British Naturalists Research Articles

How Chinese Materia Medica Informed Nineteenth-Century British Pharmaceutical Knowledge: The Case of Daniel Hanbury’s Reception and Translation of Bencao Literature

Summary Focusing on the figure of Daniel Hanbury and his research on the subject of Chinese materia medica, this essay sheds light on the reception of Chinese bencao knowledge by British naturalists in the context of the development of pharmaceutical knowledge during the mid-nineteenth century. While Hanbury and his collaborators extensively consulted diverse Chinese texts, most noticeably the Bencao gangmu, they relegated to history much Chinese bencao and medical knowledge. Hanbury’s collection of local knowledge through collaboration with Sinologists, as well as his process of selecting, omitting and editing highlights the complex roles that Chinese knowledge played in the formation of nineteenth-century British pharmaceutical knowledge—not just in terms of new Chinese materia medica and Hanbury’s own empirical research but also as a foil against which he helped formulate what constituted a new body of scientific pharmaceutical knowledge.

Natural history and the Raj: popular wildlife literature for readers in Britain and the British Empire in India (1858–1947)

From the mid nineteenth into the mid twentieth centuries a significant number of British people spent their careers in India administering what was regarded as the most important territory of the British Empire. During this period, an extensive body of literature on Indian wildlife was published both in Britain and in India itself. This paper surveys the authors and the publishers of this literature and suggests that the material was shaped by the differing interests of readers in the two countries. The emergence of a community of enthusiastic naturalists among the British expatriates is contrasted with the promotion of India as an exotic location for readers in Britain itself. The role of hunting narratives in providing information for the study of natural history is explored, along with growing concerns about the need for conservation. The complexity of the relationships between expatriate British naturalists and the local populations is used to throw light on how the situation changed in the decades leading to independence. In conclusion, the publications of the Bombay Natural History Society are used to illustrate these developments

Early Modern Attitudes to the Ravens and Red Kites of London

Ravens (Corvus corax) and red kites (Milvus milvus) were commonly seen in London in the early modern period. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the diversity of attitudes towards these birds. Previous historiography on the subject has failed to contextualize its sources. The excited accounts of travellers like Schaseck, the Venetian Ambassador’s amanuensis and Lupold von Wedel need to be counter-balanced by considering the bored antipathy common amongst the British naturalists; William Turner, Francis Willughby and John Ray and the descriptions of sanitation services provided by European naturalists and local poets. The final part of the paper reconstructs the patchwork of legislation and custom relating to the species from early modern London.

The Environmental Violence of Soy Cultivation in the Brazilian Amazon

The Environmental Violence of Soy Cultivation in the Brazilian Amazon Marcos Colón1 An area of great environmental complexity, inhabited by ancient traditional fishing communities and around 400 Afro-Brazilian (Quilombolas) families, is about to disappear (Locatelli, 2016). I refer to the region of Lago do Maicá (Santarém, Pará, Brazil), an area inhabited by about 1,500 families. Maicá is an ecological sanctuary, a natural cradle for unique species of aquatic fauna and Amazonian bird life. It was here, almost two centuries ago, that two leading British naturalists, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, spent three years studying animals and insects. Despite hardships, the men reveled in what they called the “glorious forest” (Bates, 2009 [1863], p. 371). It is estimated that by the end of their three years, they had collected more than 14,000 species of animals (mostly insects). Based on this long and demanding trip, Bates published his book The Naturalist on the River Amazons (Bates, 2009 [1863]), which is still regarded as a classic. Today, besides being a tourist attraction, the lake is also a source of income for the families who make a living from fishing, providing about 30 percent of the fish consumed in town (de Matos Vaz, 2017). Now part of the lake might be turned into a private port for soybean transshipment, which would make it easier for companies like the Brazilian Port Company of Santarém (Embraps) to export goods. The construction of large enterprises in this region will attack Indigenous ways of life and irreversibly damage the environment (Rajão et al., 2020). This will lead to accelerated destruction of the lower wetlands and the expansion of soybean monoculture and its associated high levels of toxicity (Karlsson Pollak, 2020). Santarém is one of the oldest cities in the interior of Amazônia, located at the meeting point of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers. It was founded by Portuguese Jesuit priests in 1661, as the Portuguese colonized the region. Since then, Santarém has been a strategic production center, first for cacao, then for livestock, the extraction of rubber and jute, and, more recently, for soybean monoculture. Located 500 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, its geographical position is strategic for soybean production, whether the crop arrives by road on the sealed highway BR-163 or by barge on the Tapajós River. Crops can be easily trans-shipped down the Amazon River to the Atlantic coast for eventual movement to overseas markets (Colón, 2018). The port project was “sold” to the local population with the promise of generating income and employment in Santarém, in addition to significant taxes that would be collected by the state government. If history is a guide, this is unlikely to actually happen. [End Page 186] The Minnesota-based Cargill Corporation has operated a similar port nearby since the 1970s and stands as a clear example that this type of enterprise does not primarily benefit the local population. Further examples of this can be seen in my film Beyond Ford-lândia: An Environmental Account of Henry Ford’s Adventure in the Amazon (Colón, 2017), which examines the strategies used by these industries and explores the negative impacts that monoculture plantations can have on local populations. The building of a new port zone in the Lago do Maicá region is just part of the region’s soy farmers’ and trading companies’ plans to expand the flow of grains from the Mato Grosso region up to the north of the country, through the Tapajós-Teles Pires axis. Although the plan was embargoed by the Brazilian Court for lack of prior consultation before making purchases, the Embraps Company strategy has been to purchase land and install small projects such as gas stations that will later be used to sustain the activities of the port. How long will the economic power of corrupt politicians continue defying international laws (for instance the Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization) on behalf of a small number of mostly foreign company shareholders (see Colón, 2018)? How long will the Amazon rainforest be at the mercy of politicians and businesspeople who formulate...

