In 1845 Lubbock entered Eton College, and after three years, before he was fifteen, he was removed from school and taken into the family bank, where he shortly assumed the responsibilities of an adult partner.
In 1845 Lubbock entered Eton College, and after three years, before he was fifteen, he was removed from school and taken into the family bank, where he shortly assumed the responsibilities of an adult partner.
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury was an English banker, Liberal politician, philanthropist, scientist and polymath. He made significant contributions in archaeology, ethnography, and several branches of biology.
Background
Lubbock was born on April 30, 1834, in London, England, the the eldest son of a baronet, Sir John William Lubbock. His father was a banker and mathematician who did work on probability and the theory of tides, and was treasurer of the Royal Society.
Lubbock was one of eight brothers and three sisters; three brothers, Alfred, Nevile and Edgar,played first-class cricket for Kent. Edgar and Alfred also played football and played together for Old Etonians in the 1875 FA Cup Final.
Education
In 1845 Lubbock entered Eton College, and after three years, before he was fifteen, he was removed from school and taken into the family bank, where he shortly assumed the responsibilities of an adult partner. Thereafter his education was largely self-directed according to a rigorous schedule, with emphasis upon natural history. He trained himself to shift from one subject to another at short intervals with entire concentration, a habit he retained through life.
Of crucial importance for the development of Lubbock's interests was the presence at Down House, close by the Lubbock estate in Kent, of Charles Darwin. From the time of his settlement there in 1842, Darwin gave the boy encouragement and direction, beginning a friendship that continued for forty years. In his treatise on barnacles, Darwin utilized Lubbock’s talent for drawing, and Lubbock’s earliest scientific papers were on zoological specimens from the Beagle. His careful work earned the notice and respect of Lyell, T. H. Huxley, Joseph Hooker, and Tyndall, all of whom became his friends.
In 1855 Lyell proposed him for the Geological Society. In the same year Lubbock discovered the first fossil remains of a musk-ox to be unearthed in Britain, evidence of a glacial age. Lubbock’s account of the methods of reproduction in Daphnia, which Darwin submitted to the Royal Society for him, led to his election as a fellow in 1858; three years later he was made a member of the council. A convinced natural selectionist from the beginning, after the release of the Darwin-Wallace papers Lubbock’s work in micro-anatomy, such as his notice of the irregularity in the central ganglion of Coccus hesperidum, pointed to the high degree of variation in nature. Despite his youth Lubbock was one of the handful of men whose opinions mattered to Darwin, and he took a prominent part in the controversy that followed the appearance of the Origin of Species.
Lubbock first gained an international reputation by his provision of an evolutionary framework for the accumulated archaeological remains bearing on human beginnings. The tools collected from French river gravels by Boucher de Perthes had long indicated an origin for culture antedating the geologically recent past. The final acceptance of this view by leading British men of science in the late 1850’s generated an enthusiasm for the reconstruction of man’s prehistory. Lubbock had already taken part in the furtherance of Lyell’s search for fossil gaps in the geological record. Between 1860 and 1864, he traveled to the Somme Valley and the Dordogne Caves, the Swiss lake village sites, and the tumuli, kitchen middens, and museums of Denmark. He went over the ground with the investigators, studied the finds, and read the reports and literature, even those in Danish.
The series of articles Lubbock wrote aroused wide interest and formed the basis for a pioneer work, Pre-Historic Times, that consolidated the data on the life of prehistoric man in Europe and North America. He coined the terms Neolithic and Paleolithic to distinguish the later and earlier Stone Age periods. Here and in a sequel, The Origin of Civilisation, Lubbock identified prehistoric cultures as evolutionary precursors of modern civilization and contended for the independent origination of cultural inventions as against diffusion or borrowing.
In his lifetime Lubbock was one of the best-known men in England. He began a long career as a Liberal in Parliament by sponsoring the famous Bank Holidays Act which established what came to be called St. Lubbock’s Days. He went on to sponsor over two dozen other bills, including acts regulating the health professions, the Wild Birds Protection Act, Open Spaces Act, Ancient Monuments Act, and acts requiring the limitation of shop hours and the provision of seats for employees. In 1900 he was made a peer.
He published some twenty-five books, over a hundred scientific papers, and gave lectures on subjects ranging from free trade to the forces that formed the Alps, the hearing of Crustacea, and the pleasures of life. He was never merely a popularizer; his widely read books on the scenery of Switzerland and Britain were also fascinating treatises on geology by an expert. In volumes on British flowers he dealt with the questions of the relation of a flower’s parts to each other and to insects.
Essentially, Lubbock was a great public educator, perhaps the foremost of his time. As an exponent of Darwinism, he was as active as Huxley, without his truculence. A vice-chancellor of London University, head of its Extension Society, and president of the Working Men’s College, he helped widen educational opportunities and the spread of scientific literacy. An 1887 address to the college on “The Hundred Best Books” had a far-reaching effect on publishing in both England and the United States.
