Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord , “Seriality and scientific objects in the nineteenth century”, History of Science, xlviii . Series represent much that was new and significant in the sciences between the French Revolution and the First World War. From periodical publication to the cinema, tabulation to industrialized screening, series feature in major innovations in scientific communication and the organization of laboratories, clinics, libraries, museums and field - XIXe siècle – Nouvel article.

ArgumentThe nineteenth century witnessed the advent of the modern zoo. Nearly everyone who came to watch the exotic animals was a “lay person” in the sense that virtually none had formal training in zoology. This paper provides a typology of these observers: the zoo directors, assistants, keepers, animal painters, and the “common” visitor. What did they observe and what were their motivations? Did they pursue a certain agenda? What kind of knowledge, if any, did they produce? Soon the issue of (...) the reliability of these observations emerged. Lay observers insisted on the veracity of their intimate and personal knowledge of animals while academics complained that their claims could not be generalized and were tainted by anthropomorphism. Hence the focus on the observations of these laymen will reveal contemporary assumptions on what may count as “scientific.” This is closely linked to the question of how far the zoo may qualify as a site of scientific investigation in the first place. The constraints on doing research on animals in a public space such as the zoo were numerous. Yet despite these obstacles the zoological garden contributed to the rise of ecological thinking as well as to the formation of ethology as a scientific discipline. (shrink)

From 1827 to 1831 the German historian Leopold von Ranke travelled through Germany, Austria, and Italy, hunting for documents and archives. During this journey Ranke developed a new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge. Within the archive, Ranke claimed, the trained historian could forget his personal predispositions and political loyalties, and write objective history. This essay critically examines Ranke's model for historical research through a study of the (...) obstacles, frustrations, and joys that he encountered on his journey. It shows how Ranke's archival experiences inspired him to re-evaluate his own identity as a historian and as a human being, and investigates some of the affiliations between his model for historical research and the political realities of Prince Metternich's European order. Finally, the essay compares Ranke's historical discipline to other nineteenth-century disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An overview of some of the main modes of making images of natural objects and processes, as they have appeared in the history of science, leads to two main conclusions. First, the dichotomies that have traditionally distinguished, for example, art from science, museums from laboratories, and geometrical from algebraic methods have produced a poverty of understanding of visualization. It is at the intersections of these dichotomies where much of the creative work of science occurs, and it is into those (...) intersections that this Focus section leads us. Second, the section suggests that we need to understand images as arguments. Generalizing, we need to develop a “materialized epistemology” that reunites sensual with ideational knowing. Recent work in the history of science is already pointing the way and producing a dramatically new historiography. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay examines drawings of antiquities in the context of the history of early modern scientific illustration. The role of illustrations in the establishment of archaeology as a discipline is assessed, and the emergence of a graphic style for representing artifacts is shown to be closely connected to the development of scientific illustration in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The essay argues that the production of conventionalized drawings of antiquities during this period represents a fundamental shift in the (...) approach to ancient material culture, signifying the recognition of objects as evidence. As has been demonstrated in other scientific fields, the creation of a visual system for recording objects was central to the acceptance of artifacts as “data” that could be organized into groups, classified as types, and analyzed to gain knowledge of the past. (shrink)

The Danish amateur scholar Christian Jürgensen Thomsen has often been described as a founder of modern “scientific” archaeology. Thomsen's innovation, this essay argues, reflects developments within neighboring fields, such as philology and history. He reacted against historians who limited themselves to histories of texts and therefore abandoned the earliest human history. Instead, he proposed a new history of objects, which included the entire history of humankind. Thomsen's work as director of the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities in Copenhagen was especially (...) important for this renewal. The arrangement of artifacts not only helped him formulate his theories, but also allowed him to present his arguments in a language of objects. At the same time, Thomsen's definition of archaeology as a museum science placed his branch of archaeology in a closer relationship with other museum sciences, such as geology and comparative anatomy. From the 1840s, Thomsen's museum became a model for how the study of human artifacts could deliver scientific insights into human nature and the laws of human development. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While a great deal of scholarly attention has been given to the publication of serialized novels in early Victorian Britain, there has been hardly any consideration of the no less widespread practice of issuing scientific works in parts and numbers. What scholarship there has been has insisted that scientific part-works operated on entirely different principles from the strategies for maintaining readerly interest that were being developed by serial novelists like Charles Dickens. Deploying the methods of book history, this essay (...) examines the reporting of Richard Owen's celebrated paleontological reconstructions from the 1830s and 1840s in the serialized formats of the Proceedings of the Zoological Society, his own History of British Fossil Mammals, and, in particular, the Penny Cyclopaedia. It argues that Owen, along with his close friend William John Broderip, clearly recognized the affective possibilities of the serial format and that they exploited the Penny Cyclopaedia's sequential mode of publication to evoke suspense and expectation in their anonymous but collaboratively authored accounts of Owen's paleontological researches. (shrink)