manual de historia natural no brasil

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Review: Natural History in Depth Author(s): James A. Secord Review by: James A. Secord Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Feb., 1985), pp. 181-200Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/285315Accessed: 09-06-2015 04:38 UTC

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ESSAY REVIEW

Natural History in Depth

James A. Secord

Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875 (London: Blond & Briggs, 1982), 287 pp., ?15.95. ISBN 0-85634-121-5. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1q84), $22.50. ISBN 0-226-14343-0.

Paul L. Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline: 1760-1850 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1982), xxi + 191 pp., ?23.40, $39.50. ISBN 90-277-1410-X.

Janet Browne, The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1983), x + 273 pp., ?21.00, $27.50. ISBN 0-300-02460-6.

Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth- Century British Biology (Madison, Wis., and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), xv + 281 pp., ?25.50, $30.00. ISBN 0-299-09430-8.

All the facts in natural history, taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.

These words from Ralph Waldo Emerson's address on nature appeared at the head of David Allen's pioneering book of 1976, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History. The message that Allen's survey so effectively conveyed was that the past development of natural history - the sciences of botany, stratigraphy, mineralogy and zoology - could only be understood in relation to broad trends in social history. The rise of the

Social Studies of Science (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills and New Delhi), Vol. 1 5 (1 985), 1 81 -200.


182 Social Studies of Science

virtuoso, the Romantic taste for travel, the industrial revolution and the invention of the bicycle all had a relation to the study of natural objects. Historical studies of nineteenth-century natural history have blossomed since the publication of Allen's book; the appearance of the four volumes under review is striking testimony to this, and others could be listed as well.' The range of topics and approaches they cover is one sign of the subject's current vigour. Paul Farber, using techniques derived from the sociological study of disciplines, describes the emergence of ornithology in Europe as a focused area of specialization; Janet Browne offers an engaging survey of ideas in biogeography, centring on the work leading up to Darwin; Philip Rehbock provides new insights into a group of self- styled 'philosophical naturalists' who wished to revitalize natural history in Britain during the early nineteenth century. And, in a particularly important book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the historical sociology of scientific knowledge, Adrian Desmond gives an account of the social and ideological issues at stake in debates about vertebrate palaeontology in mid-Victorian London.

The near-simultaneous publication of these books affords a good opportunity for an assessment of the current state of research into the natural historical sciences in nineteenth-century Britain. By implication, such a survey also has a wider significance, for it illustrates to a remarkable degree the fructifying effect sociological approaches are beginning to have throughout the history of science.2 Whether or not one accepts the programmatic epistemological claims of the sociology of knowledge, its practical payoffs as a strategy for historical research are now beyond question. Many historians welcomed the early manifestos of the 'strong programme' as explicit statements of what they had been attempting to do on an empirical level for some time. Any other approach virtually precluded a truly historical understanding of certain subjects: for the historian of taxonomy, the sense of relief is palpable. Studies of classification, distribution and order, once dismissed as unproblematic exercises in tracing natural boundaries, are now seen as culturally based methods for defining what is natural in the first place.3 For social historians this new understanding has begun to provide a rich harvest in what was once a virtual desert, for the drawing of boundaries is now emerging as one of the best available means for recapturing visions of the natural world in the past.


Essay Review: Secord: Natural History 183

Life Before Darwin: Disciplines and Classifications

Like most aspects of the history of science, the study of natural history still has strong roots in the history of ideas. One could scarcely ask for a better pedigree than The Great Chain of Being.4 Although few have adopted Arthur Lovejoy's concept of 'unit ideas' in its strict sense, the intellectualist tradition has always emphasized the superstructures of high theory believed to hold classifications together: evolution, extinction, progression, uniformity and serial ordering have occupied central roles. Authors like Lovejoy, Francis Haber or Charles Gillispie mention few if any special names; what matters are ideas, and the natural world itself seems relatively distant.5 With the development during the 1970s of specialist journals and a small cadre of professional historians of biology and geology, more attention began to be paid to the role of empirical evidence in scientific argumentation, although conceptual issues have usually retained pride of place. Martin Rudwick's superb book The Meaning of Fossils (1972) is thus not so much about those who socially defined themselves as palae- ontologists - in fact, several of those he discusses actually knew little about technical taxonomy - but rather about the manifold 'meanings' of fossils and their uses in high theory. As Rudwick emphasizes in the preface to the second edition of his book,6 this focus continues to be fully justifiable - even if most authors would also join him in wanting to place these developments within concrete social environments.

What is especially needed at this point is much more intensive study of the entire community of naturalists, from provincial collectors to the grand metropolitan savants who controlled the learned societies. Within the British Isles, Allen's survey points the way ahead, but for all its merits it remains a first attempt. The size of the task is suggested by a remarkable series of biographical aids prepared by working taxonomists for their own scientific studies, but which are also extremely useful for the social historian. One pages through the thousands of unfamiliar names in Ray Desmond's Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horti- culturalists, William Sarjeant's Geologists and the History of Geology, Pamela Gilbert's Compendium of the Biographical Literature on Deceased Entomologists and Ronald Cleevely's World Palaeontological Collections with a mingled sense of despair and opportunity, a chastened sense of just how limited the focus



has hitherto been.7 An equally lamentable aspect of the subject is that studies of the social world of natural history have remained only loosely connected with other work in the social history of science (although there are several exceptions, notably in the history of geology).8 Given these circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that we lack a coherent notion of the natural history community even within the British Isles, and that individuals prove difficult to locate within coherent intellectual and social traditions. As Allen has pointed out, the structures of high theory around which historians of science have typically organized their materials are only partially adequate for placing most taxonomic work in context. Natural history, he insists, 'is an area of cultural behaviour rather than a network of ideas'. (Many historians of the physical sciences would certainly want to argue a similar point.) A new institutional and sociological framework for the subject is required, a 'social geography' of natural history knowledge.9

