him as a stubborn traditionalist – an ‘endangered species’ in his own way.Footnote ³³ To Archibald Geikie, a former student, the fact that Newton received ‘with joy and admiration this momentous revolution in scientific thought’ and ‘actually made some effort to induce his brother naturalists to do likewise’ was paradoxical.Footnote ³⁴ Why, then, was Newton one of the first naturalists to take up Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution by natural selection? The explanation for this seeming paradox lies in what evolution by natural selection did and did not do for Newton – how it proved useful for his scientific work, and how he was able to interpret it so as to interfere as little as possible with his conservative world view.

Significantly, what evolution did not do for Newton – unlike for many of his colleagues at Cambridge and elsewhere – was spur any theological or metaphysical doubts. Newton was a practising Anglican, proud of his impeccable attendance record at college services and virulently opposed to changes in chapel procedure.Footnote ³⁵ In part, Newton was able to hold onto his belief while adopting a Darwinian framework by refusing to speculate on the theory's more troublesome implications, such as its application to human society. For a devoted adherent, Newton had surprisingly little – indeed, nothing at all – to say about Darwin's own effort in this direction in his 1871 book on The Descent of Man. Indeed, Newton seems to have restricted himself to the theory's implications for non-human nature, a fact that speaks to his capacity to pick and choose from within the larger theoretical framework. Though Newton was present at the famous 1860 Huxley–Wilberforce debate, he did not seem troubled by the implications in this area drawn forth by the bishop, focusing instead on the theory's ability to explain perceived relations in non-human nature. Blinkered to the question of human ancestry, Newton came down firmly on the side of Huxley, describing Wilberforce's remarks in a letter to his brother as ‘a wonderfully good speech … if the facts had been correct’.Footnote ³⁶

In terms of what evolution did do for Newton, a typical example of his published scientific work reveals one vector of the theory's impact. In an 1869 paper on avian osteology, consisting of an exhaustive morphological comparison of hundreds of bone specimens, Newton concluded that only common ancestry could make sense of certain observed similarities.Footnote ³⁷ While the authors – Newton co-wrote the article with his brother – remained agnostic on the ultimate truth of natural selection, the theory provided the best means of collating their evidence:

The theory of natural selection served, in part, as a justification for the practices of traditional morphology in which Newton had been trained.Footnote ³⁹ The intense anatomical scrutiny of museum specimens, sometimes for the purposes of classification but often with only minute description in mind, now had a new justification. According to Newton, such studies had been ‘little more than the shuffling of cards, the ingenious arrangement of counters in a pretty pattern’ before Darwin. Now, comparative morphology had become ‘the serious study of the workings of Nature’, the elucidation of the intricate process of natural selection.Footnote ⁴⁰

Beyond justifying the practices of natural history, Darwinism also furnished a new framework for natural knowledge itself. Newton insisted that natural selection provided him with ‘an explanation of all the difficulties encountered in an honest attempt to understand the causes of a limited number of observed facts’.Footnote ⁴¹ As in the osteological study mentioned above, the principal of common descent was simply a ‘deduction from the facts’; it provided a stable system of interlocking relations that could be mirrored in a new stability in the organization of natural-historical learning. According to the geneticist William Bateson, one of Newton's students, finding such a foundation was crucial for Newton: ‘The collection and preservation of ornithological learning was his chief undertaking.’Footnote ⁴² The importance of organizing knowledge, and the role of Darwin in that organization, is clear in Newton's work on ‘zoological regions’ and their analogy to ‘species’. Such concepts, he argued in 1887, were convenient names for complex processes of gradual chance. Each – ‘species’ and ‘zoological regions’ – was composed of ‘a fauna which is, so to speak, a “function” of the period of its development’. The name pinpointed only a moment in the tide of natural events. ‘One of the best tests of a biologist’, Newton concluded, ‘is his ability to talk or write of “Species” without believing that the term is more than a convenient counter for the exchange of ideas'.Footnote ⁴³ Here we see that the gradualism and continuity over time built into Darwin's theory appealed to Newton's desire for stability in the organization of both nature and natural knowledge.

