Type specimens and scientific memory

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 153-182

  Daston, Lorraine ^a  

^a MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE   (Germany)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33746343151     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/427306     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. See Umberto Eco, "Languages in Paradise," Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1998), p. 23.
2. See Carlolus von Linnaeus, Critica botanica (1737), trans. Arthur Hort and M. L. Green (London, 1938), aphorisms 296, 299, pp. 177, 182; hereafter abbreviated CB.
3. Alphonse de Candolle, Lois de la nomenclature botanique (Paris, 1867), art. 28.4-5, p. 20; hereafter abbreviated L.
4. As the 1999 International Code of Botantical Nomenclature (Saint Louis Code) states in its preamble, "This Code aims at the provision of a stable method of naming taxonomic groups, avoiding and rejecting the use of names which may cause error or ambiguity or throw science into confusion. Next in importance is the avoidance of the useless creation of names." Even names defined as illegitimate by the rules may be conserved (nomina conservanda) to "avoid disadvantageous nomenclatural changes" (International Code of Botantical Nomenclature [Saint Louis Code], ed. W. Greuter et al., http://www.bgbm.org/IAPT/Nomenclature/Code/SaintLouis, preamble, art. 14.1; hereafter abbreviated SLC).
5. See Candolle's chart on p. 9. The example cited by Candolle was taken from George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker, Genera plantarum, 3 vols. (London, 1862-83), vol. 1, fasc. 1-2.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Fragmens pour un dictionnaire des termes d'usage en botanique" (1781), Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris, 1999), 4:1209; quoted in Jean-Marc Drouin, "Les Herborisations d'un philosophe: Rousseau et la botanique savante," in Rousseau et les sciences, ed. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Bruno Bernardi (Paris, 2003), p. 86.
7. There are many parallels between modern botanical and zoological codes of nomenclature, as a result of shared challenges and mutual influences. I have however chosen to concentrate on botany, in part because of significant divergences in practices by circa 1850 and in part because important technical advances in the preservation of specimens in botanical and zoological collections have different chronologies. On divergences, see Peter F. Stevens, "Metaphors and Typology in the Development of Botanical Systematics 1690-1960, or the Art of Putting New Wine in Old Bottles," Taxon 33 (May 1984): 169-211; on taxidermy
8. see Paul Lawrence Farber, "The Development of Ornithological Collections in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries and Their Relevance to the Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline," Journal of the Society of the Bibliography of Natural History 9, no. 4 (1980): 391-94.
9. On the history of taxonomy and nomenclature in botany and zoology, see Annette Diekmann, Klassifikation - System - "scala naturae": Das Ordnen der Objekte in Naturwissenschaft und Pharmazie zwischen 1700 und 1850 (Stuttgart, 1992);
10. Stevens, The Development of Biological Systematics: Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, Nature, and the Natural System (New York, 1994);
11. Richard V. Melville, Towards Stability in the Names of Animals: A History of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 1895-1995 (Dorchester, 1995);
12. Staffan Müller-Wille, Botanik und weltweiter Handel: Zur Begründung eines natürlichen Systems der Pflanzen durch Carl von Linné (1707-78) (Berlin, 1999);
13. and Farber, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (Baltimore, 2000).
14. See Lorraine Daston, "The Historicity of Science," in Historicization-Historisierung, ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 201-21.
15. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos, trans. E. C. Otté and W. S. Dallas, 5 vols. (1844; New York, 1850-59), 1:xi-xii.
16. See Candolle, La Phytographie (Paris, 1880), p. xi.
17. Although I will follow general usage in referring to holotypes and type specimens interchangeably, some botanists have used the latter term to refer collectively to all the specimens used to establish a type (for example, paratype, syntype, epitype, lectotype, and so on), whereas the former term is reserved for "a single specimen (or fragment) upon which a species is based" (Donald Leslie Frizell, "Terminology of Types," American Midland Naturalist 14 [1933]: 652).
18. See also Wörterbuch der Botanik: Die Termini in ihrem historischen Zusammenhang, ed. Gerhard Wagenitz (Jena, 1996), pp. 180, 387.
19. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1690; Oxford, 1975), 3.3.2, p. 414.
20. See Stanwyn G. Shetler, An Introduction to the Botanical Type Specimen Register (Washington, D.C., 1973), p. 6.
21. See Farber, "The Type-Concept in Zoology during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," Journal of the History of Biology 9 (Spring 1976): 97.
22. The term herbarium was originally a book of medical plants; Joseph Tournefort applied the word to mean a hortus siccus (allegedly invented by Bologna professor Luca Ghini in the early sixteenth century) in 1700 and by the late eighteenth century herbarium had become the standard term. See William Thomas Stern, "An Introduction to the Species plantarum and Cognate Botanical Works of Carl Linnaeus," in Linnaeus, "Species plantarum": A Facsimile of the First Edition, 2 vols. (1753; London, 1957), 1:103.
