Botany on a plate: Pleasure and the power of pictures in promoting early nineteenth-century scientific knowledge

ISIS

Volumn 93, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 28-57

  Secord, Anne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; BOTANY; EDUCATION; ESTHETICS; HISTORY; HUMAN; MEDICAL ILLUSTRATION; MOTIVATION; RECOGNITION; SCIENCE; UNITED KINGDOM;

BOOKS, ILLUSTRATED; BOTANY; ESTHETICS; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MOTIVATION; RECOGNITION (PSYCHOLOGY); SCIENCE;

EID: 0036491070     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/343245     Document Type: Article

References (216)

1. Edwin Lees, "Local Occurrences in Natural History," Naturalist, 1838, 4:57-68, on p. 59.
2. Timothy L. Alborn, "The Business of Induction: Industry and Genius in the Language of British Scientific Reform, 1820-1840," History of Science, 1996, 34:91-121.
3. My formulation here draws directly on Colin Mercer, "Complicit Pleasures," in Popular Culture and Social Relations, ed. Tony Bennett, Mercer, and Janet Woollacott (Milton Keynes: Open Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 50-68;
4. and Mercer, "That's Entertainment: The Resilience of Popular Forms," ibid., pp. 177-195.
5. For a discussion of the politics of pleasure see Frederic Jameson, "Pleasure: A Political Issue," in Jameson et al. Formations of Pleasure (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 1-14.
6. J. F. W Herschel, "An Address to the Windsor and Eton Public Library and Reading Room . . . on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 1833," in Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, with Addresses and Other Pieces (London, 1857), pp. 1-20, on pp. 13-14 (I am grateful to Katey Anderson for this reference).
7. [Henry Brougham], The. Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science (London, 1827), pp. 1, 2; the "wonder" of science was referred to on pp. 36-37.
8. The significance of Brougham's essay, which was the first number of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's "Library of Useful Knowledge," Natural Philosophy, Vol. 1 (London, 1829), is hard to exaggerate; ten thousand copies had sold by June 1827 (Edinburgh Review, 1827, 46:243), and forty-two thousand copies had been sold by 1833.
9. See Jonathan Topham, "Science and Popular Education in the 1830s: The Role of the Bridgewater Treatises," British Journal for the History of Science, 1992, 25:397-430, on pp. 413-414.
10. Brougham, was a founder and leading light of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), whose Penny Magazine was copiously illustrated. However, as Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790-1860 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 68, points out, the pictorial content of the magazine was the sole responsibility of SDUK publisher Charles Knight, and none of the members of the publication committee, including the chairman, Brougham, "had Knight's well-developed concept of the instructional value and civilizing power of pictures."
11. For Knight's use of pictures to impart both information and enjoyment to the reader see ibid., Ch. 2.
12. See also Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 3 vols. (London, 1864), Vol. 3, pp. 18-20.
13. On the rapid increase in the availability of illustrated publications see Anderson, Printed Image.
14. Barbara Stafford, "Author's Response," in "Review Symposia on Visual Cultures," Metascience, 1994, N.S., no. 6, pp. 57-61, on p. 60.
15. For the substance of her arguments see Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994);
16. and Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
17. Martin J. S. Rudwick, "The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science, 1760-1840," Hist. Sci, 1976, 14:149-195, draws attention to the association of images and entertainment by historians of science and to their consequent neglect of the important role of forms of visual communication in science.
18. Lorraine Daston, "Scientific Objectivity with and without Words," in Little Tools of Knowledge, ed. Peter Becker and William Clark (Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 259-284, argues that part of the construction of scientific objectivity in the mid-nineteenth century resulted in the marginalization of sensory practices that involved aesthetic pleasure.
19. Colin Mercer, "A Poverty of Desire: Pleasure and Popular Politics," in Jameson et al., Formations of Pleasure (cit. n. 3), pp. 84-100, esp. p. 89.
20. See, e.g., the gorgeous reproductions in Wilfred Blunt and William T. Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration, new ed. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1994);
21. Gill Saunders, Picturing Plants: An Analytical, History of Botanical Illustration (London: Zwemmer, 1995);
22. and David Scrase, Flower Drawings (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). Eighteenth-century botanical art such as George Ehret's drawings or Sydney Parkinson's plates for Joseph Banks's Florilegium, few of which were published until the late twentieth century, is now made familiar on greeting cards. In 1997 Ehret's botanical art was reproduced on several postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail.
23. Robert S. Nelson, "The Slide Lecture; or, The Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Critical Inquiry, 2000, 26:414-434, on pp. 428, 433.
24. For the immense significance of photography for the study of art see André Malraux, Museum without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967).
25. Martin Kemp, '"Implanted in Our Natures': Humans, Plants, and the Stories of Art," in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 197-229, on p. 197.
26. J. D. Hooker to William Wilson, 3 Apr. 1844, 28 Aug. 1844, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (hereafter cited as RBGK), "Letters from J. D. Hooker," Vol. 13, fols. 370, 382-383.
27. See also J. D. Hooker, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, ed. Leonard Huxley, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1918), Vol. 1, pp. 168-171, where Hooker's concern about claiming priority of discovery is expressed as a wish for merit to accrue to "our Expedition and country" (p. 169). The Flora Antarctica, according to Lovell Reeve's 1857 "List of Publications," sold for £10 15s. colored and £7 10s. plain; the separately issued Cryptogamia Antarctica containing Wilson's descriptions sold for £4 4s. colored, £2 17s. plain.
28. This was exhibited not least in the links between horticulture and botany within the British context. For the importance to botany of the aesthetics of garden landscape architecture as it shifted from the preserve of the landed gentry to the province of a large middle class in the Victorian period see A. J. Lustig, "Cultivating Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century English Gardens," Science in Context, 2000, 13:155-181.
29. A literal association of the pleasure of botanical illustrations with bodily appetites was made by those able to afford porcelain plates, from the Danish Royal patrons of the magnificent Flora Danica table service to the middle-class purchasers of the botanical china produced by Lewis Weston Dillwyn, a cryptogamic botanist and owner of a Swansea pottery.
30. See Blunt and Stearn, Art of Botanical Illustration (cit. n. 9), pp. 188-189;
31. and Jennifer Lamond, "Plantsmen and Pottery," in Plant Taxonomy, Phytogeography, and Related Subjects: The Davis and Hedge Festschrift, ed. Kit Tan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 261-275.
