Gulick, John Thomas

George John Romanes,(1848–1894), and John Thomas Gulick,(1832-1923),were both evolutionary biologists.

John Thomas Gulick was a missionary to China and Japan, a naturalist, and author ("Evolution, Racial and Habitudinal," 1905).

John Thomas Gulick (1832-1923) was born at Waimea, Kauai, Hawaii. The son of Rev. Peter Johnson and Fanny Hinckley (Thomas) Gulick, early American missionaries to Hawaii, he travelled extensively as a missionary and contributed to the early development of evolutionary science, beginning with his study of Hawaiian land snails.

Gulick studied at Punahou Academy in Honolulu and the preparatory department of the University of the City of New York. After a short time in California, where he worked as a miner (1849-1850) he graduated from Williams College in 1859 and the Union Theological Seminary in 1861. In 1862 he travelled to Japan, supporting himself by teaching and photography which trying to convince the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to begin work in the area. From 1864 to 1899 he worked as a Board missionary in various locations, including Peking and Kalgan in China and Kobe and Osaka in Japan. Returning to the United States in 1900, he studied problems related to evolution at Oberlin, Ohio.

Gulick maintained that perfect harmony is possible between science and religion, and that the two major themes of his life – missionary work and evolutionary biology – were perfectly compatible. His son and biographer notes: “The scientist’s psychology would be but half told without the portrayal of the almost mystical religious awe with which great scientific truths were approached. And the development … of a carefully thought philosophy of life would be unaccounted for without an exposition of the scientific concepts that gave an impetus to changing stand-points toward religion and the problems of human conduct. To a singular degree the diversity of Gulick’s achievements sprang out of a unity of personal character and purpose.”

Gulick was twice married. His first wife, Emily de la Cour, died in 1874. With his second wife, Frances A. Stevens, he had two children, Addison and Louise. In 1906 Gulick returned to Hawaii to devote himself to the study of social problems. He died there in 1923, at the age of ninety-one.