In these practical and conceptual aspects of his scientific work, and in the absence of the theological quandaries that beset some of his peers, we begin to see how Darwinism made sense for Newton. Even more important for our purposes, evolution shaped Newton's understanding of extinction. By affording a ‘natural’ explanation for extinctions that could not be attributed to human action, Darwinism gave moral force to Newton's pronouncements against extermination. The distinction was an important one: even a fervent Darwinian like Newton could adopt certain aspects of the theory without erasing the boundary between man and nature or abandoning the values, like stewardship, that governed it. In his article on ‘The gare-fowl and its historians’ he laid the blame for the great auk's demise not on the inherent unfitness of the bird, but rather on ‘the merciless hand of man’ – the extinction of the great auk was different, for Newton, from those for which Darwin's theory offered a viable explanation.Footnote ⁴⁴ A newspaper summary of Newton's 1876 BAAS address captured this double vision perfectly: ‘Nature, it may be admitted, is infinite in her variety, but, on the other hand, the number of existing types is daily diminishing.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Darwinian extinction was a by-product of the origin of (new) species; when humans destroyed a lineage, nothing sprang up to replace it.

For Newton, Darwinism was an acceptable explanation of the world precisely because the cases it explained were ‘perfectly natural ones’, and thus, he felt, ‘must occur, have occurred, and possibly be occurring still’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Human-caused extinction was not just a loss to the natural world; it was also a loss to science and to naturalists. Each lost animal was a hole in the potential storehouse of scientific knowledge, rendering the general understanding of the evolutionary process that much more difficult. In an 1876 address, Newton worked hard to blend science and sentiment by arguing that naturalists' feelings should be aroused by the endangerment of any creature through human action:

For Darwinian naturalists, he suggested, such disruptions to the continuity of the grand processes of nature were also disruptions to the scientific learning process. Natural selection conferred harmony on both nature and natural knowledge. In terms of Newton's advocacy, it also provided a background explanation for ‘natural’ extinctions against which human-caused extinctions could be contrasted. Newton made this contrast explicit in a discussion of islands in his Dictionary of Birds: ‘In them’, Newton wrote, ‘each species has long been brought into harmony with its circumstances, and relations with its fellow-creatures have so far become mutually adjusted that in the long run the balance between them is preserved’ – until, that is, ‘the appearance on the scene of man, and especially of civilized man, upsets the equilibrium’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Natural selection produced variety only humans could destroy. Newton thus distanced himself from those fatalistic Darwinians who were ‘content to let the dead bury their dead’: by accepting a certain level of ‘natural’ extinction, he could distinguish, and rail against, human-caused extermination.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is in this way that evolution shaped Newton's understanding of extinction, by enabling him to make a distinction he used to define both the ends and the means of animal protection for decades.

‘Tempered by the naturalists’

Over the course of the 1860s, ornithologists began to call more frequently for legislative protection on behalf of certain avian species. Specialists pinpointed a specific set of historical causes: a burgeoning middle class with available leisure time increasingly turned to birding and bird-shooting for recreation just as technological innovations in firearms and transport became widespread, rendering flocks of nesting birds both closer and easier targets. The specificity of these phenomena and the relative visibility of birdlife and its problems explain why birds were some of the first creatures afforded protection at a national level. While pressure was indeed on the rise in the mid-Victorian period, it should also be noted that Newton and his fellow ornithologists used rhetoric about such changes to protect not only birds, but also their own expertise on matters of extinction and protection. In particular, Newton was wary of having his movement to prevent extinction confused with other, older campaigns on behalf of animals, for reasons explained below.

Newton's advocacy was not without precedent – far from it. As James Turner, Harriet Ritvo and others have shown, there was a long tradition of British engagement with the animal world; perhaps most famously, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) had been waging campaigns on behalf of domestic animals for half a century.Footnote ⁵⁰ While the RSPCA was far from monolithic, and indeed called on sentiment in ways sometimes similar to Newton's own, he felt that their emphasis on suffering and appeals to sympathy blinded the public to more permanent consequences. Extinction (that is, human-caused extinction) was, for Newton, far more serious than cruelty, and he worked hard to disengage the issue of extinction from that of cruelty. Despite these efforts, historians of conservation have tended to flatten out this distinction, often treating Newton's campaign against extinction as a stepping-stone between better-known RSPCA campaigns against cruelty earlier in the century and campaigns against vivisection and the feather fashion later on.Footnote ⁵¹ As a result, important aspects of the relationship between science and sentiment in this period tend to disappear.