32. The prevalence of drawing as a social practice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain is discussed in Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).
33. For the popularity of depictions of the landscape see also Timothy Clayton, The English Print, 1688-1802 (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 155-167;
34. and John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997), pp. 458-461.
35. According to Blunt and Stearn, Art of Botanical Illustration, pp. 252-256, by the early nineteenth century the market was flooded with botanical copybooks.
36. J. D. Hooker to Wilson, 28 Aug. 1844 (cit. n. 12).
37. In 1845 Joseph Hooker declared that W. J. Hooker's periodical Icones Plantarum, started in 1836, which contained descriptions and uncolored octavo lithograph plates of new and rare plants from his herbarium, was "the only model for what a Botanical work should be": J. D. Hooker, Life and Letters, ed. Huxley (cit. n. 12), Vol. 1, pp. 189.
38. Joseph Hooker would have been aware of problems caused by the expense of colored plates from, the experience of his own family. His grandfather Dawson Turner had recruited William Jackson Hooker, his future son-in-law, to prepare the bulk of the drawings for his magnificent Fuci; or, Coloured Figures and Descriptions of the Plants Referred by Botanists to the Genus Fucus, 4 vols. (London, 1808-1819), the last volume of which was delayed when Turner's bank faced financial difficulties. W. J. Hooker's equally magnificent illustrated folio monograph British Jungermanniae (London, 1812-1816) left him with losses of "about £400" by the time it was completed in 1816;
39. see the note by Benjamin Carrington on the last page of his set of plates from British Jungermanniae bound together with other plates of liverworts, Manchester Museum. Sales of the first part of W. J. Hooker, Musci Exotici, 2 vols. (London, 1818-1820), left him. "£170 out of pocket," as John Lindley reported to Robert Brown, 27 June 1819, British Library, Add. MSS 32440, fols. 238-239.
40. Presumably to cater to botanical purchasers, the quarto colored Musci Exotici could also be purchased in octavo with uncolored plates; examples of both can be found in Cambridge University Library. However, although the engraved plates were identical, botanists may have regretted forfeiting the pleasure of color and the larger book format. "How amazingly the beauty of a botanical work is heightened by the size of the margin," the botanist Charles Lyell enthused upon the "splendid addition" of Hooker's British Jungermanniae to his library: Charles Lyell to W.J. Hooker, 9 Mar. 1831, RBGK, Directors' Correspondence, Vol. 2, letter 121.
41. On the expense of producing natural history works with the colored plates that he advocated see also William Swainson, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History (London, 1834), pp. 398-407.
42. In the event, Joseph Hooker's Flora Antarctica left him £100 out of pocket: J. D. Hooker, Life and Letters, ed. Huxley, Vol. 1, p. 217.
43. Wilson to W.J. Hooker, 23 June 183.1, RBGK, Directors' Correspondence, Vol. 6, letter 344.
44. For the technical difficulties associated with the production of colored illustrations see Brian Dolan, "Pedagogy through Print: James Sowerby, John Mawe, and the Problem of Colour in Early Nineteenth-Century Natural History Illustration," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1998, 37:275-304.
45. Blunt and Stearn, Art of Botanical Illustration (cit. n. 9), p. 163, refers to the "hack colour-plate books" of the early nineteenth century.
46. Edwin Lees, "Observations on the Popularity of Natural History: With Illustrations and Suggestions," Naturalist, 1838, 3:115-123, 291-301, on pp. 12.1, 122, 298, 300-301.
47. Lees, a founder of the Worcester Natural History Society, also advocated free museums and popular lectures given by members of natural history societies. For the middle-class radicalism of this society and of the Naturalist magazine (the second volume of which was dedicated to Edwin Lees) see Gordon R. McOuat, "Species, Rules, and Meaning: The Politics of Language and the Ends of Definitions in Nineteenth-Century Natural History," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1996, 27:473-519, esp. pp. 488-489. After abandoning his business concerns early in life, Lees was one of the first botanists to study the complex taxonomy of brambles.
48. Peter Rylands, "On the Abuse of Prints in Works on Natural History," Naturalist, 1838, 4:8-10, on pp. 9, 10.
49. Although Rylands did allow the utility of illustrations that depicted difficult-to-describe or difficult-to-see characters as a way to guide readers to observe more clearly, he held that illustrations were helpful to beginners in natural history only if (to use a modern analogy), like waterwings, they encouraged novices to learn how to swim.; they were pernicious when their use became a substitute for swimming. Rylands, who was also a religious writer and active in politics, was forced to abandon his natural history interests because of business pressures; in.1868 he was elected Liberal M.P. for Warrington. See L. Gordon Rylands, Correspondence and Speeches of Mr. Peter Rylands, M.P., with a Sketch of His Career, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1890).
50. Peter Rylands, "On the Use and Abuse of Plates of Natural Objects," Naturalist, 1838, 4:356-358, on p. 357.
51. Rylands's use of the term "empiricism" to refer to unscientific practice, or quackery, contrasts with its more usual, and in the nineteenth century increasingly prevalent, association with, a scientific practice based on observation and experiment. However, for Rylands, as much as for later "empiricists," the crucial issue lay in persuading beginners to keep their attention on and to acquire knowledge from the natural object being observed. The scientist and educator T. H. Huxley, who held that all "true science begins with empiricism"- "The Connection of the Biological Sciences with Medicine," Nature, 1881, 24:342-346, on p. 343 - confronted this problem when he discovered that students were more likely to depict specimens as pictured in books or on the blackboard than to draw what they saw under the microscope.
52. See Graeme Gooday, "'Nature' in the Laboratory: Domestication and Discipline with the Microscope in Victorian Life Science," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1991, 24:307-341, esp. pp. 307, 339-340.
53. Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, "Head and Hand: Rhetorical Resources in British Pedagogical Writing, 1770-1850," Oxford Review of Education, 1976, 2:231-254, on p. 232;
54. and James Edward Smith, The English Flora, 4 vols., Vol. 1 (London, 1824), pp. xix-xx, xxvi.
55. The work in question was James Sowerby and Smith, English Botany; or, Coloured Figures of British Plants, with Their Essential Characters, Synonyms, and Places of Growth, 36 vols. (London, 1790-1814).
