Emigrants and pioneers: Moritz Wagner's "law of migration" in context

Knowing Global Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages 39-58

  Nyhart, Lynn K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

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EID: 79956130046     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (58)

1. Historians of medicine were among the earliest to call attention to the role of lay knowledge and its importance in shaping and contesting the knowledge of experts. See Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Preindustrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
2. Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, eds., Science in the Field, Osiris 11 (1996);
3. Daniel W. Schneider, "Local Knowledge, Environmental Politics, and the Founding of Ecology in the United States: Stephen Forbes and 'The Lake as a Microcosm' (1887)", Isis 91(2000):681-705;
4. Florian Charvolin, André Micoud, and Lynn K. Nyhart, eds., Des sciences citoyennes? La question de l'amateur dans les sciences naturalistes (La Tour d'Aigues, France: Editions de l'Aube, 2007).
5. On travelers' knowledge, see Stuart McCook, "'It May Be Truth, but It Is Not Evidence': Paul du Chaillu and the Legitimation of Evidence in the Field Sciences", Osiris 11(1996):177-197.
6. Environmental history is a large and rapidly growing field of historical inquiry; I have continued to find Bill Cronon's work an invaluable source of insight and inspiration. See William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1996).
7. On the history of medical geography, see Nicolaas Rupke, ed., Medical Geography in Historical Perspective (London: Wellcome Trust Centre, 2000);
8. Frank Barrett, Disease and Geography: The History of an Idea (Toronto: Atkinson College, Department of Geography, 2000).
9. Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellers, eds., Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments, Osiris 19 (2004).
10. Donald Waller, "Reshaping the Tree of Life: Human Impacts on the Future of Evolution", presentation at Darwin Day, University of Wisconsin, Madison, February 9, 2008.
11. Moritz Wagner, Die Darwin'sche Theorie und das Migrationsgesetz der Organismen (1868), in Die Entstehung der Arten durch räumliche Sonderung: Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Moriz Wagner (Basel, Switzerland: Benno Schwabe, 1889), 47-97. This was an expansion of a paper he had read at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences on March 2, 1868. Pagination is from the reprinted version in Wagner's collected essays, cited above. The title's English translation and all other unattributed translations are my own.
12. Woodruff D. Smith, "Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum", German Studies Review 3(1980):51-68.
13. Wagner, Die Darwin'sche Theorie, 79-80, on p. 79.
14. Wagner's "end of evolution" scenario, like his model of individual human pairs as the founders of races, seems to be a naturalistic interpretation of Judeo-Christian assumptions, though Wagner himself was not religious. On eschatology and the end of history in nineteenth-century earth science, see Nicolaas Rupke, "'The End of History' in the Early Picturing of Geological Time", History of Science 36(1998):61-90.
15. Wagner, Die Darwin'sche Theorie, 97.
16. Frank Sulloway, "Geographic Isolation in Darwin's Thinking: The Vicissitudes of a Crucial Idea", Studies in History of Biology 3(1979):23-65.
17. Interestingly, Wagner never claimed that Darwin had led him to his new, evolutionary interpretation of the biogeographical facts. It was his eponymous nephew and biographer who made that claim for him, after his death (in Wagner, Die Entstehung der Arten), and whom Sulloway cites (p. 49) as evidence of the senior Wagner's debt to Darwin.
18. Wagner, Die Darwin'sche Theorie, 52.
19. Sander Gliboff, Translation and Transformation: The Origins of German Darwinism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
20. Ernst Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1870), 326-332, on p. 332.
21. August Weismann, Ueber die Berechtigung der Darwin'schen Theorie: Ein Akademischer Vortrag gehalten am 8. Juli 1868 in der Aula der Universitat zu Breiburg im Breisgau (Leipzig, Germany: W. Engelmann, 1868), 32-36.
22. Moritz Wagner, Ueber den Einfluss der geographischen Isolierung und Kolonienbildung auf die morphologischen Veränderungen der Organismen: Vortrag in der Sitzung der k. bayer. Akademie der Wissenschaften vom 2. Jul. 1870, in Wagner, Die Entstehung der Arten, 101-116.
23. August Weismann, Ueber den Einfluss der Isolirung auf die Artbildung (Leipzig, Germany: W. Engelmann, 1872).
24. Haeckel to Weismann, 3 May 1871;
25. Weismann to Haeckel, 31 May 1871;
26. Haeckel to Weismann, 18 January 1872
