Seriality and scientific objects in the nineteenth century

History of Science

Volumn 48, Issue 3-4, 2010, Pages 251-285

  Hopwood, Nick ^a   Schaffer, Simon ^a   Secord, Jim ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 78751515156     PISSN: 00732753     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/007327531004800301     Document Type: Article

References (144)

1. Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The life of James Clerk Maxwell, with selections from his correspondence and occasional writings, new edn (London, 1884), 354.
2. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 242-87;
3. William F. Bynum, "The great chain of being after 40 years: An appraisal", History of science, xiii (1975), 1-28.
4. E.g., Joseph O'Connell, "Metrology: The creation of universality by the circulation of particulars", Social studies of science, xxiii (1993), 129-73
5. M. Norton Wise (ed.), The values of precision (Princeton, 1995);
6. Theodore M. Porter, Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life (Princeton, 1995);
7. Bruce J. Hunt, "Doing science in a global empire: Cable telegraphy and electrical physics in Victorian Britain", in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian science in context (Chicago, 1997), 312-33;
8. Simon Schaffer, "Metrology, metrication, and Victorian values", Victorian science in context, ibid., 438-74;
9. Volker Hess (ed.), Normierung der Gesundheit: Messende Verfahren der Medizin als kulturelle Praktik um 1900 (Husum, 1997);
10. Graeme J. N. Gooday, The morals of measurement: Accuracy, irony and trust in late Victorian electrical practice (Cambridge, 2004);
11. and (for literature reviews) Arne Hessenbruch, "Metrology" and "Standardization", in idem (ed.), Reader's guide to the history of science (London, 2000), 477-80 and 704-6.
12. Oxford English dictionary, s.v. "series"; Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue francaise (4 vols, Paris, 1877)
13. s.v. "série"; Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, viii (Leipzig, 1893), cols 636-55.
14. Lovejoy, Deutsches Worterbuch, op. cit. (ref. 2), 236.
15. On missing links in nineteenth-century culture see Gillian Beer, Open fields: Science in cultural encounter (Oxford, 1996), 115-15;
16. and James W. Cook, The arts of deception: Playing with fraud in the age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
17. Lovejoy, The arts of deception: Playing with fraud in the age of Barnum, op. cit. (ref. 2), 332.
18. Michel Foucault, The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (London, 1970), 150, 138, 275.
19. See also Henri Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck: Les classeszoologiques et l'idee de serie animale (1790-1830) (Paris, 1926);
20. Francois Jacob, The logic of life: A history of heredity (New York, 1982);
21. and Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1976).
22. Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Ueber die Verhältniße der organischen Kräfte unter einander in der Reihe der verschiedenen Organisationen, die Geseze und Folgen dieser Verhältniße (Stuttgart, 1793), 38-9;
23. Timothy Lenoir, The strategy of life: Teleology and mechanics in nineteenth-century German biology (Chicago, 1982), 43.
24. Karl Ernst v. Baer, "Beiträge zur Kenntniss der niedern Thiere. VII. Die Verwandtschafts-Verhältnisse unter den niedern Thierformen", Verhandlungen der Kaiserlichen Leopoldinisch-Carolinischen Akademie der Naturforscher, xiii (1827), 731-62, p. 740
25. translated according to "Fragments relating to philosophical zoology: Selected from the works of K. E. von Baer", in Scientific memoirs, selected from the transactions of foreign academies of science and from foreign journals: Natural history, ed. by Arthur Henfrey and Thomas Henry Huxley (London, 1853), 176-238, p. 179;
26. Foucault, Scientific memoirs, selected from the transactions of foreign academies of science and from foreign journals: Natural history, op. cit. (ref. 7), 271.
27. Toby A. Appel, "Henri de Blainville and the animal series: A nineteenth-century chain of being", Journal of the history of biology, xiii (1980), 291-319.
28. "Observations on the nature and importance of geology", Edinburgh new philosophical journal, i (1826), 292-302, p. 300.
