The Life and Writings of Richard Quiller Couch

Introduction

This is a study of the life and writings of Dr Richard Quiller Couch (1816–1863), the oldest son of Dr Jonathan Couch. He was Q's uncle, but died shortly before Q was born. However, Q formed a close relationship with Richard's children in Penzance. The study is based on Richard's writings in the journals and reports of:

• Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society
• The Royal Geological Society of Cornwall
• The Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, particularly 'A Statistical Investigation into the Mortality of Miners’.
• The Royal Institution of Cornwall

The study also looks at the life of Richard Quiller Couch with special emphasis on his training at Guy's Hospital in London. 

Biographical Details

Birth

Richard Quiller Couch was born in Polperro, in south-east Cornwall, on March 14, 1816, in the first year of peace following the Napoleonic War. The previous June the Battle of Waterloo had been fought, with Napoleon abdicating soon afterwards and on July 7 the allied armies occupying Paris. In November, the Second Treaty of Paris was signed. France's star was on the wane, with that of Prussia rising. The year of Jonathan Couch's death, 1870, saw the defeat of France by Prussia.

Politically, London government under Lord Liverpool saw the established politicians driving under the forces of reform which the French Revolution had encouraged. In his Cambridge lecture 'Shelley (I)', Q castigates 'Sidmouth, Castlereagh and Canning' for their reactionary Toryism. In 1816, Polperro was surrounded by 'rotten boroughs' (boroughs with very few voters that were able to elect MPs and that were usually in the control of one individual or family). Looe had four MPs, with the boroughs controlled for local landed families by Thomas Bond. (For a short biography of Bond see The Mayor of Troy (Couch, 1906).) Jonathan Couch was a personal friend of Bond but not of his politics. Richard was born into a politically radical family.

Richard was the first child of Jonathan and Jane Couch, but he had an older half-sister, Jane Rundle Couch, the offspring of Jonathan's marriage to Jane Prynn Rundle. Jane died in childbirth on October 14, 1810. Richard was born on March 12 but he was not baptised until June 12, his parents’ first wedding anniversary. The baptism took place at Lansallos church, where Jonathan Couch and Jane Quiller had been married a year earlier. The gap of three months suggests that Jonathan, a Wesleyan, had little regard for the doctrine of 'baptismal regeneration' although it had been held by the Revds John and Charles Wesley.

Richard appears to have been the last Couch to be baptised an Anglican. Jonathan had led the Polperro Wesleyans out of Anglicanism in 1814, overseeing the construction of a Wesleyan chapel. The baptismal register for Polperro Wesleyan Chapel opens on March 15, 1818, when Mary Paul of Water Gate was baptised by William Jewel. The first Couch was Jonathan on November 28, 1821, with Thomas, Q's father, following on September 28, 1826. As Thomas had been born on May 26, 1826, there was a gap of four months. (There is evidence of dual baptisms on some registers!.)

When Richard later moved to Penzance he would have encountered the Branwell family. It was Maria Branwell of Penzance who married Patrick Bronte, with the Bronte novelists as offspring. The Branwells were also Wesleyan Anglicans. At least one branch moved out of Anglicanism at the same time as Jonathan Couch. The baptismal register for the Penzance Wesleyan Circuit, commencing in 1804, gives Joseph, son of Joseph and Charlotte Branwell, being baptised on December 26, 1813, with Richard following on February 18, 1816, and Thomas Bronte on April 20, 1817.

Adolescent Years

Central to Richard's life at this time was his father's rejection of authority, religious, political and scientific. Jonathan opposed the oligarchies which ruled the political life of the area, supporting the movement of reform which led to the Reform Act of 1832. He also opposed what he saw as the clericalisation of Wesleyanism, and in 1835 helped head a movement which led to schism. Scientifically, he believed in observation and experiment, not the tenets of any scientific establishment or medical school. Richard's mother appears to have been an eminently practical woman. When confronted by a fanciful notion from a young Couch, she would respond that 'it butters no parsnips!' Her health, however, was never robust, possibly owing to the traumas of having her father, her grandfather and other near relations lost at sea. This did not lead to an austere home. They were a family steeped in wide reading and with a penchant for watercolours. Many thought Thomas, Q's father, should have become a professional watercolourist. Nor was it religiously repressive, as academic histories and Bronte scholarship would have us believe of such homes. Wesleyan followed the central tenet of the Reformation, 'Salvation by faith through grace', not salvation through moral repression.

According to J.R. Johns in Doctor by Nature  (2010, p. 28), the Couch family moved into the Quiller house, by the bridge in Polperro, after the death of Jane's mother. The Quillers had been one of Cornwall's leading smuggling, privateering and coastal trading families before and during the Napoleonic period. Jonathan was amazed at the false beams, a wig-cupboard and a lazaret (a smugglers' hidey-hole), along with the key of a quadrant hung by Jane's father before his last journey. Q describes this in Memories and Opinions (1945, p. 4) and in a number of his stories. How Richard's youthful imagination must have been fired!

Of all Jonathan's children, Richard is the one who most took after him and of whom most was expected. He was educated at home, attended the Wesleyan chapel and collaborated with Jonathan on a number of zoological and geological projects. His aptitude for medicine was pronounced, with Guy's Hospital as the place chosen for his training. Such training was ruinously expensive, as all lectures and dissections had to be paid for in advance, and lodgings had to be procured. And Richard was the first of three to attend Guy's. Maybe some former Quiller money was put to use. 

Medical Training at Guy's Hospital in London

In 1835, Richard qualified for medical training at Guy's Hospital, following in the footsteps of his father. In August of that year, Jonathan went to London to make the arrangements. Bertha Couch's Life (1891) includes a letter he wrote back from Ryder Street, St James, where William Yarrell lived. The letter reveals the distinguished people Jonathan met while there: Bransby Cooper, nephew of his former teacher Sir Astley Cooper, Dr Hodgkin, a lecturer, William Yarrell and Mr Gray, who introduced him to Mr Daw, curator of the museum. These names appear and reappear in histories of the time.

Eminent Doctors by G.T. Bettany (1885) gives us insight into Guy's Hospital at the time Richard was in training. He would have attended lectures, worked in the dissecting room and gone on ward rounds. These would all have had to be paid for. He probably also purchased lectures at other hospitals.

One of the leading physicians at Guy's was Thomas Addison. In 1824 he was appointed Assistant-Physician and in 1827 given a lectureship. Two years later, in conjunction with John Morgan, Surgeon to Guy's, he published An Essay on the Operation of Poisonous Agents on the Living Body (1829). In Q's novel Poison Island, Dr Beauregard is an expert on poisons. As Addison was still at Guy's when Thomas enrolled, there is probably a fictional link between Beauregard and Addison, although in character they were quite different. Addison was elected full Physician in 1837 and appointed Joint-Lecturer on Medicine with Dr Bright. Richard would certainly have received instruction in the lecture theatre, the dissecting room and the ward from Addison, Bright and Morgan.

According to Bettany (1885), Addison was an 'innovator' who used ‘observations’ and ‘deduction’. On occasions he addressed Guy's Physical Society, where no doubt Richard heard him. His ‘clinical teaching in the wards was especially superior. He could most vividly illustrate on the patient, and most clearly define and demonstrate his disease.’ We can well see Richard standing beside the bed with notebook in hand. As a teacher Addison was popular: ‘His interest in his class was genuine and unfeigned; he was eager to draw out the talents of his students’.