56. The works of another famous natural history artist sold for the sake of the pictures alone: so great was the appeal of Thomas Bewick's illustrations that readers thought of his books as "a series of delightful pictures" and overlooked his text even when it reflected his reformist politics. See Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination (cit. n. 14), pp. 514-515.
57. Dr. Aikin and Mrs. Barbauld, Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile Budget Opened: Consisting of a Variety of Miscellaneous Pieces for the Instruction and Amusement of Young Persons (Glasgow, 1836), pp. 176-177.
58. By this date this work had been heavily revised, although it still expressed the Aikins's Unitarian emphasis on reason and their encouragement to children actually to engage in scientific practices. For a discussion of the work and its publishing history see Aileen Fyfe, "Reading Children's Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families," Historical Journal, 2000, 43:453-474;
59. and Fyfe, "Copyrights and Competition: Producing and Protecting Children's Books in the Nineteenth Century," Publishing History, 1999, 45:35-59.
60. P. Rylands, "Abuse of Prints" (cit. n. 18), p. 9.
61. For similar views on work, pleasure, and botany in the American context see Elizabeth Keeney, The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 83-98.
62. The pleasure of hard intellectual work, in contrast to knowledge presented in amusing and exciting forms, was forcefully expressed to later audiences in Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (London, 1859), pp. 268-271.
63. Lees, "Observations" (cit. n. 17), p. 301;
64. P. Rylands, "Abuse of Prints," pp. 8-9;
65. and Edwin Lees, "On the Value of Plates and Illustrations as Subservient to the Study of Natural History," Naturalist, 1838, 4:288-295, on pp. 290, 295, 289, 294, 292, 294. In the closing article of the exchange, "On the Use and Abuse of Plates" (cit. n. 19), Rylands attempted to show that Lees's position was not opposed to his own. Rylands agreed with Lees's point that illustrations removed doubts and difficulties but claimed that these resulted only from inadequate descriptions; plates should therefore be consulted only as a last resort and not as a matter of course.
66. Lees, "Value of Plates," p. 293 (for similar impetus in mineralogy see Dolan, "Pedagogy through Print" [cit. n. 16]);
67. [John Lindley], Botany (London, 1838), p. 214 (this work also formed part of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's "Library of Useful Knowledge," Natural Philosophy, Vol. 4 [London, 1838]);
68. and [John MacCulloch], "French Geology of Scotland," Edinburgh Rev., 1823, 38:415-437, on p. 419.
69. W. J. Hooker to Dawson Turner, 11 Dec. 1811, RBGK, "W. J. Hooker Letters," Vol. 1, fols. 134-136: "I really cannot send my ideas of the species of Jungermanniae till I have drawn all the species."
70. Francis's comment about the appeal of pictures was reported in Wilson to W. J. Hooker, 22 Sept. 1837, RBGK, Directors' Correspondence, Vol. 9, letter 336, which also mentioned that Francis's book, cost him £50 to produce; Watson's statements occur in the review by "H.C.W" of George William Francis, The Little English Flora, in Naturalist, 1839, 4:280-281. For Francis's illustrations see G. W. Francis, An Analysis of the British Ferns and Their Allies (London, 1837), p. ii;
71. and Francis, The Little English Flora; or, A Botanical and Popular Account of All Our Common Field Flowers with Engravings on Steel of Every Species (London, 1839), which was dedicated to the "Young Ladies of England." His work on ferns was dedicated to W. J. Hooker, who had "contributed so essentially to diffuse a love of Botany." The figures in both these works are very tiny, with up to twenty on each plate.
72. Lees, "Value of Plates" (cit. n. 23), p. 291;
73. H.C.W., review of Francis, Little English Flora, p. 281;
74. Peter Rylands, "Further Hints to Young Entomologists: Observation.-Collection, and Arrangement of Specimens," Naturalist, 1838, 3:244-249, on p. 247;
75. and Lees, "Local Occurrences" (cit. n. 1).
76. For Lees's recollection of learning how to name plants see Mary Munslow Jones, The Lookers-Out of Worcestershire: A Memoir of Edwin Lees (Worcester: Worcestershire Naturalists' Club, 1980), p. 12.
77. W. J. Hooker to J. S. Henslow, 14 Apr. 1827, Cambridge University Library, Add. MSS 8176, letter 54. The need to recommend botany may have come as a surprise to Hooker, who, though an expert botanist, was not university educated and was self-taught in botany.
78. On the Apothecaries' Act see D. E. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 107. Although a license from the Society of Apothecaries was compulsory only for medical practitioners in England and Wales, most students in Scotland and Ireland also acquired the necessary botanical knowledge in order to be able to practice in England.
79. Soon after arriving in Glasgow, Hooker told Robert Brown that he had only thirty paying students: "Nor is a student, among even the medical ones, obliged to attend the botanical course at Glasgow: - any where else serves him just as well to entitle him to his degree." By the autumn of the following year, Hooker referred to "the trifling emoluments of my professorship, which this year do not exceed 160£." W. J. Hooker to Robert Brown, 21 May 1820, 26 Sept. 1821, Botany Library, Natural History Museum, London, Robert Brown Correspondence, Vol. 1, letters 230, 232.
80. W. J. Hooker to Turner, 15 Aug. 1821, 1 July 1821, RBGK, "W. J. Hooker Letters, 1805-1832," Vol. 1, fols. 312-313 ("utterly ruined"), 308-309 (on Graham);
81. and W. J. Hooker to Henslow, 14 Apr. 1827 (cit. n. 28). For the book itself see William Jackson Hooker, Botanical Illustrations: Being a Series of Figures Designed to Illustrate the Terms Employed in a Course of Lectures on Botany, with Descriptions (Edinburgh, 1822). The work contains eight plates (111 figures) on flowers, six plates (107 figures) on leaves, one plate (17 figures) on roots, three plates (48 figures) on cryptogamia, two plates (33 figures) on fruits and seeds, and one plate (16 figures) on the anatomy of plants.
82. Munslow Jones, Lookers-Out of Worcestershire (cit. n. 27), p. 11.
83. On the eighteenth-century purchasers of expensive illustrated natural history books see D. E. Allen, "Natural History in Britain in the Eighteenth Century," Archives of Natural History, 1993, 20:333-347, esp. pp. 336-337.