29. The author of this article is uncertain, but it is certainly not Robert Edmond Grant and may even be Jameson himself: James A. Secord, "Edinburgh Lamarckians: Robert Jameson and Robert E. Grant", Journal of the history of biology, xxiv (1991), 1-18;
30. and, for discussion of contemporary 'ultraserialism', Adrian Desmond, The politics of evolution: Morphology, medicine and reform in radical London (Chicago, 1989), 5 n. 11, 45, 311.
31. Desmond, The politics of evolution: Morphology, medicine and reform in radical London, op. cit. (ref. 11), 263-4.
32. William Herschel, "Astronomical observations relating to the sidereal part of the heavens", Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, civ (1814), 248-84, p. 248.
33. John Herschel, "Account of some observations made with a 20-feet reflecting telescope", Memoirs of the Astronomical Society, ii (1826), 459-97, p. 488;
34. [John Pringle Nichol], "State of discovery and speculation concerning the nebulae", Westminster review, xxv (1836), 390-409, pp. 404-5n;
35. Michael Hoskin, "John Herschel's cosmology", Journal for the history of astronomy, xviii (1987), 1-34, p. 8;
36. Stephen G. Brush, Nebulous Earth: The origin of the solar system and the core of the Earth from Laplace to Jeffreys (Cambridge, 1996), 40-2.
37. Simon Schaffer, "The nebular hypothesis and the science of progress", in James R. Moore (ed.), History, humanity and evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge, 1989), 131-64, pp. 150-1.
38. Giulio Barsanti, La scala, la mappa, l'albero: Immagini e classificazioni della natura tra Sei e Ottocento (Florence, 1992).
39. On the transformation of maps, see Rachel Laudan, From mineralogy to geology: The foundations of a science, 1650-1830 (Chicago, 1987), 168-9;
40. Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the limits of time: The reconstruction of geohistory in the age of revolution (Chicago, 2005);
41. idem, "The emergence of a visual language for geological science, 1760-1840", History of science, xiv (1976), 149-95.
42. Esther Fischer-Homberger, Medizin vor Gericht: Gerichtsmedizin von der Renaissance bis zur Aufklärung (Bern, 1983), 249-50;
43. Barbara Duden, "Zwischen 'wahrem Wissen' und Prophetie: Konzeptionen des Ungeborenen", in Duden, Jürgen Schlumbohm and Patrice Veit (eds), Geschichte des Ungeborenen: Zur Erfahrungs- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Schwangerschaft, 17.-20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2002), 11-48
44. Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood, "Development", in Making visible embryos (2008; http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/s2.html).
45. See further Michael Hagner, "Enlightened monsters", in William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer (eds), The sciences in enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 175-217;
46. Janina Wellmann, "Keine Ikone der Entwicklung: Die Icones embryonum humanorum von Samuel Thomas Soemmerring", in Ulrich Johannes Schneider (ed.), Kulturen des Wissens im 18. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 2008), 585-94;
47. and idem, "Die Metamorphose der Bilder: Die Verwandlung der Insekten und ihre Darstellung vom Ende des 17. bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts", N. T. M., xvi (2008), 183-211.
48. David Gooding, "Experiment and concept formation in electromagnetic science and technology in England in the 1820s", History and technology, ii (1985), 151-76;
49. Michael Faraday, Experimental researches in electricity (London, 1839), pp. iii-iv;
50. Iwan Morus, Frankenstein's children: Electricity, exhibition and experiment in early nineteenth-century London (Princeton, 1998), 23-41.
51. Nick Hopwood, "Visual standards and disciplinary change: Normal plates, tables and stages in embryology", History of science, xliii (2005), 239-303.
52. Gowan Dawson is currently completing work on forms of publication in Victorian palaeontology. On Cuvier and Laplace, see Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, science and authority in post-Revolutionary France (Manchester, 1984);
53. and Charles Coulston Gillispie (with the collaboration of Robert Fox and Ivor Grattan-Guinness), Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749-1827: A life in exact science (Princeton, 1997).