The approach to medicine taken by Addison was not greatly different from that taken by Jonathan's teachers 35 years before. ‘His strong, positive and perpetual insistence upon the term “practical” … He was always ready to discuss newly-started theories, but he never for a moment allowed them to interfere with the results of his mature experience.’As a consequence, ‘He never reasoned from a half-discovered fact …’ but would ‘tax his mind with the minutest details...until he achieved the ultimate object of an industry of search, a correlation of facts deduced from scientific observation...’. There can be little doubt that Richard was deeply influenced, in his medicine and his other scientific papers, by this approach. (Bettany, 1885, p. xi).

Addison published little in medical journals, but many papers appeared in Guy's Hospital Reports. He did address the Guy's Junior Physical Society, where Richard would have heard him. Eventually, Addison was elected to the Presidency of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society or R.M.C.S. Interestingly, he was a 'zealous Tory', in marked contrast to the political opinions of Jonathan's teachers.

Addison was only one of the distinguished doctors with whom Richard came into contact. Another was Richard Bright, who was born in the same year as Jonathan Couch, 1789. Richard Bright and Jonathan Couch did not meet. In 1808, when Jonathan was arriving at the united medical school of Guy's and St Thomas', Bright was entering Edinburgh University. In 1810, when Jonathan was leaving, Bright was journeying through Iceland studying botany and zoology. On the completion of his travels, Bright did arrive at Guy's, where he made contact with Jonathan's former tutor, (Sir) Astley Cooper. Richard Couch would have reason to make personal contact with Richard Bright.

In 1820, 15 years before the entry of Richard Couch, Dr Richard Bright was elected Assistant-Physician at Guy's Hospital and in 1822 a FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society). In 1822 he began lecturing on Botany and Materia Medica, being joined in 1824 by Dr Cholmeley and some years after by Dr Addison. Bettany informs us that Bright was not a 'theorist' but an observer and a dissector, with his records showing care and detail. In 1836, the year after Richard Couch's entry, eight papers by Bright appeared in Guy's Hospital Reports and Richard would certainly have studied them. Having been elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1832, Bright was a censor in 1836 and delivered the Lumleian lectures on 'Disorders of the Brain' in 1837. He was a 'sincerely religious' man who married the third daughter of Dr Babington, snr, the close friend of Sir Humphry Davy.

A doctor who was associated with Guy's Hospital from 1823 to 1878 was Alfred Swaine Taylor. Richard, Thomas and John Couch would all have encountered him. He was an authority on geology, minerology and physiology. He studied chemistry under Allen and Aikin and won a prize at Guy's for anatomy. Guy's possessed its own chemical laboratory. He was an authority on poisoning and medical jurisprudence and in 1842 brought out Manual of Medical Jurisprudence which went through many British and American editions. He was frequently called to court as a witness in important legal cases. It is interesting that Richard Couch was also frequently called as a witness to Bodmin Assize for important and difficult legal cases. It is also interesting that Q deals with poisoning in The Haunted Dragoon, with Dr Gale providing the evidence, at the Spring Assize in Bodmin, upon which Madam Noy is convicted of poisoning her husband.

Richard Couch spent three years in London mixing with some of the most eminent physicians and scientists of his day. These provided him with more than information. They taught him a methodology, one he followed for the rest of his life. It emphasised the primacy of observed fact, dissection and experiment. It relegated theory and hypothesis to a secondary position. In other words, it drew a strict and uncrossable line between fact and theory. Fact was for the scientist and physician, theory for the philosopher. The test of fact was whether it led to positive results, whether it worked! Not whether it produced a good theory. In 1838, Richard passed his examination at the College of Surgeons on March 9 and received his diploma. On November 14 he passed his examination at the Apothecaries Hall. Richard subsequently returned to Polperro, turning his back on a career in London, as his father had done before.

The Return to Polperro from London, 1839 to 1844

Those desiring an overview of nineteenth century science in Cornwall at this time and the place in it of Richard and Jonathan Couch are directed to: 

• Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England by Simon Naylor, number eleven in the Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series, editor Bernard Lightman.

At a more biographical level:

• Doctor by Nature. Jonathan Couch: Surgeon of Polperro by Jeremy Rowett Johns.

• A Memoir of William Pengelly, edited by Hester Pengelly

 What is found below complements or challenges but does not replace the above and is taken from various sources.

Also valuable is the 'Private Memoirs of Jonathan Couch', as transcribed and edited by Alwyne Wheeler from the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall for 1983.

At the time Richard was completing his course in London, Jonathan Couch was elected a Corresponding Member of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, a body of which Richard was later to be Secretary. Jonathan was proposed by its President, Davies Gilbert, a friend and relation of Thomas Bond of Looe, and the President of the Royal Society following from Sir Humphry Davy. The year after Richard's return, Jonathan attended the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, being appointed one of the local secretaries. On returning to Polperro, Richard was not consigning himself to a scientific backwater.

In conjunction with Jonathan and others, Richard commenced a detailed investigation of the zoology and geology of south-east Cornwall, publishing studies of national importance. In August 1841, Richard was awarded a Silver Medal for his Natural History of Zoophytes by the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, and in October 1843 was awarded the same for a paper on crustaceans. At the time he was working on the third part of Cornish Fauna, which was published in April 1845, with the drawings, transcribed with a steel pen to zinc plates, by Thomas Q. Couch, Q's father.

When Richard returned to Polperro around 1840, he must have expected a period of relative tranquillity back in the family home, assisting his father in the practice and continuing his zoological and geological investigations. The reality was somewhat different. There was considerable anti-Corn Law agitation which led to repeal and many tenant farmers leaving the land. Potato blight struck in 1845. In the same year Jonathan temporarily left the Wesleyan Methodist Association he had helped found, and in June 1847 came into direct conflict with the Anglican establishment over the burial of his granddaughter. As Richard appears to have joined St Mary's Anglican church on arrival in Penzance, it is significant that Jonathan wrote in his Private Memoir of June 1847: 'a church established by law, with exclusive privileges, is an established evil'. This was a minor breach between Richard and Jonathan which was later to widen.

The Private Memoir gives Richard as leaving Polperro on March 1, 1844. A letter home, dated March 19, outlines his hopes and plans. At the time he was working on section three of Cornish Fauna, having taken over the work from his father. Bertha Couch (1891) has him settling in Penzance in August 1845, possibly the month he established a practice at 10 Chapel Street. He lodged with Miss Swain, the post mistress. It was eight years before Richard married. On June 25, 1853, he wed Lydia Pearce, eldest daughter of Richard Pearce, merchant and later Mayor of Penzance. In September and October Jonathan visited Penzance and Penwith, staying for two weeks with Richard and Lydia in a house opposite the entrance or gate leading to the churchyard.

Lydia Pearce was a daughter of Richard Pearce, one of the most distinguished men of Penzance and at the centre of many activities. He was a manager of a local savings bank. He was also the Hanoverian and Belgian Consul, and the French, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Prussian, Spanish, Portuguese and Netherlands Vice-Consul. Furthermore, he was a Lloyds Agent and the Receiver of Wrecks. Richard Couch possibly initially came across Richard Pearce when he acted as consulting surgeon at the Public Dispensary and Richard Pearce was the dispensary's secretary.

