When was the first time the word “extinction” was used in the environmental sense? [closed]
The word ‘extinction’ has a general meaning (= vanishing, death) and a particular one related to biology and environmental crises (the extinction of species).
According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of the word in the general sense is the 15th century. When was the first time it was used in the environmental sense? Or is there any way to find that out?
The formal organization of species, both extant and extinct, into tree-like structures was modelled on the family tree. It was expanded to represent tribal relations and eventually, all life. So the model came pre-equipped with terminology. Extinct has been used to refer to human lineages and entire tribes for much longer, so extending it to entire species only needed the idea that that was indeed possible.
[Georges]Cuvier is also known for establishing extinction as a fact—at the time, extinction was considered by many of Cuvier's contemporaries to be merely controversial speculation. In his Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813) Cuvier proposed that now-extinct species had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier
There are three instances of extinct in the modern translation of Essay on the Theory of the Earth, but you would need to check the French version and any early translations to tie this up with a ribbon. Thomas Jefferson didn't by into this, argued against extinction, and sent Lewis and Clark west to find evidence that megafauna extinct in the East was still roaming around out west.
From the accounts here published, it appears that two extinct species of fossil crocodiles, nearly allied to the gavial, or gangetic croco- dile, occur in a pyritical bluish-grey compact limestone, at the bottom of the cliffs of Honfleur and Havre; that one of these species at least is found in other parts of France, as at Alen$on and elsewhere.
Essay on the Theory of the Earth
Cuvier, G. (2009). APPENDIX: MINERALOGICAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. In R. Kerr (Trans.), Essay on the Theory of the Earth (Cambridge Library Collection - Darwin, Evolution and Genetics, pp. 195-332). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511694332.005
Below is a usage from the preface of the forth edition from 1817
Some naturalists, as Lamarck, having maintained that the present existing races of quadrupeds are mere modifications or varieties of those ancient races which we now find in a fossil state, modifications which may have been produced by change of climate, and other local circumstances, and since brought to the present great difference, by the operation of similar causes during a long succession of ages,—Cuvier shews that the difference between the fossil species and those which now exist, is bounded by certain limits ; that these limits are a great deal more extensive than those which now distinguish the varieties of the same species, and consequently, that the extinct species of quadrupeds are not varieties of the presently existing species. This very interesting discussion naturally leads our author to state the proofs of the recent population of the world ; of the comparatively modern origin of its present surface ; of the deluge, and the subsequent renewal of human society.
ROBERT JAMESON. COLLEGE MUSEUM, EDINBURGH, 19th November 1817.
The debate over species extinction was huge. Here's a fun example that shows how fast it entered everyday use. This is the first sentence of the preface to Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge - "The late Mr. Waterton, having, some time ago, expressed the opinion that ravens are gradually becoming extinct in England, I offered the few following words about my experience of these birds." This was in 1840.