ABSTRACT During the first half of the nineteenth century, while Georges Cuvier ruled over natural history and the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (MHN) was at its institutional acme, a French banker and industrialist with a Swiss family background, Benjamin Delessert, was developing an important botanical museum in Paris. His private collection included both a rich botanical library and a massive herbarium: the close integration of these two dimensions, together with the magnanimity of Delessert’s patronage, contributed to making this private institution a (...) worthy rival to the powerful and state-funded MHN. Delessert’s museum had the favor of both professional and amateur naturalists. Knowledgeable and dedicated assistants (Antoine Guillemin and Antoine Lasègue) curated the collections. Moreover, Delessert was an intimate friend of the Genevan botanist Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle. Although Delessert’s herbarium followed the Linnaean order, the Delessert Botanical Museum (DBM) contributed to the development of Candolle’s natural system, especially through the publication of costly volumes of engravings, the Icones selectae plantarum rariorum. This essay draws together the main steps in the evolution of Delessert’s collections, stressing the interdependency between books and dried plants. It focuses on the DBM as a case of cooperation between institutional and amateur expertise, private and public collections, and field collectors and cabinet naturalists. (shrink)

Historians of twentieth-century science have been systematically ignoring some of the subject’s richest sources and most exciting stories; this has left us with a body of work that is necessarily lopsided and that can be self-reinforcing in its insistence on certain features of “modern” science as uniquely dominant or significant after 1900. Methods, concepts, research questions, research areas, and resources that have been routinely and productively used by historians of science immersed in earlier centuries appear to drop out of our (...) toolkits when we turn to the twentieth century. This essay highlights one neglected area—human physiology studied in the field—and points to other topics where asking questions appropriate to natural history or “museum” ways of knowing might cast a completely new light on scientific practices and knowledge production. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How are scientists made? How, as young adults, have they discovered a scientific vocation and career? Through formal schooling, typically; but in the field sciences also through practical apprenticeship—through work. This essay presents the story of a frontier farm lad who became a career naturalist as a hired collector of animal specimens in the American West. Family and work are the leitmotifs of Vernon Bailey's story. It was family farming—bringing in the hay and finding the cows—that connected Bailey's love (...) of skilled outdoor work with a desire to know nature scientifically. Traveling and working with professional naturalists, he came to see himself as a professional as well. His socialization was less a replacement than a layering of two identities, family and career. (shrink)

The biographical study of scientists, though familiar, has mostly seemed anodyne rather than profound as a tool of history of science. But it bears closely on the public role of the scientist, associated nowadays with the detachment of objectivity and with a sense of the scientific life as a fracturing of “the science” from other aspects of a career. Although this division is indeed characteristic of the modern scientific identity, historians should not take it as natural or inevitable. The life (...) of the statistician Karl Pearson, who endeavored to live out a Bildungsroman, demonstrates the survival into the twentieth century of alternative ideals and, with them, of ambitions for science going far beyond the professionalization of a technical field. Pearson’s career offers a model for historicizing the relationship of science to public reason. (shrink)

Joseph Hooker first learned that Charles Darwin believed in the transmutation of species in 1844. For the next 14 years, Hooker remained a "nonconsenter" to Darwin's views, resolving to keep the question of species origin "subservient to Botany instead of Botany to it, as must be the true relation." Hooker placed particular emphasis on the need for any theory of species origin to support the broad taxonomic delimitation of species, a highly contentious issue. His always provisional support for special creation (...) waned during the 1850s as he lost faith in its expediency for coordinating the study of plant geography, systematics and physiology. In 1858, Hooker embraced Darwin's "considerable revolution in natural history," but only after Darwin had carefully molded his transmutationism to meet Hooker's exacting specifications. (shrink)

In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

The post-Civil War American natural history craze spawned a new institution -- the natural history dealer -- that has failed to receive the historical attention it deserves. The individuals who created these enterprises simultaneously helped to promote and hoped to profit from the burgeoning interest in both scientific and popular specimen collecting. At a time when other employment and educational prospects in natural history were severely limited, hundreds of dealers across the nation provided encouragement, specimens, publication outlets, training opportunities, and (...) jobs for naturalists of all motivations and levels of expertise. This paper explores the crucial role that specimen dealers played in the larger natural history community. After briefly examining the development of local taxidermy shops in the mid-nineteenth century, it then traces the history of four large natural history dealerships established in the United States during the latter half of the century: Ward's Natural History Establishment, Frank Blake Webster's Naturalists' Supply Depot, Southwick & Jencks' Natural History Store, and Frank H. Lattin & Co. By the early twentieth century, changing tastes in interior design, the growth of the Audubon movement, and the dramatic expansion of alternate training and job opportunities for naturalists led many specimen dealers either to shift their emphasis or to shut their doors. (shrink)