Paul Farber takes an important step towards the establishment of such a framework in his Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline. Drawing on recent sociological literature,'10 he provides a clearly argued case-study of discipline formation in the natural sciences, showing how the unified natural history of Buffon broke down at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century into specialized studies of individual groups of organisms. Natural history, which started out as an aspect of polite learning pursued by a general cultured audience, became a cluster of esoteric enterprises entrusted to specialists. These were not necessarily paid professionals (although some could be, particularly on the Continent), but rather experts in command of a complicated body of taxonomic literature and craft lore. Anyone concerned with the formation of new scientific disciplines will find Farber's account invaluable. Unfortunately, it is too short and tends to repeat its insights rather than fully develop them. For example, the allusive subject of eighteenth-century knowledge about birds, which would well repay study along the lines of Keith Thomas's recent Man and the Natural World,1" is discussed in five brief pages. The wealth of manuscripts cited in the footnotes and the host of pointers for further research show just how much could be done. Especially welcome is Farber's emphasis on the need for comparative studies of European countries.

Just as investigations of the physical sciences community have generated a new concern with experiment, so too have attempts to



elucidate the structure of the natural history community been accompanied by a revitalized interest in classification. Farber, like Allen, makes the reasons for this abundantly clear. Throughout the nineteenth century, most naturalists saw classification as their primary goal. Ordering the world of nature was what they spent their time doing; it was what they published papers on, what they taught students, what they corresponded about, what they debated at scientific gatherings. Thus one of the chief points in Farber's study is that the development of the new discipline was not accompanied by any fundamental shift in aims. Taxonomy remained at its heart. 'The transformation of natural history', he writes, 'did not result in its dissolution and replacement by an entirely new subject, but rather in its extension, specialisation and growth into separate scientific disciplines' (127). Some authors, notably Michel Foucault, have argued for an epistemic break in the late eighteenth century, and the assumption of a profound shift in outlook is deeply embedded in the older literature on the emergence of 'historicism' .12 Farber, while recognizing that changes did occur, convincingly stresses the continuities within natural history.

Perhaps the best measure of the ascendancy of the classificatory view of nature during the nineteenth century is the simple fact that the crystallization of separate scientific disciplines occurred around individual groups of organisms. The natural world, so often seen as a unity by the taxonomists of the eighteenth century, was being carved up in a new and more decisive way. Subdividing nature into sharply bounded categories, naturalists reorganized themselves into correspondingly distinct specialties: a new social order for naturalists went hand in hand with a new natural one for plants, animals and minerals.

Against this backdrop of specialized disciplines, the discussions of theoretical natural history provided by Janet Browne's Secular Ark and Philip Rehbock's Philosophical Naturalists are of particular interest. Both books describe activities that uncomfortably straddled the disciplinary boundaries which had been set up at the end of the eighteenth century. The figures discussed in the Philosophical Naturalists, for example, believed that natural history had become bogged down in classification and description; they wanted instead to begin a search for causes and laws. This search, as Rehbock characterizes it, took two forms. Robert Knox, William B. Carpenter, Richard Owen and other naturalists (mostly trained in Edinburgh or in Edinburgh-based



traditions) wished to import Continental idealism into morphology and anatomy. On the other hand, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Hewett Cottrell Watson and others wished to understand the geographical distribution of species across the face of the Earth. Uniting these two traditions of 'philosophical' natural history (and, rather uneasily, the two halves of Rehbock's book) was the Manxman Edward Forbes. Forbes - one of the leaders of the early Victorian natural history community - exemplifies perfectly the kind of naturalist who felt constrained by the specialisms of natural history during this period. In his earliest lectures he even attempted to create boundary-breaking hybrid subjects like 'zoo-geology' and 'psycho-zoology'; his later work continued to range across the entire living and fossil world.13 A complementary discussion of Forbes figures largely in Browne's valuable survey of pre- Darwinian biogeography. The book begins with an account of the positive effects of the biblical story of Noah's ark on early studies of plant and animal distribution, and rapidly settles into an excellent series of chapters on the biogeographical background to the work of Darwin, a figure famed for his forays across specialist boundaries. In a thought-provoking conclusion, Browne points out that studies of organic distribution possessed almost none of the disciplinary trappings - journals, societies, university chairs and so forth - that Farber discusses in connection with ornithology. 'Indeed,' she writes, 'without strong social or conceptual boundaries to set it apart, the study of geographical distribution retains close links with its early nineteenth-century forebears - geology, botany and zoology. In this respect it cannot be compared with more clearly defined areas of scientific interest' (224-25). Like oceanography and geography before the twentieth century, it depended on the contributions of individuals in diverse fields. Birds, insects and fossil vertebrates had all been successfully demarcated from the diversity of the natural world and made the subjects of separate scientific studies. Biogeography, despite all the efforts of Alexander von Humboldt and his disciples, proved a stillborn scientific discipline.