84. James Sowerby, a natural history artist, made his living from his publications; in 1816 his son, carrying on the family business, expressed the wish that "the rich would purchase English botany as necessary furniture for their fashionable houses": James de Carle Sowerby to Turner, 23 Feb. 18.16, Dawson Turner Letters, Trinity College, Cambridge. While James Edward Smith, who provided the botanical descriptions for the English Botany (cit. n. 20), was happy enough to receive his share of the profits, he publicly acknowledged his contribution to the work only from Volume 4 (1795), when its botanical value had become apparent. However, the availability of the English Botany to expert botanists should not be assumed. Hewett Cottrell Watson stated in The New Botanist's Guide to the Localities of the Rarer Plants of Britain, 2 vols. (London, 1835-1837), Vol. 1 (1835), p. 4,
85. that Sowerby and Smith's English Botany was "not generally quoted from want of access to a copy." On Curtis's Botanical Magazine see Blanche Henrey, British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800, 3 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), Vol. 2, pp. 302-307.
86. J. D. Hooker to Turner, 22 May 1823, RBGK, "W. J. Hooker Letters, 1805-1832," Vol. 1, fol. 335.
87. Hooker's initial difficulties in articulating the "attractive" character of botany in his popular course were resolved by 1827, when he was able to describe the "actual pleasure" of botany by quoting from Brougham's "most delightful publication ... on the Objects, Advantages, & Pleasures of Science" (the work cited in note 5, above). See W. J. Hooker, "Lectures on Botany," RBGK, MSS, 3 vols., Vol. 1, "Popular Course Introductory" [1826], p. 1, and notes for new lectures dated 1827, pp. 81-83.
88. W J. Hooker to Henslow, 14 Apr. 1827 (cit. n. 28). While Hooker had reservations about admitting women to his university course, other lecturers had no such qualms about boosting their fees in this way. In 1826 Thomas Charles Hope began to admit women to lectures on chemistry at Edinburgh University;
89. see J. B. Morrell, "Science and Scottish University Reform: Edinburgh in 1826," Brit. J. Hist. Sci, 1972, 6:39-56, esp. pp. 54-55.
90. In 1832 the geologist Charles Lyell requested that women be allowed to attend his lectures at King's College, London, despite his initial opinion that this was "unacademical"; see Martin Rudwick, "Charles Lyell, F.R.S. (1797-1875), and His London, Lectures on Geology, 1832-33," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 1975, 29:231-263, esp. pp. 241-253.
91. The interest of women in attending university science lectures may well have been the impetus for starting popular courses in botany. The Edinburgh botany professor Robert Graham began to give "a Class for the Ladies" from 1828: W J. Hooker to Brown, 28 May 1829, Robert Brown Correspondence (cit. n. 29), Vol. 1, letter 239;
92. he may have decided to do so because by 1827 both his university and his "popular" classes were greatly reduced in numbers: R. K. Greville to M. J. Berkeley, 2 July 1827, Botany Library, Natural History Museum, London, M. J. Berkeley Correspondence, Vol. 6.
93. In no way do I mean to imply that women were treated as equals in science or that their contributions were always recognized. On the practice of botany by women see Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), which also discusses the exclusion of women from professional science. Nonetheless, John Lindley, who was most active in excluding women from professional botany, recognized their potentially useful contributions to the science and therefore published his Ladies' Botany (London, 1834), a popular illustrated work explaining the natural system, of plant classification. This introductory text was also recommended to workingmen and gardeners, for Lindley offered the assurance that any reader who worked through the book as directed "will be a Botanist" and, although not very learned, fully capable of progressing to "more scientific works" (p. xii).
94. D. E. Allen, "Women Members of the Botanical Society of London, 1836-1856," Brit. J. Hist. Sci, 1980, 13:240-254, reveals the practical participation of women in botanical exchange networks.
95. See Bermingham, Learning to Draw (cit. n. 14), Ch. 5, for a discussion of the gendered nature of debates about the accomplished woman in the early nineteenth century.
96. W. J. Hooker, "Lectures on Botany" (cit. n. 32), Vol. 1, pp. 48-49.
97. Ellen Hutchins provided a large percentage of the specimens described in Dawson Turner's and W. J. Hooker's monographs on the Fuci and Jungermanniae, respectively (both are cited in note 15, above), and was honored by Robert Brown, who named a genus of alpine plants after her. See Anne Secord, "Ellen Hutchins," in The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, ed. Marilyn Ogilvie and Joy Harvey, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2000) Vol. 1, pp. 633-635.
98. Hutchins had learned to draw and paint as part of her education, as had Dawson Turner's daughters, who were taught by the artist John Sell Cotman. See Mea Allan, The Hookers of Kew, 1785-1911 (London: Michael Joseph, 1967), p. 32.
99. Maria Turner, who married Hooker, was a good botanist with an interest in mosses; Hooker told Robert Brown that she assisted in the preparation of the plates for W. J. Hooker and T. Taylor, Muscologia Britannica (London, 1818):
100. W J. Hooker to Brown, 9 Nov. 18.15, British Library, Add. MSS 32440, fols. 95-96.
101. For women botanical artists see Bermingham, Learning to Draw, pp. 210-224;
102. and Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science.
103. For later women natural history illustrators see Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 74-83.
104. With respect to Hooker's sensitivity to those without classical education, it is worth remembering that he was not university educated and had to ask his father-in-law to write his inaugural oration to the senate at Glasgow University when he discovered it had to be delivered in Latin: Allan, Hookers of Kew, pp. 75, 77.
105. For his reasons for writing his book on mosses in English see Anne Secord, "Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire," Hist. Sci., 1994, 32:269-315, on p. 298.
106. W. J. Hooker to Turner, 15 Mar. 1822, RBGK, "W. J. Hooker Letters, 1805-1832," Vol. 1, fols. 324-325, in which Hooker also reported that his not having been educated at Oxford University would also "decidedly remove every hope of succeeding to the Professorship at Oxford."
107. For the politics surrounding Henslow's appointment and tenure see S. M. Walters, The Shaping of Cambridge Botany: A Short History of Whole-Plant Botany in Cambridge from the Time of Ray into the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981; rpt. by Friends of Cambridge Univ. Botanic Garden, 1996), Ch. 5. Henslow, a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, had previously held the chair in mineralogy.
