Adam Smith: Evolutionary Social Theorist ante litteram

This article explores the evolutionary aspect of Adam Smith’s work and his substantive conclusions regarding the civilizing process and the risks associated with it. The first section of the article represents an introduction to the problem, where research tasks are formulated. The second section contains materials indicating Smith’s familiarity with the early evolutionary concepts presented in the works of Leclerc. The third section provides an overview of the key «evolutionary» components of Smith’s study of the civilizing process. In the fourth section, the author offers a brief overview of how Smith’s concepts and principles are reflected in the analysis of Marx and Schumpeter, who were greatly influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary biology. All three authors sought to identify the forces that determine the «civilizing process» or “laws of motion” of society, as well as the risks associated with this process. They tried to understand whether such a process in itself leads to an increase in the standard of living and the accompanying «liberty, equality, and fraternity». And, conversely, whether it can serve to destroy the system, inevitably plunging it into gradual degradation. In their research, they tried to determine whether the unintended consequences of selfish human actions could lead to tyranny and human suffering. This issue is addressed in the fifth section of the article, which emphasizes that the civilizing process generates tendencies from within that threaten its continuation and may even lead to regression and degradation. In such cases, the “wisdom of the state” is urgently needed to effectively counteract such tendencies. As an example illustrating this need, Adam Smith’s political economy of war is cited. In conclusion, the author expresses the hope that Smith will be right, and that the civilizing process is in fact driven by nature’s intended desire for happiness and the perfection of the species.

The proposal that the Romantic period sees experimentation across genres and cultures is not a new one. The common tale of social upheaval resulting from the French Revolution and literary upheaval following the publication of Lyrical Ballads is fundamental to the critical understanding of the period, even if 1798 is no longer fully accepted as the “start date.” Wordsworth has always been central to this formulation: “Wordsworth in his early years was drawn into paths of speculation and experiment,” says David Bromwich in his justly celebrated study of the poetry of the 1790s.1 For Bromwich, the experimentation was social and philosophical, centered on enduring questions about the interrelationships between authority, oppression, and cultural ownership. Crucially, “personal identity” is both expressive through poetry and “coherent and irreducible by analysis,” and Wordsworth’s experimental impulse lay in finding and working through a variety of “images of Wordsworth” (pp. x, 43). This reading chimes with the contemporary understanding, within natural history, that forms — whether species, classes, orders, or other words denoting coherent groups — were themselves “coherent and irreducible.” Once discovered, they were known; and once known, they were fixed. From at least the middle of the eighteenth century onward, naturalists, following Carolus Linnaeus and Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, concentrated on finding difference and instituting order. Although Linnaeus and de Buffon diverged, with Linnaeus concentrating on “morphological differences” while de Buffon favored a more comprehensive understanding of interrelated aspects of being, their approaches required an acceptance of a neat and distinct web, rather than chain, of being.2 The Wordsworth who may subdivide self-images but who maintains a self-focus functions as his own species, his poems as branches from the main stem of being.