But Browne does make a point of relating the most important intellectual division within biogeography to a social division between two distinctive communities of scientific practitioners. Geologists, she argues, approached biogeographical studies with an understanding of process and history, while those in botany and zoology were concerned above all with patterns, particularly



the spatial distribution of plants and animals. This 'historical'/ 'distributional' divide certainly isolates an important division within early nineteenth-century natural history, but I doubt that it can be so straighforwardly mapped on to the earth and life sciences. Most geologists, like those naturalists dealing with living organisms, were simply not concerned in practice with processes or history. Rather, they confronted the fundamentally static 'geognostic' problem of the distribution of rock strata in three-dimensional space."4 The distinctive position of geologists within the wider natural history community came not from any unique awareness of time, but from their focus on strata. From the geological perspective, organisms were of primary interest as stratigraphical markers rather than as ancient forms of life. Such a view obviously sat uneasily with zoologists and botanists, whose priorities lay in precisely the opposite direction.

Given this alternative interpretation of the orientation of geology, pre-Darwinian biogeography could be viewed as the result not of individuals approaching such studies from separate scientific disciplines, but rather of the presence (within a more broadly defined natural history community) of distinctive groups of researchers intent upon emphasizing a process-oriented kind of scientific theorizing. In other words, in discussing a boundary- crossing activity like biogeography, a model based on smaller-scale 'research programmes' or 'enterprises' may prove more effective than one based on disciplines or scientific specialties.15 For all its usefulness in understanding the practical activities pursued by naturalists in common, the concept of a discipline is simply too abstract to be helpful in interpreting the theoretical ideas of a small handful of individuals. Historical instruments with a finer degree of resolution must be brought into play.

The Philosophical Naturalists gives some idea of how such cross- disciplinary projects may be analyzed. At the same time, it points to certain limitations. When described as 'traditions', 'movements' or 'frames of mind', such developments can take on a life of their own, independent of any social context or even any individual scientist; the result can be an historiographic idealism that would do a transcendentalist proud. Fortunately, Rehbock's focus on a particular time and place allows him to escape at least some of these difficulties. His attention to a single individual, Forbes, provides an unexpected advantage in this regard: scientific biography, sometimes unjustly denigrated, has proved itself as one area where



social and intellectual history can readily find common ground.16 On a wider level, Rehbock's emphasis on the importance of Knox as founder of a school of idealism in Edinburgh, although over- stated, does have the signal advantage of giving the importation of Continental idealism a concrete institutional and pedagogical base. His reconstruction of Forbes's circle through the use of an unpublished mailing list of associates is also of interest.17 In cases like this, and indeed throughout much of his book, Rehbock is fruitfully speaking about the contacts, correspondence and reading of specified individuals, not the vaguely defined movements of thought which have bedevilled the history of science for far too long.

Classifications in Context: The Local History of Taxonomy

The difference that a really close attention to context can make is suggested by a comparison of two articles which appeared in Isis during the past decade, both dealing with the interpretation of gigantic fossil bones.18 The first, by J. B. Delair and W. A. S. Sarjeant, opened with discoveries by late seventeenth-century collectors and continued into the early nineteenth century with findings by William Buckland, Gideon Mantell and Mary Anning. The article was carefully researched and clarified confusing points about the sequence of events. But for Delair and Sarjeant, 'dinosaur' was a self-evident taxonomic category: all these early findings contributed to a picture that was given its finishing touches by Richard Owen in 1841, when the monstrous creatures received at long last their appropriate name.

The second essay, by Adrian Desmond, offered a radically different picture. All the individual bones and teeth gathered by the early investigators did not collectively constitute the dinosaur, for there was little idea of grouping these objects together. There was no 'missed opportunity'. Instead, the dinosaur was literally designed by Owen, created according to a blueprint that had been drawn up according to specific social and political specifications. Dinosaurs, grouped together as a 'tribe', served as a bulwark against transmutation and the bestialization of man. In Owen's view the modern reptiles had actually degenerated from their saurian splendour in the Mesozoic, and their history thus decisively refuted any attempt to draw evolutionary conclusions from the



fossil record. Of course, the overtly political circumstances surrounding this episode are of great interest, but the really important point is that the emergence of the dinosaur as a taxonomic entity occurred within a specific historical context - in Plymouth, in 1841, at the British Association, by Richard Owen. It would be easy to say that this second article was simply the work of a more sensitive historical understanding, but that would be to miss the main question at issue. For this case highlights the possibilities that emerge when modern taxonomic categories are not given any privileged status, when conceptions of natural order are firmly located within their original contexts of use.