Having his surgery at 10 Chapel Street, Richard Couch had distinguished neighbours. At number 15 stood Batten, Carne and Carne, a bank with Miss Elizabeth Carne as one of its directors. Elizabeth Carne contributed papers to the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall. Nearby lived Joseph Carne, FRS, MPIA, the society's treasurer. In 1864, the Misses Millett, who contributed studies in botany to the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society, lived at number 35, although in 1856 they lived at 5 Clarence Place. An interesting name in Chapel Street in 1856 was Edmund Davy. Closely related to Sir Humphry Davy were two other scientists of distinction, Edmund Davy snr and Edmund Davy jnr. Maybe one retired back to Penzance.

Richard quickly established himself at the centre of the Royal Geological Society and the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society. On May 28, 1854, Maria Jane was born, followed on March 21, 1856, by Sarah Lydia. Richard's mother died in Polperro, aged 67, in September 1857. On June 25, 1858, Richard jnr was born, an individual Q was to come to know. The first section of Richard snr's study on The Mortality of Miners was translated into French in the same year. However, in Polperro his father was courting Sarah Lander Roose, a much younger woman, in a relationship Richard strongly disapproved of. Jonathan and Sarah were married in Liskeard on October 23, 1858. Correspondence with Jonathan ceased, but was maintained with John Quiller Couch, Jonathan's youngest son, who was about to move to Penzance. On March 16, 1860, Margaret was born, but on July 5, 1862 a second son died soon after birth. Richard Pearce, Richard's father-in-law, died on August 23, 1862. In the following November Richard was elected an Alderman. He was also Staff-Surgeon to the western Battalion of the Duke of Cornwall's Rifle Volunteers and surgeon to the West Cornwall Railway Company. He was frequently subpoenaed for important cases at the Cornwall Assizes in Bodmin.

By 1862 Richard was a locally, a nationally and to a lesser extent an internationally known figure. He was at the height of his powers with a string of distinguished publications behind him and a well-paid practice to support him and his growing family.

 Death and Aftermath

Richard Quiller Couch died in May 1863, aged 47. Some time before he had inoculated himself with poisonous matter from an unguarded nail-spring and his health had never properly recovered. In August 1862, Richard Pearce, Richard's father-in-law died. On March 2, 1863, Thomas Quiller Couch married Mary Ford of Abbotskerswell. In the middle of April Richard took a turn for the worse and in spite of the ill-feeling occasioned by Jonathan's third marriage, Jonathan travelled from Polperro to Penzance to assist recovery. After two weeks Jonathan returned home. Then a week later on May 8, at about midnight, Richard died, leaving a widow and four children, three daughters and one son. The family had intended a private funeral but this was not possible for such a public figure. At this time John Quiller Couch, Jonathan's youngest son, was in practice in Penzance. He gave the widow some assistance, but, being an irascible man, unusual in a Couch, soon fell out with her.

The funeral took place on Friday 15, with the Rev P. Hedgeland, incumbent of St Mary's Anglican church, Penzance, taking the funeral. The Corporation and representatives from various bodies took part. He was buried in Penzance cemetery.

The death of Richard was widely reported. When Bertha Couch came to write her Life of Jonathan Couch in 1891, she obtained information about Richard  from an obituary report in the Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse Gazette. Bertha Couch was the oldest child of Jonathan's third marriage, while Richard was the oldest from Jonathan's second marriage. Richard died in 1863, Bertha in 1942. it is unlikely that she ever met any of the children from the second marriage, even though Dr John Q. Couch of Penzance, the youngest of Jonathan's sons by his second marriage, was still alive when Bertha was writing her Life. The report is sufficiently long and detailed to suggest having been written by a member of the Couch family, possibly Thomas, Q's father.

The Plymouth report is considerably longer than the one found in The West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser on Friday, May 15, 1863:

'The funeral of the late Mr. Richard Q. Couch, surgeon, of Penzance, will take place on Friday morning, at eleven o'clock, on which mournful occasion there will, no doubt, be a very large attendance of the inhabitants generally, as well as many of his closest friends from a distance.'

In a different column is a report from the 1^st Penzance D.C.R. Volunteers of Monday 7 pm:

 'The lamented decease of the surgeon of the battalion, Mr. R. Q. Couch, was also made subject of a few kind and appropriate remarks by Captain Boase; after which the company proceeded to the prom and went through the light infantry evolutions...'

The paper also includes a report of the annual review of the Royal Cornwall Rangers Militia at Bodmin barracks. Thomas Q. Couch was surgeon to the militia. Q was born at Bodmin six months after the decease of Richard. As it says in Memories and Opinions (1945, pp.14-4), Q attended (with his father) the final reviews and rifle practice on Cardinham moors, an account of which also appears in Chapter II of the novel The Ship of Stars.

'On Tuesday last, the regiment was reviewed on Bodmin Beacon by Lieut.-Colonel Addision of the 2^nd (Queens Royal) Regiment of Foot...Lieut.-Colonel Addison accompanied by Lieut.-Colonel Commandant Coryton, arrived on the ground at 11 a.m. ...On Thursday they were dismissed.'

 In the 'Deaths' column appeared:

'At Chapel-Street, Penzance, on Saturday last, regretted by a wide circle of friends, and by many scientific and literary acquaintances, Richard Q. Couch, Esq., M.R.C.S., aged 46.'

This is a rare mention of Richard's literary side.

Nearby, under the heading The War in America, was reported the crossing of the Rappehannock by General Hooker as a prelude to the battle of Fredericksburg. The report appeared after the battle had actually taken place. The battle produced a famous photograph by Matthew Brady: 'Confederate dead at Marye's Height, Fredericksburg, Virginia'. The photograph was taken less than 20 minutes after the Heights had been stormed by Sedgwick's 6^th Maine Infantry, on May 3, 1863 (A.J. Russell/Brady Collection). A General Couch fought on the Union side during the American Civil War, but whether related is unknown.

In 1864, Miss Pearce and Mrs Richard Quiller Couch are given as living at 22 Chapel Street. Miss Swain, post-mistress, with whom Richard lodged before his marriage, is given as living at number 50. John Quiller Couch and Mrs Henry Rickard, presumably his housekeeper, are given at 10 Chapel Street, where the surgery was.

Richard's children appeared to have shared few of their father's interests. Richard Pearce Couch became a successful businessman in Penzance. In 1897, he was offered the mayoralty but turned it down. The following year he accepted. The Cornish Telegraph for Thursday, November 17, 1898, gives an account of the mayoralty banquet, which Dr John Q. Couch attended, and at which Q was the guest speaker. Q appears to have been close to his Couch relations in Penzance. No doubt he stayed with them while researching his western stories. The novella Ia, set in Hayle and St Ives, came out in 1896, with Dr Hammer being based on Dr John Q Couch, although devoid of irascibility. Dr Hammer has to deal with diptheria and typhus. He takes the practical steps of improving hygiene and sanitation after having followed the course of disease from the sites of infection to the various parts of the town. He uses fact and observation not theory to ameliorate the situation. What is true is what works!

