The Quest for the Invisible

The Quest for the Invisible Microscopy in the Enlightenment Marc J. Ratcliff The Quest for the Invisible To Eric an...

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The Quest for the Invisible Microscopy in the Enlightenment

Marc J. Ratcliff

The Quest for the Invisible

To Eric and Anne-Marie

The Quest for the Invisible Microscopy in the Enlightenment

Marc J. Ratcliff University of Geneva, Switzerland

© Marc J. Ratcliff 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Marc J. Ratcliff has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ratcliff, Marc J. The quest for the invisible : microscopy in the Enlightenment 1. Microscopy – History – 18th century I. Title 502.8'2'094 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ratcliff, Marc J. The quest for the invisible : microscopy in the Enlightenment / Marc J. Ratcliff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6150-4 (alk. paper) 1. Microscopy—History—18th century. I. Title. QH204.R38 2007 502.8'2094—dc22 09ANSHT ISBN 978-0-7546-6150-4

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Contents

List of Figures List of Charts and Tables Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

vii xi xiii xv

Introduction: Reasons for a New Historiography Part I 1

1

The Definition of Good Microscopical Objects 1680–1740

Production and Visibility of Microscopes in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century

13

2

The Study of Animalcules at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century 33

3

Insects, Hermaphrodites and Ambiguity

Part II 4

57

The Break with the Past 1740–1760s

Towards Marketing Strategies for the Microscope in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

77

5 Abraham Trembley, the Polyp and New Directions for Microscopical Research 103 6

The Disputes over Authority and Microscopical Observations

125

The Quest for the Invisible

vi

Part III

Infusoria and Microscopical Experiments. The True Invisible Objects1760s–1800s

7

The Quantifying Spirit in Microscopical Research and ‘Keeping Up’ with Invisible Objects 149

8

The Emergence of the Systematics of Infusoria

177

9 From Spontaneous Generation to the Limits of Life: The Microscopical Experimentalist Research from the 1760s to 1800 217 Conclusion Bibliography Prosopographical Index Author Index

245 265 293 313

List of Figures

The figures are courtesy Bibliothèque de Genève (BGE; formerly Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Geneva) and Musée d’Histoire des Sciences (MHS), Geneva. 1.1 Bion’s 1709 design for a plate of the Cabinet’s instruments, including three microscopes inconspicuously placed. Bion 1709, pl. 10 (MHS). 21 1.2 Comparing Wilson’s 1702 design for a simple microscope with Joblot’s 1718 plate for the microscope à liqueur highlights the difference between advertisement (Wilson) and diffusion of secrets (Joblot). Wilson 1702, pl. 1; Joblot 1718, pl. 5 (MHS). 23 1.3 Barker’s 1740 improved catoptric microscope. Barker 1740, plate, p. 170 (BGE). 29 2.1 A plate showing the kinds of animals described by Joblot. Joblot 1718, pl. 6 (MHS). 2.2 Here Joblot used a dotted line to show the various motions of the animalcules. Joblot 1718, pl. 2 (MHS). 2.3 Joblot showed many tools in his engravings, such as ‘animalcule conveyors’ and tweezers. Joblot 1718, pl. 3, 10 details (MHS). 3.1 Ruusscher’s plate demonstrating the animality of cochineal. Ruusscher 1729, p. 47 (BGE). 3.2 Ledermüller’s plate with magnified figures of cochineal, and depicting the Mexican harvest. Ledermüller 1763, pl. 28 (BGE). 3.3 Breyn’s table showing the coccus cycle in both sexes over the course of a year. Breyn 1733, table, pp. 30–31 (BGE).

35 37 38 64 66 68

4.1 Easier handling of the objects and better stability characterized the so-called Ellis-Cuff aquatic microscope in contrast with the Wilson-Cuff which required slides. Baker 1743, pl. 1; Ellis 1755, pl. 35 (MHS). 82 4.2 The flexible structure, with socket-and-ball mounted lenses, of Joblot’s microscope, Trembley’s microscope and Lyonet’s microscope. Joblot 1718, pl. 13 detail (MHS); Needham 1747, pl. 7 detail; Lyonet 1762, plate I (BGE). 84

viii

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4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

Microscopes made with wooden bases: in France, Thomin 1749; in Italy, Selva 1761; and in Bavaria, Gleichen’s microscope, in Ledermüller 1762. Thomin 1749, pl. 1 detail (MHS); Selva 1761, plate 2 (MHS); Ledermüller 1762, pl. 7 (BGE). 85 The compound Cuff microscope (1744). Cuff 1744, plate (MHS). 86 Abbé Nollet’s figure of a wood and ebony compound microscope, an example of which was acquired by Bonnet in 1741. Nollet 1743–1764, vol. 1, pl. 2 (MHS). 87 Selva’s plate of microscopes (1761). Selva 1761, pl. 2 (MHS). 90 San Martino’s simple microscope. Lupieri 1784, last plate (BGE). 97

5.1

Trembley’s polyps in a glass (1744). Trembley 1744, pl. 3 detail (BGE).

7.1a The natural comparison iconographic technique, from the time of Swammerdam to that of Müller. One image is drawn ‘natural size’, the other is magnified. Swammerdam 1685, pl. 2 detail; Wilson 1702, plate; Marsigli 1711/1733, plate p. 48 detail (BGE); Réaumur 1734–1742, vol. 3, 1738, pl. 46 (MHS). 7.1b Baster 1759, pl. 10 detail; Schaeffer 1755, pl. I detail; Müller 1776, plate, detail; Bjerkander 1792, pl. 10 detail (BGE). 7.2 For the series comparison in these illustrations, the draughtsman added a more magnified detail to a natural comparison. Réaumur 1734–1742, vol. 3, 1738, pl. 40 detail (MHS); de Geer 1753, plate, detail; Müller 1771, pl. 1; Goeze 1775, pl. VIII detail (BGE). 7.3 In this 1761 plate showing natural comparison a cross added to the letter and number referring to a figure indicates the magnification of the figure. Gesner 1765, pl. 1 (BGE). 7.4 Lyonet’s 1762 table comparing the practical and theoretical methods of measure of his own microscope. Lyonet 1762, table, p. 24 (BGE). 7.5 The Duc de Chaulnes’s dividing machine with a microscope. Duc de Chaulnes 1768, pl. 5 (MHS). 8.1 Hill’s illustration for the ‘Animalcule Kingdom’ (1752), without binomial nomenclature. Hill 1752, vol. 3, pl. I (BGE). 8.2 Linnaeus’s description of Chaos infusorium, which shows the change in his usual writing rules. Linnaeus 1767, vol. 1, pp. 1326–7 (BGE). 8.3 Müller’s 1771 table showing the reproduction of naiads through spontaneous division. Müller 1771, table (BGE). 8.4 Eichhorn’s realistic drawings of animalcules allowed them to be identified by Müller. Eichhorn 1778, pl. II (BGE). 8.5 Müller’s 1786 plate showing the division of a Kerona (figs 5, 6, 7, 8). Müller 1786, pl. 34 (BGE).

104

152 152

155 164 165 170 178 193 195 201 203

List of Figures

8.6 8.7

ix

Good-quality drawings of several animalcules by Corti, among which figs 1, 2, and 3 show animalcules dividing. Corti 1774, pl. II (BGE). 208 Adam’s plate of animalcules taken from Müller. Adams 1787, pl. 25 (MHS). 214

9.1 The animalcules observed by Goeze. Goeze 1773, pl. VII (BGE). 9.2 A worm that caused rusted wheat according to Roffredi. Roffredi 1775, pl. I (BGE). 9.3 Roffredi’s 1770 plate showing the mechanism of the proboscis in mosquitoes. Roffredi 1770, plate, detail (BGE). 9.4 Vaucher’s 1803 drawing showing the development of algae. Vaucher 1803, pl. 10 detail (BGE).