Desmond has now written a book that extends the consequences of this insight into an analysis of the debates over vertebrate fossil remains in the decades surrounding the publication of the Origin of Species. The result is one of the most exciting works in the history of science in recent years. Archetypes and Ancestors has already been warmly welcomed by reviewers writing from a wide variety of perspectives;19 for readers anxious to see the difference an informed application of the sociology of knowledge can make to the interpretation of a well-known historical episode, it will come as a revelation. Unlike Browne, Farber or Rehbock, Desmond closely circumscribes his geographical focus: London, with glimpses of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Germany and Oxford. Here the book follows the best practice in recent social and institutional history of science, which has clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of dealing with well defined local contexts.20 In an analogous way, Desmond also limits his chronological scope, centring on the single quarter-century from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the mid- 1 870s. But in narrowing his sights, he gains a crucial advantage; for it enables him to range from the widest political and social debates to minute details of fossil taxonomy, from the rise of a professional class to the description of a single mammalian skull.

The principles of the natural sciences were in great flux during this period; it opened with Owen's transcendental archetypes and closed with John Tyndall's notorious manifesto of materialism, the Belfast Address. These years also witnessed a transformation of the means by which science could be pursued, as brash young professionals like T. H. Huxley pushed their way to the fore over an earlier generation largely dependent on gentlemanly incomes and clerical patronage. These two sets of changes were closely related - and Desmond shows that they also had important



consequences for the interpretation of fossil remains. Vertebrate fossils in particular were large, attractive to a non-specialized audience and seized on by those who spoke out frequently on matters of high theory. With so much at stake, the bones were seen, interpreted and constructed in different ways by different factions of the scientific community. Thus the famous reptile-bird Archaeopteryx, found in 1861 and usually claimed by historians as a triumphant confirmation for an evolutionary view, was in fact equally open to a conservative Owenian interpretation. In many ways it was initially little more than an annoying irrelevance to Huxley, who was still arguing for an anti-progressionist vision of Earth history which would have birds separating off from reptiles in pre-Cambrian times, long before the earliest preserved fossils. Darwin's bulldog found these particular bones little to his liking.21

In the final chapters of his book Desmond goes beyond the use of spectacular individual specimens like Archaeopteryx, which so clearly have a role in ideological conflict, to look at the shape of entire classifications and how they can function in the service of broader social strategies. In Desmond's picture, whole taxonomic systems can be mapped on to social and political ideologies: colonialism and geographical distribution, progression and Smilesian self-improvement, idealism and an aristocratic order, materialism and a plebeian commitment; this book links them all, and the pairing off is generally as subtle and refined as it is thoroughgoing. The author justifiably presents this technique as an extension of the conceptually-oriented approach of books like Martin Rudwick's Meaning of Fossils and Peter Bowler's Fossils and Progress.22 The theoretical structures that underpin scientific classifications become the connecting links with social and political concerns. In this sense, Desmond takes the fresh historical insights of authors like Rehbock and Browne to a deeper level ultimately, that of class - although his version of determinism is not particularly rigid. His story is essentially one of mediations between the various levels of analysis, and it is this flexibility which gives the book its many strengths.

A striking example is provided by Desmond's analysis of Harry Seeley's classifications of Mesozoic flying reptiles, or pterosaurs:

The socially-stratified moral cosmos of the Cambridge dons found its microscopic reflection in Seeley's brand of Owenism, with its emphasis on order and rank rather than phylogenetic (= social) mobility. To the extent that Cambridge tried to maintain standards by becoming politically and socially



repressive, so Seeley - in snatching pterosaurs and dinosaurs from the evolutionists and placing them beyond reach - seemed insensitive to the new palaeontological needs (or rather, those of self-confessed 'plebeians' like Huxley). On the other hand, it is difficult to deny that his obsession with 'plans' and 'grades' paid handsome dividends. (193)

To all this a sceptic might reply that Seeley, who began his working life apprenticed to a piano manufacturer, is actually the most plebeian of all the naturalists discussed in the book - certainly more so than Huxley, whose father was a schoolmaster. But Desmond is always carefully attentive to the self-perceived status and aspirations of particular individuals. Thus naturalists can come from similar social backgrounds but differ in their social commitments and likewise in their palaeontological theories and classifications. What might appear to a more rigid approach as uncomfortable exceptions become instead means towards a fuller historical understanding. Clearly, this flexibility can be carried too far, and the precise significance of locutions such as 'microscopic reflection' or phylogenetic 'equalling' social mobility remains problematic. But the author generally steers between the Scylla of schematization and the Charybdis of stolid empiricism with enviable skill.

The lively reconstruction of the social process of reconstructing extinct animals in Archetypes and Ancestors deserves the widest possible attention, far beyond the circle of those concerned directly with the history of palaeontology or natural history. All of the books under review are readable, but this one is compulsively so, even by the non-specialist. Many will surely look forward to seeing its approach extended elsewhere. In this they need not search far, for all of the other volumes point to questions immediately amenable to the same kind of enquiry. Browne's excellent discussion of the relationship between early nineteenth-century political censuses and contemporary surveys of living organisms is particularly revealing in this regard, as are her brief comments on the colonial connections of natural history research. Farber develops the latter subject further, as does Lucille Brockway's recent book on the Royal Botanic Gardens. Imperialism, exploration and colonialism clearly deserve more attention from historians of science.23

Another target for future research must surely be the social and political connotations of the idealist movement that Rehbock has brought to light. The extreme transcendentalism developed in



