Eighteenth-century Natural History Research Articles

Leonora Sansay's Secret History of Land Crabs

Using an unusual scene of a land crab invasion as a focal point, this essay traces the symbolic significance of this crustacean in eighteenth-century natural history writing to illustrate how Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) incorporated scientific modes of description to both express and diffuse American concerns over the Haitian Revolution. Through an emblematic reading of these creatures, it becomes apparent how Sansay drew on the land crab's symbolic significance, which developed as natural historians turned to these animals as a means to express concerns surrounding slavery, specifically the dangers posed by the enslaved to European colonization. From this perspective, the land crab invasion in Secret History becomes an instance in which Sansay both represents the dangers posed by the Haitian Revolution and draws on scientific modes of description to diffuse said concerns. This analysis of Secret History advances the case for the importance of considering the role of natural history in early American literature to understand the political commentaries found in the era's works of fiction.

"None of Them Could Say They Ever Had Seen Them, but Only Had It from Others": Encounters with Animals in Eighteenth-Century Natural Histories of Greenland.

Simple SummaryThis article uses eighteenth century natural histories of Greenland to engage with recent debates over the role of personal observation and encounter with animals in the history of natural knowledge. In particular, it draws upon the works of Hans Egede, David Cranz, and Otto Fabricius to explore the connections between missionary work, natural history, ethnography and cultural exchange in this period. It asserts the importance of a more nuanced understanding of histories of human encounters with animals and nature in the early modern period, and human encounters with that history.The pages of early modern natural histories expose the plasticity of the natural world, and the variegated nature of the encounter between human and animal in this period. Descriptions of the flora and fauna reflect this kind of negotiated encounter between the world that is seen, that which is heard about, and that which is constructed from the language of the sacred text of scripture. The natural histories of Greenland that form the basis of this analysis exemplify the complexity of human–animal encounters in this period, and the intersections that existed between natural and unnatural, written authority and personal testimony, and culture, belief, and ethnography in natural histories. They invite a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which animals and people interact in the making of culture, and demonstrate the contribution made by such texts to the study of animal encounters, cultures, and concepts. This article explores the intersection between natural history and the work of Christian mission in the eighteenth century, and the connections between personal encounter, ethnography, history, and oral and written tradition. The analysis demonstrates that European natural histories continued to be anthropocentric in content and tone, the product of what was believed, as much as what was seen.

Kant, Linnaeus, and the economy of nature

Ecology arguably has roots in eighteenth-century natural histories, such as Linnaeus's economy of nature, which pressed a case for holistic and final-causal explanations of organisms in terms of what we'd now call their environment. After sketching Kant's arguments for the indispensability of final-causal explanation merely in the case of individual organisms, and considering the Linnaean alternative, this paper examines Kant's critical response to Linnaean ideas. I argue that Kant does not explicitly reject Linnaeus's holism. But he maintains that the indispensability of final-causal explanation depends on robust modal connections between types of organism and their functional parts; relationships in Linnaeus's economy of nature, by contrast, are relatively contingent. Kant's framework avoids strong metaphysical assumptions, is responsive to empirical evidence, and can be fruitfully compared with some contemporary approaches to biological organization.

The Book of Job and the Sex Life of Elephants: The Limits of Evidential Credibility in Eighteenth-Century Natural History and Biblical Criticism

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Book of Job and the Sex Life of Elephants: The Limits of Evidential Credibility in Eighteenth-Century Natural History and Biblical Criticism*Avi LifschitzAvi LifschitzUniversity of Oxford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 91, Number 4December 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705813 Views: 6987Total views on this site © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Pierre Lyonet’s (1706–1789) Study of Insects: Displaying Virtue and Gaining Social Status through Natural History

This paper looks at the gentlemanly natural history practiced by Pierre Lyonet (1706–1789). Eighteenth-century natural history was inextricably linked to social status and Enlightenment ideals such as civility. By looking at the social network Lyonet built, we can reconstruct how past-time naturalists could enter the Republic of Letters, learned societies, and what this meant in the wider culture. For Lyonet, his study of insects had profound moral, religious and patriotic dimensions. This political and societal embeddedness enabled Lyonet to be both a benefactor to the state’s “public good”, meet the standards of a gentleman, while at the same time adhering to politesse in the Republic of Letters. All in all, this paper presents Lyonet as a gentlemanly naturalist working for state and status.