Reviewed by: Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton Hanna Roman (bio) Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton. Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy. Vols. VI and VII. Ed. Stéphane Schmitt and Cédric Crémière. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011. In volumes IV (1753) and V (1755) of his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, the Count of Buffon fully articulates his understanding of the concept of species, notably in the articles “Le Cheval,” “L’Asne,” and “Le Chien avec ses variétés.” His definition of this controversial term emerged from his famous attack, in the “Premier discours” (in volume I, 1749), on botanical systems of classification and in particular on the taxonomy and nomenclature of the Swedish naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus. Buffon identifies species of animals not in terms of their defining characteristics and names, but in terms of the traceable, historical development and procession of a lineage of animals who can successfully reproduce with one another. This natural movement through time is adapted and refined by humans, who gradually come to play an important role—almost as powerful as that of nature—in the creation, definition, and perfection of a species by means of moving animals to different climates, domestication, and selective breeding. The horse, donkey, and dog all fit within Buffon’s project of ordering animals according to their utility and relative closeness to people’s everyday life. In many ways, their “species-ness” takes shape with respect to how humans train and interact with them. But what happens when we come to the study of animals less familiar to us, and less susceptible to our control and modification? Where, and how, does Buffon draw the line between the well-known animals of the household and barnyard, and those that exist beyond these walls, those who flee from and avoid the influence of people? An investigation of this question may be found in volumes VI (1756) and VII (1758) of the Histoire naturelle, which have both recently been published by Honoré Champion in 2011. These volumes are part of the ongoing—and necessary, for we have gone too long without a standard edition of Buffon’s most famous work!—re-transcription and annotation of the Histoire naturelle from its first-edition print run. In volumes VI and VII, Buffon transitions from domestic to wild animals through a series of important articles, notably “Le Chat” (an animal he considers half domestic and half wild 6: 101–14), “Les Animaux sauvages” (6: 149–54), and “Les Animaux carnassiers” (7: 101–30). From the titles alone of these articles, the modern reader gains no clue as to their actual content or meaning. These articles deliver less a guide to different [End Page 1060] species of wild animals than a discussion of both the intellectual and historical processes through which humans have come to define the marginal and the other, or that which is completely unlike them. These articles all function in differing ways as types of introductions, or framing discourses, to the histories and descriptions of specific wild animals contained within the volumes. They furnish the reader with the intellectual and conceptual tools to understand the process of distinguishing between savage and tame, between the natural world untouched by humans and that which they inhabit and modify. The articles provide methodological guidelines to show readers how to observe and rationalize those animals such deer, hares, otters, and wolves, just to name a few, that Buffon defines through their antagonistic relationship—and sometimes even lack of relationship—to humans. However, many of these tools and strategies would remain invisible to the modern reader of Buffon, were it not for the introductions and annexes to the text provided by the editors Stéphane Schmitt, researcher at the CNRS in Paris, and Cédric Crémière, director of the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle du Havre. As these editors have done in the previous five volumes of the Histoire naturelle (published between 2007–2010...

Reviewed by: Cherubino's Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment by Richard Kramer Katharina Clausius Cherubino's Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment. By Richard Kramer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. [xvi, 224 p. ISBN 9780226377896 (hardback), $45; ISBN 9780226384085 (e-book), $10–45.] Music examples, reproductions, bibliography, index. Upon his election to the Académie française in 1753, the polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, entertained his fellow colleagues with a discourse on the subject of the scholar's literary style. In good eighteenth-century academic fashion, he began with benign flattery of the Académie's own literary endeavors and then systematically tackled the concept of "style"—its basic definitions, parameters, and pitfalls. Far from adopting a circumscribed approach to his topic, Buffon wound up contemplating human nature and the very quality of enlightenment. In spite of Buffon's delicate protestations to the contrary, the Académie's exalted membership may have found cause to take umbrage at some of his more pointed observations: "nothing runs more contrary to enlightenment [la lumière], which establishes itself and spreads uniformly through writing, than a series of sparks that one only extracts by force by knocking words against one another and that dazzle us for a mere instant only to then leave us in darkness" (Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, "Discours sur le style, prononcé à l'Académie française," ed. Adolphe Hatzfeld [Paris: Lecoffre fils, 1872], 20 [my translation]). The surprising collision of ideas might well taunt us with a promise of illumination, Buffon argues, but such ideas are too quickly consumed again by darkness: real enlightenment foregoes the excitement of such scintillating moments in order to shatter obscurity more permanently through sustained understanding and work. Buffon's dictum—that the scholar ought to suppress the temptation to play idly with juxtapositions and incongruities—sounds relatively sensible in theory. In practice, Buffon's strict sense of good scholarly style perhaps forecloses on rewarding discoveries made accessible by the more "sparkling" style he denounces. Certainly, Richard Kramer's latest book puts to the test just such an approach with a view to recharacterizing the "established" and "uniform" Enlightenment as a self-contradictory and fragmented aesthetic praxis. In many ways, Kramer turns Buffon's logic on its head to argue that far from establishing itself and spreading uniformly, Enlightenment music radiates vividly, momentarily, and spontaneously through scintillating disjunctions—Überraschungen (p. xiii). Conventional, patient, scholarly style promising a kind of permanent illumination cannot hope to capture such intense sparks, implies Kramer, who characterizes his method as a series of "snapshots" that do not depict as much as "anticipate" beauty-filled surprises that promise to "reclaim for us a place and a time long after its players had vanished" (p. xiii). Unlike a conventional photo album, Kramer's eschews all sense of historical chronology; his discussion largely focuses on the period 1760–1815, but various "players" and accompanying examples enter as though impervious to the linear passage of time. Like a scrapbook of half-forgotten occasions and group photos without captions identifying the sitters, Kramer unfurls an extended family of Aufklärung composers, poets, and theorists and a strikingly diverse series of music examples. What knits the assemblage together is a tacit assumption of generational heritage and the sense of [End Page 527] intangible affinity among distant relatives. Presuming rather than asserting connections, Cherubino's Leap springs nimbly across decades, characters, and musical works. The German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, for instance, casually populates several of Kramer's snapshots alongside contemporaries like Ludwig van Beethoven, and Kramer's evenhanded treatment of both men assumes a readership intimately familiar with the life and accomplishments of this eclectic cast. Such bold gestures recur throughout the book and in their own way testify to a historiography wholly committed to inducing the feeling rather than the knowledge of the historian's thesis. It is as though Kramer bravely resists the rigid demands of a scholarly audience accustomed to being shown the way rather than being content to stay put and admire the fireworks. Perhaps in this sense, Kramer has innovated a strategy to forestall the formulaic sequence of apologias and contextualizations...