‘HUMBOLDTIAN SCIENCE’ AND BEYOND. THE HUMBOLDTIAN WAY OF SEEING AND KNOWING IN VIENNA AND IN FRANZ UNGER’S AND FRIEDRICH SIMONY’S EARTH SCIENCES

ABSTRACT This contribution builds on the notion of ‘Humboldtian Science’, coined by the American historian of science Susan F. Cannon who, in her book Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (1978), identifed a constellation of practices, strategies and ideas as typical of the research style of British naturalists during the nineteenth century. Cannon’s explanatory model has been widely accepted and for many different reasons. It became attractive as it seemed to break the deadlock of the ambivalence between idealism and empiricism, leading beyond the narrow perspective of academic disciplines. At the same time, it focused on practices and has become a useful tool to analyze the seemingly everyday activities of naturalists in the field. This contribution discusses the potential of this concept at different levels and will also show its limits; insofar as it runs the risk of idealizing Humboldt as an already epigonal figure. It will also analyze Humboldt’s connections to Vienna and his influences on natural sciences by focusing on two examples from the earth sciences, the contributions of the palaeontologist and biologist Franz Unger and the geologist and geographer Friedrich Simony. In so doing, it will widen understanding of the impact of Humboldt’s work in Vienna, detecting not only ‘Humboldtian Science’ but also the Humboldtian way of seeing and knowing where it is not expected: in Unger’s Atlantis theory, his visualization of origins of cultivated plants, and his visualization of deep time, as well as Friedrich Simony’s concept of scientific landscape drawings.

Alfred Wallace's Baby Orangutan: Game, Pet, Specimen.

Alfred Russell Wallace's The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869, is a classic text in natural history and the theory of evolution. Amidst heroic hunting narratives and picturesque descriptions of local fauna and flora, stands out a curious episode in which Wallace describes adopting a baby orangutan, whose mother he had killed. Wallace, a British naturalist and collector, cultivated an affectionate relationship with the orphaned orangutan, often referring to her as his "baby." This paper examines how the orangutan was transformed from being a moving target for museum display, to a beloved companion but also a scientific specimen. In this process, Wallace redesigned his colonial bungalow to a space that combined domestic settings with engineered nature-like environments, a familiar construction in later primate research. I use Wallace's adoption episode to discuss how affect and care were interwoven into the exploitative relations of British naturalists and physiologists and the animals they studied. The account of Wallace's idiosyncratic relationship with the orangutan is augmented with additional documentation of the close relationships of scientists with research animals, staged as familial kinship. The emergence of the "laboratory pet" demonstrates how the production of knowledge, the sharing of households, and human-animal emotional ties were interwoven in early biomedical research.