54. For serial publication of novels see Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian serial (Charlottesville, VA, 1991);
55. Mary Poovey, Uneven developments: The ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988);
56. Norman N. Feltes, Modes of production of Victorian novels (Chicago, 1986);
57. and several of the essays in John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (eds), Literature in the marketplace: Nineteenth-century British publishing and reading practices (Cambridge, 1995).
58. John Herschel, "Sound", Encyclopaedia metropolitana, iv (London, 1830), 763-824;
59. and Susan Faye Cannon, Science in culture: The early Victorian period (New York, 1978), 180-1.
60. On the debates about transmutation, see Pietro Corsi, "The importance of French transformist ideas for the second volume of Lyell's Principles of geology", The British journal for the history of science, xi (1978), 221-44, pp. 227-9.
61. On periodicals, see Maurice Crosland, In the shadow of Lavoisier: The Annales de chimie and the establishment of a new science (Oxford, 1994);
62. W. H. Brock, "The development of commercial science journals in Victorian Britain", in A. J. Meadows (ed.), Development of science publishing in Europe (Amsterdam, 1980), 95-122;
63. Thomas H. Broman, "Periodical literature", in Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (eds), Books and the sciences in history (Cambridge, 2000), 225-38;
64. James A. Secord, "Science, technology and mathematics", in David McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge history of the book in Britain, vi: 1830-1914 (Cambridge, 2009), 443-74, pp. 451-9;
65. and W. F. Bynum, Stephen Lock and Roy Porter (eds), Medical journals and medical knowledge: Historical essays (London, 1992).
66. The significance of general periodicals for the sciences is brought out in the work of the SciPer Project at Leeds and Sheffield, especially Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes and Jonathan R. Topham, "Introduction" to Geoffrey Cantor et al. (eds), Science in the nineteenth-century periodical: Reading the magazine of nature (Cambridge, 2004), 1-34.
67. Simon Schaffer, "Scientific discoveries and the end of natural philosophy", Social studies of science, xvi (1986), 387-420.
68. On the 'spirit of the age', see James Chandler, England in 1819: The politics of literary culture and the case of Romantic historicism (Chicago, 1998).
69. James A. Secord, "How scientific conversation became shop talk", in Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the marketplace: Nineteenth-century sites and experiences (Chicago, 2007), 23-59.
70. For aspects of the French case, Dorinda Outram, "Before objectivity: Wives, patronage, and cultural reproduction in early nineteenth-century French science", in Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (eds), Uneasy careers and intimate lives: Women in science, 1789-1979 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), 1-30.
71. These issues have recently been extensively discussed, e.g., in C. A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world, 1780-1914 (Oxford, 2004);
72. Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and empire: Media, markets, and globalization, 1860-1930 (Durham, NC, 2007);
73. and the focus section edited by Sujit Sivasundaram, "Global histories of science", Isis, ci (2010), 95-158.
74. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral vistas: The expositions universelles, great exhibitions and world's fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, 1991);
75. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy Gwinn (eds), Fair representations: World's fairs and the modern world (Amsterdam, 1994);
76. Chantal Georgel (ed.), La jeunesse des musées: Les musées de France au XIXe siécle (Paris, 1994);
77. Eckhardt Fuchs (ed.), Weltausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1999);
78. Carla Yanni, Nature's museums: Victorian science and the architecture of display (London, 1999).
79. For Salter: James A. Secord, "The Geological Survey of Great Britain as a research school, 1839-1855", History of science, xxiv (1986), 223-75, p. 260;
80. for Neumayr: Martin J. S. Rudwick, The meaning of fossils: Episodes in the history of palaeontology (Chicago, 1985), 255.
81. Rudwick, The meaning of fossils: Episodes in the history of palaeontology, op. cit. (ref. 28), 252-4;
82. Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From devil's disciple to evolution's high priest (London, 1998), 471-3;
83. Constance Areson Clark, God - or gorilla: Images of evolution in the jazz age (Baltimore, 2008).
84. Nick Hopwood, "Pictures of evolution and charges of fraud: Ernst Haeckel's embryological illustrations", Isis, xcvii (2006), 260-301;
85. Julia Voss, Darwins Bilder: Ansichten der Evolutionstheorie 1837-1874 (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), 190-7.