France by Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and taken up in the British context by radicals like Robert Knox carried with it a heavy weight of ideological baggage. Rehbock hints at this, but fails to make it a central feature of his account. In fact, it is almost certainly of prime importance. To take only one example, much of the theoretical work of Edward Forbes might be seen as an attempt to domesticate the dangerous tendencies of Knoxian transcendentalism, so as to render theories he had imbibed as a student in Edinburgh palatable to the conservative metropolitan geological community and consonant with his own Tory political views. Hence Forbes's attempts to give idealism an acceptable genealogy within the British Isles by means of references to Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and other seventeenth-century English neoplatonists.24 A wider enquiry into the political associations of Continental transcendentalism, besides providing insights into the controversial nature of the importation of idealism, might also shed light on the violent debates within the movement itself.25

A no less urgent set of issues is raised by the prospect of applying Desmond's methods to the fine detail of classifications of organisms other than vertebrate mammals and reptiles - Forbes's studies of invertebrate molluscs, for example, or Joseph Hooker's plants. The problem, of course, is made particularly difficult by the neutral form of discourse customary in taxonomic works. This avoidance of overt idiosyncracy is itself socially maintained, and does not mean that controversial messages cannot be present at the birth of a classification or implicitly coded into its final form. On the other hand, it does make the historian's reconstructive task more difficult. Moreover, Desmond unfortunately seems to share some of Rehbock's and Browne's mild disdain for the practical activities of naming and classifying - 'It might be guessed that I have no great love for merely cataloguing collections' (15) although surely this is precisely the level at which a thoroughgoing sociology of knowledge will eventually stand or fall. In fact, there are isolated statements in his book that might lead the uninitiated to suspect that he believes a sociological approach might not apply to scientific classifications as a whole: 'classification does not necessarily reflect reality', he writes; 'at times it may serve to legitimize one's philosophy, for example by reshuffling nature into a more compatible form' (70; my emphasis). Or: 'It is certainly suggestive that supposedly objective statements often correspond as much to contemporary needs as "reality"' (114; my emphasis).



Perhaps part of the problem (if I am not pressing these statements too hard) lies in an attempt to reach at least two very different audiences, one needing to be convinced that the social world has anything to do with interpretations of nature, the other taking this as an assumed starting point.

How, then, are social historians of science to penetrate the great mass of everyday taxonomic research undertaken in the nineteenth century? There are many potential answers to this question already developed in the anthropological and philosophical literature. Within historical studies, one fruitful approach has involved examining those periods when the basic foundations of a specialized activity were being laid. Here Farber's work on the making of new natural history disciplines, like Roy Porter's studies of geology, is of obvious relevance. Such enquiries immediately point up the ideological underpinnings present at the creation of new ways of dividing up the world. Another example of a way forward, and one which shows how even blandly specialized classifications can be 'read' for wider historical meanings, is available in recent work on the barnacle classifications of Charles Darwin. Even the most esoteric parts of Darwin's research prove to be part of an evolutionary programme with all the consequences which that implied. Both Mary P. Winsor and Michael Ghiselin have shown how his classifications contain theoretical meanings just underneath a seemingly neutral facade; from these it is by comparison only a small step to Robert M. Young's common context of evolutionary and social theorizing.26 Technical insights into invertebrate taxonomy, rather than slamming the door on what Ghiselin himself has condemned as 'the curse of externalism',27 actually end up showing how bankrupt the traditional notion of 'externalism' really is.

The case of Darwin's barnacles suggests that the deep ideological divides so brilliantly explored in Archetypes and Ancestors can sometimes be followed even further into technical taxonomy. At the same time, Darwin is scarcely a typical systematist (and, it might be added, barnacles are scarcely typical animals). If it takes so much eagerly directed expertise to find implicit evolutionism in his books, how much more will be required to find similar commitments shaping the classifications of less theoretically oriented naturalists? Moreover, after a certain point there seems to be no reason to expect the immediate presence of such commitments. If we are to understand the social shaping of all classifications, other



levels of interpretation must be pursued with equal vigour. There is always a danger that historians will attempt to pry apart classifications with the big sticks of high politics or theory when the little ones of disciplinary loyalties, institutional rivalries, patronage ties or personal differences will do the trick.28 Desmond is relatively uninterested in the kind of disciplinary contrasts dealt with by Browne and Farber, although surely it must have mattered whether his practitioners learned their trade from a background in geology or one in zoology. This particular issue could assume an immense importance in practical palaeontology, for the organization of entire museums depended upon whether one saw fossils as markers of stratigraphical position or as the remains of ancient life forms. Such differences can often cut across sharp ideological divides, particularly at the 'micro'-level of detail with which taxonomists frequently deal. The insights provided by John Dean in his essay on botanical classification in the twentieth century exemplify the potential available in this kind of study.29 Historians of science still have a tendency to think of sociological explanations as typically invoking issues derived from outside the scientific enterprise. In specialized subjects addressing a small audience, such importations may well prove to be the exception rather than the rule.