27. in Georg Uschmann and Bernhard Hassenstein, "Der Briefwechsel zwischen Ernst Haeckel und August Weismann", in Kleine Festgabe aus Anlaß der hundertjährigen Wiederkehr der Gründung des Zoologischen Institutes der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena im Jahre 1865 durch Ernst Haeckel, ed. Manfred Gersch (Jena, Germany: Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, 1965), 28-30, 31-32.
28. Weismann to Haeckel, 31 May 1871, in ibid.
29. Wolfgang J. Smolka, Völkerkunde in München: Voraussetzungen, Möglichkeiten, und Entwicklungslinien ihrer Institutionalisierung (ca. 1850-1933) (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1994), 61-95.
30. Frederick B. Churchill, "August Weismann, a Developmental Evolutionist", in Ausgewählte Briefe und Dokumente: Selected Letters and Documents, ed. August Weismann, F. B. Churchill, and Helmut Risler (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Universitätsbibliothek, 1999), 2:786.
31. Sulloway, "Geographic Isolation", 55, 58.
32. Moritz Wagner, Reisen in der Regentschaft Algier in den Jahren 1836, 1837, und 1838, 3 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: Voss, 1841);
33. Wagner, der Kaukasus und das Land der Kosaken in den Jahren 1843-1846, 2 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: Arnoldi, 1848);
34. Wagner, Reise nach dem Ararat und dem Hochland Armenien (Stuttgart, Germany: Cotta, 1848);
35. Wagner, Reise nach Kolchis und nach den deutschen Colonien jenseits des Kaukasus: Mit Beiträgen zur Völkerkunde und Naturgeschichte Transkaukasiens (Leipzig, Germany: Arnoldi, 1850);
36. Wagner, Reise nach Persien und dem Lande der Kurden, 2 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: Arnoldi, 1852);
37. Wagner and Karl Scherzer, Reisen in Nordamerika in den Jahren 1852 und 1853, 3 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: Arnoldi, 1854);
38. Wagner and Scherzer, Die Republik Costa Rica in Central-Amerika mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Naturverhältnisse und der Frage der deutschen Auswanderung und Colonisation: Reisestudien und Skizzen aus den Jahren 1853 und 1854 (Leipzig, Germany: Arnoldi, 1856).
39. The authorship of the separate sections of Reisen in Nordamerika is identified by initials. Biographical information here and below is drawn from Smolka, Völkerkunde in München;
40. Friedrich Ratzel, "Wagner, Moritz", in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 40 (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften: 1896), 532-543.
41. Ratzel notes (pp. 535-536) that the natural history part of Wagner's Costa Rica researches (Wagner, Naturwissenschaftliche Reisen im tropischen Amerika [Stuttgart, Germany: Cotta, 1870]) did not appear until 1870, in a book that Ratzel said was, unfortunately, little read.
42. Smolka briefly discusses the large monetary value contemporaries assigned to Wagner's natural history collections from his American trip in the later 1850s; the evidence suggests the possibility that he hoped to live off the proceeds when he was unemployed in the early 1860s. See Smolka, Völkerkunde in München, 78-81.
43. Wagner, "Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte Vorderasiens", in Reise nach Persien, vol. 2, app. 2:282-315;
44. Wagner, "Beobachtungen über die Fauna der Kaukasusländer und der kolchischen Küste mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der geographischen Verbreitung der Thiere", in Reise nach Kolchis, 307-341.
45. Wagner, Reise nach Kolchis, 307.
46. Wagner and Scherzer, Reisen in Nordamerika, 1:49.
47. Wagner, der Kaukasus und das Land der Kosaken, 2:221-222.
48. Wagner, der Kaukasus und das Land der Kosaken, 2:206-213.
49. Wagner and Scherzer, Reisen in Nordamerika, 1:73-74.
50. Wagner, Die Darwin'sche Theorie, 63.
51. Wagner briefly discusses the practice of prairie burning in maintaining the prairie plants and keeping out trees in his 1854 book on North America, (Reisen in Nordamerika, 3:29-30), but without the explicit territorial interpretation.
52. Wagner, Reise nach Kolchis, 91-92.
53. Frank Lorenz Müller, "Imperialist Ambitions in Vormärz and Revolutionary Germany: The Agitation for German Settlement Colonies Overseas, 1840-1849", German History 17(1999):346-368.
54. Woodruff D. Smith, "The Ideology of German Colonialism, 1840-1906", Journal of Modern History 46(1974):641-663.
55. Wilhelm Roscher, Kolonien, Kolonial-Politik und Auswanderung, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, Germany: C. F. Winter, 1856).
56. Friedrich Ratzel, "Die Gesetze des räumlichen Wachstums der Staaten", Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 42(1896):97-107;
57. Smith, "Friedrich Ratzel", esp. 67.
58. Andreas W. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848-1914 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998), esp. chap. 3.