Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

ArgumentThe historiography of botanical maps has mainly concentrated on their alleged “golden age,” on maps drawn by famous first-generation plant geographers. This article instead describes botanical maps after the age of discovery, and detects both a quantitative explosion and qualitative modification in the late nineteenth century. By spotlighting the case of the plant geographer Oscar Drude (1852–1933), I argue that the dynamics of botanical mappings were closely linked to a specific milieu of knowledge production: the visual culture of Imperial Germany. (...) The scientific upgrading of maps was stimulated by a prospering commercial cartographical market as well as a widespread practice of mediating between professionals and amateurs via maps in the public sphere. In transferring skills and practices from these “popular” fields of knowledge to scientific domains, botanists like Oscar Drude established maps as an indispensable element of botanical observation. This wholesale dissemination of botanical maps had thus a formative influence on collective perception – the botanist's “period eye” – regarding plant distribution. (shrink)

Historians of science have attributed the emergence of ecology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century to the synthesis of Humboldtian botanical geography and Darwinian evolution. In this essay, I begin to explore another, largely neglected but very important dimension of this history. Using Sergei Vinogradskii’s career and scientific research trajectory as a point of entry, I illustrate the manner in which microbiologists, chemists, botanists, and plant physiologists inscribed the concept of a “cycle of life” into their investigations. Their (...) research transformed a longstanding notion into the fundamental approaches and concepts that underlay the new ecological disciplines that emerged in the 1920s. Pasteur thus joins Humboldt as a foundational figure in ecological thinking, and the broader picture that emerges of the history of ecology explains some otherwise puzzling features of that discipline – such as its fusion of experimental and natural historical methodologies. Vinogradskii’s personal “cycle of life” is also interesting as an example of the interplay between Russian and Western European scientific networks and intellectual traditions. Trained in Russia to investigate nature as a super-organism comprised of circulating energy, matter, and life; over the course of five decades – in contact with scientists and scientific discourses in France, Germany, and Switzerland – he developed a series of research methods that translated the concept of a “cycle of life” into an ecologically conceived soil science and microbiology in the 1920s and 1930s. These methods, bolstered by his authority as a founding father of microbiology, captured the attention of an international network of scientists. Vinogradskii’s conceptualization of the “cycle of life” as chemosynthesis, autotrophy, and global nutrient cycles attracted the attention of ecosystem ecologists; and his methods appealed to practitioners at agricultural experiment stations and microbiological institutes in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union. (shrink)

Between 1907 and 1915 Albert Francis Blakeslee transformed both himself and the Connecticut Agricultural College at Storrs into things neither had been at the beginning of the century. Using the varied commitments of the agricultural college and experiment station at which he worked as resources with which to build his career, Blakeslee began as a botanist and instructor in botany and ended as a geneticist and teacher of genetics. Moreover, he left behind at Storrs a legacy of genetic research and (...) instruction in the form of an autonomous department of Botany and Genetics. The story of Blakeslee's career at the Connecticut Agricultural College reveals the multifold ways in which agricultural researchers identified unique institutional resources and built unexpected careers and unanticipated institutional structures, a process which had a significant impact on the disciplinary growth of genetics in the United States. (shrink)

Beginning in the nineteenth century, scientists speculated that the Pleistocene megafauna—species such as the giant ground sloth, wooly mammoth, and saber-tooth cat—perished because of rapid climate change accompanying the end of the most recent Ice Age. In the 1950s, a small network of ecologists challenged this view in collaboration with archeologists who used the new tool of radiocarbon dating. The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis imagined human hunting, not climate change, to be the primary cause of megafaunal extinction. This article situates the (...) Pleistocene overkill hypothesis in a broader history of the emergence of historical ecology as a distinct sub-discipline of paleoecology. Tracing the work of the Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and an interdisciplinary research network that included Paul Sears, Richard Foster Flint, Edward Deevey, Kathryn Clisby, and Paul S. Martin, it reveals how both the methods and the meaning of studying fossil pollen shifted between the 1910s and 1960s. First used as a tool for fossil fuel extraction, fossil pollen became a means of envisioning climatic history, and ultimately, a means of reimagining global ecological history. First through pollen stratigraphy and then through radiocarbon dating, ecologists reconstructed past biotic communities and rethought the role of humans in these communities. By the 1980s, the discipline of historical ecology would reshape physical environments through the practice of ecological restoration. (shrink)