223 224 225 237

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List of Charts and Tables

Charts 1.1 Number of positive and negative titles between 1700 and 1749 (per 10 years and for each country) 2.1 Frequency of microscopical papers in Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences and in Philosophical Transactions, 1700–1730 (per five years) 5.1 Number of positive and negative titles per year for all Europe, 1730–1759 8.1 Number of citations of authors per country in Müller’s works of 1773 and 1786 8.2 The three waves of studies on animalcules, then infusoria, 1670–1786 (per country and period of publication) 8.3 Frequency of observations per authors cited, distributed by year of birth, with a logarithmic scale

17 53 116 206 209 210

Tables 2.1 ‘Advances’ in the experiments on spontaneous generation of animalcules 2.2 Frequency of microscopical papers per author in Philosophical Transactions, and Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, 1700–1730 3.1 Genealogical record of the parthenogenetic problem 4.1 Citations of microscope makers by scholars per country, 1700–1800 (excluding leaflets) 4.2 Number of microscopes used for scientific purposes produced per country, 1700–1800 8.1 Hill’s 1752 classification 8.2 Number of authors per country quoted by Ledermüller (1764) and Baker (1753) 8.3 Number of observations and of authors cited by Linnaeus in Systema Naturae (1767) for the five genera Vorticella, Volvox, Hydra, Furia and Chaos 8.4 Number of genera and species of infusoria in 1773 8.5 Number of genera and species of infusoria in 1786 8.6 Characters for Vorticella

44

53 71 98 102 179 187

194 196 204 205

xii

8.7 8.8 9.1

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Müller’s 1786 table for the subdivision of Vorticella Logical tree of Müller’s 1786 chart for Vorticella Ratio of citations of microscope makers according to period

205 206 228

Acknowledgments The text of the first version of this work, a PhD dissertation at University College London, has benefited from the help of several colleagues at the various Institutes to which I was a pilgrim over the course of three years. The Max Planck Institute für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, and the Institut d’histoire de la médecine et de la santé in Geneva, provided hospitality between 1997 and 2000. I am indebted to the scholars in these institutes – Lorraine Daston, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Janet Browne, Bill Bynum and Bernardino Fantini – for their support and their suggestions. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the many persons who have assisted my work at various stages of research and writing: Paola Bertucci, Paolo Brenni, Julie Boch, Denys de Caprona, Ivano Dal Prete, Michela Fazzari, Marian Fournier, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Jean Gayon, Dario Generali, Inge Keil, Ann La Berge, Maria Teresa Monti, Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, Jutta Schickore, Emma Spary, Isaline Stahl-Gretsch, Mary Terrall and Anthony Turner were sources of encouragement and ideas. Eric Ratcliff, Allison Morehead, Sean Alejandro Valles and Mary Murphy assisted me in the editing of the book. I also thank the anonymous reviewer whose criticisms were very helpful. Without the assistance of grant no. 8210-050423, from the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique, this research could not have been completed. I thank the Fonds Général de l’Université de Genève for a grant that aided the editing. I am grateful to the Royal Society, the Archives de l’Académie des Sciences de Paris, the Bibliothèque de Genève, and Mr. Jacques Trembley for allowing me to quote from manuscript sources in their collections. Finally, I thank the Bibliothèque de Genève and the Musée d’histoire des sciences in Geneva for permission to use illustrations from their – wonderful – book collections.

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List of Abbreviations

BGE Bibliothèque de Genève DSB Dictionary of Scientific Biography Journ. Phys. Observations sur la Physique, les Arts et l’Histoire Naturelle ou Journal de Physique MASP Memoires de l’Académie royale des sciences de Paris Mél. Soc. Turin Mélange de Philosophie et de Mathématiques de la Société de Turin MHS Musée d’Histoire des Sciences, Geneva PT Philosophical Transactions PV ASP Procès-verbaux de l’Académie des sciences de Paris

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Introduction

Reasons for a New Historiography

The main question of this work relates to the construction, during the Enlightenment, of scientific objects that escaped natural sight. At a time when only a few institutions defended scientific discourse and practice, when scholars were working to establish their legitimacy as a new power in Western society, on what grounds could such a new scientific object be constructed? Limiting the investigation to the framework of natural history, this object was the barely-visible or invisible body, only accessible at that time thanks to certain microscopes. Far from being the invisible world, or the atoms over which many savants of the previous century had argued, these microscopic things were considered to be whole and living organisms, and eventually determined to be species. We shall thus have to face several historically constructed aspects: understanding what contributed to making this scientific endeavour a lasting one and what did not; describing, within the various sociocultural contexts and marketplaces of the Enlightenment, the relationship between building, advertising and using microscopes; showing the existence of various networks interested in this object and evaluating the impact of their investigations on the further development of microscopical research. Creating an audience that trusts the discourse on these microscopical bodies is not the least of these aspects, and is key to its impact. Contrary to relativism, my claim is that there are not several epistemological ways that permit a community to create shared scientific objects such as microscopical bodies. My central thesis is that doing science means dealing both with communication and cognition; or, in other words, constructing a scientific object means addressing the communication components in a body of knowledge as if they were cognitive problems. As we shall see, though many scholars have addressed the cognitive problems raised by the microscopical bodies – Are they animals? What is their method of reproduction? What are their sizes? and so forth – only a few of them have addressed both the communication and the cognitive problems. Even fewer tried to actually solve the communication issue, according it as much importance as any scientific problem. While there are many roads to nowhere in Enlightenment microscopical research, I claim that there was only one heuristic way to create the foundation for stable microscopical knowledge, and that was by approaching the communication (and

�� See Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, 1995); Edward G. Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery (Cambridge, 1996); and Christof Lüthy, ‘Atomism, Lynceus, and the Fate of Seventeenth-Century Microscopy’, Early Science and Medicine, 1 (1996): 1–27.

The Quest for the Invisible

thus also the social) issue as a scientific problem. This has little to do with building a scholarly career, but it directly relates to the way a new scientific field can appear, become demarcated, and ultimately flourish. My story also radically contradicts claims in the tradition of the history of microscopy, which I shall outline briefly. Concerning the instrument, it is said that there was practically no optical improvement of the microscope in the eighteenth century. Yet, it was at this time that many morphological improvements led the microscope to acquire its modern shape. As a consequence of the preceding thesis concerning microscopes, the eighteenth-century use of the microscope is always presented in an unfavourable light in comparison to the treatment of seventeenthand nineteenth-century microscope use. Such a portrayal strengthens the contrast between the ‘good research’ carried out in the seventeenth century and the ‘amateur work’ of the eighteenth century. As Maria Rooseboom typically put it: ‘After the great discoveries of the pioneers, the 18th-century brought little sensational news in the fields of microscopes and microscopy’. Held by historians of the microscope since long before the 1960s, this view did not really change in its more recent version, maintaining that the seventeenth-century scientific ‘programme of microscopy’ did not continue during the Enlightenment. There is a discrepancy between data showing that a great number of microscopes existed in the eighteenth century, and this ‘absence’ of a programme. What were the microscopes used for? According to historians they served as amusements. With the exception of the Netherlands, the ‘decline of microscopy’ started between 1690 and 1710, after which time microscopes were prized as entertaining toys for amateurs: ‘The programme of microscopy does not survive into the eighteenth century as a resource for natural philosophy except at the relatively popular level’. Some historians believe the microscope was also used by a few scholars as a scientific device. As a consequence, eighteenth-century microscopical research has been very poorly studied, in contrast with that of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, a cursory glance over Enlightenment sources throws serious doubt on this general

�� See Reginald S. Clay and Thomas H. Court, The History of the Microscope (London, 1932). �� Maria Rooseboom, Microscopium (Leiden, 1956), p. 7. �� Ruestow, p. 276. �� Marian Fournier The Fabric of Life: The Rise and Decline of Seventeenth-Century Microscopy (PhD thesis, 1991), pp. 4, 16–17. �� Jim Bennett, ‘Malpighi and the Microscope’, in Domenico Bertoloni Meli (ed.), Marcello Malpighi Anatomist and Physician (Florence, 1997), pp. 63–72, p. 72. See also, on the microscope and other instruments considered as toys, Gerard L’E. Turner, ‘A Very Scientific Century’, in Turner, Scientific Instruments and Experimental Philosophy 1550–1850 (Aldershot, 1990; first pub. 1973), paper XIV, p. 19. �� See Fournier, Fabric of Life, p. 2, and Ann F. La Berge, ‘The History of Science and the History of Microscopy’, Perspectives on Science, 7/1 (1999): 111–42, pp. 111–12.

