In 1859, Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810–1888) published an essay of what he called “the abstract of Japan botany.” In it, he applied Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to explain why strong similarities could be found between the flora of Japan and that of eastern North America, which provoked his famous debate with Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) and initiated Gray’s efforts to secure a place for Darwinian biology in the American sciences. Notably, although the Gray–Agassiz debate has become one of the most (...) thoroughly studied scientific debates, historians of science remain unable to answer one critical question: How was Gray able to acquire specimens from Japan? Making use of previously unknown archival materials, this article scrutinizes the institutional, instrumental, financial, and military settings that enabled Gray’s collector, Charles Wright (1811–1885), to travel to Japan, as well as examine Wright’s collecting practices in Japan. I argue that it is necessary to examine Gray’s diagnosis of Japan’s flora and the subsequent debate about it from the viewpoint of field sciences. The field-centered approach not only unveils an array of historical significances that have been overshadowed by the analytical framework of the Darwinian revolution and the reception of Darwinism, but also places a seemingly domestic incident in a transnational context. (shrink)

Why and how have lay people participated in scientific observation? And on what terms have they collaborated with experts and professionals? We have become accustomed to the involvement of lay observers in the practice of many branches of science, including both the natural and human sciences, usually as subordinates to experts. The current surge of interest in this phenomenon, as well as in the closely related topic of how expertise has been constructed, suggests that historians of science can offer a (...) valuable contribution to these vital questions. A historical approach to lay participation allows us to better understand the making of expert-lay relations in science, and it offers a broader, long-term perspective on contemporary debates about that boundary. (shrink)

The fossilized primate skull known as the Taungs Baby, discovered in South Africa, was put forward in 1925 as a controversial ‘missing link’ between humans and apes. This essay examines the controversy generated by the fossil, with a focus on practice and the circulation of material objects. Viewing the Taungs story from this perspective provides a new outlook on debates, one that suggests that attention to the importance of place, particularly the ways that specific localities shape scientific practices, is crucial (...) to understanding such controversies. During the 1920s, the fossil itself did not move or circulate from its South African location, a fact that raised methodological concerns in understanding its significance and drew immense criticism from a range of experts. Examining the criticisms regarding the fossil’s failure to circulate draws attention to the importance of centers of accumulation in the analysis of hominid fossils. Diverging from existing histories that primarily emphasize the role of theory in paleoanthropological debates, then, this article argues that scientific practice played an important role in the Taungs fossil controversy. Examining this dimension of the debates has broader implications for revealing the underlying imperial assumptions that guided hominid paleontology during the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Palaeontology developed as a field dependent upon comparison. Not only did reconstructing the fragmentary records of fossil organisms and placing them within taxonomic systems and evolutionary lineages require detailed anatomical comparisons with living and fossil animals, but the field also required thinking in terms of behavioural, biological and ecological analogies with modern organisms to understand how prehistoric animals lived and behaved. Yet palaeontological material often worked against making easy linkages, bringing a sense of mystery and doubt. This paper will look (...) at an animal whose study exemplified these problems: the Chalicothere. Increasingly recognized as a specific type from finds across North America and Eurasia from the early nineteenth century onwards, these prehistoric mammals showed short back legs terminating in pawed feet, long front limbs ending in sharp claws, a long flexible neck, and herbivorous grinding teeth. The Chalicothere became a significant organism within palaeontological studies, as the unexpected mix of characters made it a textbook example against the Cuvierian notion of “correlation of parts,” while explaining how the animal moved, fed and behaved became puzzling. However, rather than prevent comparisons, these actually led to comparative analogies becoming flexible and varied, with different forms of comparison being made with varying methods and degrees of confidence, and with the anatomy, movement and behaviour of giraffes, bears, horses, anteaters, primates and other organisms all serving at various points as potential models for different aspects of the animal. This paper will examine some of the attempts to reconstruct and define the Chalicotheres across a long timescale, using this to show how multiple comparisons and analogies could be deployed in a reconstructive and evolutionary science like palaeontology, and illustrate some of the limits and tensions in comparative methods, as they were used to reconstruct organisms which were thought to be incomparable to any modern animal. (shrink)

This essay examines the Mission paléontologique française of the 1920s, a series of scientific expeditions into the Ordos Desert in Inner Mongolia in which a team of Jesuit scholar-scientists worked with local collaborators to provide material for the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The case study shows that the global and colonial expansion of Western science in the early twentieth century provided space for traditional scientific institutions, such as universalizing metropolitan collections and clerical scholarly networks, to extend their research projects. (...) The linking of approaches, agendas, and geographic regions was facilitated by the concepts and practices of the deep-time sciences of geology, paleontology, and human prehistory. These were based on the interchange of expertise, common projects of unveiling the development of life, and the alignment of different regions and specimens. Moreover, the expeditions did not just conduct research based around global movement and transmission. They also conceptualized the ancient development of life in terms of movement, migration, and exchange. The act of forming research networks that linked Asia and Europe also led scientists to conceive of these regions as bound by deep natural processes. Circulation and transfer became important actors’ categories used to understand the origins and history of life. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines the field network – linking together lay observers in geographically distributed locations with a central figure who aggregated their locally produced observations into more general, regional knowledge – as a historically emergent mode of knowledge production. After discussing the significance of weather knowledge as a vital domain in which field networks have operated, it describes and analyzes how a more robust and systematized weather observing field network became established and maintained on the ground in the early twentieth (...) century. This case study, which examines two Kansas City-based local observer networks supervised by the same U.S. Weather Bureau office, demonstrates some of the key issues involved in maintaining field networks, such as the role of communications infrastructure, especially the telegraph, the procedures designed to make local observation more systematic and uniform, and the centralized, hierarchical power relations that underpinned even a low-status example of knowledge production on the periphery. (shrink)