23. Walter T. Swingle, "Types of Species in Botanical Taxonomy," Science, n.s., 37, no. 962 (1913): 864-65.
24. See Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Les Liliacées, 8 vols. (Paris, 1802-16).
25. See also, for the history of this terminology, Charles Schuchert, "What Is a Type in Natural History?" Science, n.s., 5, no. 121 (1897): 636-40. At one point botanists found themselves in the absurd position of combating the synonymy of the type terminology, itself introduced to combat the synonymy of nomenclature;
26. see Frizzell, "Terminology of Types," pp. 637-40.
27. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, 5 vols. (Turin, 1922), IIa-ae, 153.12, 4:141-42;
28. compare Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, 1961), 3.8, p. 65.
29. See "The Linnaean Database," http://www.nhm.ac.uk/botany/ linnaean/Introduction.html. The first edition of the Species plantarum (1753) was officially accepted as the starting point for botanical nomenclature for all groups of vascular plants at the International Botanical Congress of 1905 at Vienna;
30. see Stern, "An Introduction to the Species plantarum and Cognate Botanical Works of Carl Linnaeus," p. 4. The starting point for zoological nomenclature is the tenth edition of Linnaeus's Systema naturae (1758).
31. Sometimes two or more specimens are designated by the author of a species as its types; these are called syntypes. Specimens cited in the original publication but that are designated neither as the holotype nor as syntypes are known as paratypes (SLC, art. 9.4-5).
32. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 3.3.2, p. 409.
33. On the relationships between botanists and horticulturalists, see Abigail J. Lustig, "The Creation and Uses of Horticulture in Britain and France in the Nineteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997).
34. See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 44-59.
35. See William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (London, 1847), 1:508.
36. On older plant names considered vulgar, see D. Gledhill, The Names of Plants (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 2-3.
37. Zoologist Ernst Mayr notes that Linnaeus never designated any type specimens for his zoological species either and warns that because it "was customary in several European museums in the first half of the nineteenth century to substitute 'new' type-specimens whenever the old ones became faded or were damaged by insect pests.... Evidence from old types must be treated with extreme care and discrimination and never be used to upset stable nomenclature" (Ernst Mayr, Principles of Systematic Zoology [New York, 1969], p. 368).
38. See Zeno G. Swijtink, "The Objectification of Observation: Measurement and Statistical Methods in the Nineteenth Century," in The Probabilistic Revolution, ed. Lorenz Krüger, Daston, and Michael Heidelberger (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 261-85.
39. See Pierre-Simon Laplace, Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814), in Oeuvres complètes de Laplace, 14 vols. (Paris, 1878-1912), 7:xlviii-ix.
40. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Erfahrung und Wissenschaft" [composed 1768], Goethes Werke ("Hamburger Ausgabe"), ed. Dorothea Kuhn and Rike Wankmüller, 13 vols. (1981; Munich, 1994), 13:23-24.
41. See Albrecht von Haller, Icones anatomicae, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1756), vol. 2, fasc. V, f. A2.r-v.
42. Lodolf Treviranus, Die Anwendung des Holzschnittes zur bildlichen Darstellung von Pflanzen (1855; Utrecht, 1949), p. 2.
43. Matthias Jacob Schleiden, Die Botanik als induktive Wissenschaft (Leipzig, 1845), p. 105.
44. Joshua Reynolds, "To the Idler" (1759), Discourses, ed. Helen Zimmern (London, 1887), p. 280.
45. See Mary P. Winsor, "Non-essentialist Methods in Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy," Biology and Philosophy 18, (June 2003): 391.
46. See Stevens, The Development of Biological Systematics, pp. 133-51
47. and Farber, "The Type-Concept in Zoology during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century."
48. See Stevens, The Development of Biological Systematics, p. 445 n. 4.
49. Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, "Note sur quelques genres anciens de plantes non classés antérieurement, et maintenant rapportés à leurs familles," Mémoires du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, no. 5 (1819): 247.
50. Auguste-Pyramus de Candolle [father of Alphonse de Candolle], Théorie élémentaire de la botanique (Paris, 1813), p. 287.
51. Louis Agassiz, Methods of Study in Natural History (1863; Boston, 1889), p. 139.
52. Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1:494-95.
53. See also Winsor, "Non-essentialist Methods in Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy," pp. 395-97.
54. See Hugh Edwin Strickland, "On the Inexpediency of Altering Established Terms in Natural History" and "Report of a Committee Appointed 'To Consider the Rules by Which the Nomenclature of Zoology May Be Established on a Uniform and Permanent Basis,'" Memoirs of Hugh Edwin Strickland, ed. William Jardine (London, 1858), pp. 370-74, 375-97.
55. Strickland, Accipitres, vol. 1 of Ornithological Synonyms, ed. Mrs. Hugh E. Strickland and W. Jardine (London, 1855), pp. iv, v.
56. On the social and political dimensions of Strickland's complaints and recommendations, 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 27 (Dec. 1996): 473-519.
