Eighteenth-century Naturalists Research Articles

Trees as Dividual Beings: From Vallemont's Multiplication of Willows to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Corals

This article explores how empirical observations of trees' asexual reproduction challenged conceptions of plant individuality in eighteenth-century naturalist texts. The plant's ability to grow a whole individual from a cutting is the starting point of a dialogue between a Traveler and a Lady in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's earliest publication. Rejecting the mechanistic model of the plant as a machine, the Traveler presents a fictional narrative echoing his vitalist and providential understanding of nature. After contextualizing the debate on vegetal uniqueness via analyses ofVallemont, Pluche, and Fontenelle, this study shows that Saint-Pierre temporarily reinvests the libertine imaginary of animate plants as a means of revivifying the vegetable kingdom.

‘Obliging and curious’: Taylor White (1701–1772) and his remarkable collections

Taylor White (1701–1772) was by profession a barrister and judge, active in public life in London. His life as a jurist and as the long-serving treasurer of the Foundling Hospital is documented in the records of his public appointments and in his own official correspondence. This article reveals the other Taylor White, a Fellow of the Royal Society (1725), and an active participant in the practice of science in the mid eighteenth century. White accumulated a significant collection of specimens and drawings of plants, insects, birds and mammals. Over 900 of the zoological drawings are preserved in the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection at McGill University in Montreal. White's passions for natural history and collecting are revealed tangentially through the very few letters in his hand, the notes he made about his own collection, and infrequent references in the books and letters of his friends and fellow naturalists. This article seeks not only to document the sources of White's collection, but also to extract a narrative of acquisition, transport and exchange of specimens that reveals the informal networks of eighteenth-century naturalists, which included not only scientists but also sailors, merchants and curious lawyers. It also explores the work and motivations of the collector engaged in building a reference collection of animal portraits, painted in their true colours and ‘the size of life’. Close study of this collection positions Taylor White within the community of eighteenth-century naturalists and provides a deeply textured exploration of natural history and collecting in the age of Linnaeus.

Showing and hiding: The flickering visibility of earth workers in the archives of earth science

This essay interrogates the motives of eighteenth-century European naturalists to alternately show and hide their laboring-class fossil suppliers. Focusing on rare moments of heightened visibility, I ask why gentlemen naturalists occasionally, deliberately, and even performatively made visible the marginalized science workers on whom they crucially depended but more typically ignored or effaced. Comparing archival fragments from elite works of natural history across a considerable stretch of time and space, including Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and French, Spanish, and British America, this essay sketches the contours of a disparate group of people I term 'earth workers': laborers of very low social rank, such as quarrymen, shepherds, ditch-diggers, and fieldworkers, whose daily labor in and on the earth enabled the discovery of subterranean specimens. At the same time, archival traces of laboring lives ultimately reveal more about the naturalists who created them than they do about the marginalized laborers whose lives they faintly record. Cultural norms of elite masculinity and scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters help us to understand why some eighteenth-century naturalists felt they had to publicly disavow a form of labor that would come to be recognized as a crucial and skilled part of scientific fieldwork in the modern era. Compared to other kinds of invisible labor that historians of science have brought into view, the social meaning of earth work rendered it uniquely visible in some ways and uniquely invisible in others.

French and Genevan views of Scotland in 1821: Charles Nodier’s Promenade de Dieppe aux montagnes d’Écosse and Louis-Albert Necker’s Voyage en Écosse et aux Iles Hébrides

ABSTRACTTwo books about Scotland, published in French in 1821, offer an interesting contrast, both in the aims of the authors and the style of the accounts they produced. They reveal unexpected similarities too: Louis-Albert Necker’s long and detailed account of Scotland, Voyage en Écosse et aux Iles Hébrides, seems typical of the purposive journey of an eighteenth-century naturalist, yet contains historical elements and scenic descriptions more associated with the Romantic Movement; while the avowedly Romantic Charles Nodier includes in his Promenade de Dieppe aux montagnes d’Écosse some very precise natural history along with his impressions of the country. Both authors were marked by their experience of Scotland to a larger extent than they might have foreseen: one spent the rest of his life as a self-proclaimed expert on Scotland after a visit of a few weeks, while the other passed the last twenty years of his life on the Isle of Skye.