Gilbert White, John Ray and the construction ofThe Natural History of Selborne

When compiling his seminal work, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), Gilbert White relied on a number of natural history books in order to manage and accumulate information. One of White's most important books was his copy of John Ray's Synopsis Methodica Avium et Piscium, a work frequently mentioned in Selborne. White's annotated copy of this work, now in the Whipple Library, Cambridge, provides new insight into his working practices and methods of observing and recording the natural world. White's copy of Ray's Synopsis was essential for assembling information for the letters which formed one of the most successful and influential works of eighteenth-century natural history in Britain.

First-Person Salamanders: Benjamin Rush, Impersonality, and Nonhuman Beings

In 1812, Benjamin Rush wrote about a patient who explained his arson attempts with a simple claim: "I am a salamander." This essay mobilizes the salamander patient's claim to argue that Rush's Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is structured by impersonal forms of first-person prose. Rush often accepts first-person claims, even those that seem to be about identity, with no corresponding assumptions about interiority. This practice makes rhetorical participation available to a surprisingly wide range of testifiers. As I show, both Rush's attitude toward first-person reporting and the salamander patient's claim bear close relationships to eighteenth-century natural history. Linking the salamander example to letters Rush received from his patients on the one hand and a case he cites involving enslaved African dirt eaters on the other, this essay examines when and how the parameters of human personhood are reconfigured by claims to be nonhuman.

A critical method for natural history: the development of Kant’s teleological principle

In recent years Kant’s pre-critical work on natural history has gained significant attention. Scholars have recognised that Kant’s nebular hypothesis of the formation of the solar system, his identification of the Milky Way as a rotating galaxy, and his reproductive account of heredity make innovative contributions to key debates in eighteenth century natural history. Of course, none of these ideas are especially novel.

Five unpublished manuscripts of Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798) in the archives of the Linnean Society of London

The texts concerned, all in the hand of Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798) and hitherto unremarked, have recently been transcribed and translated from the original Latin and have been made freely available on the website of the Linnean Society of London. Together they touch on many aspects of Forster's life and work, comprising a catalogue of North American animals, a fragmentary list of birds from the same area, “Description of 36 animals found during Capt. Cook's 2nd voyage … 1772–75”, a list of insects (British and North American), and a letter to Linnaeus on botanical matters which includes a description of Forstera sedifolia. Together they confirm Forster's impressive range of expertise, both as a naturalist and a linguist, and add weight to the movement that has in recent years sought to re-establish him in his rightful place as a major figure in eighteenth-century natural history.

Scientific Networks in the Études de la nature

The Études de la nature appear, at first sight, to be a random, disordered text, with fourteen Études of disproportionate lengths, many digressions, and a plethora of stylistic devices, yet they proved to be a resounding success and transformed the fortunes of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. In the Études Bernardin de Saint-Pierre drew on a network of authors when composing his major work; some of these are acknowledged, and others are not. This article will consider Bernardin's scientific sources, and in particular his use of a number of key figures – Newton, Buffon, Pluche and Rousseau, analysing the different approach he takes to each, the use he makes of their works, and the way his comments on, and appropriation of, their theories and texts, is part of his own positioning as an authoritative voice in late eighteenth-century natural history.

DISCRIMINATING EVIDENCE: CLOSENESS AND DISTANCE IN NATURAL AND CIVIL HISTORIES OF THE CARIBBEAN

Enlightenment ideas of the “the Great Map of Mankind” established relationships between historical and geographical distance which provided the problematic for eighteenth-century natural and civil histories. This raised issues of evidence for writing such histories that were particularly acute in the Caribbean, where natural history was—via the movement and transplantation of plants, animals and peoples—always a matter of “civil” history; and where the question of what (or who) was “civil” (or civilized) was addressed via discussions of the boundary between humanity and nature. It is shown that how these questions were asked provoked the use of an array of evidence that varied in its management of the relationships of proximity and distance: including travellers’ tales, eyewitness observations, classical authors and philosophical speculation. The epistemological disjunctures that this evidence brought with it meant that the questions that were opened up could not be closed down.

Nigel Leask Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century ScotlandRobert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland. Nigel Leask. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+368.

<i>Nigel Leask</i> Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland<i>Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland</i>. Nigel Leask. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+368.

