ArgumentThis paper aims to understand the emergence of comparative anatomy in the eighteenth century in the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences. As early as the 1670s, a program centered on animal anatomy was conceived, which was a first attempt to give some autonomy to studies on animals and to link anatomy with natural history, but it declined after 1690. However, a variety of studies on animals was published in theMémoiresof the Académie during the eighteenth century. We propose a descriptive typology (...) of them in order to explore the status of animals and the significance of anatomy in each type, and to determine, in particular, which elements of Perrault's program were passed on at the Académie throughout the century. We discuss the influence of this legacy on the development of comparative anatomy after 1750, especially in Daubenton's work. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper analyses the revival of Pliny's Naturalis historia within the scientific culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on a French effort to produce an edition with annotations by scientists and scholars. Between the Renaissance and the early eighteenth century, the Naturalis historia had declined in scientific importance. Increasingly, it was relegated to the humanities, as we demonstrate with a review of editions. For a variety of reasons, however, scientific interest in the Naturalis historia grew in (...) the second half of the eighteenth century. Epitomizing this interest was a plan for a scientifically annotated, Latin-French edition of the Naturalis historia. Initially coordinated by the French governmental minister Malesherbes in the 1750s, the edition was imperfectly realized by Poinsinet a few decades later. It was intended to rival two of the period's other distinguished multi-volume books of knowledge, Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and Buffon's Histoire naturelle, to which we compare it. Besides narrating the scientific revival of the Historia naturalis during this period, we examine its causes and the factors contributing to its end in the first half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

The comparative method, closely identified with Darwinian evolutionary biology, also has a long pre-Darwinian history. The method derives its scientific power from its ability to interpret comparative observations with reference to a theory of relatedness among the entities being compared. Such scientifically powerful strong comparison is distinguished from weak comparison, which lacks such theoretical grounding. This paper examines the history of the strong comparison permitted by the comparative method from the early modern period to the threshold of the Darwinian revolution (...) in the mid nineteenth century. It interprets the work of early pioneers such as Belon, Willis, Perrault, and Tyson from this methodological perspective, rather than focusing on their particular anatomical findings. Although these early writers made formative scientific contributions through their comparative investigations, the more theoretically grounded application of the comparative method by Geoffroy, Cuvier, and Owen was instrumental in laying the foundation for its later incorporation into Darwinian evolutionary theory. (shrink)