108. W. J. Hooker to Henslow, 14 Apr. 1827 (cit. n. 28).
109. Hooker also made sure to tell Henslow that the book could still be purchased for one third of the original price of eighteen shillings owing to the collapse of Archibald Constable's publishing business. Although botanical books had long had glossaries, these consisted of verbal explanations of botanical terms. Thomas Martyn's The Language of Botany: Being a Dictionary of the Terms Made Use of in That Science (London, 1793) makes clear its reliance on words alone by its very title. As Greville to Henslow, 5 Jan. 1827, Cambridge University Library, Add. MSS 8176, letter 47, reveals, Henslow had never attended a botanical lecture himself. This is not surprising, as he was a Cambridge student when Thomas Martyn held the chair of botany. Martyn was an absentee professor from 1796 to his death in 1825, during which time he gave no lectures at all.
110. Greville to Henslow, 5 Jan. 1827. Greville had studied medicine at Edinburgh and in the 1820s accompanied William Hooker on student botanical field trips to the Scottish Highlands. In the 1830s Greville became an active antislavery campaigner and religious writer. He supported the Sabbatarian and temperance movements. Financial hardship at the end of his life led to his supporting himself by the sale of his illustrations and paintings.
111. W. J. Hooker to Henslow, 14 Apr. 1827 (cit. n. 28).
112. Hooker was in a good position, to judge; Greville's Scottish Cryptogamic Flora, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1823-1828),
113. with, plates drawn and colored by the author, had been dedicated to Hooker, and by 1827 Greville had begun preparing the 240 folio colored plates, published in parts from 1828, that he produced for W. J. Hooker and R. K. Greville, Icones Filicum. . . Figures and Descriptions of Ferns, Principally of Such as Have Been Altogether Unnoticed by Botanists, or Have Not Yet Been Correctly Figured, 2 vols. (London, 1829-1831).
114. J. D. Hooker, A Sketch of the Life and Labours of Sir William Jackson Hooker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1903), p. xxx.
115. According to Jan Lewis, Walter Hood Fitch: A Celebration (London: HMSO, 1992), p. 5,
116. Fitch's first tasks for Hooker included the preparation of lecture drawings, and in 1837 he worked on a "series of above 1,000 figures selected from the best sources to explain the terms employed in a course of lectures in Botany" for a second edition of W. J. Hooker, Botanical Illustrations (Glasgow, 1837). Fitch was only seventeen when he was employed by Hooker; at the age of thirteen he had become an apprentice pattern drawer in a Glasgow textile mill.
117. Henslow to Wilson, 17 Apr. 1827, Warrington Library, Cheshire, William Wilson Correspondence, MS 53;
118. Leonard Jenyns, quoted in Walters, Shaping of Cambridge Botany (cit. n. 36), p. 51 (appreciation of Henslow's pictorial aids in teaching);
119. and Henslow to W. J. Hooker, 25 Nov. 1830, 8 Feb. 1831, RBGK, Directors' Correspondence, Vol. 2, letters 103, 105.
120. Walters, Shaping of Cambridge Botany, pp. 48-49;
121. and David Layton, Science for the People: The Origins of the School Science Curriculum in England (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), pp. 63-65, on p. 65.
122. See also Jean Russell-Gebbett, Henslow of Hitcham: Botanist, Educationalist, and Clergyman (Lavenham: Terence Daiton, 1977), pp. 44-45, 56.
123. J. D. Hooker, Life and Letters, ed. Huxley (cit. n. 12), Vol. 1, p. 395.
124. On the government-sponsored wall charts see Layton, Science for the People, p. 70.
125. Henslow designed the nine elephant folio colored charts, and they were executed at Kew by the Hookers' botanical artist Walter Fitch. Lewis, Walter Hood Fitch (cit. n. 40), p. 17, points out that because of the large size of the charts, Fitch could not use lithography but had to draw directly onto a huge zinc plate.
126. A notice in Naturalist, 1857, 7:282, considered the diagrams, each measuring 40 1/2 by 29 inches, "a most useful addition to our means of making science a portion of popular education."
127. In contrast to Britain, in Germany the publication of scientific wall charts was well established. For a discussion of their use in German schools and universities see Massimiano Bucchi, "Images of Science in the Classroom.: Wallcharts and Science Education, 1850-1920," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1998, 31:161-184.
128. W. J. Hooker to Brown, 3 Apr. 1820, Robert Brown Correspondence (cit. n. 29), Vol. 1, letter 229, mentioned that he had received "rather full notes of one of Hope's course of Lectures at Edinburgh" from Archibald Menzies, one of John Hope's students.
129. For John Hope's lecture diagrams see A. G. Morton, John Hope, 1725-1786: Scottish Botanist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh. Botanic Garden [Sibbald] Trust, 1986), pp. 22-23 (I thank Jennifer Lamond for bringing this reference to my attention).
130. The assessment of Thomas Charles Hope's teaching comes from J. B. Morrell, "Practical Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh, 1799-1843," Ambix, 1969, 16:66-80, on p. 68.
131. For the portrayal of Buckland see Nathaniel Whittock's 1823 lithograph of "The Geological Lecture Room, Oxford," reproduced on modern postcards sold in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, and also in Nicolaas A. Rupke, The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814-1849) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), p. 65.
132. Rudwick, "Emergence of a Visual Language" (cit. n. 7), p. 152.
133. R. K. Greville reported his association with Knox in a letter to Miles Joseph Berkeley in which he stated, "Three of us have associated ourselves to form a 'School of Nat. History' - in which three distinct courses will be delivered on Zoology & Comparative Anatomy (Dr Knox), - Geology & Mineralogy (Dr Hibbert) - & Botany": Greville to Berkeley, 29 Dec. 1826, M. J. Berkeley Correspondence (cit. n. 33), Vol. 6.
134. W. J. Hooker informed Robert Brown that "Greville has just joined Dr. Knox's medical school": W. J. Hooker to Brown, 28 May 1829 (cit. n. 33).
135. Both Knox and Greville had been taught by the Edinburgh anatomist John Barclay and both were advocates for temperance, although they differed greatly in their religious and political views. For Knox's radicalism and career see Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 58-59, 77-81, 388-389.
136. John Lizars, A. System of Anatomical Plates of the Human Body, Accompanied with Descriptions, 12 parts in 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1822-1826), Pt. 2 (1823), p. xi.