Q's short and amusing speech was fully reported in the Cornish Telegraph. The speech also gives a little insight into family affairs:

'Not many of them had the honour of being kinsmen of the Mayor of Penzance. There at least he could congratulate himself. The Mayor's father and his father were brothers, and also very dear friends. Sad to say, all this was very long ago;'

'The Mayor was the latest representative of a family (Pearce) which had filled the Mayoral chain with dignity for many generations. But, if he was the latest, why should he be the last. (Loud applause and laughter). He felt certain that if they could only persuade him, if only they could convince him what lustre his dignity would take were it shared by a gifted and amiable partner, his term of office, which they all hoped would be a happy and successful one, would be remembered as such, and he would then admit that this happiness had at least been redoubled. (Applause.)'

The Royal Geological Society of Cornwall

The Society was founded in 1814 at what appeared to be the end of the Napoleonic War, with Napoleon safely secured on the island of Elba. Q set the novel Poison Island at this time, with POWs returning from France and Dr Beauregard visiting the deposed emperor on Elba. Two years later, Richard was to be born to Jonathan and Jane Couch in Polperro.

At the time of Richard's removal from Polperro to Penzance, in 1844-5, Sir Charles Lemon, Bart, MP, FRS, FGS, was president of the society, with Joseph Carne, FRS, MPIA, as treasurer. Contributions to the transactions of the society came locally from Charles Peach, William Pengelly and Elizabeth Carne, and from abroad from Captain G.B. Tremenheere, FGS, Bengal Engineer, and Wm Jory Henwood, CE, FRS, FGS, Chief Commissioner of the Gongo Soco and Catta Preta Gold Mines.

Few areas of the globe are of greater geological interest than Cornwall, as it contains igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks of varying ages, plus extensive coasts and drowned landscapes. The central metalliferous backbone, from Dartmoor to West Penwith, has been extensively mined, revealing material from a considerable depth, while quarries expose material from closer to the surface. Fossils occur in sedimentary areas, particularly south-east Cornwall, where Jonathan was based, and where Richard Couch and William Pengelly were able to subsequently investigate. Work done in Cornwall fed into a national and international picture.

The writings of Jonathan and Richard Couch are a snapshot of geology at a particular time and we need to capture the excitement of continuous discoveries and fascinating problems. These workers helped free geological science from the shibboleths of the eighteenth century, establishing the subject on the basis of observation and experiment. The Couches drew a strict line between fact and theory, seeing fact as the job of the scientist and theory as the job of the philosopher. They also championed clear, concise English, a concern later taken up by Q. In fact, the methodology of Jonathan and Richard had a profound influence upon Q. It is the methodology of Dr Carfax in Q's last and unfinished novel Castle Dor.

The Couches were dedicated to geological research, but they saw this as part of a wider culture including politics, religion and literature. Each had its own province and methodology, but each fed into the other. They refused to see science as doing the business, free from the grubbiness of politics, the fantasy of religion and the escapism of literature, as some proclaim today. In fact, Q probably sought a career in the arts rather than the sciences because he realised the limitations of science.

The Membership of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall in 1860

In 1860, Jonathan Couch was an Honorary Member, while Richard Quiller Couch was the secretary and curator. Richard had three years left to live and Jonathan ten. Richard's father-in-law, Richard Pearce, was on the council.

The membership of the society was drawn from throughout the British Isles and from beyond. It was connected to the Geological Society of France through M. Dufrenoy. Some of the most distinguished geologists of the age were members.

President: Augustus Smith, Proprietor of the Scilly Isles and MP for Truro. He resided at Tresco Abbey. When Q published the novel Major Vigoureux in 1907, many suspected that Sir Caesar Hutchins, Lord Proprietor of the Isles and owner of Iniscaw Priory was based on Augustus Smith. In the preface to the Duchy Edition of 1928, Q claims a similarity in one respect only.

Of the vice-presidents, two were Members of Parliament, J. St  Aubyn and R. Davy. The connection between the society and the Houses of Parliament is clear.

From the list of Honorary Members the following are of particular interest:

• Henry S. Boase, MD, FRS, FGS, of Dundee but formerly of Penzance. The writer of: Human Nature in 1865, and A Few Words on Evolution and Creation in 1882. He was a distinguished banker and an expert on finance
• Cordier, Member of the Institute of France, Paris
•  John Davy, MD, FRS, etc, of Ambleside, the brother of Sir Humphry Davy. He arranged his collected works. His daughter married a Dr Babington, probably a near relation of Sir Humphry's closest friend, Dr Babington
• Dufrenoy, Member of the Geological Society of France
• Sir Charles Lyell, MA, FRS, LS, GS, London, a close friend of Charles Darwin
• Richard Owen, FRS, LS, GS, Professor of Anatomy in the Royal College of Surgeons. A friend and correspondent of Jonathan Couch
• Rev A. Sedgwick, FRS, LS, GS, Professor of Geology at Cambridge
• Rev William Whewell, DD, FRS, GS, Cambridge. Writer of the History of the Inductive Sciences in three volumes
• Robert Hunt, FRS, Keeper of Mining Records at the Museum of Practical Geology in London. A collector of folklore who published Popular Romances of the West of England in 1865, to which Thomas Quiller Couch of Bodmin made a distinguished contribution.
• Charles W. Peach, a friend of Jonathan Couch.
• William Pengelly, FRS, of Torquay, but formerly of West Looe. An acolyte of Jonathan Couch. In Memories and Opinions, Q related how an elderly Pengelly befriended him, taking him from Newton Abbot College to Bradley Wood on fossil hunting expeditions. This was the one time when Q considered a career in science. The friendship continued until Pengelly's death.

Ordinary Members (selection)

The ordinary members of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall included: 

• John St Aubyn MP, still a prominent family in West Cornwall. He was a county MP
• Sir Thomas D. Acland, Bart, MP, FRS, of Killerton in Devon. The Aclands were and continued to be leading members of the Liberal Party and Q would have had dealings with them
• Miss Elizabeth Carne, the daughter of Joseph Carne, smelter, banker and merchant, and granddaughter of Joseph Carne, a friend of John Wesley. The Carnes were Wesleyan Anglicans. She was a banker, a geologist, a travel writer and an amateur theologian. Living in West Cornwall she was able to develop in a way impossible in England at the time. Related to the Bronte novelists
• Rd Davey, FGS, MP, a County Member for West Cornwall, 1857-1868, of Polsew. A mine adventurer and farmer
• Sir Charles Lemon, Baronet, FRS, of Cardew, a Whig and a County Member, along with E.W. Pendarves, for West Cornwall from 1833 to 1853
• Richard Pearce of Penzance, Richard Couch's father-in-law
• Dr George Smith of Camborne, probably the writer of the History of Wesleyan Methodism, 1859-65 ( 3 Vols).
• Sir Richard R. Vyvyan, Bart, FRS, of Trelowarren, Ultra Tory, West Cornwall County MP, and MP for Helston and Truro. An opponent of the 1832 Reform Act.

Contributions to the Transactions of the Royal Geographical Society of Cornwall

 These contributions were made between 1846 and 1859 by Richard and Jonathan Couch and other relevant individuals. The contributions are numbered and, where possible, dated. Summaries, quotations and (in brackets) comments are added as appropriate.

XXIV: 'On the cause of the  red colour in the fossiliferous rocks in the neighbourhood of Looe' by Jonathan Couch

The first discovery of fossils in the Looe area was probably by 'my late friend Thomas Bond' who wrote a History of Looe. (For a short biography of Thomas Bond and his relationship with Davies Gilbert, one time President of the Royal Society, see Mayor of Troy.)