Community concepts in plant ecology: from Humboldtian plant geography to the superorganism and beyond

Abstract. The paper seeks to provide an introduction to, and review of, the history of concepts of the plant community. Eighteenth-century naturalists recognised that vegetation was distributed geographically and that different species of plants and animals were interconnected in what would later be called ecological relationships. It was not, however, until the early nineteenth century that the study of vegetation became a distinctive and autonomous form of scientific inquiry. Humboldt was the first to call communities of plants "associations". His programme for the empirical study of plant communities was extended by many European and North American botanists, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. There developed an almost complete consensus among ecologists that vegetation was made up of natural communities, discrete entities with real boundaries. However, there was little agreement about the nature of the putative unit or how it should be classified. Gleason advanced the alternative view that vegetation was an assemblage of individual plants, with each species being distributed according to its own physiological requirements and competitive interactions. This debate was never wholly resolved and the divergent opinions can be discerned within early ecosystem theory.

The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing by Rachel Poliquin (review)

Reviewed by: The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing by Rachel Poliquin Ty Fishkind (bio) Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures series, vol. 1. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012, 272 pp. $34.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. In Erica Fudge’s 2012 essay “Renaissance Animal Things,” she proposes two terms that urge us to reconsider human relationships to animal matter: the animal-made object and the animal, made object.1 Fudge injects this variation into the ongoing conversation on animal bodies to “remind us of the concurrent status of animals as both agents and matter” (p. 43). This insistence that animals, made object actively bear immense cultural weight is the central theme of Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo, the first in the Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures series by Pennsylvania State University Press. The Breathless Zoo is a methodically organized, accessible, and comprehensive contribution to the recent surge in the study of taxidermy. Culling examples from history, science, popular culture, and art, Poliquin asserts the ways in [End Page 234] which human desire articulates a need to preserve an animal just so, in a fixed state that captures its aesthetic presence, its size, form, or strangeness. In The Breathless Zoo, a taxidermic animal-object becomes an accidental host for human longing and a desire for connection with an idealized version of Nature. The agency of the animal, made object, as Poliquin describes, lies in its persistent and sometimes aggressive, albeit lifeless, hoisting of those desires and anxieties back onto its creators, collectors, and admirers, eliciting a visceral reaction—a “bodily knowing” that occurs during encounters with taxidermy (p. 39). Poliquin situates Susan Stewart’s On Longing (1993) as the scaffolding upon which she constructs her study of seven “narratives of longing.”2 Poliquin credits each of these narratives with being a catalyst for the necessity and perseverance of taxidermy—the practice of stretching preserved animal skins over synthetic molded armature and fashioning them into lifelike postures. These incentives are demonstrated in seven chapters. The first, “Wonder,” discusses early explorers’ collective impulse to acquire and preserve curious pieces of incomplete animals or bizarre natural anomalies—including a stone removed from a dog’s bladder, a two-headed cat, or the molted skin of a Kimono dragon—to represent the marvels of the exotic natural world. This section includes catalogs of early curio cabinets and evidence of the role of obscure animal collections in mythmaking about the unfamiliar world. These random groupings of strange preserved animal parts, according to Poliquin, represented “warehouses of raw potentiality” to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century naturalists, who used modern empirical methodologies to extract knowledge about the natural world through these incomplete, or “opaque,” animal objects (p. 36). Here, Poliquin traces the beginning of systematically collecting and preserving animal parts for scientific speculation. The author continues to structure the following chapters by anchoring narrative tropes to a particularly relevant or exemplary specimen, drawing attention to those that both illustrate the many dimensions of longing under which they were created and articulating the ways in which they serve as visual referents to which the reader can apply a thematic template. Poliquin rounds out her examples by offering complete historical, scientific, and cultural data on the animal in relation to the theme. The effect of this representational methodology is that the selected animal becomes a kind of totem for the dimension of longing it represents. Poliquin’s consistent message, that humans employ taxidermy as a conduit to nature by painstakingly recreating nature on human terms, is evident in each specimen she presents. For example, in the chapter on “Spectacle,” the lion becomes the standard-bearer for the sublime thrill of a human encounter with a natural predator. Here, various renderings of lions demonstrate the violence not done to them in the event of their own deaths, but rather the terror they bestow on other creatures, including humans. She introduces the lion in a painting by Henri Rousseau; in an instructional rendering from a nineteenth-century taxidermy manual; in a grizzly scene of a lion mauling an agonized camel and its human rider; and in the...