Paying attention to Newton's emphasis on extinction, on the other hand, helps brings the complexity of this relationship forward. Rare and endangered birds were both a scientific and a personal passion for Newton, though he was always careful to delineate between the two poles and to give precedence to his ‘rational’ interest. In his influential address, ‘On the zoological aspect of the game laws’, which he read before the BAAS in 1868, he intimated that, ‘with reference to sea-fowl, a certain amount of sentiment must be confessed’.Footnote ⁵² Newton was not opposed to sentiment – indeed, he later regretted that it was ‘seldom that any one … feels the romance that clings around the history of an expiring race’ – but felt that such feelings had to serve ends determined by scientific thought, rather than be allowed to roam free from such guidance.Footnote ⁵³ In the case of extinction, as he understood it, the two worked in tandem: ‘The regret with which I regard such extirpation is not merely a matter of sentiment’, he declared in an 1876 address, adding, ‘Here sentiment and science are for once in the same side. A heavy blow will be inflicted on Zoology by the disappearance of some of these marvellous and peculiar forms.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Defined around extinction, animal protection might draw on science and sentiment simultaneously.

In 1868, Newton had hoped to rouse his audience to take up a protection movement defined around extinction; as it happened, a number of naturalists heeded his call. Responding to this interest the following year, the BAAS established a committee for the purpose of assessing ‘the practicability of establishing “A Close Time” [a suspension of hunting, in this instance during breeding seasons] for the protection of indigenous Animals’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This ‘Close-Time Committee’, as it became known, comprised pre-eminent naturalists like Alfred Newton, Canon Tristram, James Harting and Henry Dresser, each a member of one or more of London's most influential learned societies. The committee's strength came from its members’ knowledge, influence and ostensibly apolitical interest in assessment. As Newton put it, the naturalist was a necessary intermediary between sentimental and economic interests: ‘The officiousness of the one class and the slackness of the other must equally be tempered by the naturalists.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Newton's claim that the scientific basis of bird protection and the committee's efforts in that regard were ‘wholly unconnected with party politics’ fit both the style of rhetoric typical of the British Association and a more general trend in the relation between politics and expertise in this period.Footnote ⁵⁷

Drawing on such apolitical rhetoric meant that, if the members of the Committee wanted to advocate as well as analyse, they would need to find an external body through which to do so. This they quickly did, in the form of the Association for the Protection of Sea Birds (APSB), a Yorkshire group that had emerged from a meeting in late 1868.Footnote ⁵⁸ Henry Frederick Barnes, the vicar of Bridlington, had called the meeting to discuss the plight of seabirds at nearby Flamborough Head, whose decline had been pinned erroneously on local residents.Footnote ⁵⁹ The real offenders, Barnes insisted, were ‘parties of sportsmen from all corners of the Kingdom’ who had been making excursions to slaughter birds for target practice since the 1830s.Footnote ⁶⁰ He had called the meeting in the hope of securing protective legislation for the birds, and a number of local naturalists, including the local ornithological celebrity Francis Orpen Morris, turned out in support.Footnote ⁶¹ Looking to substantiate the APSB's claims with the expertise of influential naturalists, Barnes jumped at the chance to use Morris as a means of connecting his group to the recently established Close-Time Committee.Footnote ⁶² Both bodies benefited from their somewhat tacit collaboration, working together through correspondence on what would become Britain's first national legislation on behalf of non-game animals: the 1869 Sea Birds Preservation Act.Footnote ⁶³