The red colour is not the result of iron in the sedimentary deposits but encrinitic fossils, probably Comatula rosacea.

'In illustration of the above remarks, which are here applied to different families of echinodermata, in explanation of these fossil appearances, it may be necessary to observe, as a fact known to zoologists, that the family of encrinites (the greater portion of  which have become extinct as living animals), comatulae, ophiurae, and starfishes, not only belong to one natural order, but that there is good proof that the comatulae and ophiurae, at least in the early stages of their existence, partake of the encrinitic form: the difference between them being only such as is seen in many others of the lower class of animals, where a section of the family in the course of development stops short, and continues to bear as a permanent form, what in some other classes or genera, is no more than one of the stages which is passed in the way to a higher degree of development.'

(The identification of the fossils in the fossiliferous rocks began a controversy referred to repeatedly in the following studies because it affected the dating of geological periods.)

1846, XXVI: 'On the Silurian remains in the strata of the south-east coast of Cornwall' by Richard Q. Couch.

This is the coast from the River Fowey eastwards to the River Tamar, taking in Polperro, Looe and Rame Head.

The Silurian strata is fossil bearing, with fish beds between Looe and Fowey, centred on a deposit at Polperro. Remains are most commonly found in blue slate, less commonly where the colour is claret. Bones, scales and skin or shagreen occur but much injured and dismembered. In Scilley cove drang at Polperro, the blue slate contains fish and shells.

Couch states: 'The present system of arranging the Silurian strata is contradicted by the Cornish beds'.

(The statement proved controversial.)

1846, XXXV: 'Report on the Fossil Geology of Cornwall' by Richard Q. Couch

Some strata from the Tamar west to Truro are fossil bearing but not all. These rocks also bear traces of copper, manganese, iron and mundic in south-east Cornwall but scarcely sufficient for mining purposes. (See I saw Three Ships, Chapter 4, by Q).

Cornwall is fossiliferous, except for the granite ranges, with many species commonly found, e.g. polypiaria, crinoidea, conchifera, crustacea and fish, but some found only in specific localities. There are 40 fossils peculiar to South Petherwin. The richest deposits date to the Silurian period.

Along the south coast are six species belonging to five genera from the Old Red Sandstone and Silurian rocks with other species unidentifiable. Mr Box has observed the remains of trees in Whitsand Bay, inferring the bay once to have been wooded. This area was once below sea level before being elevated and submerged again. Couch wonders whether this has also happened to the north coast. (Q refers to the Langona legend of a city lost to the sea off Perranporth in Chapter ten of The Ship of Stars and the drowning of Mounts Bay in the short story 'Phoebus on Halzephron'.)

1846, XLIII: 'Notes on the Fossil Corals of Cornwall' by Richard Q. Couch.

13 species are listed. For each species Richard gives a name, a habitat or location in Cornwall, and habitats out of Cornwall, plus a paragraph of description and analysis.

1847, 1: 'Remarks on the present state of the Geology of Cornwall' by Richard Q. Couch, Curator of the Society.

The Limestone and slate of south Devon extends westwards beyond Fowey. In the peninsula formed by the Looe and Fowey rivers, the rocks partake of the character of the Devonian and Silurian series. Skirting the southern boundary is a bed containing fish material, richest near Polperro, but extending as far west as Polruan, but not west of the River Fowey.

The rivers of the peninsula run in a south-easterly direction, although at Water Gate, on the West Looe River, a mile and a half to the north of the fish beds, a valley runs nearly at right angles as it rises from a blue clay bed, through dull yellow, soft and friable rock, to Pelynt. This is rich in fossil material.

The tributary stream runs from Trelawne, the seat of the Trelawny family, through Ten Acre Wood to the West Looe River. In Q's short story 'The Disenchantment of 'Lizabeth', the setting is West Looe River, with the Herodsfoot lead mines in its higher reaches and the farms of Transom and Hooper in the middle valley.

At St Veep, Ethy, West Taphouse and Bogga Mill, on the stream from Lanreath to Pont, the rocks assume a light brown and grey colour, with the fossils therein being obscure in character.

In Q's novels Troy Town and The Mayor of Troy, the eastern bank of the River Fowey, in the parish of St Veep, plays an important role, with Ethy as Pentethy. In The Silver Spur, a novel of the English Civil War, the Parliamentary forces become bogged down in the 'soft and friable' road at West Taphouse, ensuring their defeat by the Royalists at the Battle of Braddock Down. This is historical fact. In the novel Shining Ferry, the rich lands of John Rosewarne lie on the rich soil of the east bank of the River Fowey stretching north to St Veep.

1847, 2: Produce of Lead Ore and Lead in the U.K. for the years 1845-1846 from Returns made to the Mining Record Office, Museum of Practical Geology' by Robert Hunt, FRS, Keeper of Mining Records, London

Robert Hunt of Devonport was a mining engineer who in 1833-34 kept a chemist's shop in Chapel Street, Penzance, near where Richard, ten years later, was to set up a medical practice. Hunt was a folklorist who published Popular Romances of the West of England (1871) with the help of Thomas Q. Couch.

1849: 'On the Ichthyolites of East Cornwall' by William Pengelly, Associate of the Society, Torquay

'Having learned a few years since, that my friends Messrs Couch and Peach had discovered Ichthyolites in the slate rock at, or near, Polperro, I took the earliest opportunity of visiting these gentlemen.'

(Sir) William Pengelly, FRS, of Looe, was an acolyte of Jonathan Couch and late in life a friend of Q.

1850: 'On the Ichthyolites of East Cornwall' by William Pengelly, FGS.

Miners were his favourite audience, many being Methodists, because they had the knowledge to grasp what he was saying (see Memoir of  William Pengelly by H. Pengelly (1871, p. 231). He was attacked by a fundamentalist magazine which he considered theologically and scientifically uninformed. Q draws a picture of a fundamentalist in the person of Samuel Rosewarne in Shining Ferry although there is no imputation that he took the first book of Genesis literally.

A partial account of the discovery of and the controversy surrounding the fish-sponge fossil bed (the Cornish Ichthyolites' Controversy) can be found in A Memoir of William Pengelly of Looe by Hester Pengelly. In Chapter III (p. 34) there is the record of a conversation between Dr Bowerbank and Pengelly on July 13, 1850. Pengelly states:

'Mr. Peach has worked a good deal among the Cornish ichthyolites' but 'When Peach dropped the investigation at Talland sand-bay I took it up, and have continued it with success to Rame Head. This year I have been working on Looe Island, and have found good specimens; on the whole I have a capital collection of these ancient fishes.'

The correspondence between Peach and Pengelly from August 28, 1850 to May 14, 1851, is included in the text. In a letter dated January 5, 1851, Pengelly writes of his disappointment in missing an opportunity of discussing the matter with Sir Roderick Murchison. This was rectified later. Murchison, FRS, was an Honorary Member of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall and a near relation of Charles Murchison mentioned in the section of Richard Couch's study of mortality in miners. It is disappointing that the correspondence between Pengelly and Jonathan Couch, which must have taken place, has been lost. However, a meeting between the two, dated to July 20, 1855, and also recorded by Bertha Couch in her Life of Jonathan Couch (1891), is recorded.

A summary of the controversy is given by Dr Henry Woodward, FRS, in the Presidential address delivered to the Geological Society of London on February 15, 1895.