The conclusion of Desmond's book raises a final question. The volume ends with Owen unpacking South African fossils that beautifully plugged a perceived gap between mammals and reptiles. These were the remains of theriodonts - weird carniverous creatures that (for Owen) occupied an idealist half-way house between two 'types'. Huxley was unwilling to put these specimens to their obvious evolutionary use, and for reasons beyond mere personal pique. But at the same time, his hard-nosed approach was producing great strides in 'our knowledge of avian evolution'. 30 Desmond's design in this chapter, and it is a proper one, is to show that both Huxley and Owen made a 'lasting contribution' to the science of palaeontology. But there is a problem here as well. In cases like this the book faces but never fully resolves the difficult problem of how the locally produced products of science become part of the commonly accepted heritage of natural knowledge. For example, Desmond writes at one point that Owen's theriodont work was 'tied' to an idealist metaphysic for its 'ultimate meaning' (175). In late Victorian times, this surely was the case - but the interpretative value of Divine Thoughts rapidly declined in the following decades; and yet by Desmond's own account Owen's



conclusions remained in certain respects intact, part of 'our knowledge'. In short, there is an important notion of scientific progress implicit in the final chapter, epitomized in phrases like 'lasting contribution', which remains incompletely analyzed. An enquiry into this problem really involves the closure of this phase of the evolutionary debates in the early twentieth century. Although outside the scope of the present book, further investigation of this later period would be of great interest.

Conclusion

David Allen has sometimes pictured the historian of the classificatory sciences engaged in rescuing nuggets of 'social' detail from a mass of otherwise inert taxonomic material. Many, however, now hope to take his approach much further and see this inert material as precisely their problem. The central question, as Desmond's book makes clear, has become one of facts. Social historians are beginning to look beyond a generalized interest in the activities pursued by scientists in the past, to a specific concern with the ways in which particular pieces of natural knowledge come into being, are maintained, and in some instances pass into the limbo of rejected knowledge. Through a fine-textured study of cultural circumstance, they are coming to grips with the same problem that Mary Winsor faced in her outstanding study of invertebrate taxonomy: 'what it means to deal scientifically with the living world'.31 The significance of this shift in emphasis scarcely needs to be stressed, but its specific impact within a single area of the history of science is worth emphasizing. This impact is not so much in providing empirical support for sociological theories of scientific knowledge (although this aspect of the subject will continue to be of importance). Rather, the new approaches provide crucial new resources for understanding past science in all its rich historical complexity. And here lies the remarkable potential of Desmond's book. Fifty years ago, G. M. Young asked what it would be like to wake up in Victorian England. The answer, he remarked, obviously depended upon where one was at the time. If the historian were to wake up in the metropolitan world of natural history in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, surely the best available guide would be Archetypes and Ancestors. To see this book as another sociologically oriented case-study using the 'Edinburgh model' would be to give only a partial view of its importance, which rests



primarily in recreating a vanished world with immediacy and fullness. In 1841 the Victorian naturalist Richard Owen found fossil reptiles pictured as sluggish elephantine lizards and made them into lively, complicated and intelligent creatures; Desmond has now done something of the same kind for Victorian naturalists themselves. Rather than passive receptors of ideas and influences, they are becoming active, engaged creators of new knowledge in natural history.

* NOTES

1. Book-length works include D. E. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London: Allen Lane, 1976); M. P. Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life: Issues in Nineteenth Century Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); D. Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838-1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); D. Knight, Ordering the World: A History of Classifying Man (London: Burnett, 1981); A. Wheeler (ed.), From Linnaeus to Darwin: Commentaries on the History of Biology and Geology (London: Society for the History of Natural History, 1985, forthcoming). For an up-to-date survey and bibliography, see D. E. Allen, 'Life Sciences: Natural History', in P. Corsi and P. Weindling (eds), Information Sources in the History of Science and Medicine (London: Butterworth Scientific, 1983), 349-60.

2. S. Shapin, 'History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions', History of Science, Vol. 20 (1982), 157-211; D. P. Miller, 'Social History of British Science: After the Harvest?' Social Studies of Science, Vol. 14 (1984), 115-35.

3. Theoretical perspectives are available in a number of works, most prominently M. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1978), and D. Bloor, 'Durkheim and Mauss Revisited: Classification and the Sociology of Knowledge', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 13 (1982), 267-97.

4. A. 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936); W. F. Bynum, 'The Great Chain of Being after Forty Years', History of Science, Vol. 13 (1975), 1-28.

5. F. C. Haber, The Age of the World: Moses to Darwin (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959); C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (New York: Harper and Row, 1959); also B. Glass, 0. Temkin and W. L. Strauss (eds), Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859 (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959). For a bibliography and clearly written survey, see P. J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984).

6. M. J. S. Rudwick, 'Preface to the Second Edition', The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology (New York: Science History, 1976).



Relevant to many of the issues discussed later in this essay is Rudwick's forthcoming The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985, forthcoming).

7. R. Desmond, Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists, Including Plant Collectors and Botanical Artists (London: Taylor and Francis, 1977); W. A. S. Sarjeant, Geologists and the History of Geology: An International Bibliography from the Origins to 1978 (London: Macmillan, 1980); P. Gilbert, Compendium of the Biographical Literature on Deceased Entomologists (London: British Museum [Natural History], 1977). Also important here are many of the detailed articles in Archives of Natural History. Allen has labelled this tradition 'taxonomic archaeology' in his 'Naturalists in Britain: Some Tasks for the Historian', Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, Vol. 8 (1977), 91-107, an article filled with useful suggestions. Manuscript sources for the subject are comprehensively listed in G. Bridson, V. C. Phillips and A. P. Harvey, Natural History Manuscript Resources in the British Isles (London: Mansell, 1980); the principal books in R. B. Freeman, British Natural History Books, 1495-1900: A Handlist (Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1980).