86. E.g., Bert Theunissen, Eugène Dubois and the ape-man from Java: The history of the first missing link and its discoverer (Dordrecht, 1989).
87. Thomas Henry Huxley, Lay sermons, addresses and reviews (London, 1870), 117;
88. Desmond, Lay sermons, addresses and reviews, op. cit. (ref. 29), 367-8.
89. E. A. Davis and I. J. Falconer, J. J. Thomson and the discovery of the electron (London, 1997), 47-52, 73-6.
90. William R. Everdell, The first moderns: Profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought (Chicago, 1997), 75-6.
91. David K. van Keuren, "Museums and ideology: Augustus Pitt-Rivers, anthropological museums and social change in later Victorian Britain", in Patrick Brantlinger (ed.), Energy and entropy: Science and culture in Victorian Britain (Bloomington, 1989), 270-88, p. 277;
92. A. Lane Fox [Pitt Rivers], "On the principles of classification adopted in the arrangement of his anthropological collection", Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, iv (1874), 1-16, p. 3;
93. William Ryan Chapman, "Arranging ethnology: A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers and the typological tradition", in George W. Stocking, Jr (ed.), Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture (Madison, 1985), 15-48, p. 41.
94. Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001), 172-98;
95. H. Glenn Penny, Objects of culture: Ethnology and ethnographic museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, 2002).
96. See also Clark, God - or gorilla (ref. 29).
97. J. R. R. Christie and J. V. Golinski, "The spreading of the word: New directions in the historiography of chemistry, 1600-1800", History of science, xx (1982), 235-66;
98. Benjamin R. Cohen, "The element of the table: Visual discourse and the preperiodic representation of chemical classification", Configurations, xii (2004), 41-75.
99. André-Marie Ampère, "Essay towards a natural classification of simple bodies", Philosophical magazine, xlvii (1816), 438-46, p. 444.
100. For chemists and the chain of being see David M. Knight, The transcendental part of chemistry (Folkestone, 1978), 248-54.
101. Michael D. Gordin, A well-ordered thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the shadow of the periodic table (New York, 2004), 26.
102. Eric R. Scerri, The periodic table: Its story and its significance (Oxford, 2007), 251.
103. Simon Eliot, Some patterns and trends in British publishing, 1800-1919 (London, 1994);
104. Gary Bryan Magee, Productivity and performance in the paper industry: Labour, capital, and technology in Britain and America, 1860-1914 (Cambridge, 1997).
105. Staffan Müller-Wille, "Early Mendelism and the subversion of taxonomy: Epistemological obstacles as institutions", Studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, xxxvi (2005), 465-87;
106. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Müller-Wille, Vererbung: Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts (Frankfurt am Main, 2009), 160-5, 175-81.
107. Michel Foucault, Security, territory, population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978, ed. by Michel Senellart (Basingstoke, 2007), 315.
108. Ian Hacking, The taming of chance (Cambridge, 1990), 35-6, 123;
109. Theodore M. Porter, The rise of statistical thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, 1986), 86.
110. Charles Lyell, Principles of geology (London, 1833), iii, 31;
111. M. J. S. Rudwick, "Charles Lyell's dream of a statistical palaeontology", Palaeontology, xxi (1978), 225-44;
112. and idem, "Transposed concepts from the human sciences in the early work of Charles Lyell", in Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (eds), Images of the Earth: Essays in the history of the environmental sciences (Chalfont St Giles, 1979), 67-83.
113. Secord, Images of the Earth: Essays in the history of the environmental sciences, op. cit. (ref. 28), 250;
114. idem, Controversy in Victorian geology: The Cambrian - Silurian dispute (Princeton, 1986), 243.
115. Maureen Perkins, Visions of the future: Almanacs, time, and cultural change, 1775-1870 (Oxford, 1996), chap. 6;
116. Theresa Levitt, The shadow of enlightenment: Optical and political transparency in France, 1789-1848 (Oxford, 2009), 91-8, 101.