The Act, like the movement that produced it, was not without precedent – indeed, Newton and the others consciously drew on a wide set of laws, both foreign and domestic, as they drew it up.Footnote ⁶⁴ What set the Act of 1869 apart was the careful effort of its advocates to base their calls on unimpeachable ornithological evidence. When Tristram lamented ‘the indiscriminate slaughter of predatory animals’ in an 1867 address, he devoted much of his time to population and geographical data.Footnote ⁶⁵ That address, ‘On the zoological aspects of the grouse-disease’, set the tone and, to a certain extent, the content of a more famous speech, ‘On the zoological aspect of the game laws’, delivered by Newton the following year. As their titles make clear, both addresses were self-consciously rooted in zoological study. To reaffirm the scientific, rather than sentimental, basis for their remarks, both men went out of their way to insist on the political infeasibility, and thus undesirability, of protecting problematic species like raptors or addressing thorny issues like habitat destruction due to agriculture.Footnote ⁶⁶

In the short run, seabirds proved less contentious. Threats to nesting populations of these birds by shooting parties led Newton to declare,

Newton closed his 1868 address by stating that, if naturalists did not insist on protection for seabirds during the breeding season, unpredictable changes would occur that would leave future naturalists resentful of the present generation's carelessness. Extinction, he insisted, was a tragic certainty if naturalists, the only group with the requisite knowledge, did not make the scientific case to back up the sentiment they shared with the public. The naturalists responded and, supplementing the heroic petitioning of Barnes and the APSB by acting as ‘expert’ lobbyists, were rewarded by a relatively smooth passage of the bill through both houses of Parliament and into law as the Sea Birds Preservation Act on 24 June 1869.

The public received the Act positively, and it was on the basis of this welcome reception that the Close-Time Committee decided to base all subsequent recommendations for the expansion of protection on its model.Footnote ⁶⁸ Relying on a popular precedent would prove necessary, especially when the Committee began preparing a new bill for the protection of wading and shore birds in 1872, since including that class of birds would invite the enmity of a powerful upper-class constituency that viewed such measures with suspicion.Footnote ⁶⁹ ‘Beggars can't be choosers’, Newton cautioned Barnes in 1872, insisting that the language of the new bill needed to mirror that of the popular Act of 1869 in order to meet success.Footnote ⁷⁰ Moderation was key, and, when a first draft of the new bill was completed, it was reportedly

The new shore birds bill, Newton declared, had ‘pretty well [hit] the mean between extreme opinions’.Footnote ⁷²

What happened next made clear the boundary Newton perceived between proper and improper sentiment. While in committee, the radical MP Auberon Herbert proposed extending coverage to all wild birds, which rendered the bill, in the words of the Close-Time Committee, ‘of general and indefinite scope’.Footnote ⁷³ The ensuing debates highlighted an important distinction: some, like Herbert, were concerned primarily with cruelty against individuals, while others, like Newton and the Close-Time Committee, worried about extinction. The latter group perceived the efforts of the former as a threat to the establishment of a scientific basis for protection: ‘Such an Act of Parliament’, the Committee reported, ‘is mischievous in its effect, since it diverts public attention from those species which, through neglect, indifference, custom, cupidity, or prejudice, are suffering a persecution that will in a few years ensure their complete extermination’.Footnote ⁷⁴ As Newton put it, the question of cruelty was ‘hardly connected with the preservation of birds and animals’, and, if no threat of extinction could be proved, then protection was not warranted.Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘The crucial test of a species wanting protection’, Newton later wrote, was ‘whether its numbers [were] decreasing or the contrary’ – and nothing more.Footnote ⁷⁶

‘A reasonable state of things’

Newton's convictions about the relationship between science and sentiment led him to lash out in earnest when he felt unchecked sentiment was undermining the proper, scientific basis of protection. When a push to protect ‘small birds’ emerged in the years after 1869, Newton reacted violently, declaring the effort a ‘mistaken and mischievous’ cooption by the ‘sentimental party’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In a letter to his brother, Newton put it in even stronger, and more colourful, terms:

Here, Newton revealed not only his ire but also his assumptions about the role of expertise in producing effective legislation. He reserved special derision for the Parliamentary Select Committee on Wild Birds Protection convened in 1873, complaining in a history he wrote for the Quarterly Review in 1881 that the quality of its witnesses – ‘ornithologists, pseudo-ornithologists, farmers, gardeners, bird-catchers, and others’ – varied widely, and lambasting the committee for examining the secretary of the RSPCA instead of Henry Dresser, the secretary of his own Close-Time Committee, ‘who was especially known to have a thorough acquaintance with the laws and regulations on the subject existing in other countries’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Although ‘it was no fault of the gentlemen composing it that they knew not what questions to ask, and were unable to discriminate between the knowledge and the show of knowledge possessed by the witnesses examined’, Newton's message was clear: naturalists alone knew the precise cause and probable cure for nature's ills. As Newton told it, neither prior agitation against cruelty nor the opinions of philanthropists, farmers, or any other group were to thank for the successes of the movement. Rather, as Newton put it in the conclusion of his anonymous Quarterly Review piece,