 'One of Pengelly's first recorded papers was On the Ichthyolites of East Cornwall ' (1849–50). These interesting remains were first identified as FISHES by C.W. Peach in 1843; after eight years they were referred to as SPONGES, under the name of Steganodictyum Cornubicum, in 1851, by McCoy; then to the Cephalopoda by Ferd. Roemer (as Archaeoteuthis Dunensis) in 1855; and back again to Fishes as Scaphapsis Cornubicus by Huxley in 1868. Pengelly mentions in one of his papers that he had no fewer than 300 fragments of these fossil fishes from the Devonian of Cornwall and Devon in his own cabinet.'

 Talland sand-bay above is Sheba sands and Sheba Cove in stories such as I Saw Three Ships by Q.

In some of his writings, Pengelly refers to a Hannafore or Havenfore sand-cross going from Mid Main (C. men or mean; E. isolated rock) to the beach on Looe Island, indicating a walkway in the early 19th century at low tide. In the early 1960s this writer paddled across to the island during a very low spring tide but this was an exceptional occasion. Coastal erosion at Hannafore was continuous until the Hannafore estate, many of the houses being built by Charles Symons, along with a protective wall, renewed in the 1960s or 1970s was developed between the wars. In all Q's stories there is but one fleeting reference to Looe Island. However, it must have been a convenient location for contraband landed by his Quiller forebears before and during the Napoleonic War. There is a curious tradition of a tunnel running from the island to Hannafore.

1851: 'Notice of the occurrence of the Horns and Bones of several species of Deer in the Tin Works of Cornwall'  by Richard Q. Couch

1851: 'An investigation of drowned landscapes around the Cornish Coast' by Richard Q. Couch

1851: 'On the Fucoidal appearances observed in the Cornish Slate' by Richard Q. Couch

1851: 'Remarks on the Geology of the South Coast of Cornwall' by William Pengelly

Undated: 'Remarks on the Geology of the South Coast of Cornwall' by William Pengelly

The fossils discovered by Jonathan and Richard Couch et al., and which Professor McCoy identified as sponges, have been submitted to the geology section of the British Association who identified them as icthyic. This identification is 'the very link needed to complete the evidence by which the chronology of our rocks was to be established.'

Pengelly makes the observation that 'truth is preferable to even a favourite theory.'

Undated: 'Notes on the Bones found in the Alluvial Deposits of Cornwall' by Richard Q. Couch

1854: 'On a supposed new species of the Fossil genus Astraea, found in Cornwall' by Jonathan Couch

This study and the subsequent papers follow that of Richard Q. Couch's 'Remarks on the present state of Geology in Cornwall' of 1847, in which the Trelawny estate is mentioned. The friendship of the Trelawnys and the Couches made the land and its quarry accessible to Jonathan Couch for scientific observation. Jonathan Couch claimed the species to be new to science, naming it Astraea Trelawniensis Nobis, discovered in a field at Bluegate.

1854: 'Description of the Fossils found in a quarry near Trelawny, in the parish of Pelynt, Cornwall' by Jonathan Couch

The stone was being quarried for the building of Looe bridge. The quarry and others nearby are rich in fossils of the Encrinite family.

1854: 'On the Zoology of the Post-tertiary Deposits of Cornwall' by Richard Q. Couch

The drowned forests of the Cornish coast.

1855: 'Notes on the Foliation and Cleavage of the Cornish Slates' by Richard Q. Couch.

1855: 'The Silurian Fauna of Cornwall' by Richard Q. Couch

An extensive list of fossils and locations.

1858: 'Notice of a specimen of Killas and Spar broken off from the Stone's Reef, in St Ives Bay' by Richard Pearce

1859: 'On the evidence to be derived from Cliff Boulders, with regard to a former condition on the land and sea, in the Lands-end district' by Miss E. Carne

1859: 'Enquiry into the Age of that part of the District of the Maritime Alps which surrounds Mentone' by Miss E. Carne

Mentone was, and continued to be, an area of remarkable interest. Hester Pengelly includes in A Memoir of William Pengelly  extracts from Pengelly's Notes on the Mentone Cavern which he sent to Sir Charles Lyell in 1872. She includes a photograph of the 'Mentone Skeleton'. (q837, pp. 217-219).)

On the previous page is a letter of Pengelly describing his further researches of the fossil beds from the River Fowey to Rame Head. In 1872, Jonathan Couch was two years dead and Richard nine.

The Presidential Address to the Society by Augustus Smith

When Augustus Smith gave his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Royal Cornwall Geological Society in 1860, he was speaking to and would be read by an audience of independent and informed men and women, including:

• Sir Charles Lyell, a close friend of Charles Darwin
• Professor Richard Owen, an anatomist and palaeontologist who questioned Darwin's thesis
• Dr John Davy, the brother of Sir Humphry Davy, PRS, whose biography of the chemist shows Humphry having gone beyond the materialistic view of evolution found in Darwin
• Henry Boase, one of the country's leading financial experts
• the Couches
• Miss Elizabeth Carne, banker, geologist, travel writer and amateur theologian, who defied Darwin's belief in women being incapable of science
• (Sir) William Pengelly, FRS, a Quaker and early supporter of evolutionary views
• A. Sedgwick, Professor of Geology
• A number of important politicians.

The 1860s were a time when individuals trained in science, economics, medicine, politics and theology could talk to each other on equal terms, free from the confines of over-specialisation.

Augustus Smith's address is a model of concise reasoning and lucid exposition. It provides us today with a knowledge of informed public discourse in the year following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and fifteen years after the publication of his Voyage of the Beagle, dedicated in the second edition to Charles Lyell. (I have my grandfather's copy: H.G. Hurrell, R.N., of Antony, near Torpoint - the village upon which Q based two novels Harry Revel and Poison Island.) 1860 was also the year of the supposed confrontation of Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford, on June 31. It is frequently claimed that no contemporary account of the meeting and the weekend exists. This is incorrect. The reader is referred to A Memoir of William Pengelly by Hester Pengelly, VIII, pp 98 to 100. An investigation into Pengelly's records might reveal additional information.

Smith's address opens with a quotation from a member of the society, Sir Charles Lyell:

'a work from Mr. Charles Darwin, the result of twenty years of observation and experiment in zoology, botany and geology, will lead us to the conclusion, that these powers of nature, which give rise to races and permanent varieties in animals and plants, are the same as those which, in much longer periods, and in a still longer series of ages, give rise to difference of generic rank. We are told his investigations and reasonings will throw a flood of light on many classes of phenomena connected with the affinities, geographical distribution, and geological succession of organic beings, for which no other hypothesis has been able, or has even attempted to account.'

Richard Q. Couch was familiar with the rigour of Darwin's work, citing him and Von Humboldt in his addresses to the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society. In the printed lectures The Victorian Age and Shelley, Q sees the 'modest Darwin' as one of many who spoke with an independence subsequently in decline. In lecture nine of On the Art of Reading, Q identifies Darwin's Descent of Man, along with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Newman's Apologia, as one of the great books of our literature.

No-one was more penetrating in his analysis of language than Q and an eyebrow might have been raised at Lyell's phrase, used to explain the rise of plants, animals and races, 'these powers of nature', when the system claims to be materialistic and mechanistic. Sir Humphry Davy made the point that matter is not self-organizing but inanimate. What this 'power' happens to be is left unexplained.