The Catesby brothers and the early eighteenth-century natural history of Gibraltar

The Catesby brothers and the early eighteenth-century natural history of Gibraltar

On Being An Animal, or, the Eighteenth-Century Zoophyte Controversy in Britain

INTRODUCTIONZoophytes, a group of strange creatures that exist somewhere on, or between, the boundaries of the plant and animal kingdoms, were the subject of considerable debate in the eighteenth century. They were believed by some naturalists to be a blend of plant and animal; others considered them to be entirely plant, albeit with some animal characteristics; and others still argued that they were wholly animal, but conceded that they occasionally behaved like plants. These disagreements about the nature of the zoophyte allow us to understand a wide range of issues in late eighteenth-century natural history: how the plant and animal kingdoms were defined; the relationship between the two; the meaning of the 'chain of being'; and the construction of taxonomic systems.Zoophyte studies brought together natural history, natural philosophy, and practices from the experimental and observational traditions in a unique way. Here I discuss how zoophytes, and zoophyte studies, can be used to elucidate questions about methodology within eighteenth-century British natural history; about the relationship between theory and practice in natural history; and about the ways in which naturalists formulated arguments and dealt with controversial issues. The strangeness of the creatures necessitated a distinctive approach; the problem of the zoophyte could not be resolved unless one combined practical knowledge of specimens with theoretical knowledge about the nature of animal life or the 'natural' order of creation. By examining this approach, one begins to see some of the ways in which natural history interacted with other fields of knowledge. The fluidity of eighteenth-century branches of knowledge has been well documented, but little work has been done specifically on the overlaps between natural history (especially within botany and zoology), natural philosophy and the chemical sciences.1A large number of organisms fell into the category of 'zoophyte': not just polyps, corals and sponges, but also starfish and earthworms were placed in this group by different naturalists.2 In ancient and early modern times zoophytes were generally seen as a rather insignificant part of nature. It was only in the eighteenth century, following the discoveries of Abraham Trembley (1710-84), that larger numbers of naturalists began to study them seriously and to see them as potentially useful in answering questions about the natural world. Trembley, a Swiss naturalist, had begun his researches on polyps in the 1730s and his key discoveries centred on the regenerative powers of those tiny creatures. A polyp is an organism, generally less than a centimetre in length, shaped like a bell or, the description more commonly employed by eighteenth-century naturalists, like the severed finger of a glove, its single opening is surrounded by tentacles and leads to a central cavity (later discovered to be its stomach); they are generally found in stagnant ditches or similar locations. When, in March 1741 , Trembley wrote to the French savant Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur (1683-1757) to announce his discovery that these polyps could reproduce from cuttings, it caused consternation in the learned circles of Europe. Especially in France, where Trembley 's findings had been reported in the Histoire de l'Academie des Sciences, discussion of polyp regeneration re-ignited debates about materialism and vitalism.3 Since I particularly wish to see how British natural history functioned, this article will focus primarily on the zoophyte studies of British-based naturalists. Many British authors tried to minimize the focus on philosophical questions about what a zoophyte was, preferring to supply a technical description of its appearance and habits.4 But it is possible, sometimes, to discern the problems these authors faced when studying polyps - particularly by looking at the ways in which they classified these organisms. The first decision to be made when classifying related to kingdom: was the specimen animal, vegetable or mineral? …

Medicine, Communication, and Authority in Samson Occom's Herbal

Despite the recent profusion of interest in Samson Occom, scholars have focused primarily on his religious writings and autobiography and, by extension, his relationship with the Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock. By contrast, this article examines Occom's medical writing, particularly "Herbs &amp; Roots," a manuscript herbal written in the 1750s, in the context both of Occom's Christian education and of Native American medical knowledge. "Herbs &amp; Roots" represents connections among plants, bodies, maladies, and medical practitioners; it makes visible medical networks that endowed plants with healing power. Moreover, Occom used the herbal's pages to keep accounts and to draft letters; these extratextual elements illustrate how Occom began to establish his relationship to Native, Christian, and colonial worlds. Finally, the herbal offers an opportunity to consider Occom in an epistemological tradition of Mohegan medical practitioners and to reexamine the form of the list in relation to eighteenth-century natural history and to oral and written communication practices.

Apocalypse Narrative, Chaotic System: Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne and Modern Ecology

The catastrophic worldview, which has been formalized into various scientific theories (punctuated equilibrium, chaos, tipping points), covets disaster as its aesthetic, with entropy and negentropy as vying principles. At the close of the eighteenth century, science centered around the new findings of Geology, and scientists like Cuvier, Lamarck, and Buffon debated the predominance of gradual change through time versus sudden, widespread calamities or ‘punctuations.’ This essay investigates Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), a non-fiction, late eighteenth century natural history chronicle of a single parish through decades of close environmental observation. Its epistolary form conveys an aesthetic of discrete, close readings of nature through time, and the chronicle breaks off with the catastrophic effects of the Laki volcanic eruption of 1783. I suggest ways in which White’s famous work is unusually precocious in ecological methodology, a particularly fruitful angle because my reading goes against the perennial critical reception of Selborne as a tome of Enlightenment balance and economy. Instead, I argue that White’s work is a distinctly modern vision of catastrophic change in nature that foregrounds the contemporary science of Chaos Ecology.