8. Examples include R. Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain, 1660-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); J. Morrell, 'Economic and Ornamental Geology: The Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1837-53', and P. Weindling, 'The British Mineralogical Society: A Case Study in Science and Social Improvement', both in I. Inkster and J. Morrell (eds), Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 231-56, 120-50; N. A. Rupke, The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology, 1814-1849 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

9. Allen, 'Life Sciences', op. cit. note 1, at 356. R. Smith provides suggestions for a study of the pre-Darwinian scientific community in his essay review of D. Hull, Darwin and his Critics, British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 7 (1974), 78-85. Efforts to establish some of the outlines of the natural history community include (among many other recent articles) M. J. S. Rudwick, 'Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science', Isis, Vol. 73 (1982), 186-206; S. Sheets-Pyenson, 'War and Peace in Natural History Publishing: The Naturalist's Library, 1833-1843', Isis, Vol. 72 (1981), 50-72; J. A. Secord, 'Darwin and the Breeders: A Social History Approach', in D. Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, forthcoming); D. E. Allen, 'The Women Members of the Botanical Society of London, 1836-1856', British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 13 (1980), 240-54; Allen, 'The Professionals in Natural History in the Early Nineteenth Century', in Wheeler (ed.), op. cit. note 1.

10. For example, G. Lemaine, R. MacLeod, M. Mulkay and P. Weingart (eds), Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines (The Hague: Mouton, 1976). Also important are Porter, op. cit. note 8, and L. Graham, W. Lepenies and P. Weingart (eds), Functions and Uses of Disciplinary History (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983).

11. K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983).



12. Compare Farber, Emergence of Ornithology (quotation at 127) with M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). Among the best of the older literature is M. Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). More recent studies include J. Lyon and P. R. Sloan (eds), From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and his Critics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Sloan, 'Buffon, German Biology, and the Historical Interpretation of Biological Species', British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 12 (1979), 109-53; and W. Lepenies, Das Ende derNaturgeschichte: Wandel Kultureller Selbst- verstandlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1976).

13. Rehbock, Philosophical Naturalists, 69. Besides the discussions in the books of Rehbock and Browne, accounts of Forbes's work are available in G. Wilson and A. Geikie, Memoir of Edward Forbes, FRS (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861); E. L. Mills, 'Edward Forbes, John Gwyn Jeffreys, and British Dredging Before the Challenger Expedition', Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, Vol. 8 (1978), 507-36; and P. F. Rehbock, 'The Early Dredgers: "Naturalizing" in British Seas, 1830-1850', Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 12 (1979), 293-368.

14. See J. A. Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian-Silurian Dispute (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, forthcoming), and M. J. S. Rudwick, 'Cognitive Styles in Geology', in M. Douglas (ed.), Essays in the Sociology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 219-41. For other reflections on the disciplinary position of geology, see D. E. Allen, 'The Lost Limb: Geology and Natural History', in L. Jordanova and R. Porter (eds), Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Chalfont St Giles, Bucks.: British Society for the History of Science, 1979), 200-12.

15. For a parallel point with respect to a later period, see G. L. Geison, 'Scientific Change, Emerging Specialties, and Research Schools', History of Science, Vol. 19 (1981), 20-40. The notion of a 'cognitive enterprise' is explored in Rudwick, 'Charles Darwin in London', op. cit. note 9. Farber provides a useful taxonomy of research traditions in his 'Research Traditions in Eighteenth-Century Natural History', in G. Montalenti and P. Rossi (eds), Lazzaro Spallanzani e la biologia del Settecento (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1982), 397-403.

16. T. L. Hankins, 'In Defence of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of Science', History of Science, Vol. 17 (1979), 1-16. For an important initiative in this area, see D. Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

17. Rehbock, Philosophical Naturalists, 73-75. 18. J. B. Delair and W. A. S. Sarjeant, 'The Earliest Discoveries of Dinosaurs',

Isis, Vol. 66 (1975), 5-25; and A. J. Desmond, 'Designing the Dinosaur: Richard Owen's Response to Robert Edmond Grant', Isis, Vol. 70 (1979), 224-34.

19. For example, W. F. Bynum, Medical History, Vol. 26 (1982), 462-66; J. H. Price, Archives of Natural History, Vol. 11 (1983), 350-52; R. Rainger, Victorian Studies, Vol. 27 (1984), 270-71; and J. H. Brooke, 'Middle Positions', London Review of Books, Vol. 5, No. 13 (1983), 11-12. The last of these reviews, which also discusses Browne's Secular Ark, nicely summarizes what has been the principal



contribution of mainstream history of nineteenth-century biology during the past decade: the demonstration that much of the so-called 'Darwinian Revolution' had already been accomplished before 1859.

20. See especially the set of essays in Inkster and Morrell, op. cit. note 8; J. Morrell and A. Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and M. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844 (London: Heinemann, 1978). Miller, op. cit. note 2, usefully surveys this literature.

21. Desmond, Archetypes, 124-31. See also M. A. di Gregorio, T. H. Huxley's Place in Natural Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984). Huxley's non-progressionism was first brought out by M. J. Bartholemew, 'Huxley's Defence of Darwin', Annals of Science, Vol. 32 (1975), 525-35; for the takeover of London science by the new guard, see F. M. Turner, 'The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension', Isis, Vol. 69 (1978), 356-76.