57. Noting that between 1840 and 1850, over four hundred naturalists visited the zoological department of the British Museum, historian of science Gordon McOuat argues that through "the absolute bulk of its 'fixed capital' of naturalist goods, the Museum could set its own tacit rules for naturalist discourse" (McOuat, "Cataloguing Power: Delineating 'Competent Naturalists' and the Meaning of Species in the British Museum," British Journal for the History of Sciences 34 [2001]: 7).
58. See Strickland, Accipitres, p. x.
59. Société Zoologique de France, De la nomenclature des êtres organisés (Paris, 1881), p. 23; see also p. 36. The zoologists took a stricter view of publication than Candolle had, ruling out anything but print; see p. 29.
60. Lester F. Ward, "The Nomenclature Question," Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 22, no. 7 (1895): 309, 316.
61. O. F. Cook, "The Method of Types in Botanical Nomenclature," Science, n.s., 12, no. 300 (1900): 476; hereafter abbreviated "MT."
62. See Alphonse de Candolle, La Phytographie, p. 242.
63. The fourth fundamental principle of the 1904 Philadelphia Code (formulated as a set of recommendations to the 1905 International Botanical Congress in Vienna) states that "the application of a name is determined by reference to its nomenclatorial type" ("Code of Botanical Nomenclature," Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 31 [1904]: 251; see esp. canon 14, p. 254).
64. Schuchert, "What Is a Type in Natural History?" p. 636.
65. C. Hart Merriam, "Type Specimens in Natural History," Science, n.s., 5, no. 127 (1897): 731-32;
66. and Maude Kellerman, "A Method of Preserving Type Specimens," Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 2 (Jan. 1912): 222-23.
67. See for example Schuchert et al., Catalogue of the Type Specimens of Fossil Invertebrates in the Department of Geology, United States National Museum, pt. 1 of Catalogue of the Type and Figured Specimens of Fossils, Minerals, Rocks, and Ores in the Department of Geology, United States National Museum, ed. George P. Merrill (Washington, D.C., 1905)
68. and Charles Davies Sherborn, Where Is the - Collection? (Cambridge, 1940).
69. See A. S. Hitchcock, "Nomenclatorial Type Specimens of Plant Species," Science, n.s., 21, no. 543 (1905): 828-32.
70. Sherborn, Where Is the - Collection? pp. 11, 41, 29.
71. See also Merriam, "Type Specimens in Natural History," p. 732;
72. Swingle, "Types of Species in Botanical Taxonomy," p. 864;
73. and Schuchert, "Catalogue," p. 10.
74. Schuchert and S. S. Buckman, "The Nomenclature of Types in Natural History," Science, n.s., 21, no. 545 (1905): 900.
75. F. A. Bather, "A Postscript on the Terminology of Types," Science, n.s., 5, no. 126 (1897): 844;
76. compare Candolle, La Phytographie, p. 51n, concerning the distinction between an échantillon authentique and an échantillon typique.
77. See Cook, "The Method of Types," Science, n.s., 8, no. 198 (1898): 514.
78. See Hitchcock, "The Type Concept in Systematic Botany," American Journal of Botany 8 (May 1921): 252-53.
79. Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter to Thomas Carlyle, 7 Oct. 1835, in Other People's Mail: Letters of Men and Women of Letters, ed. Lola L. Szladits (New York, 1973), p. 33.
80. See Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of Meaning," in Language, Mind, and Knowledge, ed. K. Gunderson (Minneapolis, 1975);
81. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980);
82. and Scott Soames, Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 2002).
83. Alex Levine, "Individualism, Type Specimens, and the Scrutability of Species Membership," Biology and Philosophy 16 (June 2001): 327-28.
84. See also David L. Hull, "Exemplars and Scientific Change," PSA 1982, ed. Peter D. Asquith and Thomas Nickles, 2 vols. (East Lansing, Mich., 1983), 2:491-92.
85. Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (1762; Harmondsworth, 1968), 3.15, p. 141.
86. For example: Echium lycopsis L. (Fl. Angl.: 12. 1754) was published without a description or diagnosis but with reference to [seventeenth-century English botanist John] Ray (Syn. Meth. Stirp. Brit., ed. 3:227. 1724), in which a "Lycopsis" species was discussed with no description or diagnosis but with citation of earlier references, including [sixteenth-century Swiss botanist Gaspard] Bauhin (Pinax: 255. 1623). The accepted validating description of E. lycopsis is that of Bauhin, and the type must be chosen from the context of his work.... The first acceptable choice is that of the illustration, cited by both Ray and Bauhin, of "Echii altera species" in [sixteenth-century Flemish botanist Rembert] Dodonaeus (Stirp. Hist. Pempt.: 620. 1583). [SLC, art. 7.7]
87. See "The E-Type Initiative," http://140.247.119.145/Etypes/ About.htm
88. Quoted in FAQ, "ALL Species Foundation," http://www.all- species.org