The tree that responds: taming the rubber tree

Abstract The starting point of this article is the assertion, common among tappers (or seringueiros) in plantations in the interior of São Paulo, that it is necessary to tame rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) at the beginning of each harvest. They use this phrase to indicate the need to accustom the trees, from the first cuts, to establish an optimal flow of latex. The process of taming the tree is also discussed here based on historical ethnographic materials regarding relationships established with rubber trees in the last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in the Amazon and in the nascent plantations in Southeast Asia. British naturalists from different colonies came to dispute who “discovered” the fact that the rubber tree possesses a mechanism that they called the “wound response”. Based on this diversity of references to the modes of relationship with the peculiar characteristics of the rubber tree, I seek to elucidate, by viewing the genesis articulated between technical and vital rhythms, what it means to affirm that a tree responds or is tamed.

For Science, Broadcasting, and Conservation: Wildlife Recording, the BBC, and the Consolidation of a British Library of Wildlife Sounds.

After World War II, wildlife recordists and bioacousticians took advantage of advances in electronics and acoustics to collect, store, and analyze recordings of animal vocalizations, leading to the establishment and expansion of numerous wildlife sound archives worldwide. This article traces the technological, organizational, and social arrangements that transformed a private collection of recordings by wildlife recordist Ludwig Koch in the 1930s into one of the largest sound archives of its kind. It argues that this sound archive was consolidated through the collective efforts of a recording community-an unlikely alliance of academic biologists, commercial and amateur hobby recordists, and the public service broadcaster British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), each with a stake in the development, use, and popularization of wildlife recordings. Zooming in on the integration of British naturalists with the BBC, the article shows how, despite scientists' oft-noted suspicion of the media, these parties developed a mutually beneficial association.

Textilia Linnaeana: Global 18th Century Textile Traditions & Trade by Viveka Hansen

Reviewed by: Textilia Linnaeana: Global 18th Century Textile Traditions & Trade by Viveka Hansen Alexander Mawyer Textilia Linnaeana: Global 18th Century Textile Traditions & Trade, by Viveka Hansen. Mundus Linnæi Series. London: The ik Foundation & Company, 2017. isbn 978-1-904145-32-5; 517 pages, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. us$72.00. Over more than two centuries, the experiences of Cook’s officers, surgeons, naturalists, artists, able-bodied sailors, and Pacific Islander inter-locutors have been minutely scrutinized. Today, a radically unexpected finding is required to make much of a stir in the sails of the relevant discourses. Or so I would have thought. Viveka Hansen’s Textilia Linnaeana: Global 18th Century Textile Traditions & Trade demonstrates that scholars engaged in the fundamental work of their particular disciplines can have subtle yet notable contributions for colleagues working in distant fields. Hansen, an expert in eighteenth-century textiles, makes a finely woven contribution to the history of science with insights at the intersection of emerging eighteenth-century botanical science, commerce, and material culture. Her work also has implications for the study of Oceania’s eighteenth-century age-of-encounter, the roots of globalization in the region, the sometimes shadowy economic motivations for Pacific navigation, and a more pluralistic vision of the place of “national projects” in European Pacific voyaging. Textilia Linnaeana is the latest volume in the Mundus Linnæi Series devoted to republishing the transformative works of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, generally known for his contributions to taxonomic conventions and the study of sexual reproduction among plants. Twenty richly hued chapters illuminate the place of textiles in the eighteenth century across hundreds of cultures around the globe, as Hansen closely scrutinizes the travels, experiences, field science, and findings of Linnaeus’s seventeen most favored students, whom he baptized his “Apostles.” These lieutenants, some of whom became scientific giants in their own right, were strategically deployed by Linnaeus for [End Page 598] undertaking basic research, gathering botanical and zoological specimens around the globe, publicizing Linnaeus’s theoretical and methodological work, and advocating for his place in the froth of the Enlightenment’s refashioning of botanical science as a formal endeavor. The apostles included two of Cook’s best-known companions in the first and second navigations, Daniel Solander and Anders Sparrman. That these two naturalists were trained by Linnaeus has not been missed by prior commentators. However, this relationship has generally been treated as a colorful fact, little more than a delightful bit of trivia, and it may have seemed unimportant to those less interested in the history of botany or the history of science more generally. Hansen’s volume suggests a different perspective on the role of these early scientists. Daniel Solander (1733–1782) was born at Piteå, on the Gulf of Bothnia, attended Uppsala University, and studied natural history under Linnaeus, who chose him to communicate the Systema Naturae, published in 1735, to the emerging Royal Society and the community of British naturalists in London. Solander became an employee of the British Museum and worked from 1763 to catalog its natural history collections. At some point, he became friendly with Joseph Banks, despite their differences in social status. Under Banks’s patronage, Solander was appointed to the suite of naturalists aboard the Endeavor on Cook’s first navigation in 1768–1771. Solander died young at age forty-nine. His immensely productive life was devoted to the primary work of cataloging the tens of thousands of new floral and faunal species gathered during Cook’s first voyage for the British Museum, presenting emerging work to the Royal Society, and supporting Banks’s ongoing scientific endeavors, including a late period of fieldwork in Iceland. However, Solander published no primary account whatsoever of his Pacific experiences. Andreas Sparrman (1748–1820) was born in Tensta, in Sweden’s Uppland, and enrolled at Uppsala as a precocious nine-year-old. Sparrman studied medicine and natural history under Linnaeus and was deployed to South Africa for the empirical incorporation of that bioregion into the Linnaean project. There, in 1772, Sparrman met Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster before Cook’s departure from the Cape and was invited to join them on the Resolution for the remainder...