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? …

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.

Jacob Christian Schäffer FRS, a versatile eighteenth-century naturalist, and his remarkable pioneering researches on microscopic crustaceans

Jacob Christian Schäffer was the first to appreciate the morphological complexity of the microscopic crustacean Daphnia. His investigations, published in 1755, provide an excellent example of the difficulties facing those who, for the first time, attempted to elucidate the structure of extremely complicated animals of small size, of which there were no familiar counterparts. Nevertheless he not only revealed many hitherto unsuspected anatomical features but attempted, with some success, to explain their function. Most notably he showed that Daphnia produces a current of water that draws suspended particles into its complex food-handling machinery. An earlier suggestion of how it feeds was completely erroneous and misleading. A pioneer of the comparative method, Schäffer provided an excellent example of how it helped him to understand, if not entirely to resolve, a complicated mechanism. That reproduction can be either parthenogenetic or sexual presented problems that were not resolved for more than another century. Unaware that males exist, and on the basis of seemingly sound, but misleading, observations, he concluded that Daphnia is a hermaphrodite.

"Eighteenth-century Naturalists of Hudson Bay" by Stuart Houston, Tim Ball and Mary Houston. 2003. [book review

"Eighteenth-century Naturalists of Hudson Bay" by Stuart Houston, Tim Ball and Mary Houston. 2003. [book review

Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay (review)

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay Peter Keating Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay. Stuart Houston, Tim Ball, and Mary Houston. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiv, 334, illus. $49.95 From its inception, the Hudson's Bay Company kept records that have served historians well. Among the data collected by the company, a good deal concerned natural history which, in its eighteenth-century acceptance, concerned not only plants and animals but much of what today would be termed anthropology, geography, geology, climatology, and so on. So in addition to furnishing the company with a steady supply of pelts (and feathers and quills), Hudson's Bay employees and visitors also provided measurements of temperature, rain and snowfall, the freezing point of mercury, the transit of Venus, as well as observations on Native language and custom, and samples of new species of plants, birds, and other wildlife. The present work offers a history of the data-gathering activities of eight Hudson's Bay Company employees whose employment spanned the eighteenth century. The method used in this study is resolutely biographical. Following an introduction to the Hudson's Bay Company, we are given brief biographies of six European naturalists such as Sir Hans Sloane and Karl Linnaeus who constitute the background, so to speak, for natural history in the eighteenth century. This contextualization, such as it is, is followed by eight more biographies of the aforementioned Hudson's Bay employees who collected data for their European masters. The book concludes with four more biographies of British naturalists in Charles Town, SC, who also supplied specimens and observations to Sloan and Linnaeus. Sandwiched in between this onslaught of biographies is a short chapter on climatology, which describes some of the weather observations [End Page 375] made by both the naturalists and Native peoples, and some of the issues involved in interpreting the observations, given the limits of the instrumentation used. As it stands, however, it is more a collection of notes than a chapter with a coherent thesis. The biographical approach allows the authors considerable leeway in their choice of facts, and in this respect, they are often like their natural history predecessors, unable to resist the odd fact or unusual observation. While much of the content of the biographies concerns the collection of natural history data and natural historical observations, both of which will usefully serve a future history of natural history in Canada (and elsewhere for that matter) or a history of the environment, there is an irritating tendency to stray off topic and to raise issues of peripheral interest (number of wives, Native and otherwise, number of children, alcoholism, etc.). Sometimes the detail borders on the whimsical, as when we are told, for example, that in order to join James Cook's ship the Resolution, for which he had been hired as a naturalist, Johann Forster took a post chaise to Plymouth (from where?), 'reaching Plymouth dock on 29 June' (22), only to be told in the same paragraph that he needn't have done so since the ship didn't leave until two weeks later. The importance of reporting Forster's undue haste is not explained, and it seems likely that there is no explanation. Why we are told that John Latham's mother was 'a Sotheby from Yorkshire' (28) remains equally mysterious. Ultimately, the intellectual content of the subject as well as the institutional context is largely drowned out by the often dreary flow of biographical minutiae, recurrent priority disputes – the authors are fastidious in their tracking of attributions across different editions of Arctic Zoology – and value judgements of questionable value; do we really know that Thomas Pennant was a 'refined gentleman' or that 'the 1770s was an exciting decade, notable for intellectual ferment' (127)? What I have described so far occupies merely half the book. Aside from the notes and indices, the other half is composed entirely of appendices. While I do not deny that there is much information contained herein (for somebody), I do not understand the principles behind their inclusion. Why, for example, is there a list of all the boats that sailed into York Factory between 1716...