On the basis of comparative views on social theories that deal with the normative foundations of modern societies (such as those of Bourdieu, Durkheim and Luhmann), the genesis of law is examined in the light of Norbert Elias’ reflexions on the process of civilization. One crucial element is the surmounting of the traditional division between micro and macro structures, which, in Elias’ thought, can be achieved by taking into account the relation between sociogenesis and psychogenesis. The psychogenetic development serves as main focus, which - with regard also to Philosophical Anthropology - is examined in it’s effects on the emergence of legal awareness.

This article scrutinizes Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology by focusing on its ontological foundations. The analytical spotlight is on the inherent tension between Elias’s stance of normative neutrality and detachment, his naturalistic ontology, and an unyielding commitment to directional development. We show how Elias’s social theory does not stand apart, as an external observer, from the figurations it seeks to explain. On the contrary, it constitutes its own outside, and this has consequences when it comes to explaining the ‘dark sides’ of the present, and in particular the social sources of organized violence in modernity. It is our contention that Elias’s ontology incorrectly posits violence as the absolute Other of civilization, so that his theory of the ‘Civilising Process’ fails to adequately account for the persistence and proliferation of warfare in the modern age.

Reviewed by: The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America by Greta LaFleur Kate Luce Mulry (bio), Jessica Choppin Roney, and Whitney Martinko Keywords Sexuality, Sexual behavior, Gender, History of sex The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America. By Greta LaFleur. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. Cloth $64.95, paper $34.95.) Greta LaFleur’s The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, recently reissued in paperback, reveals how residents of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic understood human sexuality as environmentally situated. It asks how we might rethink a history of sex outside of the body and “without the subject” (189). According to LaFleur, early modern environmental understandings of sexuality emerged in natural history texts that were engaged in debates about the relationship of environment and race. While historians of race have investigated how conceptions of porous humoral bodies shaped how early modern people understood health and inchoate ideas about race, LaFleur’s novel contribution suggests that scholars interested in the history of sexuality should be similarly attentive to how sexual behavior was seen as “highly contingent on one’s environment” (34). The book is not designed to be comprehensive but instead offers new frameworks for understanding how early Americans thought about sex and sexual behaviors. By examining natural history treatises produced by elite writers as well as multiple genres of popular print material—including Barbary captivity narratives, execution narratives, cross-dressing narratives, and anti-vice narratives in the study—LaFleur uncovers a range of writers who charted how the environment shaped human bodies and behaviors. Efforts to comprehend human difference mattered a great deal to natural philosophers, governments, colonists, and merchants during a long [End Page 651] eighteenth century of accelerated globalization and colonization. As early modern authors struggled to articulate the nature of “human variety,” their efforts regularly rested on assertions about the sexual practices of the people they described and they “began to scrutinize sexual behavior as something of a racial symptom” (6). Early modern people understood both race and sexuality as malleable features of humoral bodies that were “vulnerable” (6) to the environment. While various scholars have analyzed colonizers’ anxieties about their bodies when consuming novel foods in new colonial climates, LaFleur instead delves into how these humoralist or environmentalist beliefs also informed eighteenth-century understandings of sexual behavior.1 In doing so, LaFleur reframes scholarship on early sex by moving it away from an exclusive focus on the body. While the structure of the book is roughly chronological, the thematic structure of each chapter facilitates LaFleur’s close and incisive readings. She demonstrates that writers contributed to tangled histories of race and sex across multiple print genres, and in doing so, LaFleur “unit[es] the archives of popular narrative and natural history” (5). By investigating varied texts, LaFleur brings out the mutually imbricated and influential connection between genres and reveals an Atlantic conversation about sexuality, race, and the environment. LaFleur’s book will likely introduce to scholars to an unexpected archive by revealing the numerous popular print sources that incorporated naturalists’ investigations into the nature of human variety. If eighteenth-century science writing became a vehicle for ideas about racial difference, these lesser-known texts offer additional rich resources for investigating how writers articulated human difference through claims about sexual behavior. Indeed, the non-elite vernacular literature of the era asks many of