137. The "beautifully executed plates" were produced by his brother William Hone Lizars, an Edinburgh painter and engraver, and were used by several generations of anatomy students; see Thomas Seccombe, "John Lizars," in Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 11, pp. 1284-1285.
138. It was William Lizars, however, who was responsible for the botched production of the colored plates for W. J. Hooker's Botanical Illustrations (cit. n. 30);
139. Hooker, writing to Dawson Turner about the ruined copies of his book, stated: "Lizars, who superintended the colouring, expresses great sorrow & makes many excuses, but the fact is there is nobody in Edinburgh, who can do anything of the kind." W. J. Hooker to Turner, 15 Aug. 1821 (cit. n. 30).
140. Producing adequate illustrations in books, as for lectures, involved much effort. For a history of the events leading up to and the consequences of the 1832 Anatomy Act see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2000).
141. Henry Lonsdale, A. Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist (London, 1870), pp. 153-154.
142. Despite Knox's scorn, Lizars was as eager to obtain bodies for dissection (though not as successful) and frequently voiced his opinion on this issue in his System of Anatomical Plates. Indeed, the scarcity of bodies delayed the publication of some of the very plates designed to substitute for dissection: in Pt. 2 (1823), p. xiii,
143. Lizars stated that the "prejudice of the place" had "prevented him for upwards of five months from procuring a subject in order to make drawings of the lower extremity." Knox's livelihood depended, however, on teaching students who wished to learn anatomy through dissection in the "Paris manner"; for his involvement in the Burke and Hare scandal see Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, pp. 131-140, 327 n 103.
144. Robert Knox's Plates of the Arteries of the Human Body: After Frederic Tiedemann (Edinburgh, 1829) was intended to guide dissection and "in no way diminish the extent of actual dissection" (p. 2).
145. Knox further explained in his Engravings of the . . . Nerves . . . Copied from . . . Antonio Scarpa, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1829), p. 4, that his own experience of teaching had made him more willing to allow the use of plates in this way: "There are persons who indiscriminately censure and condemn Anatomical Drawings and Engravings, rating them dangerous and bad; and I well remember the time when I was one of these persons, because I had seen them substituted for actual dissection . . . but I knew nothing at the time of the difficult duties of the Teacher of Anatomy,-how he must adapt his mode of instruction to the capacity of the individual student,-how some acquire knowledge most readily by description and demonstration, whilst to others a single glance at a diagram or drawing, compared at the same moment with nature, will at once convey the truth: And how again, to others, both methods must be adopted or put in force, before the difficult truths of Anatomy can be fully understood. Ample experience has taught me this."
146. Providing classes with botanical specimens was regarded as a chore, at worst, especially by independent lecturers such as Greville, who, with regard to his lectures, told M. J. Berkeley that in order "to collect specimens for distribution & demonstration, I have to go into the fields before breakfast every other morning": Greville to Berkeley, 4 June 1826, M. J. Berkeley Correspondence (cit. n. 33), Vol. 5.
147. University lecturers with access to good botanical gardens had a great advantage in this respect: W. J. Hooker told Robert Brown that Professor Robert Graham "with his fair garden at Edinburgh drives all the popular lecturers off the field": W. J. Hooker to Brown, 28 May 1829 (cit. n. 33).
148. Lonsdale, Sketch of Robert Knox (cit. n. 48), p. 259.
149. In contrast, botanical wall charts were so commonplace by the later nineteenth century that in the 1880s the Edinburgh professor of botany Alexander Dickson pains-takingly made fresh drawings on the blackboard before his lectures, "holding that a student would copy a temporary sketch although he would not copy a permanent wall diagram": quoted in Henry Nolte, Catalogue of an Exhibition of John Hutton Balfour's Botanical Teaching Diagrams, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (June 2000).
150. Lonsdale, Sketch of Robert Knox, pp. 125-127, on p. 127. Knox's dress and performance were also designed to draw attention away from his pockmarked face and the loss of an eye resulting from smallpox.
151. Lustig, "Cultivating Knowledge" (cit. n. 13), shows that the the market produced by gardeners was largely satisfied by horticultural, rather than strictly botanical, publications. For the appeal of geology in this period see Simon J. Knell, The Culture of English Geology, 1815-1851 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). The industrialist Robert Hyde Greg commented to the geologist John Phillips that "geology becomes daily a more popular science & must continually gain ground with the public, from its novelty to most, & the extraordinary facts it is presenting to all": Greg to Phillips, 14 Oct. 1836, Oxford University Museum, John Phillips Letters 1836/56.
152. Neville Wood to W. J. Hooker, 19 Sept. 1838, RBGK, Directors' Correspondence, Vol. 11, letter 176;
153. Wood contrasted Roby's lectures to the usual "repulsive garb under which books & lectures appear." A short description of Roby's lectures appears in "Botanical Lectures at Rochdale," Naturalist, 1838, 4:55 (the article is signed "Ed." - i.e., Neville Wood).
154. For the more detailed account see "Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society," ibid., pp. 100-109;
155. the quotation, is from p. 104. Roby's botanical lectures were given in aid of the town's Literary and Philosophic Society and were delivered, appropriately, in the Rochdale theater. John Roby, best known for his antiquarian work The Traditions of Lancashire, 2 vols. (London, 1829), was a staunch Tory and author of a Religious Society tract. Taking up botany late in life, Roby was a member of the Botanical Society of London; his botanical practice is recorded in E. R. Roby, ed., The Legendary and Poetical Remains of John Roby. . . with a Sketch of His. . . Life (London, 1854). Roby wrote a popular introduction to botany after moving to Malvern in 1847, but this was never published, perhaps because he drowned in 1850.
156. "Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society," pp. 104-105.
157. Ibid., pp. 102-103, 106. When lecturing on language itself Roby also adopted the use of pictures; an announcement for his 1844 course of lectures on the "Peculiarities of the Lancashire Dialect" stated that he would employ "several Drawings and Diagrams": Warrington Library, Annual Reports and Printed Documents of the Warrington Natural History Society, PS 24.
158. John Roby to T. B. Hall, 21 Aug. 1840, T. B. Hall Correspondence, Botany Department, Liverpool Museum. The large diagrams "painted in distemper" were prepared by Roby and his son.