Houston, S., Ball, T. and Houston, M. Eighteenth-century naturalists of Hudson Bay

Houston, S., Ball, T. and Houston, M. <i>Eighteenth-century naturalists of Hudson Bay</i>

Eighteenth-century naturalists of Hudson Bay

Eighteenth-century naturalists of Hudson Bay

La science forestière vue par les géographes français, ou la confrontation de deux sciences «diagonales» (1870-1914)//The science of Forestry as seen by French geographers : the encounter of two «transverse» sciences (1870-1914)

The science of Forestry and Geography have a lot in common; like Agronomy or Ecology, both of them can be described as « transverse » sciences since they borrow elements from other sciences (such as Botany or Geology). Present only as scattered mentions in the works of eighteenth century naturalists, they experienced numerous changes during the nineteeth; these changes gave way to a true recognition from other scientific fields at the turn of the twentieth century. Right after the disasters of the war of 1870, the astonishing development (at every level) of the educational system in France combined with the mobilization of natural resources gave way to the creation of a French school of Geography led by Vidal de la Blache, and to the scientific popularization of the work of French foresters. Geographers and foresters met each other thanks to a large number of associations freshly created to help the country recover from the war, both physically and psychologically. Strangely, few of geographical studies dealing with forests came out of h; the work of Pierre Deffontaines, L'homme et la forêt (1933), coin cided with an interruption of studies on forests led by French geographers, right until the middle of the seventies.

Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies

I N his history of East and West Florida, eighteenth-century naturalist and cartographer Bernard Romans carefully considered the different peoples who lived in that part of the British empire and questioned how reasonable it was to designate the Indians Americans. We might call them Americans, Romans conceded, as the inhabitants of the old world are each distinguished by a name expressive of, or relative to the quarters, from which they respectively originate, but this would be confounding them with the other natives, well white black, which i think by no means reasonable. Published in I775, this astonishing statement is easily read too narrowly in the context of the colonies' maturity and stirrings of independence. Romans's words hint at the political and cultural primacy of the British immigrants who had introduced themselves into the New World, and they were a part of an emerging argument for an exceptional American cultural identity. Yet Romans's assertion was also a concluding part of a long argument about the