the “same questions” (23) as authors of natural history treatises. [End Page 652] After an introduction that clearly defines the terms and parameters of the work, the first chapter, “The Natural History of Sexuality,” acquaints her readers with an array of natural history texts composed by elite authors such as Cotton Mather, Carolus Linnaeus, the Comte de Buffon, and Thomas Jefferson. These authors articulated human difference through race and sex. The “environmental logic” (6) that underpinned their claims about race similarly underpinned their claims about sex. The second chapter, “The Complexion of Sodomy,” tracks a trope that appeared consistently in Barbary captivity narratives, in which sailors within the British Empire expressed fears about what Muslims might do to their endangered and vulnerable Christian bodies and their writings “turned to the figure of sodomy to stage their concerns about...

Painting Life, Describing Death: Problems of Representation and Style in the Histoire naturelle JOANNA STALNAKER In 1739, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon was named Intendant to the King's Garden and Natural History Cabinet in Paris. Around the same time, he conceived a project of monumental proportions that would become the Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy: thirty-six volumes published over a period of forty years, including theories of the earth, reproduction and man, twelve volumes devoted to quadrupeds, nine to birds and five to minerals.1 The challenge represented by the quadrupeds alone was immense, for Buffon intended to provide a comprehensive treatment of the nearly two hundred species known at that time, based as much as possible on first-hand observation. When he invited Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton to Paris from their native Montbard several years later, Buffon was seeking help for this highly ambitious enterprise. As keeper and demonstrator of the King's Cabinet, a position to which he was appointed in 1745, Daubenton would be responsible for the "Description du Cabinet du Roy," a section of the Histoire naturelle describing the various stuffed specimens, skeletons, anatomical parts and monstrosities held in the royal collection. Equipped with a background in medicine, he would also be responsible for precise anatomical descriptions of 182 species of quadrupeds, fifty-two of which had not previously been described. 193 194 / STALNAKER In preparing their quadruped articles, Buffon and Daubenton observed live animals in cages in Montbard and on fairgrounds, and studied stuffed exotics in natural history cabinets, and Daubenton dissected as many specimens as possible. Buffon also engaged the services of a reputed painter and illustrator, Jacques de Sève, whose engravings of live and dissected quadrupeds would do much to attract a wide audience of cultivated nonexperts , (fig. 1 and fig. 2) Between Daubenton's descriptions and de Sève's engravings of quadrupeds, readers oÃ- the Histoire naturelle would thus have various levels of visual representation at their disposal, in keeping with Buffon's founding principle for the study of natural history, "On doit done commencer par voir beaucoup & revoir souvent" (1:6).2 I will be specifically interested here in one of these levels of representation: the literary practice of description in the Histoire naturelle, and the philosophical and aesthetic concepts that guided that practice. By literary practice, I am referring to one of the aspects of natural history as a cultural phenomenon, as defined by Emma Spary and Nicholas Jardine in Cultures of Natural History: "Literary practices are conventions of genre, representation and persuasion; in natural history and other disciplines these include, along with rational argumentation, the gamut of rhetorical and aesthetic forms of persuasion—appeal to the historical precedent, to the interest, self-esteem and taste of the reader, for example."3 My own approach to literary practice in the Histoire naturelle, however, involves not so much rhetorical aspects—if these are to be understood as techniques used to convince and persuade—but rather aesthetic questions concerning the relationship between verbal and visual forms of representation. The question of what literary style would be most effective in accurately conveying absent objects to the reader was in fact a preoccupation widely shared by Enlightenment writers, not only in natural history, but also in the description of artisanal crafts and techniques in Diderot and d' Alembert's Encyclopédie, in the nascent practice of art criticism, and in the blossoming field of natural and urban landscape description. Although Buffon and Daubenton's descriptive practice should not be interpreted without regard for the specific context of natural history, I would argue that it should also be situated within this broader literary context. For Daubenton and Buffon were not simply involved with the problem of description on the nitty-gritty level of anatomy, dissection and the cataloging of traits. On the contrary, both writers offered broad theoretical approaches to description that engaged with Enlightenment debates concerning the relationship between text and image, poetry and painting. These contributions to the poetics of description are unique, because they are rooted in Buffon and Daubenton's practice of natural history, and Painting...

