In 1897 the eminent chemist Sir Henry E Roscoe, know for early studies on vanadium, presented a paper to the Linnaean Society in London on behalf of his then unknown niece, Beatrix Potter, a mycologist and gifted illustrator. Beatrix loved illustrating lichens and fungi and these detailed studies had led her to a definite conclusion with regard to the origin of lichens. However, neither scientific temper nor talent enabled her to present her research. Being a woman, she was barred from the precincts of the hallowed temple of Victorian science. Her paper, titled “On the Germination of Spores of Agaricineae", contained the radical suggestion that lichens are not a pure species (lower plants as they were then believed to be) but “a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae”. In other words lichens are a compound species, a combination of fungi and algae.
Incidentally Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace’s paper on natural selection titled “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection” too had to be read to the Society on July 1, 1858 by its then secretary John Joseph Bennett. Neither author was present. Darwin was attending the funeral of his son, and Wallace was still in Borneo.
The gathered audience, among them many eminent men of science, lost no time in rejecting her paper. Her thesis ran against the very grain of scientific thought of the time, which was schooled to arrive at neat classifications of life forms in the tradition established by Carl Linnaeus himself (the author of Systema Plantarum and Systema Naturae also invented the index card). Moreover, the world was just coming to terms with Darwin’s radical thesis on evolution, and could ill-afford another paradigm shift. The idea had arrived, but not its time. The battle would be fought another day.