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History

Norman Winfrid Moore (1923–2015)

Norman Winfrid Moore (1923–2015)

The ichneumon fly and the equilibration of British natural economies in the eighteenth century.

The parasitic ichneumon fly, discovered by European natural philosophers in the seventeenth century, remained largely unstudied until it captured the attention of Enlightenment-era natural historians. Although this sudden surge of interest has been explained as an effort to understand the natural 'evil' of parasitism, the heyday of ichneumon studies was actually inspired by the political and agricultural context of late eighteenth-century Britain. British naturalists were captivated by this insect for reasons both philosophical and practical. In the providentially self-equilibrating qualities of 'natural' ichneumon economies, they saw solutions to political problems of famine, dearth, national wealth, governance and excess population, in addition to finding reassurance that Enlightened confidence in nature's inherent stability and fruitfulness was not unfounded.

Scolopendromorph centipedes (Chilopoda: colopendromorpha) in the Natural History Museum (London): a review of the hitherto unidentified species collected in Africa, with remarks on taxonomy and distribution, and a new species of Otostigmus (Parotostigmus).

The collection of centipedes in the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is one of the most taxonomically and geographically complete in the world. Type material includes many species described by William Leach, George Newport, and especially Reginald I. Pocock. The present paper provides a survey of previously unidentified centipedes in the collections in the NHM, and is focused on scolopendromorph specimens collected during expeditions to Africa between 1892 and 1967. It deals with material gathered in numerous regions, provinces and islands across the African continent, mainly by British naturalists. Species of the genera Alipes Imhoff, 1854, Asanada Meinert, 1886, Cormocephalus Newport, 1844, Cryptops Leach, 1815, Ethmostigmus Pocock, 1898, Otostigmus Porat, 1876, Rhysida Wood, 1862, Scolopendra Linnaeus, 1758 and Scolopocryptops Newport, 1844, were examined. A total of 32 species and subspecies are identified, one of which, is described as new: Otostigmus (Parotostigmus) coltellus n. sp., from São Tome, while many of them are new to the fauna of certain African regions/countries. The syntypes of Otostigmus (Parotostigmus) productus Karsch, 1888, include two species, one of which is O. (P.) coltellus; a lectotype is selected to stabilize the name. Cormocephalus westwoodi anceps and Rhysida lithobioides paucidens have been returned to specific rank.