Q's answer to Lyell comes in Some Seventeenth Century Poets and in On the Art of Reading. At the conclusion of lecture one of the latter, Q argues: 'That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact beyond which we cannot go.'

In this Q is echoing the thinking of Jonathan and Richard Q. Couch.

In Lecture II, Q argues that the Universe is a harmony of 'ordered motion', which the natural sciences map and measure but cannot explain. Q continues that if the sceptic objects to the word 'law' as suggesting a law giver, he is satisfied with the acknowledgement of recurrence and predictability. By observation, therefore, we know the Universe not to be a 'Chaos'. If the Universe is a Chaos, rational knowledge is impossible, along with liberal democracy and an educational system based on experiment and observation.

Q would see Lyell's statement, based on 'these powers of nature', as only having meaning if the world is seen as constituted of matter and spirit, not matter alone. If 'powers of nature' applies to matter alone, as an inherent property, the phrase is void. If the metaphor 'blind watchmaker' is substituted, as by a contemporary classical Darwinian, the Universe becomes irrational or rational in appearance only, as with a sequence of numbers from a roulette wheel. Without defining what 'powers of nature' means, Lyell's statement becomes problematic in the extreme.

Consciously or otherwise, Q is also echoing the thinking of Sir Humphry Davy. In 1838, Dr John Davy published the Life and Writings of Sir Humphry Davy. This was nine years after Humphry's death and twenty-one before the publication of Origin of Species. At the time of Smith's address John Davy was a member of the society and living at Lesketh-how, near Ambleside, dying there on January 24, 1868. Sir Humphry Davy had not only been the most important scientist of his day, but the Royal Society's most distinguished president. Every major library in the country must have possessed John's publication. The Life shows that around the time of the close of the Napoleonic War, Humphry was reflecting on the evolution of life, but on a much broader canvas than Darwin was to do. He rejected materialism as a legitimate vehicle for evolution.

'Men who have considered nature only by what is visible, and who find in the forms and energies of matter the generation of thought, are like children, who may consider the motion and action of a steam engine as produced by solid matter; ignorant of the elements of fire and water, which are the immediate cause of its activity, or of the physical discoveries of human intelligence by which the combinations producing it were made.'

John Davy would have seen Darwinism as an inadequate explanation, however many mechanisms it enumerated. The world consists of matter and spirit as the Couches believed.

John Davy sets out Sir Humphry's thinking in volume I, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy', pp.217 to 222.

Davy refutes the narrow materialism later found in Darwin.

'Probably there is an analogy in all existence: the divided tail of the fish is linked in a long succession of like objects with the biped man. In the planetary system it is probable man will be found connected with a higher intellectual nature; and it is possible that the monad, or soul, is constantly undergoing a series of progressions.'

Davy drew a strict line, as did Q, between matter and spirit:

'What is true with respect to matter will probably with respect to spirit be absolutely false, as supposing organization only the link or substratum of thought; all analogies will fail us from gross matter applied to light.'

In a number of his stories, such as The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem and Castle Dor, Q uses different dimensions of time. Darwinism is based on a regular progression of linear time. Davy addresses this question.

'To infinite wisdom the past, present and future are alike.'

'May it not be imagined that the monads or spiritual germs which animate or create organic forms have no relation to space, and pass from systems to systems, wholly unlike matter, which is limited to its own gravitating sphere? Is not light the first envelope of the monads, and may not my earliest hypothesis be true?'

 Davy is prepared to be even more daring:

'Is there not a monad, or one perceptive atom or principle, which plays, as it were, round different arrangements in the brain, and which acts in its own little world, as the great diffusive monad does in the universe.'

Sir Humphry Davy, President of the Royal Society, did not stand at the periphery of the scientific community but at its centre, yet books on evolution ignore his thinking, pretending that the debate was between Darwin and Genesis or special creation.

The quotation from Lyell given by Smith ends with the claim that Origin of Species is an hypothesis which stands alone in its attempt to account for the 'geological succession of organic beings'. Firstly, if it is an hypothesis, a test should have been provided to demonstrate its truth value. Secondly, the claim is patently incorrect. In 1858, at the Linnaean Society in London, an organization to which Jonathan Couch belonged, the hypotheses of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were both discussed.

Following Lyell's quotation, Smith goes on to discuss the reception of Origin of Species. The subject, he states, is steeped in 'controversy and mystery', thus commanding for its author the attention of the 'whole philosophical and literary world' and was accorded 'the stamp and approval of higher scientific authority'. The work was given the respectful attention of the finest minds in relation to: 'its aim and scope, its material facts, its deductions and speculations, its reasonings and expressed conclusions, and still more its unexpressed tendencies and inevitable conclusions'.

The merits of the work were unanimously admitted, but it was deemed a failure.

'But when such are the merits of the work and talent of the author, it is more unaccountable that he should have been satisfied with a course of reasoning so much at variance with his knowledge, and be content so lightly to pass over difficulties, or adopt solutions, the weakness of which it is strange should not be palpable to one of his keen intelligence.'

We can see from this that criticism did not lie in the idea of evolution, or because anyone seriously took Genesis as a scientific theory, but because Darwin's argument was unconvincing. This is not the view we receive from books of popular science, where the reaction is presented as furious, bigoted and ignorant.

Maybe the Darwinists paid too little attention to the available criticism from intelligent people; with the inevitable result. In Unended Quest. An Intellectual Autobiography, Sir Karl Popper explains that when he came to investigate the neo-Darwinians, he saw the 'almost tautological character inherent in the Darwinian formulation', and 'that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme' which is unable to 'explain the origin of life' (1982, pp. 168-171). He then goes on to try and improve the formulation of the theory. He explains the success of Darwinism in its offer of a non-theistic explanation, but in the degree to which it claims an 'ultimate explanation' it is no better. This refutes one of the claims made by Lyell.

Just as Popper looked at the words, phrases and ideas of neo-Darwinism, so did Augustus Smith from Origin of Species. Smith identifies 'natural selection' as a 'new term', but claims that when it is defined as 'preservation of favourable variations, and the rejection of ingenious variations', 'struggle for existence', 'divergence of character', 'process of modification leading to the formation of genera' and the like, Darwin is putting 'a new dress of phrases and terms for doctrines and principles that have been advocated, discussed and discarded over and over again by more than one school of philosophy, only altered to the present state of modern science, and illustrated by his knowledge.'

In other words, Darwin has purloined the writings of others to present them as his own.

Smith's conclusion is: 'the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as he speaks of it in his introduction – is as much a mystery as ever...'. Popper agrees: 'I think it quite possible that life is so extremely improbable that nothing can “explain” why it originated.'

Smith leaves his central criticism of Origin of Species to the concluding paragraph of the review:

'...from researches made as to fossil remains embedded in the strata of former periods of the earth, all species would appear to have been equally free from all development by transmutation during their term of existence in each period of geological succession.'

In the last analysis, therefore, acceptance or rejection has to be based on observation, not on theory and dogma. The Darwinists responded to this criticism with the claim that a detailed and widespread investigation would verify their hypothesis. There can be little question that Richard Couch believed observation and experiment to be more important than theory and dogma, with Smith's analysis very much to his taste. Does this make Richard as much of a fossil as the material he studied?

