ABSTRACT
Hewett Cottrell Watson was one the first scientists to develop and carry out an original research program to obtain data showing that evolution is occurring, though it was an implicit rather than a published program. Watson's arguments for the transmutation of species involved, first, pointing out certain genera about which there was no concensus on how many species and varieties grew in Britain, and then attempting to show that the basis for uncertainty lay in nature, not in the biases of botanists. Watson undertook original research to document evolution. This was also true of zoologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire by the 1810s, but his research program might also have been implicit, like Watson's, until much later. Watson's rebuttal would have attracted few readers outside the phrenological movement, and even those within it would have had to read some twenty pages of Scott's misrepresentations of Andrew Combe before encountering Watson's evolutionary views.