Jefferson's Shadow: Story of His Science. By Keith Thomson. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. 321. Cloth, $35. 00.)Reviewed by Joan WitkinAmong the pursuits for which Jefferson is known and discussed today, his science is perhaps the least controversial. However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Jeffer son was at the center of raging disputes over the quality of life forms in the New World. He was passionate in his scientific inquiry, driven by a determination to demonstrate that the natural history of America was equal if not superior to that of Europe. Keith Thomson sets the story of Jeffer son's science in that historical context.A professor emeritus of natural history at Oxford University, Thomson is an executive officer at the American Philosophical Society, of which body Jeffer son once served as president. author's source of inspiration for Jefferson's Shadow was his tenure as a visiting fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello when he wrote A Passion for Nature, in the Monticello Monograph Series. He has written widely on natural history, paleontology, and evolution.Jefferson's life as a scientist began with his early education. Thomson attributes a part of his subject's propensity for observing, measuring, and cataloging to his parents. Peter Jefferson, a surveyor who was passionate about record-keeping, farmed a estate. Jane Randolph Jefferson came from a family of botanists and avid gardeners. From early in life Jefferson kept a garden diary and recorded meteorological observations. data he collected over the years made major contributions to the fields of natural history, climatology, geology, and paleontology.Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia was rich in observation and responsive to European curiosity about the New World. There was much misinformation on the Continent regarding the true nature of the emerging nation. secretary to the French delegation in Philadelphia was directed by the French government to write to authorities in each of the newly independent states requesting answers to specific questions on rivers, ports, natural riches, laws, institutions, militias, and peoples. In addition to being a formal description of the laws and conventions, geography, and commerce of one state, and a comprehensive compendium of its natural history, Jeffer son's Notes was a personal manifesto extolling Virginia's virtues (46).Thomson's title is Jefferson's own characterization of the observations he reported in Notes·. The work is nothing more than the measure of a shadow, never stationary, but lengthening as the sun advances, and to be taken anew to hour (3).Beyond pure knowledge, science was a political tool for Jefferson. highly respected French naturalist, Comte de Buffon, was convinced that the New World was dismal and inhospitable, resulting in indigenous life that was sparse and weak. Jefferson steadfastly collected data to refute Buffon. He went so far as to send a box to the Comte containing parts of American mammals including a moose, which species is much larger than the caribou, the largest animal in Europe. long voyage took its toll on the contents. Buffon was impressed, if unconvinced.The scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic debated the origin of mountains, the presence of what appeared to be shells at high elevations, and the significance of petrified bones that were referred to only as fossils (based on the Latin origin of that word, meaning dug up). Jefferson never used this term, preferring large bone. Though Jefferson admired and understood Newton's theories on mechanics and mathematics, he lived in a time of transition between traditional (e. …