In the received version of the development of science, natural kinds are established in the preliminary stages and made more precise by measurement. By examining the move from nineteenth- to twentieth-century biology, this paper unpacks the notion of species as ‘natural kinds’ and grounds for discourse, questioning received notions about both kinds and species. Life sciences in the nineteenth century established several ‘monster-barring’ techniques to block disputes about the precise definition of species. Counterintuitively, precision and definition brought dispute and disrupted (...) exchange. Thus, any attempt to add precision was doomed to failure. By intervening and measuring, the new experimental biology dislocated the established links between natural kinds and kinds of people and institutions. New kinds were built in new places. They were made to measure from the very start. This paper ends by claiming that there was no long-standing ‘species problem’ in the history of biology. That problem is a later construction of the ‘modern synthesis’, well after the disruption of ‘kinds’ and kinds of people. Only then would definitions and precision matter. A new, non-linguistic, take on the incommensurability thesis is hinted at. (shrink)

At the centre of nineteenth-century imperial authority sat the British Museum, which set the standard for discourse about natural history. This paper examines the meaning of those standards, exploring their important but little-understood role in ending the nineteenth-century species debate. The post-Reform Bill political assault on the authority of the British Museum is examined in the light of the ‘species problem’, and a surprising solution by John Edward Gray, keeper of the natural history collection, is seen as both a mediation (...) and a closure of disputes over the meaning of species and the competence of naturalists. Gray's strategic solution – revealed in his copious notes on the parliamentary commissions investigating the affairs of the BM – embodied competence in institutional discourse and set the stage for the supposed ‘cynical’ definition of species later adopted in Darwin's Origin of Species, namely that species are merely what competent naturalists say they are. (shrink)

Historians and philosophers of science have interpreted the taxonomic theory of Carl Linnaeus as an ‘essentialist’, ‘Aristotelian’, or even ‘scholastic’ one. This interpretation is flatly contradicted by what Linnaeus himself had to say about taxonomy in Systema naturae , Fundamenta botanica and Genera plantarum . This paper straightens out some of the more basic misinterpretations by showing that: Linnaeus’s species concept took account of reproductive relations among organisms and was therefore not metaphysical, but biological; Linnaeus did not favour classification by (...) logical division, but criticized it for necessarily failing to represent what he called ‘natural’ genera; Linnaeus’s definitions of ‘natural’ genera and species were not essentialist, but descriptive and polytypic; Linnaeus’s method in establishing ‘natural’ definitions was not deductive, but consisted in an inductive, bottom-up procedure of comparing concrete specimens. The conclusion will discuss the fragmentary and provisional nature of Linnaeus’s ‘natural method’. I will argue in particular that Linnaeus opted for inductive strategies not on abstract epistemological grounds, but in order to confer stability and continuity to the explorative practices of contemporary natural history. (shrink)

The life of Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) provides an invaluable lens through which to view mid-Victorian science. A biographical approach makes it clear that some well-established narratives about this period need revising. For example, Hooker's career cannot be considered an example of the professionalisation of the sciences, given the doubtful respectability of being paid to do science and his reliance on unpaid collectors with pretensions to equal scientific and/or social status. Nor was Hooker's response to Darwin's theories either straightforward or (...) contradictory; it only makes sense as carefully crafted equivocation when seen in the context of his life and career. However, the importance of Hooker's life is ultimately its typicality; what was true of Hooker was true of many other Victorian men of science. (shrink)

During the 1840s and the 1850s botanist Joseph Hooker developed distinct notions about the proper characteristics of a professional man of science. While he never articulated these ideas publicly as a coherent agenda, he did share his opinions openly in letters to family and colleagues; this private communication gives essential insight into his and his X-Club colleagues' public activities. The core aspiration of Hooker's professionalization was to consolidate men of science into a dutiful and centralized community dedicated to national well-being. (...) The nation in turn owed the scientific community for its ministration. When the government bestowed funds and status on men of science it was rewarding science -- not purchasing it. His proposed reforms were piecemeal, immediate, and above all practical. He harbored no taste for vast millenarian transformation, and rested his conception of scientific professionalism upon a respectable High Victorian foundation of patronage and pillars of duty, reciprocity, intimacy, and inequality. The process of professionalization he envisioned was as much shrewd compromise between existing interests as a vindication of principle. His power and prestige from the mid-1850s onward gave him considerable ability to carry out his reform program, although his general success did occasion some undesired consequences for the status of natural-history pursuits. (shrink)