In Dinosaur in a Haystack (1996, pp. 127-8) the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould says:

'Before Miles Eldredge and I proposed punctuated equilibrium in 1972, the stasis or nonchange of most fossil species during their lengthy geological life spans had been tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but almost never studied … Evolution had been defined as gradual transformation in extended fossil sequences, and the overwhelming prevalence of stasis became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record...Eldredge and I proposed that stasis should be an expected and interesting norm...and that evolution should be concentrated in brief episodes of branching speciation.'

On page 150 Gould continues:

'Darwin's own preferences for gradualism were equally extreme and false...'

If 'punctuated equilibrium' replaces Smith's 'doctrine of original creations' the rest of his address stands up rather well.

On page 148 of Dinosaur in a Haystack, Stephen Jay Gould quotes from a letter from Charles Darwin to Henry Fawcett which contradicts the Couch position.

'About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.'

Dr Richard Quiller Couch would have made to this a simple reply: The dramatic advance in medical science was the result of the rejection of the theoretical approach by the revolutionary surgeon John Hunter in the latter half of the eighteenth century and its replacement with observation and experiment (see The Knife Man (2005) by Wendy Moore and the section in this study on the medical training of Jonathan Couch at the united medical schools of Guy's and St Thomas'). Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution was not based on academic theories but on observation and experiment rooted in the idea of a rational universe. Specifically in relation to geology, developments in mining, metallurgy and minerology depended on observation and experiment, not on theory and speculation. This approach verified itself in practice.

In Castle Dor, the empiricist approach is that of Dr Carfax and his medical forebears who 'stuck to observed facts without any theorizing'. This is a 'summary of what we know' (1961, p. 44). In the next chapter Dr Carfax gives a lesson in logic to Mr Tregentil which derives from David Hume but which theorisers and speculators tend to ignore. When correlating two observations, 'When you say boldly one is cause and t'other effect you go beyond your strict knowledge' (ibid, p. 54).

Augustus Smith closes his analysis of Origin of Species with the following:

'So far then as the flood of light thrown by Mr. Darwin's  investigations and reasonings can assist us, the doctrine of original creations must remain for the present in full force, til the wisdom of more enlarged experience can really give it a substantial substitute.'

Smith does not try to dogmatically close down the debate but to await developments on the basis of further information. This is an eminently sensible position to take and one Richard Couch would have agreed with. It put the onus back on fact.

The second half of the address by Smith puts the onus back on fact and away from theory and speculation by looking at geological research in the North of Scotland.

'Of the progress in geological science during the past year it is now my duty to direct attention to two or three interesting fields. First the geological structure of the North of Scotland has been carefully explored by Sir Roderick Murchison, as Director-General of the Ordnance Survey of the Kingdom, and enlarged our knowledge of those strata, forming what has been named the Silurian system, as developed in that region.'

 This work by Sir Roderick Murchison on the Silurian strata would have been of particular interest to Richard Couch from the investigation he carried out in the 1840s and which appears in papers such as:1846, XXVI: 'On the Silurian remains of the south-east coast of Cornwall' and 1846, XXXV: 'Report on the Fossil Geology of Cornwall'. These investigations related to the age of rocks and the material found in them.

Smith continues by discussing Scotland's 'crystalline stratified rocks' before deftly moving to crystalline rocks, essentially granite, in Cornwall. This would not have directly interested Richard Couch, as granite is not found in south-east Cornwall, but it would have interested Elizabeth Carne, who was probably at the meeting. Smith identifies a disagreement about whether Cornish granites are igneous (which they are), or sedimentary metamorphosed 'by subsequent chemical or physical action' (which only applies to the granite's metamorphic aureole). Smith concludes by informing the meeting of a 'large mass of coal' found near Dover and a boulder of granite found near Croydon, surmising that both had been deposited by ice. He then wonders, entering an area of study of particular interest to Elizabeth Carne, whether 'the chalk flint, and green-sand fragments scattered over the granite downs of Scilly and the Land's- end' were deposited by the same means.

Richard Q. Couch believed mankind to be existing in an eternal continuum which is rational and orderly because the product of a rational spirit. The material world, fleetingly observed by any individual person, is open to rational investigation by observation and experiment. Man is matter and spirit, relating to matter through the senses, and spirit through the soul. Matter and spirit need to be kept in balance, avoiding the extremes of materialism and gnosticism.

Richard was happy to use the R.G.S.C. as the base for his geological investigations and St Mary's Anglican church as the base for his devotions. He believed the establishment of fact as the province of the scientist, the spinning of theories as the province of the philosopher. Although Richard appears to have been more tolerant of authority than his father – he returned to the Anglicanism which Jonathan had left, and adhered to the standard method of induction or inductive inference dismissed by David Hume as unsatisfactory – he was an independent thinker whose thought processes are clearly revealed in his printed talks. He did not accept ideas simply because they were espoused by the scientific establishment or appeared attractive, but because they fitted the facts. Richard was not a genius in the mould of Humphry Davy, but like Davy he did work which benefitted working people.

Some of what later appears in Q can be found in his uncle Richard, although adapted to Q's creative vision and historical circumstances.

The Royal Institution of Cornwall

The R.I.C. was founded in 1818 as The Cornwall Philosophical Institute but in 1821 changed its name to the Royal Institution of Cornwall. Reports were issued to 1863, the year of Richard Quiller Couch's death, after which the publication was called the Journal. The earliest report available to the present writer is dated to November 6, 1838, when the President was Sir Charles Lemon Bart MP, FRS, etc. The Report provides an account of the founding of the institution.

'When in February 1818, a few gentlemen desirous of encouraging a taste for Science and Literature in this town (Truro) and neighbourhood had met in the County Library, to discuss the propriety of establishing this Institution, they felt assured that there was no part of the kingdom, in which a wider field for scientific inquiries, or more interesting materials for antiquarian research, existed than in Cornwall. They believed likewise that a large number of persons were devoting their time and talents to literary and scientific pursuits.'

A Museum of Natural History was established, along with a laboratory containing the requisite apparatus and a lecture room. Specific topics of interest included chemistry, metallurgy, geology, zoology, minerology and antiquities.

The institution was to meet on the first Friday of each month for scientific discussion. Jonathan Couch attended these meetings and sometimes lectured. No doubt Richard, and later Thomas, attended these occasions.

Jonathan Couch was held in particular esteem because the annual meeting of 1838 desired 'to express the deep obligation under which the Society is to Mr. Couch' especially for 'the first part of the Fauna or Compendium of the natural history of the County, containing Vertebrate, Crustacean, and a portion of the Radiate Animals.

Contribution of Richard Q. Couch to the Reports of the Royal Institution of Cornwall

1842:   'Zoophyte of a genus new to Europe found on the south coast of Cornwall'

1843:   'Nidification of fishes'

1844:   'Specific habits of fish'

1847:   'Additions to the Cornish fauna among the crustaceans'

1850:   'Notes on the migration of the herring on the Cornish shores'

1852:   'Remarks on the anatomy of sponges'

Jonathan Couch and Thomas Q. Couch made a large number of contributions to the Journal on a range of subjects. From 1864 to 1875, Thomas Q. Couch made an annual contribution on the local fauna and flora, sectioned into months under the heading: 'Calendar of natural periodic phenomena, kept at Bodmin'. Q was reared in this atmosphere of natural history.