Introduction

view. Upon further investigation, it can be seen that the thesis of the ‘absence of microscopy’ virtually explodes on contact with supplementary sources, and the question is therefore whether these sources were intended for scientific purposes. Setting aside microanatomical research in the eighteenth century, I focus on the natural history of small-scale and invisible organisms. The construction of the microscopical object refers here to invisible and barely-visible organisms considered as independent wholes, and not microscopical parts of bigger organisms. Challenging the current credo that there was no scientific microscopical programme during the Enlightenment, I claim that there was a scientific microscopical design, and furthermore, that it was eighteenth-century scholars who established the conditions that made it possible for nineteenth-century research on microscopical bodies to be carried out. Constructing a Scientific Object The Historian’s Avenues During the eighteenth century, particular conditions made the take-off of microscopical research possible. To reconstruct the many failures and successes of that story, it is not enough to follow the endogenous development of a concept. Indeed, it is commonly believed that scientific use of the microscope could not be present because the epoch lacked the cell theory, or the concept of bacteria (identifying microscopical entities as the true causes of specific illness), or because optical microscopes were subject to inherent imperfections such as chromatic aberration. Yet this historical perspective emphasized the cognitive and technical aspects and ruled out the issue of communication. In order to understand the construction of this scientific object, I was thus required to forge a historical methodology that addresses technical, communication and cognition issues. The major methodological challenge was to move beyond the many smaller-scale case studies to create a macro-history. Moreover, to avoid misinterpretation of the sources, I also had to find ways to understand what they do and do not say. I believe the act of interpreting a source should be augmented and revised in accordance with the content of many other related sources. To produce this history, I did not deal just with discrete sources, but with intertwining networks of sources that define a space in which scientific objects are negotiated. The study of these networks analyses sources and groups them according to criteria such as similarity, interquotation, network coherence and consistency. This methodology is split into four parts: systematical research and exploitation of primary sources (two classic methods), serial citation and statistical study of sources. With serial citation, that is identifying similar quotations of arguments or ideas in various authors, one can identify consistent or widespread features in a network of sources. It enables one to sense when, where and between whom particular ideas

The Quest for the Invisible

or practices were shared. Statistical survey of sources plots one or several aspects of a network of sources into a chart or a table. To obtain the bibliographical data for Charts 1.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 and 9.1, I combined the following methods: 1. Comprehensive use of previous known sources and secondary literature on the history of microscopy. 2. Comprehensive analysis of Jona Dryander, Catalogus bibliothecae historico-naturalis Josephi Banks (4 vols, Londini, 1796–98), Achille Percheron, Bibliographie entomologique (Paris, 1837) and Louis Agassiz, Bibliographia zoologiae et geologiae (4 vols, London, 1848–54), looking for works on microscope/y, and for microscopical studies. 3. Making an index of topics and titles of the main eighteenth-century works on microscope/y, with sources located in the Max Planck Institute für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin Stadt-Bibliothek, Library of the Wellcome Institute in London, British Library, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire and Musée d’histoire des sciences in Geneva, Landmarks of Science and Gallica. 4. Searching in titles of books for the root microscop-/lens and related words, in English, French, Latin, German and Italian, using search engines of the Libraries: BVB-Munich, British Library, Bibliothèque nationale-Paris, Library of Congress. 5. All this material was analysed. 6. I also analysed 100 eighteenth-century scientific journals and periodicals and there unearthed many unknown papers dealing with microscope/y. (The 63 journals cited in the bibliography of my PhD, are here reduced to 16 for the sake of publication). 7. I used published and manuscript correspondences to find new data such as names of users or makers of microscopes. 8. All the data was entered into a Word file – now containing 2,900 titles – and a database. Works in the five languages that did not contain microscope or lens- (and any relating only to astronomy) were removed from the database. All the statistics were computed using a Macintosh software statview + graph, and all this work was done between 1997 and 2001. On the ground of this bibliographical research, the reconstruction of a network of sources was largely based on the interquotation of authors. Following those networks, I explored occasions and contexts where the microscopical object was at stake. Both virtual and actual travels yielded significant sources, the contributions of known and unknown scholars and gens de lettres from many European countries. As a first step, this enquiry required extended searches for many sources, both printed and manuscript, looking specifically for articles and mémoires in journals – the scientific forums of the Enlightenment. Half of the books I have

Introduction

analysed were already discussed by historians – usually in the context of national historiographic traditions. But historians have simply never known a vast majority of the mémoires analysed in this work. Much of this abundant material is new to academia and can be synthesized under the general category of the construction of a scientific object. Moreover, many of the histories of microscopy praised particular authors within national contexts while failing to show the role of the European networks that kept all of these scholars alive and well. Everyone agrees that anachronism should be banished from the history of science. Yet studying local or national history for historical scientific information while in fact everything was based on much more far-reaching networks is a geographical anachronism. Europe itself thus became a central object of investigation in this work. Historians of modern science during the Ancien Régime should at least think within the framework of Europe. Structures and Behaviours Shaping the Construction of the Microscopical Object How does this construction work within the actual history and from the viewpoint of the actors? On what structural basis, on what behavioural components, did Enlightenment scholars produce stable and longue durée knowledge of invisible things? In this section I shall evaluate three dimensions or axes, related to this issue. The first deals with finding the balance between size and communal visibility for microscopical objects, the second deals with adaptation to the constraints of the instrument, and the third involves two major naturalistic traditions making use of the microscope – systematics and experimentalism. As fundamental interpretative tools, communication and cognition are discussed for each of these axes. Balancing the size and visibility of microscopical objects As we shall see, the first seventeenth-century wave of research on microscopical bodies ebbed in the early Enlightenment. At the same time, certain scholars decided, to put it in modern language, to reboot microscopical research entirely. Many of the previous century’s observations on invisible bodies were not actually reproducible. A question that structured many debates at that time concerned both the reproducibility and the shared visibility of an observation. The distrust, controversies and silence concerning invisible bodies such as spermatic animalcules, and the neglect of the subject after 1720 show that scholars, contrary to the historian’s credo, were actually resetting criteria for microscopical research. They did not remove microscopes from cabinets, but abandoned a style of irreproducible scientific investigation. Eliminating microscopes would have deprived them of an instrument they acknowledged had the potential for discovery. But, it had to be used with caution and obey the communication rules of the scholars’ networks. So the best way to use it was to avoid research on truly invisible bodies, those too small to ensure repetition and consensus�� within the scientific community. Striving to observe the minutest microscopical objects had fascinated seventeenth-century users of the microscope, but they forgot to temper that fascination with shared visibility.

The Quest for the Invisible

Although applied previously, it was really only at the turn of the century that the criterion of shared vision emerged to balance the magnification. Given the lack of standardization in microscopes, it was necessary to find good microscopical objects conducive to the sharing of images and suited to the type of microscopes generally used. Ideal microscopical objects turned out to be small yet not invisible bodies, such as seeds, insects and their parts. During that period, scholars learned to use the microscope not as a super-performing instrument revealing a marvellous invisible world to only one scholar, but as a tool with particular technical constraints regarding scientific communication. The size of the microscopical objects – seeds and insects – would later be reduced, gradually becoming more invisible. During the 1740s came another radical change in the status of the microscopical naturalist object. Trembley’s polyp shifted the debate from insects towards aquatic animalcules and opened the door to a new world in nature, the world of invisible organisms. A series of questions emerged – Were these invisible beings animals, vegetables, or molecules? What was their method of reproduction? Were these things species? Were scholarly ideas and practices adapted to these new scientific objects? How should scholars negotiate the balance between shared knowledge and invisible organisms? Following this axis of interpretation through the whole century, there is no doubt that this shared microscopical object became more invisible, more abstract, from the time of Joblot and Réaumur to that of Müller and Spallanzani. The ‘microscopical object’ relates thus to bodies observed through a microscope, either small-scale and almost visible organisms (first part of the century), or true invisible bodies (second part of the century). What mattered for the eighteenth-century hard line of research on microscopical bodies was, contrary to the seventeenth-century style, to keep the balance between size and shared vision. Communication constraints on the microscope� Three major instrument-specific constraints defined the space in which users of the microscope could move: optical uncertainty, the ‘antisocial microscope’ and the lack of standardization. Under the first constraint, eighteenth-century scholars worked with optical uncertainty due to several types of defects in lenses. Because they were not ground uniformly in every part and the glass contained imperfections (bubbles, scratches, and so on), the light rays were not always equally refracted, and could produce unclear images. Strong magnification produced spherical aberration, transforming points into small circles, while compound microscopes (with eyepiece and objective lenses) could yield an image stippled with rainbow colours – that is, chromatic aberration. Well aware of these technical defects, scholars actually compensated for them, often by using several microscopes and lenses to observe one particular body, despite claims that simple microscopes were the tool for microscopical discoveries. For many investigations scholars used several �� See Brian J. Ford, Single Lens: The Story of the Simple Microscope (New York, 1985).