The history of cybernetics in McOndo

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Volpi, El Insomnio de Bolívar, 68. 2. Ibid., 74–75. 3. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 9. 4. Ibid., 98. 5. Márquez, Cien Años de Soledad, 23. 6. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 2. 7. Ibid., 98. 8. Ibid., 99. 9. Ibid.,139. 10. For a general discussion of this literature, see Roberts, ‘Situating Science in Global History.’ 11. Exemplary cases of such tradition are: Raj, Relocating Modern Science; Delbourgo and Dew, Science and Empire; Fan, British Naturalists; Schaffer et al., Brokered World. 12. Schaffer et al., Brokered World, xxxvii. 13. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 59. 14. Ibid., 56. 15. Sivasundaram, ‘Science and the Global,’ 157. 16. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 30–31. 17. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old. 18. I also follow here David Edgerton’s suggestion of replacing global south with poor countries for sake of historical accuracy. 19. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 7. 20. Ibid. 21. I have addressed this issue already in Saraiva, ‘Inventing the Technological Nation’. The article is part of a special issue of this journal edited by Konstantinos Chatzis dedicated to the national identity of engineers. 22. For an introduction to this historiography in English see, Saldaña, ‘Introduction: Latin American Scientific Theater’. 23. See for example, Glick, ‘Science and Independence;’ Peset, Ciencia y Libertad; Arboleda, ‘Ciencia y nacionalismo.’ For the specific case of Chile the literature is not so rich. See, nevertheless, Jaksic and Serrano, ‘In the Service of the Nation.’ 24. Saldaña, ‘Introduction: Latin American Scientific Theater.’ 25. Ibid. 26. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 7. 27. Lafuente, ‘Enlightenment in an Imperial Context.’ 28. Ibid., 173. 29. It is certainly also worthy to place Medina’s book in the context of the current reevaluation of the role of computers from instruments of bureaucratic oppression into materializations of liberating utopian visions as the one undertaken in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 30. Saraiva, Fascist Pigs. 31. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 223–34. 32. Ibid., 18. 33. John McNeill following malaria mosquitoes in the greater Caribbean or Andrew Zimmerman following the new South in the USA, Togo, and Germany, are excellent examples. McNeill, Mosquito Empires; Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa. 34. Unexpectedly there are only a few truly transnational accounts in the edited volume, Hecht, Entangled Geographies. 35. Notable exceptions are Lopes and Podgorny, ‘Shaping of Latin American Museums;’ McCook, States of Nature.

Ecosystems under Sail: Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth-Century French and British Atlantics

The ocean was frequently as hostile an environment for plants and animals as it was for humankind in the eighteenth century. Existing methods of preserving the plants, fish, birds, and land animals that provided the raw materials for European science increasingly proved insufficient for the often long voyages that brought them from colonial and indigenous collectors; specimens arrived dead when they were needed alive, rotten and damaged when they were needed whole, and they frequently suffered as they encountered negligent and uninterested sailors, and rats and other shipboard pests that showed too much interest. This paper examines strategies of specimen transport adopted by French and British naturalists in the Atlantic world during the first half of the eighteenth century, arguing for the importance of maritime spaces that have often been overlooked in histories of the expanding reach of European science. Atlantic networks of specimen transport were simultaneously distinctly national and endlessly entangled. Efforts to discipline maritime social environments diverged along distinctly national lines, influenced by larger patterns of scientific sociability in both Britain and France. At the same time, however, naturalists drew on a cadre of common practices when they packed and preserved specimens for transport. The study of specimen transport demonstrates the geographic expanse of the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies at work more generally in eighteenth-century science; these forces simultaneously strengthened national scientific cultures and supported a cosmopolitan network of naturalists who communicated specimens and the methods for making them throughout Europe and the wider world.

Resisting System: Britain, Buffon, And The Avoidance of Linnaeus

It is a commonplace of science (although less of the history of science) that Linnaeus definitively solved the vexing problems of taxonomy and nomenclature in the 18th century, thus freeing subsequent researchers to focus on more challenging problems. In fact the reception of the Linnaean system was slow and incomplete at the time, and much of his work was subsequently superseded. There were many sceptics among British naturalists, and examination of their responses to Linnaeus can illuminate both the nature of his work, and the social and intellectual contexts of contemporary natural history. It was generally accepted that the study of plants and animals required some kind of order--the mere accumulation of miscellaneous facts was no longer satisfactory. There were two main alternatives. One was nationalistic and relatively superficial--to accept the Linnaean agenda, but to suggest that it had been accomplished earlier and/or better by British scholars (John Ray was the most frequent, but not the only candidate for this honor). The other was to prefer a non-Linnaean mode of ordering--that is, a way of organizing the plant and animal kingdom that employed apparently different principles, often one that acknowledged more obvious and familiar differences and familiarities. These anti-systematists (as they often misleadingly called themselves) were inclined to rally behind the countervailing authority and prestige of Buffon. Buffon also figured cryptically in merely nationalistic anti-Linnaeanism, through the mechanism of unacknowledged borrowing.