The Failure of the Interpreting Class or Intellectuals in the Two Germanies

UROPE AND THE EUROPEANS have changed. Levis, argutus, inventor; versatile, shrewd, inventive-these were the characteristics which a great European, Linnaeus, used in the eighteenth century to describe what he regarded as the highest form of Homo sapiens, the Homo europaeus. Levis, argutus, inventorit seems as if Europeans, especially from Central and Eastern Europe, never corresponded more closely to the flattering description of the great eighteenth-century naturalist than today. Notions like postmodernism and posthistoire all of a sudden take on the faded colors of the intellectual catchwords of yesteryear. Who ever dreamed, only one or two years ago, of a noncommunist prime minister in Poland, of free elections in Hungary, of Vdiclav Havel being elected President of Czechoslovakia, and of Lithuania and the other Baltic republics threatening to leave the USSR? Who dreamed of youngsters from the West and from the East dancing together on the Wall in Berlin? That Germany would be united? Yesterday's utopia has turned into the reality of today. Yet there is always something embarrassing as well as exciting in the sudden realization of our dreams. Berlin, the staggering city as it was once called by the poet Gottfried Benn, is perhaps the place in Europe where this mixed feeling of excitement and unease is shared by more people more intensely than anywhere else. I am worried by the preponderance the German question-which cannot be reduced to the problem of German unity-has once again acquired in political deliberations as well as in intellectual debates. Not long ago, in the reassuring context of a slow yet definite unification of Western Europe and an ever slower yet seemingly irrevocable reform process in the communist countries of the East, the querelles or the incertitudes allemandes as a French diplomat in

Elie Bertrand (1713-1797) Sees God's Order in Nature's Record: The 1766 Recueil De Divers Traites Sur L'Historie Naturelle

Elie Bertrand (1713-1797) was a Swiss pastor/naturalist whose geological writings are illustrative of the growth of eighteenth-century natural history. Describing, cataloguing, and classifying formed the core of his work, but he also proposed theoretical analyses based on observations in the field. Bertrand's intellectual roots included Cartesian rationalism, British natural theology, and the Linnacan system of classification. Trained as a theologian. Bertrand viewed the physical world as a proving ground for showing God's Wise Design in nature. He was also committed to empiricism, and repeatedly called for expanding the base of geological knowledge.Several of the published products of Bertrand's attempts to understand the natural world were brought together in the 1766 Recueil de divers traités sur l'histoire naturelle. By briefly considering each of the incorporated papers, it is possible to recognize the topics which interested eighteenth-century naturalists and to develop insight into the methodologies they used. In the Recueil we see Bertrand's eclectic epistemology attempt to deal with such topics as the interior of the earth, earthquakes, fossils, and the origin and Providential use of mountains.Celebrated in his day, Bertrand was a correspondent of Voltaire, a counselor to the Polish court, and a member of numerous learned societies. He published articles in the French Encyclopédic, and his 1763 Dictionnaire universal des fossiles was among the most-read scientific books of the century. The obscurity which enveloped Elie Bertrand seems related in large part to the fact that he was an accumulator of data and a commentator about past theories, rather than an innovator of new concepts. As the natural theology that undergirded his writing became obsolete, the cogency of his arguments diminished. In the context of his time, however, Bertrand is an instructive example of how geoscience matured during what has been termed a sterile period in the development of natural history.

John Ellis, F. R. S. Eighteenth century naturalist and Royal Agent to West Florida

In 1754 John Ellis was elected to the Royal Society. During the next twenty two years, he won the Copley Prize in 1768, was elected to the Council in 1769, and published over thirty essays and monographs on natural history. In doing this Ellis laid the foundation of one area of zoology with his studies of zoophytes; published on the preservation of seeds and the natural history of coffee; and reported on new plants and insects. Furthermore his papers, containing correspondence with well over one hundred different people, provide a clearer picture o f the interrelationships which operated in the warp and woof of eighteenth century English and colonial science. Ellis was also a merchant in the Irish linen trade; a lobbyest at Westminster for the Irish Linen Board; the Royal Agent for West Florida, and the Colonial Agent for Dominica.

Selected Works by Eighteenth-Century Naturalists and Travellers. Natural Sciences in America.