Introduction

microscopes, including compound microscopes, using comparison to monitor the relationship between the images and the real microscopical body. As regards the second constraint, using a microscope is essentially looking at an object that no one can see at the same time in the same way. Such a style of observation differed from those in many other scientific fields: for example, people assembled around a table for dissections, in a camera obscura, around an air pump, or attending a plant demonstration in a garden. Moreover, the shape and motion of the bodies were incommensurable with the perceptive and visual patterns of everyday life. An antisocial instrument, the microscope separated the observer from the simultaneous perceptual experience of others, and thus the problem was to socialize the discourse opened by the instrument, finding suitable language for the description. On the third point, since microscopes were made by individual artisans, the lack of standardization increased the difficulty of communication. Consequently, it was never certain that the reproduction of an observation would yield the same result. Scholars employed various strategies in an attempt to enable reproduction of observations. They used iconographical techniques, specified quantification of the magnification, mentioned microscope makers, described their instrument or used a solar microscope, shared microscopes in local communities, and sought to formulate a standardized language. To work with a microscope in this way was to operate under multiple constraints, ranging from the technical to the cognitive and to the communicative. The answer to these multiple constraints gradually took shape as a unifying, historically developed yet ‘simultaneous solution’: this ‘global solution’ was to tackle communication as a scientific issue. Scholars pondered how to communicate their findings so as to close the gap opened when using the instrument. They were also confronted with a choice between two styles of communication. Some scholars fully disclosed their method to others and encouraged a comprehensive repetition of their original procedure. Others concealed the methods and procedures they had used to achieve a particular result or description, of either an analytical procedure or of tools and microscopes used. I call the former case, use of the ‘shared microscope’. There, the text aims at analytically recreating the smallest detail concerning observations and procedure. The latter case, in which the text does not provide analytical means to reproduce the observation, I shall call use of the ‘exclusive microscope’. Using one or the other impacted, in radically different ways, the process of trusting the microscopical object. The microscope between the systematical and experimental traditions During the Enlightenment, the microscope was used for both experimental and systematical purposes, and mostly in the natural sciences, as opposed to the mechanical sciences. Natural sciences deal with types of languages and logic different from �� See Peter Galison, ‘Multiple Constraints, Simultaneous Solutions’, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 2 (1988): 157–63.

The Quest for the Invisible

those of experimental sciences. Describing, naming and classifying natural objects were constitutive issues mainly for the natural sciences as they developed in the Latin-language natural history tradition, known as systematics. Although distinct historiographic traditions split them in two fields, systematics and natural experimentalism will be discussed together, because they interacted strongly in Enlightenment microscopical research.10 Many historians, including Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Peter Dear, and Christian Licoppe, have discussed the experimental report to grasp the process of forming convictions. Yet, using the experimental report alone does not entitle the historian to describe as a whole the trust-production processes that occurred in the eighteenth-century natural sciences. Research with the microscope dealt also with classification and nomenclature, that is a set of logical, linguistic and formal technologies irreducible to the three pragmatic technologies, literary, material and social, discussed by Shapin and Schaffer.11 Notably the management of conviction and reproducibility runs differently in the systematic and experimentalist traditions, for the latter reproduced phenomena and pragmatic knowledge while the former ‘reproduced’ organisms through their determination. The experimental report promoted repetition of experimental phenomena, whereas the systematical report enabled the sharing of knowledge, through description, naming and classification of organisms. Moreover, this picture is complicated by the growing pre-eminence of the Latin naturalist history tradition that slowly took a Linnaean shape during the second half of the century. Constructing a scientific object relied also on many means analysed more precisely in the course of the book. How and when was the microscope regarded as a scientific tool, a routine instrument, and by whom? What was its relation to the laboratory? How did a particular piece of knowledge become established? How did new pieces of knowledge support subsequent pieces of knowledge? How can one distinguish the long-term from the short-term impact? Is there a relation between the scientific object and the production of microscopes? A suitable environment for stable knowledge was within the use of both traditions in a particular work. Indeed, each tradition formulated its own solution to the communication issue and their conjunction regularly entailed a heuristic shift. The connection occurred 10 �� Concerning the language and classification of the Latin natural history tradition see William T. Stearn, Botanical Latin: history, grammar, syntax, terminology and vocabulary (Newton Abbot, 1993), pp. 10–16, 41–4; Peter F. Stevens, The Development of Biological Systematics (New York, 1994), pp. 202-10; Mary M. Slaughter, Universal languages and scientific taxonomy in the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 55–64, 76–82; Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966), pp. 140–50. On experimentalism, see Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1971), and Walter Bernardi, Le metafisiche dell’embrione, scienze della vita e filosofia da Malpighi a Spallanzani, 1672–1793 (Florence, 1986). 11 �� Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985), p. 25.

Introduction

when an author took resources for his work from the two traditions, and linked together systematics and experimentalism, objects and phenomena. Or when knowledge circulated from one field to the other, which occurred in many instances, independently of their truth-value. Marsigli’s flowers of coral, Breyn’s investigation of Coccus, Réaumur’s definition of species, Trembley’s polyp, Müller’s infusoria, all displayed examples of this circulating knowledge. Many experimental research projects led to changing the place of certain beings in the systematical distributions or defined physiological characteristics included thus into the systematical definitions. Similarly the founding works of systematics led experimentalists to exhibit more precision in the determination of species, thus making the replication of their experiments much easier. New cultures of negotiating knowledge allowed the discussion of new questions and the shaping of a scientific object. Yet, many authors, such as Leeuwenhoek, Joblot, Buffon, Needham, Baker and Spallanzani, used almost exclusively experimental reports and had few systematical concerns. As will be shown, their research had less impact both on the long run and on establishing the microscopical scientific object. Trembley and Müller caused a major impact because both tackled the problem of communication as a cognitive issue, connecting experimental and systematical concerns.

Structure of the Book This book examines several case studies, from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It discusses various scientific designs apropos the microscopes used while shaping the construction of the microscopical object. For each case study I tried to distinguish features from all axes of interpretation, which led me to clarify, through examples, the concepts involved. While scrutinizing the culture of negotiating knowledge through which the microscopical object emerged, my plan is also to show that, although in the natural sciences few research projects achieved unanimous reception, all participated in the process of constructing the object. Part I discusses the heritage of seventeenth-century microscopical research and the reactions from new scholarly networks by tackling the problem of constructing a shared microscopical object. First, Chapter One assesses the early European market place for microscopes, then Chapter Two on Joblot presents a little-known microscopical work that demonstrated for the first time, in 1718, the vacuity of spontaneous generation in microscopic ‘animalcules of the infusions’. This work signalled the end of the early wave of research on invisible bodies. Chapters Two and Three show the shift in attitude of Enlightenment scholars, armed with microscopes, before the 1740s, that led to the reconstruction of a scientific object. A new programme of microscopical research was then designed that balanced standardized visibility and suitable magnification, and called for non-invisible objects such as insects and seeds.

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Part II sets out the change in the microscopical object in the 1740s and 1750s, and provides elements showing the break with the previous object. Chapter Four discusses the making and marketing of microscopes among several countries and points out the break in the 1740s. Chapter Five analyses Trembley’s strategy of communication that signalled a new kind of investigation with the microscope, while Chapter Six examines Needham and Buffon’s coup against the scholarly shared forms of communication and explains their impact on further research. Part III investigates the ‘true microscopical objects’, when, from the 1750s onward, scholars again dealt with invisible microscopical objects and changed once more the balance between size and shared vision. Chapter Seven discusses the impact of quantification on the construction, use of and trust in the microscopes. In particular, attempts at standardization are echoed in the spirit of quantification in microscopy. Chapter Eight analyses the emergent systematics of microscopical bodies that led to Müller’s work and to the modern accepted solution for communicating about microscopical species. Finally, Chapter Nine investigates the microscopical experimental field and the switch from the spontaneous generation issue to the animality issue. The Conclusion first deconstructs the classic history of microscopy while investigating the early nineteenth-century impact of the achromatic microscope. The new instrument led scholars to invent a heroic memory for late seventeenthcentury research while ignoring the vital contribution of the Enlightenment.

Part I The Definition of Good Microscopical Objects 1680–1740

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Chapter 1

Production and Visibility of Microscopes in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century

Changes in the Visibility of the European Microscope Market in the First Half of the Century In the latter years of the seventeenth century, it seems that the manufacture of microscopes was strongly reduced. When we include an international dimension present up until 1700, the trade in microscopes began to decrease after 1700 when transactions became more local and less visible, remaining so until the 1730s. While historians believe that the English captured a large part of that European market, I claim that there was no single model for the marketing of microscopes, and many European regions handled particularism and internationalism very differently. Such tensions and idiosyncrasies had characterized the microscope market since its beginning in the seventeenth century, and many scholars contributed to the circulation of microscopes and information about their making and microscopical discoveries. For instance, in Tuscany, the physician Francesco Redi availed himself of the Grand Duke’s microscopes, a Divini and an English, in 1668. Malpighi, who owned microscopes made by Eustachio Divini in Rome, also received lenses from the English optician John Mellin. In England, Philosophical Transactions reported on tests of a Divini microscope, Boyle used microscopes by the Augsburg maker Wiesel and another made in Rome, and the botanist �� Paolo Brenni, ‘L’industria degli strumenti scientifici in Francia nel XVIII e XIXe secolo’, in Gerard l’E. Turner (ed.), Storia delle scienze 1: gli strumenti (Turin, 1991), p. 450; Maurice Daumas, Les instruments scientifiques aux XVII et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1953), pp. 123–4. To the majority of historians of the instruments, the London microscopemakers are viewed as European leaders in conceiving, building and selling microscopes throughout the century: John R. Millburn, Adams of Fleet Street, Instrument Makers to King George III (Aldershot, 2000); R.H. Nuttall, Microscopes from the Frank Collection 1800–1860 (Jersey, 1979), pp. 8–13; Gunnar Pipping, The Chamber of Physics (Stockholm, 1977), p. 101; Gerard L’E. Turner, ‘The London Trade in Scientific Instrument-Making in the Eighteenth Century’, in Turner, Scientific Instruments, IX; Eva G.R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England 1714–1840 (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 57–8. �� A few examples are Christiaan and Constantijn Huygens, Homberg, Monconys. �� Francesco Redi, Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’Insetti (Firenze, 1668), pp. 69, 204.

