A Peek Behind a Veil of Anonymity: An Addendum
Koen B. Tanghe, Mike Kestemont · BioScience · 2022
In 2018, we pointed out in a paper in BioScience (Tanghe and Kestemont 2018) that a stylometric analysis of two early-nineteenth century anonymous papers tentatively confirmed the identity of their suspected authors: the writing style of these two naturalists matched better that of the anonymous papers than the writing style of a small group of other possible authors. These two papers were published in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (ENPJ) in 1826 and 1827, respectively, and are historically highly relevant, since they proposed or seemingly suggested an evolutionary solution to the then mysterious question of the origin of new species. Several scholars believed that the 1826 paper was written by the editor of the ENPJ, Regius Professor of Natural History Robert Jameson (1774–1854). The Edinburgh historian Bill Jenkins suggested that the author of the 1827 paper was Ami Boué (1794–1881), an Austrian geologist of French–German origin. Recently, Pietro Corsi (2021) has discovered that these papers were, in fact, English translations of texts that were published originally in German and in French, respectively. Their authors were the Swiss physician and politician Albrecht Rengger (1764–1835) and the French naturalist Baron André Étienne d'Audebert de Férussac (1786–1836).