Translating the vernacular: Indigenous and African knowledge in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic

Encounters between diverse peoples and knowledges were one of the defining features of the early modern Atlantic world. This article examines some of the implications of these encounters by focusing on the place of indigenous and African knowledge in eighteenth-century natural histories of British plantation societies (from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean). It builds on recent scholarship to argue that while colonials acknowledged the authority of their black and indigenous informants as experts about American nature, they represented such expertise as merely the raw materials out of which they fashioned new natural knowledge. Naturalists credited their informants not as individual authors, but as members of groups whose collective experiences and observations gave them unique understanding of New World nature. Colonial naturalists appropriated such expertise while simultaneously asserting that it represented mere know-how, rather than genuine knowledge. Colonials suggested that their own ways of knowing were necessary in order to turn the collective know-how of enslaved and free Africans and Amerindians into stable, universal knowledge suitable for enlightened European audiences. By translating vernacular knowledge into a universal key, colonials suggested that they became authors of new matters of fact about American nature.

Following insects around: tools and techniques of eighteenth-century natural history

This paper examines the movement of the materials, ideas and practices that went into the construction of natural-historical observations in Paris and the French provinces--in particular, observations of insects. The paired notions of circulation and locality expose the complex dynamic at play in the production of knowledge about these mundane creatures. I show how the movement of things and people problematizes the notion of a single 'centre of calculation', even where a dominant figure like Réaumur was managing collections and producing authoritative texts. Réaumur was indeed managing the flow of observations, letters and specimens from his privileged vantage point in Paris, but he was not the only one doing the processing, and the objects and knowledge flowed in all directions. The paper uses correspondence among eighteenth-century naturalists of various sorts to get at the dynamics of circulation, tracing the movements of insects, bits of text or narrative, drawings, letters, questions, apparatus, books and people. My title refers to the activities of naturalists, who had to follow insects around in order to observe them, and to my own activity in following the insects in their movement through letters, conversations, specimen jars, drawings and texts. My research depends on the accumulation of details about experimental and observational practice, culled from the masses of letters that moved continually around Europe, much as the science of insects depended on the accumulation of details about insects--their physiology, habits, metamorphosis and place in the human economy and the economy of nature.

"LITTLE PEOPLE" IN : Beckett and the Eighteenth Century

This paper aims to study how eighteenth-century natural history operates in Beckett's . Regarding its "little people," I show that they can be compared to insects and animals. Firstly, I suggest that the bodies on the cylinder's floor can be regarded as animalcules under the microscope as in Diderot's . Secondly, I demonstrate similarities in the way insects are depicted in and in Voltaire's . Thirdly, I discuss the "dépeupleur" in connection with Swift. Lastly, Beckett is considered to be a writer who aims for "mindlessness" by reducing the number of animals in the brain.

The Significance of Temminck’s Work on Biogeography: Early Nineteenth Century Natural History in Leiden, The Netherlands

C.J. Temminck, director of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (now the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden) and a renowned ornithologist, gained his contemporary's respect thanks to the description of many new species and to his detailed monographs on birds. He also published a small number of works on biogeography describing the fauna of the Dutch colonies in South East Asia and Japan. These works are remarkable for two reasons. First, in them Temminck accurately described the species composition of poorly explored regions, like the Sunda Islands and Japan. Secondly, he formulated a new law on the geographical distribution of animals around the globe, based on the parallels he observed between the fauna from Europe, Asia and Japan. The underlying ideas that lead Temminck to this law were the type-concept, which he understood as the ideal morphological plan behind animal form, the unchanging character of the species and a strong belief in nature's divine design. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the type- and the species-concept, the origin and fixity of the species and the meaning of variations aroused heated discussions. When put in the context of his time, Temminck emerges as a scientist whose work was driven by the dominating scientific philosophy of the time in which he lived, under the influence of late eighteenth century natural history and of French empiricists, in particular, the great zoologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. Temminck's detailed descriptions of the Dutch East Indian fauna helped the great naturalists after him to understand nature's patterns and to propose comprehensive theories that explain its diversity.