22. Rudwick, op. cit. note 6; P. J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976).

23. Browne, 77-80, 130-31; Farber, 27, 33, 147-50; L. H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979); J. A. Secord, 'King of Siluria: Roderick Murchison and the Imperial Theme in Nineteenth-Century British Geology', Victorian Studies, Vol. 25 (1982), 413-42; R. A. Stafford, 'Geological Surveys, Mineral Discoveries, and British Expansion, 1835-71', The Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History. Vol. 12 (1984), 5-32. Roy MacLeod gives a valuable survey in 'On Visiting the "Moving Metropolis": Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science', Historical Records of Australian Science, Vol. 5 (1982), 1-15.

24. Some of these issues are raised in E. L. Mills, 'A View of Edward Forbes, Naturalist', Archives of Natural History, Vol. 11 (1984), 365-93. Rehbock mentions the use of the Cambridge anti-Hobbists by Forbes on 114, and by Owen on 87. For an analysis of the radical associations of certain forms of transcendentalism, see A. J. Desmond, 'Robert E. Grant (1793-1874): The Social Predicament of a Pre- Darwinian Transmutationist', Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 17 (1984), 189-223, and Desmond, 'Richard Owen's Reaction to Transmutationism in the 1830s', British Journalfor the History of Science (forthcoming).

25. The presence of these disputes is indicated in some fascinating comments in the Philosophical Naturalists (e.g. 78-80), but these are immediately played down.

26. M. P. Winsor, 'Barnacle Larvae in the Nineteenth Century: A Case-Study in Taxonomic Theory', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 24 (1969), 294-309; M. T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1969), 103-30; R. M. Young, 'Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory', Past and Present, No. 43 (1969), 109-45. The insights into reading scientific texts offered in G. Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) should also greatly facilitate this linking.

27. M. T. Ghiselin, Review of A. Wheeler and J. Price (eds), History in the Service of Systematics (London: Society for the Bibliography of Natural History,



1981), Isis, Vol. 73 (1982), 586. 28. The same point is made more generally and developed at length in Shapin,

op. cit. note 2, and Bloor, op. cit. note 3. 29. J. Dean, 'Controversy over Classification: A Case Study from the History of

Botany', in B. Barnes and S. Shapin (eds), Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (London: Sage, 1979), 211-28. For another finely detailed investigation - in this case emphasizing personal over conceptual issues - see M. P. Winsor, 'Louis Agassiz and the Species Question', Studies in History of Biology, Vol. 3 (1979), 89-117.

30. Desmond, Archetypes, 193-203. One of the most interesting points which emerges from Desmond's study is the persistence of idealism late into the nineteenth century; cf. Rehbock, Philosophical Naturalists, 192-96. The point is also evident from P. J. Bowler's recent Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

31. Winsor, op. cit. note 1, 6.

James A. Secord is a Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. His publications include: Controversy in Victorian

Geology: The Cambridge-Silurian Dispute (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1 985, forthcoming) and several articles on Charles Darwin: 'Nature's Fancy: Charles Darwin

and the Breeding of Pigeons', Isis, Vol. 72 (1 981), 162-1 86; and 'Darwin and the Breeders: A Social History

Approach', in D. Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1 985,

forthcoming). Other articles include 'King of Siluria: Roderick Murchison and the Imperial Theme in Nineteenth Century

British Geology', Victorian Studies, Vol. 25 (1 982), 41 3-42, and 'Newton in the Nursery: Tom Telescope and the

Philosophy of Tops and Balls, 1 761 -1 838', History of Science, Vol. 23 (1 985, forthcoming). Work in Progress: A study of the reception of Robert Chambers's anonymously

published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844-1860. Author's address: Churchill College, Cambridge

CB3 ODS, UK.


Article Contentsp. [181]p. 182p. 183p. 184p. 185p. 186p. 187p. 188p. 189p. 190p. 191p. 192p. 193p. 194p. 195p. 196p. 197p. 198p. 199p. 200

Issue Table of ContentsSocial Studies of Science, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Feb., 1985) pp. 1-204Front Matter [pp. 1-174]Towards an Analysis of Scientific Observation: The Externality and Evidential Significance of Observational Reports in Physics [pp. 3-36]Discipline and the Material Form of Images: An Analysis of Scientific Visibility [pp. 37-66]Expertise and Causal Attribution in Deciding between Crime and Mental Disorder [pp. 67-98]Vocabularies of Freedom and Resentment: A Strawsonian Perspective on the Nature of Argumentation in Science and the Law [pp. 99-126]Discussion PaperComparing the Sciences: Citation Context Analysis of Papers from Neuropharmacology and the Sociology of Science [pp. 127-153]

Notes and LettersCan Scientists Rationally Assess Conditional Inferences? [pp. 155-173]

Responses and RepliesA Case of Amnesia? [pp. 175-176]With Enemies like This, Who Needs Friends? [pp. 176-177]Empirical Studies or Philosophy? (Reply to Barnes and Collins) [pp. 178-180]

Essay ReviewNatural History in Depth [pp. 181-200]

Corrigendum: Private Science and Public Knowledge: The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal and Its Use of the Literature [pp. 201-203]Back Matter [pp. 204-204]

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