While the secretary of the RSPCA could offer advice on anti-cruelty advocacy, these concluding words make clear that Newton had shaped the animal protection movement in such a way as to position the men of the Close-Time Committee – including himself – as its natural leaders. By turning extinction into an object of scientific study and shaping the animal protection movement around it, Newton helped to crystallize the concept of extinction and the form of animal protection with which we still operate today. What is more, his insistence on a particular balance of science and sentiment, and on a place for naturalists at the boundary between the two, reveals a moment in which the cultural authority of science and the values underpinning it were still very much up for grabs.

As I have argued, that moment is captured perfectly in the concept of extinction as developed by Newton. What I have shown is how a fundamental aspect of our knowledge of the natural order coalesced in a particular Victorian context. The strands leading into Newton's understanding of extinction – including a vision of the balance between science and sentiment, as well as a selective appropriation of Darwinian natural selection – reflect the ideas and values of his age. While this is partly about the genesis of an important idea, it is also about ‘the uses of extinction’, to borrow a phrase of Gillian Beer's.Footnote ⁸¹ In a recent article on the subject, Beer argues that Darwin and his early followers were much more sanguine about extinctions than we are today. For them, it was a necessary fact of life, one essential to the diversification of those ‘endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful’ about which he wrote with such apparent rapture. Today, by contrast, we have trouble seeing past our own destructive hand in the matter. Beer goes on to suggest that ‘perhaps we need to recognize that extinction is humdrum and persistent as well as being an extreme event’ – that extinction has a dual identity as both a tragedy and a commonplace.Footnote ⁸² It is a welcome intervention, but it fails to see that the concept's early elucidation was bifurcated in precisely this way. Extinction was not welcomed and then subsequently lamented: its early definition accommodated both reactions, a fact we lose sight of unless we attend on the concept's complex history.

For Newton, there were a number of ‘uses of extinction’. For one, Darwinian natural selection helped naturalize certain animal disappearances, allowing Newton to define human-caused extinction as ‘unnatural’. Without an explanation for extinctions in which humans played no part, Newton would have been hard pressed to moralize about those that stemmed from human action. Defining extinction as an ‘exterminating process’ that could be studied scientifically, Newton carved a space for naturalists like himself within the nascent state-based animal protection apparatus. In this sense, extinction, as a concept, served the interests of naturalists and nature alike: expertise in a process operating at the human/nature boundary became a prerequisite for policing it. A newspaper summarized Newton's view: ‘our interference is at present so fatal that further interpositions of another kind are required as a counterbalance; while that counterbalance science only can supply’.Footnote ⁸³ To maintain the balance of nature, advocacy itself had to be balanced – it had to be, as Newton put it, ‘tempered by the naturalists’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Newton drove home this need for balance, and the related need for scientific knowledge, in his 1876 address: ‘We can only govern Nature by obeying her, only by obeying her can we assist her’, he said, adding, ‘To obey her laws we must know them; what can we know of them but what Science teaches us?’Footnote ⁸⁵ Knowledge of the complex workings of the natural world was the only way to ensure nature's protection – to fight extinction, one had to know it. Such knowledge, like the theory of natural selection, turned some into fatalists about animal endangerment.Footnote ⁸⁶ Not so for Newton. He concluded his 1876 address on a hopeful note:

Accepting ubiquitous change – even extinction – was not a prelude to pessimism. Rather, Newton felt that naturalists should call on their unique familiarity with such processes to engage the sentiments of the wider public. By simultaneously defining animal protection as a movement against extinction and defining extinction as a process to be studied scientifically, Newton joined science and sentiment in a way that continues to hold sway in the environmental movement today.