Nineteenth-century British entomologist William Kirby is best known for his generic division of bees based on tongues and his vigorous defence of natural theology. Focusing on these aspects of Kirby's work has lead many current scholars to characterise Kirby as an "essentialist." As a result of this characterisation, many important aspects of his work, Monographia Apum Angliœ (1802) have been over-looked or misunderstood. Kirby's religious devotion, for example, have lead some scholars to assume Kirby used the term "type" for connecting (...) an ontological assumption about essences with a creationist assumption about species fixity, which I argue conceals a variety of ways Kirby employed the term. Also, Kirby frequently cautioned against organising a classification system exclusively by what he called "analytic reasoning," a style of reasoning 20th century scholars often associate with Aristotelian logic of division. I argue that Kirby's critique of analytic reasoning brought the virtues of his own methodological agenda into sharp relief. Kirby used familiar metaphors in the natural history literature-Ariadne's thread, the Eleusinian mysteries, and Bacon's bee and spider metaphors-to emphasise the virtues of building tradition and cooperation in the goals and methodological practices of 19th century British naturalists. (shrink)

The origins of field guides and other plant identification manuals have been poorly understood until now because little attention has been paid to 18th century botanical identification guides. Identification manuals came to have the format we continue to use today when botanical instructors in post-Revolutionary France combined identification keys (step-wise analyses focusing on distinctions between plants) with the "natural method" (clustering of similar plants, allowing for identification by gestalt) and alphabetical indexes. Botanical works featuring multiple but linked techniques to enable (...) plant identification became very popular in France by the first decade of the 19th century. British botanists, however, continued to use Linnaeus's sexual system almost exclusively for another two decades. Their reluctance to use other methods or systems of classification Can be attributed to a culture suspicious of innovation, anti-French sentiment and the association of all things Linnaean with English national pride, fostered in particular by the President of the Linnean Society of London, Sir James Edward Smith. The British aversion to using multiple plant identification technologies in one text also helps explain why it took so long for English botanists to adopt the natural method, even after several Englishmen had tried to introduce it to their country. Historians of ornithology emphasize that the popularity of ornithological guides in the 19th and 20th centuries stems from their illustrations, illustrations made possible by printing technologies that improved illustration quality and reduced costs. Though illustrations are the most obvious features of late 19th century and 20th century guides, the organizational principles that make them functional as identification devices come from techniques developed in botanical works in the 18th century. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In our current moment, there is considerable interest in networks, in how people and things are connected. This essay outlines one approach that brings together insights from actor-network theory, social network analysis, and digital history to interpret past scientific activity. Multispecies network analysis (MNA) is a means of understanding the historical interactions among scientists, institutions, and preferred experimental animals. A reexamination of studies of sexual behavior funded by the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex between the 1920s and (...) the 1940s demonstrates the applicability of MNA to clarifying the relations that sustained this area of psychology. The measures of weighted degree and betweenness can highlight which nodes (whether organisms or institutions) were particularly “central” to this network. Rats featured as the animals most widely studied during this period, but the analysis also reveals distinct institutional and disciplinary cultures where different species were favored as either surrogates for humans or representatives of more general biological groups. (shrink)