Previous articleNext article No AccessNew Biological BooksSelected Works by Eighteenth-Century Naturalists and Travellers. Natural Sciences in America.Jane OppenheimerJane Oppenheimer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 50, Number 4Dec., 1975 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/408750 Copyright 1975 Stony Brook Foundation, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Le Cat and the Physiology of Negroes

Le Cat and the Physiology of Negroes G. S. Rousseau TFHE ORIGIN of Negroes,’’ Ephraim Chambers wrote in the 1728 Cyclopaedia, "and the cause of that remarkable difference in complexion from the rest of mankind, has much perplexed the nat­ uralists; nor has anything satisfactory been yet offered on that hand." A generation later, in the 1750’s, this was still true, although Claude Nicolas Le Cat was to influence considerably the picture. It is hard to know if Chambers, no scientist or medical man, would have been at all impressed by Le Cat’s theories. But if he had heard or read them, he might have modified somewhat his statement in the Cyclopaedia. From the vantage of the history of science, Le Cat’s entire career, quite unsurveyed, incidentally, is as exciting as that part of it rep­ resented by his contribution to the age-old debate about the color of negro skin, its origins and history, from the beginning of man to the eighteenth century. Born in 1700 and dead by 1768, Le Cat was the chief physician and surgeon of the Hotel-Dieu, the leading hospital in Rouen, a member of many French and foreign scien­ tific societies, and the author of over a dozen medical treatises. In 1762 he retired from his hospital post, and during his remaining seven years wrote most of the books that utilize his researches, ob­ servations, and reading of over fifty years.1 His scientific contribution to the race argument has either been neglected or thought so insignificant until now that one looks in vain for his name in most modern reference books in the history of science and medicine as well as in encyclopaedias and dictionaries of biography. And yet, careful scrutiny of his works reveals that 369 Racism in the Eighteenth Century he played a role in advancing biological understanding of skin col­ or. He himself was apparently aware of this role, and he according­ ly devoted his greatest scientific energies to what we today must regard as his most significant medical work, Traite de la couleur de la peau humaine en general & de celle des Negres en particulier, published in Amsterdam in 1765.2 Le Cat’s treatise contradicts previous theories maintaining that bile is responsible for the color of human skin; this argument had been advanced as indisputable scientific fact in the earliest writings of Egyptian medicine, later appeared in Homer, Strabo, Ovid, and Pliny, and was advanced throughout the Renaissance and for much of the eighteenth century. The Teatro Critico of Father Feijoo is typical of the impressionistic manner in which the bile argument was set forward: succinctly, without experimental support, and as an ipse dixit argument.3 Other eighteenth-century naturalists, in­ cluding Raymond de Vieussens, Buffon, La Mettrie, D’Holbach, and numerous travel writers, also repeated the argument as if it were gospel truer than truth. In Italy Albinus and Sanctorini supported a bile theory (although these men recanted and at several junctures even displayed skepti­ cism about the belief), and in France, where it seems to have been extremely popular, it attracted numerous advocates, and none more vocal than Pierre Barrere, a Perpignanese physician and medical author who strenuously championed it in 1741 in a dissertation on the cause of skin color, Dissertation sur la cause physique de la couleur, des Negres, de la qualite de leurs cheveux, & de la genera­ tion de l’un & de I’autre. Germans, Scandinavians, and Englishmen also gave the belief their stamp and seal, and it is accurate to say that by 1750 the belief was prevalent—truly as popular as the ’monster-mongering” sport, to use the phrase of Professor Jordan in his edition of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s Essay on the Causes of Complexion4—that blacks were another species of man, sans the ordinary human organs, tissues, and heart, and (of course) sans soul.5 Le Cat’s theory, in contrast, introduces a black substance, "ethiops” (in other words, melanin and its cell the melanocyte), which, he maintained, is present to some extent in all creatures, white and dark, but to a greater degree in blacks;, and it is this that 370 Le Cat and the Physiology of Negroes distinguishes...