159. See E. R. Roby, ed., Legendary and Poetical Remains (cit. n. 54), pp. 40-42. According to "Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society," p. 100, they depicted the "minutest structure" of plants "large enough to be distinctly seen in every part of the house."
160. "Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society," pp. 105, 104.
161. For Roby's association of pleasure and his own practice of scientific botany see his record of sensations and musings in E. R. Roby, ed., Legendary and Poetical Remains, p. 36.
162. Roby's stress on learning botany like a child in order to become a more accomplished botanist contrasts with the aim. of some art manuals of the period, which, Ann Bermingham argues, not only addressed their readers as children but did not allow them, to progress beyond a childlike stage of draftsmanship, thus keeping them in a state of "permanent amateurism": Bermingham, Learning to Draw (cit. n. 14), pp. 172-174.
163. John Roby, "Syllabus of a Course of Four Lectures on the 'Linnaean Classification of Plants,' Illustrated by Numerous Drawings and Specimens," held in the Museum of the Natural History Society, Warrington, Oct. 1843, Warrington Library, Annual Reports and Printed Documents of the Warrington Natural History Society, PS 24;
164. and J. Roby to Hall, 21 Aug. 1840 (cit. n. 57).
165. See Susan R. Horton, "Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves," in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1995), pp. 1-26.
166. For the prominent location of the lantern in nineteenth-century domestic slide shows, as well as in Michael Faraday's lectures at the Royal Institution, see David Robinson, The Lantern Image: Iconography of the Magic Lantern, 1420-1880 (London: Magic Lantern Society, 1993), Figs. 118, 174, 185. The improved magic lantern developed by the optician Philip Carpenter in the early 1820s had promoted the educational use of slides. Carpenter himself supplied sets of slides illustrating natural history subjects arranged according to the Linnaean system and published Elements of Zoology ... a Companion to New Copper-Plate Sliders (London, 1823) to accompany an early series of slides.
167. See David Henry, "Carpenter & Westley," New Magic Lantern Journal, 1984, 3(1):8-9;
168. and John Barnes, "Philip Carpenter, 1776-1833," ibid., 3(2):8-9.
169. The oxyhydrogen microscope, first displayed in 1833, remained, according to Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1978), pp. 369-371, little more than a spectacular toy.
170. Its importance is perhaps better described in J. N. Hays, "The London Lecturing Empire, 1800-50," in Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780-1850, ed. Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 91-119, on p. 106, which states that its use in London scientific lectures combined "new technology, biological investigation, and visual display," thus allowing lecturers to "partake of both medical and popular traditions." The significance of the oxyhydrogen microscope consisted - as its name implied - in the powerful artificial light source, which allowed the magic lantern to move out of the domestic setting and into public lecture halls.
171. For this, and on the difficulty of painting on glass slides, see Steve Humphries, Victorian Britain through the Magic Lantern (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989), pp. 21-22, 112-113.
172. Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 2 vols. (1877; London: Virago, 1983), Vol. 1, p. 15.
173. Martineau's association of sensuality with horror is even more clear in her adult recollection of her experience of tactile pleasure at the age of two, when, while being carried by her nursemaid, she stretched out her hand to touch a flat velvet button on the top of her sister's bonnet: "The rapture of the sensation was really monstrous, as I remember it now" (ibid., p. 13).
174. On the loss of control as the basis for horror see Mercer, "Complicit Pleasures" (cit. n. 3), pp. 59-60.
175. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 325-328.
176. See also Saunders, Picturing Plants (cit. n. 9).
177. Charles Dickens, quoted in Altick, Shows of London (cit. n. 60), pp. 365-366. Here the extent of the boredom experienced by Dickens was conveyed in terms of its physical effect on the body. Altick attributes the boredom to "the cold, heavy hand of educational purpose" and not, as I do, to the failure of the spectacle to maintain an illusion of realism and thereby to entertain, by deception.
178. See Robert Dale Owen, "An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark" (Glasgow, 1825), in The Radical Tradition in Education in Britain, ed. Brian Simon (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), pp. 143-176, on p. 162;
179. and Simon, Studies in the History of Education, 1780-1870 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1960), pp. 193-197 and plate opposite p. 193 showing G. Hunt's 1825 engraving of "Robert Owen's School at New Lanark," also available as a modern color postcard.
180. For Brougham's opinion of Pestalozzi and Fellenberg see [Henry Brougham], "Pestalozzi-Diffusion of Knowledge," Edinburgh Rev., 1828, 47:118-134, esp. pp. 124-126;
181. here Brougham stated that "our expectations" of the good done by the "close alliance between amusement and science" were "unbounded" (p. 129). See also Simon, Studies in the History of Education, pp. 134-136;
182. and W. A. C. Stewart and W. P. McCann, The Educational Innovators, 1750-1880 (London.: Macmillan, 1967), Pt. 1: "1750-1850."
183. James Jennings, The. Family Cyclopaedia: Being a Manual of Useful and Necessary Knowledge, 2 vols. (London, 1821), Vol. 2, p. 78.1.
184. Similarly, in 1840 the Chartists William Lovett and John Collins argued that acquisition of knowledge depended on the exercise and refinement of the senses. "In order to impress particular objects on the memory," they suggested that "the room should be ornamented with well-executed, coloured prints, or drawings, in natural history, zoology, astronomy, and machinery, together with neat models, and a few specimens of minerals and fossils." Lovett and Collins, Chartism: A New Organization of the People, Embracing a Plan for the Education and Improvement of the People, Politically and Socially . . . Written in Warwick Gaol, (London, 1840; rpt., New York: Humanities, 1969), pp. 81-92, on p. 86.
185. Watson's active promotion of phrenology included his editorship of the Phrenological Journal, 1837-1841.
186. See Roger Cooter, Phrenology in the British Isles: An Annotated, Historical Bibliography and Index (London: Scarecrow, 1989), pp. 338-339 (for Watson's publications), 287 (for those of Rylands).