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Richard Bradley said he used a Campani microscope. In 1686, Giuseppe Campani had advertised a microscope in the Leipzig-based Acta Eruditorum. Clearly, some prestigious microscopes circulated, and this can be tracked thanks to international correspondences, whereas the local and purely oral exchanges are much more difficult to detect. In fact, the proportion of foreign microscopes to domestic ones in Europe was probably less than a tenth. As is known, while state patent systems prevailed no international patent rights existed to prevent one maker from plagiarizing another’s ideas. In each country instrument makers were active in imitating, adapting, exploiting and producing inventions of mostly seventeenth-century scholars: for example, Campani’s screw-barrel and slide-holder, Homberg’s focusing adjustment, Ciampini’s two-lens eyepieces, Hartsoeker’s screw-barrel microscope, Honoré Fabri and Divini’s new combination of lenses, the field-lens by Wiesel and Francesco Fontana, and Hertel’s movable body and plane mirror. Nonetheless, English craftsmen brought perfection to small details and improved the instrument as a whole. But, most importantly, they integrated instruments into an expansive marketing culture, characterized by advertisement, competition and profit. Throughout Europe, models and new concepts for the microscope circulated until the early 1700s. In contrast to the more visible triangular Italian-English-Dutch practice of exchange focused around the Royal Society, the French and German markets each promoted less visible, although not autarkic, forms of exchange in the trade of microscopes, within important urban centres like Paris, Augsburg and Erlangen. In France, several networks of scholars that included Huygens, Homberg, and Joblot devised microscopes for their own work, but also collaborated with practitioners for the purpose of grinding lenses. For instance, Christiaan Huygens knew personally Louis XIV’s enameller Hubin, the opticians Guillaume Menard and his son, and Lebas and his widow, all of whom made and sold microscopes. In the late 1670s, �� On Malpighi’s microscope and the Italian market for instruments, see Bennett, pp. 64–70; Silvio A. Bedini, ‘Seventeenth-Century Italian Compound Microscopes’, Physis, 5 (1963): 383–422, pp. 410–15, 418; Michela Fazzari, ‘Incredibili visioni: Roma e i microscopi alla fine del ’600’, in Dario Generali and Marc J. Ratcliff (eds), From Makers to Users, Microscopes, Markets, and Scientific Practices in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Florence, 2007), pp. 3–42. On Mellin, see Clay and Court, p. 44. Robert Boyle, ‘Of The Usefulness of natural Philosophy, essay II’, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (6 vols, London, 1772), vol. 2, p. 25, mentioned that microscopes from Rome were used in London to search for the eels of vinegar. Richard Bradley, ‘Observations and Experiments relating to the Motion of the Sap in Vegetables’, Philosophical Transactions [hereafter PT], 29/349 (1716): 486–90, p. 488. �� See Bennett, pp. 68–70; Bedini, pp. 416, 421; Clay and Court, pp. 21–2, 41–2, 104–7. �� Lebas supplied lenses to Christiaan Huygens and Lamy; see Louis Puget, ‘Lettre de M. de Puget au R.P. Lamy’, Journal des sçavans (January 1704): 65–79, p. 66. Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes (22 vols, La Haye, 1888–1950), vol. 7, p. 133 (Lebas); vol. 10, p. 731 (Hubin), p. 727 (Mainard, for telescopes).

Production and Visibility of Microscopes

15

he specifically pressed the widow Lebas to reveal her secrets for the grinding of microscopical lenses. At the same time, Father Lamy was in touch with Gallon, Puget, Malebranche, the Lebas, and Joblot, who all shared an interest in making and using microscopes. In the provinces, other opticians and instrument makers were active: Villette and his son worked in Lyon, supplying mirrors to several academies, and lenses and microscopes to Puget, Malebranche and Father Lamy; Chérubin d’Orléans was in Chinon; Hautefeuille worked in Orléans; and Le Mariée was in Strasburg.10 The early years of the eighteenth century saw this European impetus towards exchange begin a transformation as artisans withdrew to their own countries and cities, with the exception of the Dutch Republic. Dutch instrument workshops, supported by a tradition that dated back to the 1650s, specialized in producing, among other items, optical instruments and microscopes in the eighteenthcentury.11 A business was usually handed down from father to son, and remained active sometimes for three generations, nearly a century. The Musschenbroeks’ business was kept alive between the 1660s and the 1740s, that of the Metz family extended over three generations, that of the van Deijls in Amsterdam, between 1740 and 1809.12 These workshops enjoyed a good reputation throughout Europe, maintaining privileged relations with many countries. For instance, the workshop run by the Musschenbroeks in Leiden sold physics instrument cabinets for the purpose of experimental philosophy to customers in Sweden, the German lands and Portugal.13 The stabilization of microscopy-related professions was also advanced in Holland through improvements in drawing and engraving. With a wealth of visual arts experience behind them, engravers and draughtsmen in the Low Countries had a fine reputation, and masters like Wandelaar and Van der Schley specialized in anatomical drawings. Microscopes, the anatomical tradition and optical �� Huygens, Oeuvres, vol. 8, pp. 212, 241: ‘Je suis aussi apres a faire quelque nouvelle tentative pour le parfait poli du verre que nostre petite vesve leBas tient fort secrette’. �� See Gallon to Puget, 6 July 1678 and 5 August 1678, in Oeuvres de Malebranche, ed. André Robinet (19 vols, Paris, 1955–65), vol. 18, pp. 134–5; Gallon to Puget, 16 November 1678, in H. Brocard (ed.), Louis de Puget, François Lamy, Louis Joblot. Leur action scientifique d’après de nouveaux documents (Bar-le-Duc, 1905), p. 25. �� Puget to Lamy, 22 November 1702, Lamy to Puget, 9 January 1703, in Louis de Puget, François Lamy…, pp. 58, 64; Puget to Malebranche, 21 October 1699, in Oeuvres de Malebranche, vol. 19, p. 695. 10 �� See Fournier, Early Microscopes (Leiden, 2003), p. 138. 11 �� Fournier, Early Microscopes, pp. 205–16 analyses more than 70 Dutch workshops. See also Webster database: http://historydb.adlerplanetarium.org/signatures/ 12 �� See Peter de Clercq, ‘Exporting Scientific Instruments around 1700, The Musschenbroek Documents in Marburg’, Tractrix, 3 (1991): 79–120, p. 79; Daumas, p. 328; Fournier, Early Microscopes, pp. 207, 212–13. 13 �� De Clercq, pp. 83–5.

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The Quest for the Invisible

machines in Holland favoured the professionalization of renowned artists with specialties in scientific illustration, who collaborated with early eighteenth-century physicians and anatomists such as Boerhaave, Ruysch, Muys, Albinus and Gaub.14 The iconographic trend extended to natural history with the works of Goedart, Swammerdam and Maria Sibylla Merian and they were succeeded by drawers such as Lyonet and Slabber who illustrated insects and invertebrates during the second half of the century. Therefore in the Dutch Republic, instrument makers, illustrators and engravers contributed to a dynamic meta-network that included the scholarly users of microscopes, editors, printers and publishers, as well as, at the end of the chain, reporters who reviewed, criticized and disseminated the intellectual products. Such conditions were not universal in Europe, and it was not unusual to find scholars who complained about the lack of a good illustrator, an engraver, a good publisher or a craftsman.15 In England, the growth of optical workshops was not matched by iconographic development before the second half of the century, while the Dutch Republic created a professional milieu that allowed, for instance, Trembley’s research on the polyp, that included Lyonet’s engravings, to expand under optimal conditions and subsequently to circulate, with major impact, in Europe. The withdrawal of English and continental makers to their home countries begs a comparison to the reduction of visibility in microscopical writings. Throughout Europe, microscopical ‘tags’, that is ‘microscope’ and related terms, in the titles of printed material were abandoned during the first four decades. Chart 1.1 plots the number of microscopical writings in five European countries, with titles containing or omitting (positive or negative area) a term relating to the microscope.

