Throughout the late 1840s and the early 1850s, Harvard botanist Asa Gray and his close friend George Engelmann of St. Louis engaged themselves with recruiting men who sought to make a living by natural history collecting, sending these men into the field, searching for institutions and individuals who would subscribe to incoming collections, compiling catalogs, and collecting subscription fees. Although several botanists have noted Gray and Engelmann’s bold experiment as having introduced America to a mode by which European naturalists had (...) devised to organize scientific expeditions, historians of science have not taken the “subscription mode” seriously. I argue that it was specifically by undertaking the labor of cataloging species and charging subscription fees for the cataloged species that Gray established himself as a metropolitan botanist. One crucial consequence of Gray’s rising profile was that he acquired sufficient “cataloging power” to secure his status as an authoritative cataloger of species, and as a kind of “mint” or “storehouse” :1–28, 2001a) who produced well-pruned lists of American species to enable transactions between American and European botanists. But this essay is not focused on the Europeanization of American taxonomy. Drawing on work by scholars who place emphasis on how new forms of knowledge get produced when knowledge travels, my focus here is the evolution of the subscription mode when Gray and Engelmann adapted it to American natural history. My conclusion examines what historian of science Vanessa Heggie :318–334, 2014) identifies as the “danger of category dominance” in today’s historiography of science and shows how a kind of “assemblage thinking” may help historians cope with this danger. (shrink)

At the present time, there is considerable interest for the physical setting of science, that is, its actual ‘place’ of practice. Among historians of biology, place has been considered to be a crucial component for the study of ecology. Other historians have noted the ‘built’ environments for the study of biology along the seashore, even referring to these places in terms more applicable to vacation sites. In this paper, I examine the place of intertidal ecology investigations, both in terms of (...) the physical space and the built space. Part of the examination will investigate the aesthetic aspect of the Pacific Coast, part will evaluate the unique character of the intertidal zone, and part will consider the construction of natural laboratories and built laboratories as characteristic places for biology. (shrink)

The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA provided opportunities for women to conduct research in the late 19th and early 20th century at a time when many barriers existed to their pursuit of a scientific career. One woman who benefited from the welcoming environment at the MBL was Mary Jane Hogue. Her remarkable career as an experimental biologist spanned over 55 years. Hogue was born into a Quaker family in 1883 and received her undergraduate degree from Goucher College. She (...) went to Germany to obtain an advanced degree, and her research at the University of Würzburg with Theodor Boveri resulted in her Ph.D.. Although her research interests included experimental embryology, and the use of tissue culture to study a variety of cell types, she is considered foremost a protozoologist. Her extraordinary demonstration of chromidia in the life history of a new species of Flabellula associated with diseased oyster beds is as important as it is ignored. We discuss Hogue’s career path and her science to highlight the importance of an informal network of teachers, research advisors, and other women scientists at the MBL all of whom contributed to her success as a woman scientist. (shrink)

Biological field stations proliferated in the Rocky Mountains region of the western United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. This essay examines these Rocky Mountain field stations as hybrid lab-field sites from the perspective of the field side of the dichotomy: as field sites with raised walls rather than as laboratories whose walls with the natural world have been lowered. Not only were these field stations transformed to be more like laboratories, but they were also embedded within (...) the particular regional environmental and institutional context of the Rocky Mountains. Using the University of Colorado’s Mountain Laboratory at Tolland and other contemporaneous sites as examples, this essay analyzes key features of these sites, including their location within transportation networks, buildings, equipment, personnel, scheduling, recreational and social activities, and other material and social practices on the ground. Considering both the distinctive and shared characteristics of the Rocky Mountain field stations in comparison to other types of field stations provides a more complete picture of the diversity and range of lab-field hybrid sites in the biological sciences in the early twentieth-century United States. (shrink)

Histories of ocean science have emphasized the ways that state-sponsored deep-sea expeditions ushered in a new age of oceanic understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay, on the other hand, examines the ways that shallow waters played host to less formal but nevertheless important efforts to create oceanic natural knowledge, often centuries earlier. By documenting the legends and experiences of people who worked on and lived by the ocean—divers, sailors, and fishermen, among others—and corroborating their stories (...) with firsthand observation, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural historians built a nascent science of the sea. In its close focus on “sea beans” and “barnacle geese,” subjects of wide conjecture and earnest curiosity, the essay shows how shallow waters welcomed new actors onto the scientific stage and decentered the geographies of knowledge production, thereby advancing contemporary knowledge of oceanic circulation as well as the taxonomies and ecologies of coastal creatures. (shrink)

In 1916, a 41 year old woman with little formal scientific education became the secretary of the New York Aquarium. In becoming the Aquarium’s first female officer, Ida M. Mellen realized her lifelong dream of successfully pursuing a career in the biological sciences and broke with the limitations and low expectations surrounding her sex and class backgrounds. By 1930, Mellen left the NYA and pursued a career in popular hobbyist writing, becoming the foremost expert on aquarium fishes and domesticated cats (...) in the United States. Margaret Rossiter and other historians of science have illuminated women’s common career paths in the sciences, but little work has been done on individuals whose gender and class impacted their career. Building on Rossiter’s framework, this case study suggests that class, as much as gender, structured the scientific career of women. Through the narrative of the outsider scientific practitioner, we can more fully illuminate the social structure of scientific work. Examining the struggles of Mellen to enter and maintain a scientific career sheds light, not just on her own career path, but those alternately closed to her. If we wish to understand science in the early twentieth century, especially questions of inclusion and exclusion in the scientific process, we must examine those individuals who operated on the periphery of the “traditional” scientific path. (shrink)

During the early twentieth century, the Bermuda Biological Station for Research functioned as a multipurpose scientific site. Jointly founded by New York University, Harvard University, and the Bermuda Natural History Society, the BBSR created opportunities for a mostly US-based set of practitioners to study animal biology in the field. I argue that mixed gender field stations like the BBSR supported professional advancement in science, while also operating as important places for women and men to experiment with the social and cultural (...) work of identity formation, courtship and marriage, and social critique. Between 1903 and 1930, the BBSR functioned as a laboratory of domesticity, a temporary scientific household in British Bermuda where women and men interacted with established colonial ideologies about science, sex difference, and racial hierarchy in their public and private accounts of doing biology and socializing in the field. Viewing field stations as generative of multiple forms of labor offers a corrective to narratives within the history of biology, in which scientific practices are considered to be the principal forms of output produced by practitioners in the field. Understanding how women and men at the BBSR engaged with the politics of gender and race from the periphery of U.S. networks of biology suggests that we might view field stations as shaping not only academic science but also domestic life and fields as disparate as fiction and the law. (shrink)