117. Katharine Anderson, Predicting the weather: Victorians and the science of meteorology (Chicago, 2005), 58-63.
118. Ibid., 207-8.
119. Andrew Ure, The philosophy of manufactures; or, an exposition of the scientific, moral and commercial economy of the factory system of Great Britain (London, 1835), 13;
120. W. V. Farrar, "Andrew Ure and the philosophy of manufactures", Notes and records of the Royal Society, xxvii (1973), 299-324;
121. Maxine Berg, The machinery question and the making of political economy, 1815-1848 (Cambridge, 1980), 199.
122. Berg, The machinery question and the making of political economy, 1815-1848, op. cit. (ref. 51), 282, cites a socialist journal of 1836;
123. Kufahl (1844) is cited in Richard Biernacki, The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 (Berkeley, 1997), 139.
124. For rival systems of serial factory layouts see Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and power: Freedom and control in the origin of modern building types (London, 1993), 261-70.
125. Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy, i (London, 1976), 463-5, 500-2, 544-5.
126. Compare Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization takes command: A contribution to anonymous history (New York, 1969), 99-100;
127. Thomas P. Hughes, "The order of the technological world", History of technology, v (1980), 1-16, pp. 5-7;
128. and Raniero Panzieri, "The capitalist use of machinery: Marx versus the 'objectivists'", in Phil Slater (ed.), Outlines of a critique of technology (London, 1980), 44-68.
129. Charles Babbage, The ninth Bridgewater treatise: A fragment, 2nd edn (London, 1838), 41-42, 66;
130. idem, Passages from the life of a philosopher (London, 1864), 387;
131. Simon Schaffer, "Babbage's intelligence: Calculating engines and the factory system", Critical inquiry, xxi (1994), 203-27;
132. Brian P. Dolan, "Representing novelty: Charles Babbage, Charles Lyell, and experiments in early Victorian geology", History of science, xxxvi (1998), 299-327.
133. For serial production and artful variation in commodity culture see Asa Briggs, Victorian things (Harmondsworth, 1990), 20-4, 370-4;
134. Thomas Richards, The commodity culture of Victorian England: Advertising and spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, 1990);
135. Lara Kriegel, Grand designs: Labor, empire and the museum in Victorian culture (Durham, NC, 2007). These debates about standards and adaptations in serial production had major scientific and moral aspects. Natural theology often used the minute adaptations of natural entities to argue for their divine origin. But in the 1870s, for example, Clerk Maxwell and his colleagues used magazines, encyclopaedia articles and sermons to debate whether molecules' uniformity made them resemble "manufactured articles" like mass-produced screws or shoes, and whether this uniformity was better evidence of molecules' divine manufacture than was ingenious adaptation.
136. See Campbell and Garnett, Grand designs: Labor, empire and the museum in Victorian culture, op. cit. (ref. 1), 300-2;
137. Paul Theerman, "James Clerk Maxwell and religion", American journal of physics, liv (1986), 312-17.
138. Giedion, American journal of physics, op. cit. (ref. 53), 17-30, 101-13;
139. Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of the nineteenth century (New York, 1977), 39-40;
140. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the 19th century (Berkeley, 1986), 61-4.
141. For panoramic vision in nineteenth-century sciences, see Charlotte Bigg, "The panorama, or la nature a coup d'oeil", in Erna Fiorentini (ed.), Observing nature - representing experience: The osmotic dynamics of Romanticism, 1800-1850 (Berlin, 2007), 73-95.
142. Grace Seiberling, Monet's series (New York, 1981), 29-35.
143. Anson Rabinbach, The human motor: Energy, fatigue and the origins of modernity (Berkeley, 1992), 103, 116.
144. Compare Robert M. Brain, "Representation on the line: Graphic recording instruments and scientific modernism", in Bruce Clark and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (eds), From energy to information: Representation in science and technology, art, and literature (Stanford, 2002), 155-77.