14 �� See Matthew Cobb, ‘Malpighi, Swammerdam and the Colourful Silkworm: Replication and Visual Representation in Early Modern Science’, Annals of Science, 59 (2002): 111–47; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the SeventeenthCentury (Chicago, 1983). 15 �� Charles Bonnet, Traité d’insectologie, ou Observations sur les pucerons (Paris, 1745), pp. xii–xiii; Bonnet to Trembley, 5 September 1743, in Virginia P. Dawson (ed.), Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Réaumur (Philadelphia, 1987), p. 227.

Production and Visibility of Microscopes

17

Chart 1.1 Number of positive and negative titles between 1700 and 1749 (per 10 years and for each country) Note: All the texts refer to microscopical research, but not all their titles do. A ‘positive title’ contained a word related to ‘microscope’, while a ‘negative title’ did not. Positive titles (above the line) measure the visibility, or visible production, while negative titles (below the line) measure invisible production. Each of the five columns (10 years each) represents the frequency of texts published in a country, between 1700 and 1749. The data is incomplete. Further inquiries would no doubt reveal a higher number of texts, but, most likely, visibility would not change significantly.

Chart 1.1 reveals several trends. The number of publications in England (positive and negative titles combined) diminished between 1700 and 1710. Visibility decreased between 1700 and 1720, as did the number of texts (Leeuwenhoek’s texts are taken into account). A steady and considerable supply of French publications, almost invisible, demonstrated that in France the microscope was a routine instrument. Italy showed a pattern close to the French one, but at half the production rate. The German lands and Holland followed different models of development. In the German lands, the number of texts increased and took off in the 1730s, a decade before the general surge in the 1740s. The sudden acceleration of Dutch publications in the 1720s corresponded to three factors. Holland was a European centre for printing and publication, a centre for anatomical works and a forum for journalists, whose reports on other scholars’ microscopical works made up a third of the Dutch data. This chart shows that France and England followed two distinct models for the production of microscopical texts, contrasting

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The Quest for the Invisible

in their rhythm, visibility and production. Strong market visibility, as defended by the English, was highly sensitive to the social representation of the microscope, a factor that induced a drop in visibility and production in the early years of the century. Marjorie Nicolson indeed demonstrated the negative influences writers and reporters exerted on the fall of microscopy.16 From the 1680s onwards people competed to grab the public’s attention by pelting the Royal Society with scathing and ironic critiques. They published pamphlets and satires, and performed plays that made scholarly activity appear ridiculous and useless, especially microscopy. On the other hand, the French were much less influenced by such factors, because the research there was much less visible, although it still continued. In other words, from the 1690s onwards the English felt the influence of changes in the social representations of the microscope, and their publication rates greatly declined. The other countries cultivated their own ways of producing microscopical texts, particularly with relation to the equation visibility + invisibility = production, and maintained autonomous rhythms of production. Thus, the decline at the turn of the century concerned mainly England and, to a lesser extent, Holland and Italy. These countries had experienced a resounding increase in microscopical research during the previous century, and the decline has in part been elucidated by historians. As regards Italy, for example, Marta Cavazza has shown that, in Bologna, the quarrel between the physicians Sbaraglia and Malpighi in the 1690s, led the conservative Galenist faction to oppose microscopic investigation as a useless technique in the traditional therapeutic theory.17 But, on the other hand, three countries adopted lower visibility for microscopical research – France, the German lands and Italy. The French scholars attempted to rationalize and routinize the instrument, a process better conducted behind the closed doors of academies; German scholars came up against the limits of their vast territorial market; while the Italians kept microscopical research alive in few areas. New Models and Styles in Microscope Production If Chart 1.1 represents the European production of microscopical texts, it also provides clues to the demand for instruments; for instance, the sudden increase in England during the 1740s mirrors an acknowledged growth in production of, and demand for, microscopes. In London, in the first decades of the century, several makers and opticians were active, including Mann, Marshall, Wilson, Culpeper, 16 �� Marjorie Nicolson, ‘The Microscope and English Imagination’, Smith College Studies in Modern Language, 16/4 (1935): 1–92, pp. 22–37. 17 �� Marta Cavazza, ‘The Uselessness of Anatomy: Mini and Sbaraglia versus Malpighi’, in Marcello Malpighi Anatomist and Physician, pp. 129–45, pp. 140–42; Anita Guerrini, ‘The Varieties of Mechanical Medicine: Borelli, Malpighi, Bellini, and Pitcairne’, in Marcello Malpighi Anatomist and Physician, pp. 111–28, pp. 117–20; C. Wilson, pp. 232–5.

Production and Visibility of Microscopes

19

Cole, Loft and Scarlett the optician to King George II. Privileged relationships with the fellows of the Royal Society could serve to boost reputation for certain among them, such as James Wilson whose simple microscope was advertised in Philosophical Transactions in 1702, thus reaching a wider international audience.18 Yet, there are few traces of foreign scholars buying English microscopes before the 1740s, and moreover, although London makers produced classic models, or invented new ones such as the Culpeper compound microscope in 1725,19 according to Chart 1.1 it appears that the demand was decreasing between 1700 and 1720. Chart 1.1 offers �� clues as to my claim that throughout Europe the production of microscopes, and not only microscopical texts, followed different and independent patterns. The demand for microscopes was kept alive differently in each country, with reduced international exchange until 1740. In France, between the 1680s and the 1720s, opticians, enamellers and mathematical instrument makers like Butterfield, Hubin, Bion, the widow Lebas, Grégoire, Pouilly, the Chapotots, the Lefebvres, Gatellier, Gilbert François and Langlois built several types of microscopes – after Huygens, three lenses, compass, flea, screw-barrel, Joblot’s microscopes – that satisfied most of the demand from French academicians, physicians, ‘the curious’ and philosophers.20 During the 1720s, certain Paris scholars tried to sustain production through institutional control but the attempt failed. Indeed, the 1728 rules of the Société des Arts supported the making and assessment of microscopes among other instruments. Created in 1726 but torpedoed by the Académie in 1733, the Society gathered practitioners and makers such as the clock maker Sully, Gallon the editor of Machines et Inventions approuvées par l’Académie, abbé Nollet and the optician Thomin.21 A letter from Nollet, physicist and instrument maker, provides also good evidence of the divergence between French and English microscopical cultures. Since 1738, he had advertised four 18 �� James Wilson, ‘The Description and manner of Using a late Invented Set of small Pocket-Microscopes’, PT, 23/281 (1702): 1241–7. 19 �� Culpeper’s leaflet is undated. See Clay and Court, pp. 108–15. 20 �� Butterfield, Bion, the Chapotots, Grégoire, Pouilly and probably the widow Lebas built simple microscopes after Huygens’s design. See Marian Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Microscopical Researches’, Janus, 68 (1981): 199–209, p. 201; Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Designs for a Simple Microscope’, Annals of Science, 46 (1989): 575–96, pp. 591–3; Anthony Turner, ‘Microscopical advances’, ENDOXA, 19 (2005): 41–57; Ruestow, p. 26; Fournier, Early Microscopes, p. 27; Raymond V. Giordano, Singular Beauty (MIT, 2006), p. 13; G. Turner, Catalogue of microscopes (Florence, 1991), pp. 30–33. Daumas, pp. 111–12, reported on the microscope by Gratellié. Butterfield’s pupil Langlois, Jean Lefebvre and his son Etienne-Jean made microscopes for and after Joblot, see Giordano, p. 21. See also those entries in Denis Beaudoin, Paolo Brenni and Anthony Turner, A Bio-bibliographical Dictionary of Precision Instrument-makers and Related Craftsmen in France 1430–1960 (forthcoming). 21 �� See Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: the Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 109–10.

