Link to the Show / Show Notes
Professor George Gibbs, entomologist and author of Ghosts of Gondwanda, wanted to figure out ‘what sort of science James Hector did.’ While George was impressed with the wide range of topics that Hector covered in his 35 years as editor of the Transactions the thing that really caught his eye was the correspondence between James Hector and Charles Darwin.
Then as our conversation unfolded we started toying with the idea that colonial scientists were perhaps a little freer to explore new ideas and theories than their peers back in England. So while Charles Darwin's ideas were at first unpalatable to the scientific community in Britain, the gentlemen scientists hanging out in New Zealand such as Hooker, Hector and Hudson (Gibbs great-grandfather!) thought that Darwin's ideas were very sensible. Seeing evidence of Darwin’s theories of evolution right before their very eyes would no doubt have helped. But with all this 'evidence' what did the colonial scientists do with it? Well they obviously shoved many specimens into museums display cases but they also wrote about it in the Transactions and this is where George Gibb's story starts.
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