187. L. G. Rylands, Correspondence and Speeches of Peter Rylands (cit. n. 18), Vol. 1, pp. 6-7, records that in 1838 Rylands was "a firm believer" in phrenology and an active member of the Warrington Phrenological Society; according to his brother T. G. Rylands, Peter Rylands was so inspired by hearing Hewett Cottrell Watson lecture on phrenology in Manchester that he "fell in love with him": T. G. Rylands to Hall, 22 Mar. 1839,
188. T. B. Hall Correspondence (cit. n. 57).
189. J. G. Spurzheim, Phrenology; or, The Doctrine of the Mind, 4th ed. (London, 1833), p. 94.
190. The translation of observational practices from one field to another was promoted by botanists as justification for the study of systematic botany. Edward Forbes, An Inaugural Lecture on Botany (London, 1843), p. 10, stressed that the skills of observation and discrimination so essential to the physician were best learned through the study of botany and, in response to critics who claimed that physicians should learn these at the bedside, argued that "no training is so strengthening as that which separates the process from the object of the process."
191. See also Layton, Science for the People (cit. n. 42), pp. 58-59, 68-69, for the promotion of botany as a good way to develop reasoning powers and visual skills. By the 1830s phrenologists, like Owenites, widely endorsed the views of Pestalozzi.
192. See Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 227, 377 n 10.
193. For further discussion of phrenologists' attitudes toward education see David de Giustino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975), Ch. 8.
194. For a phrenological discussion of memory see H. C. Watson, "Remarks on the Peculiarities of Memory," Phrenological Journal, 1831-1832, 7:212-224.
195. James Jennings, An Inquiry Concerning the Nature and Operations of the Human Mind, in Which the Science of Phrenology, the Doctrine of Necessity, Punishment, and Education, Are Particularly Considered (London, 1828), pp. 23-26, on p. 24.
196. Jennings argued that "pleasurable" sensations result only when the mind is "excited" or "impelled" (p. 39).
197. Cooter, Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, pp. 118-119, remarks that phrenology, with its emphasis on a number of distinct intellectual faculties, the relative force of each being determined through the observation of the external structure of the skull, provided little account of sensual experience; the repression of the "body's anarchical sensual parts" followed from phrenologists' exclusive concentration on "outer reality" rather than "inner structures of thought." This point is borne out by the ways in which phrenological naturalists discussed what predisposed certain people to the study of natural history.
198. Peter Rylands, drawing on phrenological principles, dismissed the need to attract superficial lovers of nature to scientific study by suggesting in "The Abuse of Prints" (cit. n. 18) that attraction to science was determined by the "relative development of the perceptive faculties" (p. 8).
199. Hewett Cottrell Watson provided a classification of naturalists according to phrenological principles in "Relation between Cerebral Development and the Tendency to Particular Pursuits; - And on the Heads of Botanists," Phrenol. J., 1832-1834, 8:97-108.
200. John Roby provided a phrenological explanation for his own sudden interest in botany: "What should possess me to learn botany, all my life laughing at it. Arrangement, bump of order I suppose." E. R. Roby, ed., Legendary and Poetical Remains (cit. n. 54), p. 36.
201. P. Rylands, "Further Hints to Young Entomologists" (cit. n. 27), p. 247.
202. Shapin and Barnes, "Head and Hand" (cit. n. 20), pp. 234-235, 240-241;
203. and H.C.W., review of Francis, Little English Flora (cit. n. 26), p. 281.
204. Shapin and Barnes point out that the endless variety of ways in which these two models of mind could be and were used indicates not an indebtedness to particular theories but their cultural familiarity as stereotypes. Writers, they state, thus "confidently referred to mental types, expecting to be believed, and feeling no need to cite empirical evidence or personal study and investigation which supported their commentary" ("Head and Hand," p. 246).
205. One of the arguments in Stafford, Artful Science (cit. n. 7), revolves around the Protestant distaste for the Catholic emphasis on images and relics.
206. In the highly charged anti-Catholic atmosphere of Lancashire of the late 1830s, it is possible that the fears underlying Protestant attitudes toward "Romish" superstition and ignorance may have predisposed Nonconformists, such as Rylands and Wilson, to place more emphasis on knowledge derived from words. More likely (not least because pictures were used by Evangelical groups like the Religious Tract Society, as Anderson, Printed Image [cit. n. 5], pp. 29-35, points out),
207. a suspicion of images in particular resulted from a more general fear of leisure pursuits that involved sensuality of any sort, as discussed in Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830-1885 (London: Methuen, 1978).
208. D. E. Allen, "The Early Professionals in British Natural History," in From Linnaeus to Darwin: Commentaries on the History of Biology and Geology, ed. Alwyne Wheeler and James H. Price (London: Society for the History of Natural History, 1985), pp. 1-12;
209. and Allen, Naturalist in Britain (cit. n. 28).
210. W. J. Hooker to Turner, 27 June 1817, RBGK, "W. J. Hooker Letters, 1805-1832," Vol. 1, fols. 237-238.
211. Hooker correctly stated that the work was written by "Miss Fitton," although the book was published anonymously and many attributed it to Jane Marcet. Despite Hooker's dismissal, Sarah Fitton's Conversations on Botany (London, 1817) went through nine editions by 1840.
212. See Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (cit. n. 34), pp. 89-93.
213. Fitton's aim was correct training of the mental faculties, and in her introduction (pp. iv-v) she quoted from Maria Edgeworth's Letters for Literary Ladies to the effect that botany could be recommended as a branch of general education, for "there is no danger of its inflaming the imagination, because the mind is intent upon realities. The knowledge that is acquired is exact; and the pleasure of the pursuit is a sufficient reward for the labour." As Shapin and Barnes, "Head and Hand" (cit. n. 20), p. 242, point out, Maria and R. L. Edgeworth's educational advice to the higher classes "advocated extreme circumspection on the pedagogic role of objects and demonstrations" and made clear that "sensually based forms of communication had to be abandoned as soon as practicably possible."
214. [Henry Brougham], "Library of Useful Knowledge: Preliminary Treatise: The Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science, Published under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 5th Edit.," Edinburgh Rev., 1827, 46:225-244, on pp. 243, 244.
215. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of " illustration" as the "pictorial elucidation" of any subject is drawn from nineteenth-century usages, with W. J. Hooker's Botanical Illustrations (1822) given as the first scientific use (I am grateful to Sachiko Kusukawa for drawing this to my attention).
216. Although Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 51, states that by the end of the eighteenth century the word "illustration had become identified largely with engravings," Stafford stresses that the use of such images was to accompany text in order to provide a complete representation of what had been observed. Strikingly, however, in her own copiously illustrated book Stafford included no pictures in her discussion of the scientific gaze (Ch. 1).