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20

types of microscopes from his Paris workshop, but, in 1741, when the Geneva physicist Jallabert begged him for a ‘double microscope’, the standard English name for the compound microscope, Nollet did not unders�� tand his request, and asked: What do you mean exactly by double microscope: does this mean that you want two of them, or you want a microscope with several spare lenses; My microscopes have three lenses, with five objective lenses that vary the degrees of strength.22

Up to the 1740s, even a physicist and designer of instruments like Nollet who had travelled in the mid-1730s to meet English and Dutch makers and scholars in person did not know the English terminology. In France the compound microscope was usually called the ‘three lenses microscope’.23 Concentrated on Paris, the eighteenth-century French self-sufficient market fits with the advertising strategies of the practitioners who produced extensive treatises on the making of instruments where they mixed the educational and advertising functions. Bion’s 1709 Traité de la construction et�� des principaux usages des instrumens de mathématique became a classic, issued in six editions over forty-three years, five German translations were reprinted, as was an English translation. Figure 1.1 shows a plate illustrating Bion’s models of microscopes among many other instruments.24

22

�� Nollet to Jallabert, 10 February 1741, in Théories électriques du XVIIIe siècle: correspondance entre l’abbé Nollet (1700–1770) et le physicien genevois Jean Jallabert (1712–1768), ed. Isaac Benguigui (Geneva, 1984), p. 104. 23 �� Louis Joblot, Descriptions et usages de plusieurs nouveaux microscopes, tant simples que composez (2 vols, Paris, 1718), part 1, pp. 63–4; Nicolas Bion, Traité de la construction et des principaux usages des instrumens de mathematique (Paris, 1709), p. 112; Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, ‘Anatomie de la poire’, Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences de Paris [hereafter MASP] (1730, pub. 1732): 299–327, p. 314; Marc Mitouflet Thomin, Traité d’optique mechanique (Paris, 1749), p. 132; Alexis Magny, ‘Sur le Microscope composé, ou à 3 verres, & universel’, Journal œconomique (August 1753): 48–79, p. 48; Jean-Jacques Béraud, ‘Mémoire … sur l’alun’, Observations sur la Physique, les Arts et l’Histoire Naturelle ou Journal de Physique [hereafter Journ. Phys.], (1791): 241–245, p. 244. 24 �� Bion, pp. 111–14, plate 10, figs I, K, L.

Production and Visibility of Microscopes

21

Fig. 1.1 Bion’s 1709 design for a plate of the Cabinet’s instruments, including three microscopes inconspicuously placed (bottom, figs I, K, L)

The Quest for the Invisible

22

Following Bion and Joblot, certain French makers shared some trade secrets. For instance, the �� optician Passemant revealed the formula of his brass alloy in his 1738 book and his colleague Thomin explained the grinding of lenses in his Traité d’optique méchanique (1749). When Nollet set about selling whole cabinets de physique, he publicized his business with a combination of traditional advertising material and educational books – his 1738 catalogue of instruments, Programme pour un cours de physique expérimentale, and the 1743–47 Leçons de physique expérimentale. Whereas English practitioners used printed trade cards and loose sheets, as well as insertions in journals and newspapers to advertise their goods, their French counterparts did not use loose-leaf or leaflet advertising flyers. The concealment of advertising behind technical education contrasted with the marketing strategy soon adopted by the English. Moreover, academies – not only the French – fought for the dissemination of hidden techniques, to register, evaluate and circulate people’s inventions. Réaumur, who discovered methods of dying, and of making artificial pearls, steel, ceramics and papers, published many of his results in Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences. On microscopes, Job�� lot’s behaviour widely diverged from that of the practitioners who strove to conceal their trade secrets. Joblot provided full instructions for building microscopes and not just, like most artisans, an advertisement of the product.25 A comparison of Joblot’s 1718 plate for the microscope à liqueur,26 with Wilson’s 1702 design for a simple microscope outlines the difference between diffusion and withholding of technical details (Fig.1.2). Joblot’s diagram, drawn to scale, would enable anyone, skilled enough in woodturning, to build the same instrument. However, one cannot separate the French from the English on this point; comparatively better disclosure of practical knowledge and know-how distinguished academics from craftsmen in both countries. As a rule, academicians were required to publicly disclose their methods, while manufacturers concealed their trade secrets, and this was true for the whole of Europe.27 In London, certain craftsmen, such as George Adams and Benjamin Martin, also wanted to combine their scholarly activities with the making of microscope.28 Yet, when Adams translated Joblot’s book in his 1746 Micrographia illustrata, he omitted the first part which revealed precise blueprints 25

�� See Daumas, p. 109. �� The French name for this simple microscope derives from its function. It allows microscopical observations of infusions or ‘liqueurs’. 27 �� On that issue, see Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 97–114; Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, L’invention technique au Siècle des Lumières (Paris, 2000); Mario Biagioli, ‘From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe’, History of Science, 44 (2006): 139–86. 28 �� See Millburn, Adams of Fleet Street, pp. 85–91; John R. Millburn, Benjamin Martin, Author, Instrument-Maker, and ‘Country Showman’ (Leiden, 1976); Jutta Schickore, ‘“The Most Signal and Illustrious Instance of the Use of the Microscope” – Benjamin Martin on 26

Fig. 1.2 Comparing Wilson’s 1702 design for a simple microscope (left: fig. I) with Joblot’s 1718 plate for the microscope à liqueur (right) highlights the difference between advertisement (Wilson) and diffusion of secrets (Joblot)

24

The Quest for the Invisible

for microscopes, while scholars such as the mathematician Robert Smith set out guidelines for constructing microscopes and grinding lenses in his comprehensive 1738 work A Compleat System of Opticks.29 Speaking a language that was virtually unknown to European scholars, the Germans developed their own market for microscopes and designed new tools for it, especially during the 1710s through the publication of several books that boosted the interest for optics and the microscope. Theodor Balthasar, a professor of mathematics in Erlangen explained in 1710 the construction of micrometers, while the professor to Coburg College, Conradi, demonstrated two-lens objectives in his book on optics. In Gießen, the physician Valentini also dedicated a few chapters of his 1714 Museum Museorum, to optical machines and microscopes. Similarly, in Halle, the mathematician Hertel, who fitted a mirror to the microscope, described several methods for grinding glasses in his 1716 Comprehensive instructions on grinding glass. Eventually, in Wittenberg, Leutmann invented a concave mirror for the microscope. His widely acclaimed book, first published in 1719, went through five editions in twenty years, and in 1725 Leutmann was invited to become professor of optics and mechanics at the St Petersburg Academy.30 While this impetus originated from central Germany during the 1710s, optical traditions were developed in the south German lands from the seventeenth century onwards. Inge Keil showed that in Augsburg the making of microscopes began with Wiesel in the 1630s, and it was taken over and developed into a tradition that included well-known makers such as Depiere, Cuno, Brander and Höschel.31 Not far, in Nuremberg, practitioners marketed wood microscopes while scholars promoted treatises on optics and physics.32 Indeed, the Nuremberg tradition of mathematics and natural history developed practical optics, successively improving on the heritage of Griendel von Ach, Zahn, Johann Heinrich Müller, Mercklein, and Doppelmayr who translated Bion’s treatise in 1726 and had Brander among his students.33 Therefore, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the German countries, which did not experience a ‘golden age of microscopy’ like that of the insect eye’, in From Makers to Users, pp. 271–88, and Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye (Chicago, 2007), pp. 19–36. 29 �� Robert Smith, Cours complet d’optique, trans. Esprit Pézenas (2 vols, Avignon, 1767; 1st edn 1738), vol. 2, pp. 320–30. 30 �� See Pieter Harting, Das Mikroskop (Braunschweig, 1859), pp. 618, 670–72, 675, 877–8, Clay and Court, pp. 104, 189, 213. 31 �� See Inge Keil, Augustanus Opticus. Johann Wiesel (1583–1662) und 200 Jahre optisches Handwerk in Augsburg (Berlin, 2000), and Keil, ‘Microscopes made in Augsburg’, in From Makers to Users, pp. 43–71. 32 �� Johannes Zahn, �� Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus (Norimbergae, 1702; 1st edn 1685), pp. 708, 748–50. 33 �� On the Nuremberg microscopical tradition, see Armin Geus, ‘Die Microscopia des Cosmus Conrad Cuno’, Mikrokosmos 65/5 (1976): 132–6, pp. 133–4; Hubert de Martin, Griendel von Ach, ein Mikroskopiker der Barockzeit (Vienna, 1970), pp. 11–13.

Production and Visibility of Microscopes

25

Bologna or London, also had no need to reduce the visibility of their microscopical works. Practical and theoretical knowledge for making microscopes and grinding lenses was taught and transmitted by scholars and makers through workshops, societies, academies and universities in cities throughout the German Empire. The existence of Italian optical workshops in the eighteenth century has been documented thanks to the works of Silvio Bedini and Alberto Lualdi. During the last decades of the seventeenth century, microscope manufacturers established themselves in Rome, and optical workshops existed also in such cities as Bologna, Milan, Naples, Florence and Venice.34 Rome had several major competing microscope makers – Campani, Divini, Tortoni, Galland and Cellio – and English gentlemen, such as the physician Ellis Veryard definitely met them when travelling across Europe.35 In particular, eminent Italian scholars used microscopes from Rome for research. Some of those used by Cestoni, Malpighi, Redi, Marsigli and probably Baglivi came from Rome, and the physician Bonomo who discovered the acarus scabiei praised the Roman microscopes.36 Thanks to the Roman Accademia fisicomatematica lead by Monsignor Ciampini between 1677 and the 1690s, the reputation of these instruments extended beyond Italy’s borders. Among the microscope makers in Rome, religious men were also active, for instance the Jesuit Filippo Buonanni invented a highly advanced horizontal microscope in the early 1690s, regarded by his contemporaries as better than those of Campani and Tortoni.37 Early in the eighteenth century, the Italian market underwent a decline, and the demand for microscopes slowed. Rome, which had been in the forefront of competitive and creative production lost its prominent place after Campani’s death in 1715, and new practitioners emerged in the north of Italy, such as Patroni and