Reviewed by: Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution by Ian Duncan Iain Crawford Ian Duncan. Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution. Princeton UP, 2019. Pp. xiii + 290. $35 / £35. ISBN 978-0-691-17507-2. Ian Duncan's Human Forms is built around a large central claim: that "the novel reorganizes itself as the literary form of the modern scientific conception of a developmental, that is, mutable rather than fixed human nature" (8). The novel, Duncan argues, evolved during a period both when Western power was growing into unprecedented supremacy and while scientific discourse was reorganizing understandings of humanity's position in the universe and its relationship with other species of life. In the context of the massive shifts – economic, imperial, intellectual – occurring during the late Enlightenment and on into the nineteenth century and as a fluid, malleable genre unconstrained by classical precedent, European realistic fiction was uniquely suited "to model the changing form of man" (1) and become "the form without forms that likewise assimilates all forms: the literary form of the human" (9). Extending a scholarly conversation that he traces from the work of Gillian Beer and George Levine in the 1980s through to recent books by, among others, Lauren Goodlad, Devin Griffiths, Jon Klancher, and Allen MacDuffie, Duncan's study is a wide ranging, superbly researched and brilliantly written account of the ways in which the history of the novel is interwoven with the emergence of the new discourse of "natural history, and its logic of an organic transformation of forms and kinds" (1). To make this case and to highlight the ways in which realistic fiction in Britain differentiated itself from its counterparts across Europe, Duncan arranges his argument in five parts. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the formation of human natural history and examine how the emergence of both the bildungsroman and the historical novel reshaped the genre to make use of the potential of this new discourse. Chapter 3 considers the impact of Jean-Baptist Lamarck and his protégé Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and their "influential systematization of transformist ideas" (90) that became widely influential in both France and Britain during the 1820s and 1830s and that furthered the debate over whether human nature was unitary or multiple. This debate would itself be recast during the 1860s into the contrast between monogenesis versus polygenesis and, framed in these terms, would play a major role in not only the abolitionist and anti-abolitionist movements but also in discussions of colonialism and the treatment of indigenous populations. Chapters 4 and 5 conclude the book by turning, respectively, to Dickens and George Eliot as complementary embodiments of the discourse of natural history and the debates it engendered, with Chapter 4 focused on Bleak House and Chapter 5 ranging more broadly across Eliot's career but paying particular attention to Middlemarch. [End Page 204] In exploring the formation of human natural history during the latter half of the eighteenth century, Chapters 1 and 2 show how this new discourse replaced the antecedent science of man by situating humanity as just one biological entity among all the others. Using the dispute that broke out between Kant and Herder in the 1780s to illustrate the emergence of conjectural history, Duncan explores territory also discussed by Devin Griffiths in his examination of the rise of analogical reasoning, its place in the work of thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Dugald Stewart, and its enabling "fictionality" to find a role "within the scientific project of a human natural history" (36). The "key development," he argues, was "Herder's figurative mobilization of concepts emerging from the new life sciences for a naturalization of the history of man," since this would allow not only for cultural anthropology to emerge as a discipline but also for "the full immersion of the human in a natural history of infinite formal variability" (40). The developmental model of epigenesis thus replaces preformation theory in understandings of humanity and, while Herder followed the Comte de Buffon in seeking to maintain a clear divide between man and the other species, the barrier could no longer be seen as absolute and "the vaunted permanence...

To understand the full importance of the revolution in the human sciences encompassed in the comment by Comte de Buffon, this chapter focuses on the concept of a “natural history” of the human species. To develop these claims, it initially explores the origins of the idea of a “natural history” of man in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and displays the extension of this in the systematic work of the Swedish natural historian Carolus Linnaeus. The chapter then analyzes the character of Linnaeus's contemporary Buffon's self- conscious effort to construct an alternative “natural history” to that represented by the well-entrenched Linnaean program.