A summary of revisionist accounts of the contextual meaning of "professional" and "amateur," as applied to the mid-Victorian X Club, is followed by an analysis of the liberal goals and inner tensions of this coalition of gentlemen specialists and government teachers. The changing status of amateurs is appraised, as are the new sites for the emerging laboratory discipline of "biology." Various historiographical strategies for recovering the women's role are considered. The relationship of science journalism to professionalization, and the constructive engagement (...) of X Club publicists with their empowering audiences, are discussed. Finally, the article assesses how far the content and boundary closure of "biology," forged by Thomas Henry Huxley, were related to 'professional' and political goals. Pure biology's social and medical roots are examined, and the way inter-professional and wider Darwinian conflicts resulted in a new lexicon of words for the X Clubbers around 1870, including "evolution" and "agnosticism," as well as "biology." Biology's role in the forging of British national identity is discussed, as are its relationship to the social strategies of liberal, Dissenting, and industrial groups in the country, whose authority sustained the new laboratory rhetoric. (shrink)

Some early nineteenth-century American naturalists condemned their contemporary, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque , as ‘eccentric’, or worse. Both during his life and long after his death, his botanical work in particular was criticised, even ridiculed. However, in recent years, attempts have been made to restore his reputation and the term ‘genius’ has even been used to describe him. This paper examines this continuing fascination with this strange, disturbing figure and argues that in the competing interpretations of his life and work, Rafinesque (...) has generally been used to typify bad classification; he is perhaps better understood in a broader, literary context as embodying a particular kind of American national identity. (shrink)

Money is everywhere in science. Yet historians have only rarely placed the money trail at the center of their analyses. The essays in this Focus section demonstrate that following the money offers a historiographical path for investigating a number of key issues across disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on cases and materials relating to a number of scientific fields, including electrical engineering, aeronautics, agriculture, and paleontology, the essays examine the continuous role of money in industrial and (...) military patronage, personal connections and networks, and spatial and geographical dimensions of science, as well as in relation to state funding and ownership. Together, the contributions demonstrate how following the money offers a way of overcoming hyperprofessionalism in the history of science. (shrink)

Early nineteenth-century natural history books reveal that British naturalists depended heavily on correspondence as a means for gathering information and specimens. Edward Newman commented in hisHistory of British Ferns: ‘Were I to make out a list ofallthe correspondents who have assisted me it would be wearisome from its length.’ Works such as William Withering'sBotanical Arrangementshow that artisans numbered among his correspondents. However, the literary products of scientific practice reveal little of the workings or such correspondences and how or why they (...) were sustained. An exchange or letters is maintained if the interests of both recipient and writer are satisfied. Withering's book tells us only that his interests were served by his correspondents; it allows us to say nothing with certainty about the interests of those who wrote to him. Published texts effectively hide the means by which the author determined the veracity of distant correspondents and also the way these informants demonstrated their credibility. (shrink)

Fossils have been traded for centuries. Over the past two hundred years the market has developed into an organized enterprise, with fossils serving multiple functions as objects of scientific study, collectors' items, and investments. Finding fossils, digging them up or purchasing them, transporting, studying, and conserving them, and putting them on display was and still is expensive. Since the early nineteenth century, funding bodies, academic institutions and museums, philanthropists, dealers, collectors, amateurs, and professional paleontologists have constituted elaborate networks driven by (...) collaboration, necessity, ambition, accolades, and capital to generate knowledge and produce geological artifacts, increasing our understanding of the natural world, advancing careers and institutions, and contributing to personal fortunes. The emergence of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline around 1900 generated a scientific focus on the human story that was easy to sell. The scarcity of ancient human remains made it close to impossible for a commercial market to evolve, yet finding them required serious funding. Elaborate schemes for financing expeditions and excavations went hand in hand with individual aspirations, patronage, philanthropy, networks, and alliance building, as concession rights and access to sponsors were objects of regular political intrigues and often bitter disputes. (shrink)

How much is a dinosaur worth? This essay offers an account of the way vertebrate fossils were priced in late 19th-century America to explore the process by which monetary values are established in science. Examining a long and drawn-out negotiation over the sale of an unusually rich dinosaur quarry in Wyoming, I argue that, on their own, abstract market principles did not suffice to mediate between supply and demand. Rather, people haggling over the price of dinosaur bones looked to social (...) norms from the mineral industry for cues on how to value these rare and unusual objects, adopting a set of negotiation tactics that exploited asymmetries in the distribution of scarce information to secure the better end of the deal. On the mining frontier in America’s Gilded Age, dinosaurs were thus valued in much the same way as any other scarce natural resource one could dig out of the ground, including gold, silver, and coal. (shrink)