The contents of the British Ornithologists' Union's journal, "The Ibis," during the first half of the 20th century illustrates some of the transformations that have taken place in the naturalist tradition. Although later generations of ornithologists described these changes as logical and progressive, their historical narratives had more to do with legitimizing the infiltration of the priorities of evolutionary theory, ecology, and ethology than analyzing the legacy of the naturalist tradition on its own terms. Despite ornithologists' claim that the journal's (...) increasing focus on "biology" represented a natural development after the preliminary phase of systematics and geographical ornithology, in fact a small group campaigned to bring the priorities of population ecology, behavior, and selection theory into the journal and British ornithology more generally. The problems involved in this transition highlight the importance of methodological and institutional context in determining and reinforcing appropriate research programs for ornithologists. Comparing the discipline-building rhetoric of moderns with the contents of the past illustrates how modern evaluations of 19th century research programs have been enmeshed in ornithologists' endeavors to forge new identities for traditional disciplines. (shrink)

Much of our knowledge about the nineteenth-century natural history boom resides with the collectors themselves and their collections. We know much less about the conduct of the global trade that made collecting possible. That such a trade occurred in the face of significant obstacles of distance, variable prices, inadequate information, and diverse agents makes our knowledge deficit the more significant. William John Macleay, based in Sydney, built his significant natural history collection by trading locally as well as across the globe. (...) Our study of Macleay measures his complete set of trading transactions at a time of rapid expansion of his collection. It analyses how he chose between different forms of exchange and agreed fair value in order to complete long-distance specimen trading. (shrink)

Bionomics was a research approach invented by British biological scientists in the late nineteenth century and adopted by the American entomologist and evolutionist Vernon Lyman Kellogg in the early twentieth century. Kellogg hoped to use bionomics, which was the controlled observation and experimentation of organisms within settings that approximated their natural environments, to overcome the percieved weaknesses in the Darwinian natural selection theory. To this end, he established a bionomics laboratory at Stanford University, widely published results from his bionomic investigations, (...) and encouraged other biological researchers to adopt bionomics. (shrink)