As a Member of Parliament, Lubbock had a distinguished political career, with four main political agendas: promotion of the study of science in primary and secondary schools; the national debt, free trade, and related economic issues; protection of ancient monuments; securing of additional holidays and shorter working hours for the working classes. He was successful with numerous enactments in Parliament, including the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 and the Ancient Monuments Act of 1882, along with another 28 acts of Parliament. When the Liberals split in 1886 on the issue of Irish Home Rule, Lubbock joined the breakaway Liberal Unionist Party in opposition to Irish home rule. A prominent supporter of the Statistical Society, he took an active part in criticizing the encroachment of municipal trading and the increase of the municipal debt.
Views
Lubbock saw in a common creative mind for mankind a promise of the general evolutionary movement toward civilization and happiness. Lubbock rejected Bishop Whately’s theory of degeneration and categorized savage tribes as comparable to the opossums of the natural world. By studying contemporary primitives he sought clues to the function of ancient implements. The popularity of these books led to their reissue in new editions for over a generation, even after their simplistic evolutionism had become outmoded. But Lubbock never modified these first conclusions.
Anthropology did not interfere with Lubbock’s research on insects, and in 1873 the Ray Society published his standard Monograph on the Collembola and Thysanura. Beautifully illustrated with his own plates, this book of over two hundred pages separated the springtails from the bristletails on the basis of the ventral tube, and named the new order Collembola. About this time he began the seminal studies in insect behavior that were reported in Ants, Bees, and Wasps and On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals. It was not only the normal habits of his subjects that he set out to investigate, but their powers of sensing, learning, and what seemed to be calculated response. For this purpose he devised the “Lubbock nest,” as it became known, in which ant colonies are confined in moistened earth between two panes of glass. Stacked in series and attached to a post, these could be lowered to a platform surrounded by a moat and the ants let out for excursions. Previously, ant nests had never been kept under observation for more than several months. and the life-span of an ant was thought to be a year. Lubbock was able to keep some workers alive for as long as seven years, and two queens for twice that time. No one as yet knew how an ant nest started, but Lubbock watched queens of Myrmica ruginodis rear larvae and establish a colony. He observed, and described for the first time, that aphid eggs laid in the fall are taken into ant nests over the winter, and in the spring the newly hatched young are transported out to feed on plant shoots. In the nests Lubbock discovered a new mite, Uropoda formicariae, and two parasitic dipterons, Platyphora Lubbocki and Phora formicarum.
While trying to make ants respond to sounds, Lubbock located in their legs a chordontal organ known until then only in Orthoptera, and suggested correctly that it was a sort of hearing instrument. An imaginative and ingenious experimenter, Lubbock introduced specificity into the study of insect behavior by marking individuals with paint for identification, a practice that later became common. He also used obstacles and mazes to test the intelligence of ants, thus anticipating animal psychologists like Kohler.
Lubbock’s experiments on insect vision and color sense were of special significance. On a table with movable concentric rings, designed for him by Francis Galton, Lubbock found that some ants were partly influenced in their sense of direction by the angle of the light, a discovery important for homing. By using colored glass and solutions with spectral light, he established that ants and Daphnia could not only distinguish colors, but were especially sensitive to ultraviolet light. After tabulating the color preferences of bees, and training them to return to colors associated with honey after the honey was removed, Lubbock concluded that bees could see colors. He did not test them with spectral light, however, to eliminate the possibility that they were attracted merely by different degrees of brightness. With modifications, Karl von Frisch utilized Lubbock’s procedures, but it was not until the 1920’s that A. Kühn’s use of the spectrum delineated the range of color vision in bees and revealed their sensitivity to ultraviolet light.
Membership
American Antiquarian Society
,
United States
1893
Royal Academy of Belgium
,
Belgium
Personality
Possessed of charm and a conciliatory manner, Lubbock helped smooth the proceedings of the many scientific societies he headed at various times. His mind was not subtle or deep, but he had an organized intelligence and great energy, and he was a magnificent amateur in the old sense.
Connections
Lubbock married Ellen Frances Horden in April 1856. Five years after her death in 1879, he married Alice Lane Fox, the daughter of Augustus Pitt Rivers on 17 May 1884.
He presided over a large household, and often drafted family members and servants alike to assist and appreciate his always ongoing investigations of nature.
Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury
The achievements of the polymath Sir John Lubbock spanned banking, politics, science and philanthropy. First published in 1914, this two-volume biography by Horace G. Hutchinson traces Lubbock's extraordinary life and career. Hutchinson, who knew his subject in later years, paints a highly favourable portrait of Lubbock's varied accomplishments.