Charles Darwin’s Beagle Voyage, Fossil Vertebrate Succession, and “The Gradual Birth & Death of Species”

The prevailing view among historians of science holds that Charles Darwin became a convinced transmutationist only in the early spring of 1837, after his Beagle collections had been examined by expert British naturalists. With respect to the fossil vertebrate evidence, some historians believe that Darwin was incapable of seeing or understanding the transmutationist implications of his specimens without the help of Richard Owen. There is ample evidence, however, that he clearly recognized the similarities between several of the fossil vertebrates he collected and some of the extant fauna of South America before he returned to Britain. These comparisons, recorded in his correspondence, his diary and his notebooks during the voyage, were instances of a phenomenon that he later called the "law of the succession of types." Moreover, on the Beagle, he was following a geological research agenda outlined in the second volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which implies that paleontological data alone could provide an insight into the laws which govern the appearance of new species. Since Darwin claims in On the Origin of Species that fossil vertebrate succession was one of the key lines of evidence that led him to question the fixity of species, it seems certain that he was seriously contemplating transmutation during the Beagle voyage. If so, historians of science need to reconsider both the role of Britain's expert naturalists and the importance of the fossil vertebrate evidence in the development of Darwin's ideas on transmutation.

Placing Colonial Ornithology

This paper examines the emergence of colonial ornithology in Upper Canada, 1791-1841, to determine the impact of empire and local contexts on the natural history activity. I argue that colonial ornithology emerged as a by-product of British imperialism that helped to reinforce British, upper- and middle-class, gender-specific white identities through practices of sportsman-hunting, taxidermy, natural theology, and the romantic-aesthetic. However, as this paper reveals, British imperial practices and ideas of ornithology relied on the participation of First Nations and Métis peoples, whose knowledge and skills were instrumental to British naturalists. The First Nations and Métis peoples therefore exerted a real presence in colonial ornithology in Upper Canada--albeit a subservient one in the British ornithological texts--as they positioned themselves as part of the ornithological trade with the collection and trading of specimens. Furthermore, British military officers, settlers, and tourists tapped into American scientific networks and knowledge systems rather than focusing solely on Britain as an imperial centre of accumulation. British imperial ideas and practices of colonial ornithology in Upper Canada therefore remained ambiguous during the early nineteenth century.

Threads that Guide or Ties that Bind: William Kirby and the Essentialism Story

Nineteenth-century British entomologist William Kirby is best known for his generic division of bees based on tongues and his vigorous defence of natural theology. Focusing on these aspects of Kirby's work has lead many current scholars to characterise Kirby as an "essentialist." As a result of this characterisation, many important aspects of his work, Monographia Apum Angliae (1802) have been over-looked or misunderstood. Kirby's religious devotion, for example, have lead some scholars to assume Kirby used the term "type" for connecting an ontological assumption about essences with a creationist assumption about species fixity, which I argue conceals a variety of ways Kirby employed the term. Also, Kirby frequently cautioned against organising a classification system exclusively by what he called "analytic reasoning," a style of reasoning 20th century scholars often associate with Aristotelian logic of division. I argue that Kirby's critique of analytic reasoning brought the virtues of his own methodological agenda into sharp relief. Kirby used familiar metaphors in the natural history literature--Ariadne's thread, the Eleusinian mysteries, and Bacon's bee and spider metaphors--to emphasise the virtues of building tradition and cooperation in the goals and methodological practices of 19th century British naturalists.

Video in science. Protocol videos: the implications for research and society.

The Chinese folktale, Three Blind Men and an Elephant , is more than 2,000 years old. Three blind men approached an elephant and tried to describe it. The first man felt the elephant's ear and decided that it was like a fan. The second man touched the elephant's knee and decided that it was like a tree. The third man held the elephant's trunk and concluded that it was like a snake. They could not agree on what an elephant is really like (Kuo & Kuo, 1976). If each of the three men had felt the whole of the elephant, or at least experienced each of the three parts themselves, they would have gained a better idea of what animal they were trying to describe. Scientists, like the blind men, often have too narrow a focus when thinking about their field of research or particular topics. To obtain a larger, more complete picture—to understand what the ‘elephant’ is—they need as much information as possible. One way of achieving this is to take advantage of new technologies, such as video, and use it to communicate scientific methods, protocols and results. Here, I describe the possible advantages of using video to communicate scientific protocols instead of verbal descriptions, and highlight some further benefits of such an approach, in particular in educational and outreach programmes. Visual information is fundamental to communication. As humans, we have relied on our visual perception of the world to convey ideas, feelings and images ever since our ancestors started painting animals on cave walls thousands of years ago. Drawings, paintings, photography, film, television, analogue and digital video, computer‐generated images and the Internet have all further increased and enhanced the use of images to communicate information—not just in general, but specifically with regard to scientific ideas, results and communication. …