The article briefly covers the pages of the history of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (Paris, France), which was established in 1793, inheriting the material base and collections of one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world—the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants. Contribution to the development of the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants was made by its leaders and employees: Guy de La Brosse, Guy Crescent Fagon, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Pierre Chirac, the family of French botanists de Jussieu, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. After its foundation, the museum was managed, among others, by Louis Jean-Marie D’Aubenton, Bernard Germain Étienne de Laville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacépède, George-Léopold-Chrétien-Frédéric-Dagobert Cuvier, Michel Eugène Chevreul, Adolphe Théodore Brongniart, André Marie Constant Duméril, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Alphonse Milne-Edwards, Jean Octave Edmond Perrier, Achille Joseph Urbain, Maurice Alfred Fontaine, and Jean Dorst. The heyday of the scientific activity of the Museum was during the long years of leadership of Michel Eugène Chevrel. Table medals of France and the USA, researched and described by the authors of the article, were created to honour these famous scientists. Attention is also drawn to modern tourist medals (tokens) dedicated to the Museum’s facilities: the Garden of the Plants, the Great Evolution Gallery, the Palaeontological Museum (Galleries of Comparative Anatomy and Palaeontology), the Botanical Garden Zoo, and the Vincennes Zoo. The results of the analysis of the medals made it possible to display in a new plane the most vivid pages of the history of the Museum, the function of which is teaching, research, and dissemination of natural science knowledge, its modernity, biographies of outstanding personalities who worked in it. Most of the medals were first introduced into scientific biological circulation. The obtained information once again confirmed the possibility of using objects that are studied by special historical disciplines (in this case, the section of numismatics, medal art) for the study of the history of science.

Here Be Monsters

The aim of this article is to probe the connections between two key fields of knowledge of the French Enlightenment: political economy and natural history. It does so by analyzing the uses of reproduction, a term that eighteenth- century political economists imported from natural history. While historians of knowledge have demonstrated the crucial role played by political and economic concerns in the practices of naturalists, intent on improving their nation, the significance of natural history for the development of political economy has not been sufficiently analyzed. Studying side-by-side the works of the period’s most famous school of political economy, the physiocrats, and one of its most influential naturalists, the Comte de Buffon, the paper demonstrates that the physiocrats adopted not only the term from natural historians but also the conceptual baggage that accompanied it. Buffon radically reconceptualized the reproduction of living beings as a process governed by natural laws and not divine intervention. As the paper argues, the physiocrats’ political-economic system was based on precisely such a conception of the natural laws of reproduction, which they extended from the world of the living to the entire economy of the nation.

Giraffes have been known for many thousands of years from rock art and Egyptian artefacts, displayed by Roman emperors at games and triumphs between 46BC and AD 274, and briefly exhibited in the zoos of the Italian City States in the 15th Century, yet they remained in the realm of mythology until, in 1764, Ryk Tulbagh, Governor of the Cape Colony, sent a skin and a drawing of a giraffe to Holland. This was the first evidence of their existence to reach Europe for 280 years. Philip Carteret took a copy of the drawing to England in 1769 where it was published by the Royal Society of London, and this drawing became the image that entered the encyclopaedias of natural history emerging at that time. In 1780, more skins, drawings, skeletons and notes were sent to Holland by Robert Jacob Gordon, and were taken to England by William Paterson. Other specimens were sent to France by Francois LeVaillant, and to England by William Burchell. The specimens sent to England were largely ignored. Those sent to Europe were studied by Arnout Vosmaer and Jean Allamand in Holland and by the Comte de Buffon and Etienne Geoffroy-St Hilaire in France. Recognition of the unique taxonomic position of giraffes was the significant outcome of these studies. The specimens prompted the import of living giraffes and the first of these was sent to France in 1826 and to England in 1827. Two publications on giraffe anatomy and reproduction by Richard Owen, first Director of the British Natural History Museum, put the study of giraffe biology on a sound scientific basis, and initiated the more detailed study of giraffes which has lasted nearly 200 years.