Természettudomány magyarul vagy magyar természettudomány?
Natural Science in Hungarian or Hungarian Natural Science?

László Dapsy, Hungarian Darwinism, and the Origins of the Publishing Company of the Hungarian Society of Natural Science

Summary/Abstract: On 1 June 1873 László Dapsy, teacher of natural history in the Calvinist secondary school in Pest and an active member of the Hungarian Society of Natural History, wrote in a letter to Charles Darwin that his Hungarian translation of the Origin of Species would be published in August of the same year. In the letter he also reported that the Society did not only approve the Hungarian translation of Darwin’s work, but they also accepted Dapsy’s 1871 proposal to found a publishing company that would publish in Hungarian “foreign works of significance” in the natural sciences. The series continued successfully for decades, attracting not only the attention of a wide readership, but also financial profit. The aim of Dapsy’s publishing initiative and his wider agenda of science popularisation was to make Hungarian natural science and scientific culture flourish through the translation of existing, fundamental and renowned foreign (Western) literature instead of trying to produce original, national works of science. His translator’s introduction to the 1873 Hungarian edition The Origin of Species is an important document wherein he details his agenda and strategy for the development of Hungarian science; however, his opinion proved to be too controversial and found criticism with those members of the scientific community and the public who resented the implication that original Hungarian scientific output was not on par with that of the more “developed” nations. As a result of the ensuing debate, the Society publicly distanced itself from Dapsy, and the book series eventually came to include books by Hungarian scientists besides the works of renowned foreign scholars. The aim of this study is to analyse various strategies of the circulation and popularisation of scientific knowledge in nineteenth-century Hungary. Dapsy’s agenda of translation and reception and the criticism expressed by his contemporaries are treated in the context of the program of the Society of Natural Science to disseminate and popularise the natural sciences to a wide general audience in the public space. Dapsy’s role was more complex than a mere translator of Darwin’s text: not unlike other members of the scientific community, he was an active agent of cultural transfer, whose position in creating a new scientific discourse influenced not only the science popularisation strategies of the Society of Natural Science, but also the ways in which scientific ideas entered “popular” culture and the public sphere of late-nineteenth-century Hungary.

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