34 �� The names of the main Italian optical makers, professional and amateur, are as follows: in Bologna: Belletti, Manzini, Manfredi, Stancari; in Naples: Fontana; in Tuscany: Salvetti, Coveri; in Genova: Degola. 35 �� On these instrument makers, see Silvio Bedini and Arthur G. Bennett, ‘“A Treatise on Optics” by Giovanni Christoforo Bolantio’, Annals of Science, 52/2 (1995): 103–26, pp. 104–7; Alberto Lualdi, ‘Repertorio dei costruttori italiani di strumenti scientifici’, Nuncius, 15/1 (2000): 169–234; A. Turner, p. 50. Ellis Veryard, An Account of Divers Choice Remarks (London, 1701), p. 199. 36 �� Baglivi worked in Rome and said he used a compound microscope with three lenses: Baglivi, ‘De Anatome, Morsu, & Effectibus Tarantulae’, in Opera Omnia (Antwerpiae, 1715; 1st edn 1698), pp. 599–640, p. 612, and another with four lenses (ibid., p. 399); Redi, Esperienze, pp. 69, 204, used a Divini Microscope; Giovanni Cosimo Bonomo [and Diacinto Cestoni], Osservazioni intorno a’ pellicelli del corpo umano (Firenze, 1687), p. 5; see Bedini, p. 418; and Dario Generali, ‘L’uso del microscopio in Vallisneri’, in From Makers to Users, pp. 231–70. 37 �� Michela Fazzari, ‘Redi, Buonanni e la controversia sulla generazione spontanea’, in Walter Bernardi and Luigi Guerrini (eds), Francesco Redi un protagonista della scienza moderna (Florence, 1999), pp. 97–127, p. 118. Fazzari, ‘Incredibili visioni’, pp. 19–20.

26

The Quest for the Invisible

Baillou in Milan.38 These workshops perpetuated professional microscope making, and Patroni made a binocular model in the 1720s. He was known abroad, yet no leaflet for his microscopes is known.39 However, this decline does not match the scientific uses of the instrument. Indeed, between 1700 and 1740, microscopes were promoted in Italian universities and academies of central Italy (Florence, Bologna) and northern Italy (Padua, Turin, Milan), by naturalists and physicians who continued to use them for their private research, although with scarce visibility.40 The most famous is perhaps Pier Antonio Micheli of Florence who discovered the method of reproduction of fungi in 1718 and described, using the microscope, hundreds of cryptogam species in his 1729 Nova plantarum genera. To Maurice Daumas, Italy was in a ‘state of decline of the industry of instruments during the whole eighteenth-century’.41 Nevertheless, the question to be dealt with is more complex because of Italy’s spreading urban centres and different cultures of instrument making. In London and Paris the vast majority of craftsmen grouped themselves into distinct districts based on their specialties, while the Italian artisans were dispersed throughout the country in the cities of the small political states. Information about Italian microscopes and makers circulated much more in private correspondences than in printed text. And, although they mentioned microscopes, scholars who took an active part in the Italian microscopical research during the first half of the century usually gave no information about the manufacturers of those microscopes. Moreover, in order to obtain an instrument, Italian scholars also turned to amateur makers; for instance, during the 1710s, the professor of medicine in Padua, Antonio Vallisneri, used good simple microscopes made by amateurs in Turin and Brescia.42 Similarly, in a 1743 microscopical investigation, the Tuscan Count Francesco Ginanni mentioned a ‘very bright lens’ polished by his uncle Giuseppe Zinanni.43 Several clues show that this was not uncommon practice in Italy, where religious men in particular were skilled in practical optics. Indeed, after Patroni’s binocular device, no new microscope was designed until 38 �� See Alberto Lualdi, ‘Microscope makers in eighteenth-century northern Italy’, in From Makers to Users, pp. 113–34. 39 �� Lualdi, ‘Microscope makers …’, pp. 114–17. 40 �� Antonio Vallisneri, ‘Secondo dialogo sopra la curiosa origine di molti insetti’, Galleria di Minerva, 3 (1700): 297–318; Louis Bourguet, Lettres philosophiques sur la formation des sels et des crystaux … (Amsterdam, 1729); Carlo Mazzucchelli, Notizie pratiche intorno all’epidemia degli animali bovini insurta nell’anno 1735 (Milano, 1736), pp. 10–11. Among the others were Marsigli, Cestoni, Micheli, Cocchi, the Ginanni, Monti, and the physicians Lancisi, Nigrisoli, Bianchi, and Janus Plancus. 41 �� Daumas, p. 324. 42 �� Antonio Vallisneri, Opere fisico-mediche (3 vols, Venezia, 1733), vol. 2, p. 104, cited Falchi and the physician Bono. See Generali, pp. 264–7. 43 �� Francesco Ginanni, ‘Lettera intorno alla scoperta degli insetti che si molteplicano mediante la sezione de’ loro corpi’, Raccolta d’Opuscoli Scientifici di Calogerà, 37 (1747): 253–94, p. 266.

Production and Visibility of Microscopes

27

1749, when Father Della Torre in Naples renewed the interest in simple globular lenses and cast spherule microscopes.44 From Changes in Shape to Changes in Production The production of microscopes was also determined by practice and by the particular needs scholars expressed concerning features, optics and morphology. Notably, the shape influenced the position taken on observation, the style of science and, indirectly, the scholars’ demand for microscopes. In this respect, the death of Leeuwenhoek marked the end of an era. In his will he had bequeathed 26 of his microscopes to the Royal Society and these arrived in England in 1723. They were described at a meeting of the Society by Newton’s pupil Martin Folkes, most of them having an object fixed with glue – eyes of gnats and flies, fibres of fish and hairs, blood globules and desiccated animalcula in semine masculino – objects ‘on which he had made the most considerable discoveries’.45 While the Society fellows could examine them, Folkes discussed the high quality of the microscopes as well as Leeuwenhoek’s skill, especially his experience, assiduity, and preparations. However, the results of his analysis turned out to be rather deceptive because Folkes recommended that the fellows should not ‘rashly condemn any of this gentleman’s observations, tho’ even with his own glasses, we should not immediately be able to verify them our selves’.46 This episode indicates the status the Royal Society granted to Leeuwenhoek’s observations. They had to be accepted regardless of the fact that scholars were unable to repeat them, even with Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes in hand. Although no one was able to verify the observations, the fellows were committed to trusting Folkes’ word: ‘There can surely be no reason to distrust his accuracy in those others [discoveries] which have not yet been so frequently or carefully examin’d’.47 Although Leeuwenhoek acquired many skills, his resistance to open communication prevented these skills from being developed into standards both for making microscopes and for their use, and witnesses for this fact are not lacking: ‘I had not’, reported Archibald Adams in 1710, ‘an opportunity of examining Mr Leeuwenhoek’s glasses particularly, which is a favour he allows to none.’48

44

�� Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni intorno la storia naturale (Napoli, 1763), pp. xiv–xv, 35. 45 �� Martin Folkes, ‘Some Account of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s curious Microscopes, lately presented to the Royal Society’, PT, 32/380 (1723): 446–53, p. 447. 46 �� Ibid., p. 452. 47 �� Ibid., p. 453. 48 �� Archibald Adams, ‘Concerning the Manner of Making Microscopes’, PT, 27/325 (1710): 24–7, p. 24. Others complained, such as the French anatomist Petit in 1730. See also Maurizio Roffredi, ‘Mémoire sur la trompe du cousin, & sur celle du Taon’, Mélanges

28

The Quest for the Invisible

Leibniz similarly begged Leeuwenhoek to divulge the secret of his microscopes as well as his method of observation. Although Leeuwenhoek had depicted the construction of his microscope in a letter to the Royal Society dated 12 January 1689,49 no real tradition of his skills was transmitted and improved through subsequent generations of scholars. Folkes’ proposal – that, despite the inability the replicate them, Leeuwenhoek’s observations should be accepted because he was reliable – effectively sidestepped the problem. Leeuwenhoek’s works were not integrated with the scientific network to promote the repetition of his observations, and the decrease in microscopical publications in England in the period 1700–30 should also be linked to his resistance to publicizing his know-how. Folkes’ argument sought, by boosting community trust artificially, to rescue Leeuwenhoek’s observations, but, despite the former’s pathetic appeal to ‘pursue those enquiries’,50 microscopical research on blood, animalcula and tissues, ceased in England between his 1723 death and 1740. Except for occasional references by Hans Sloane or others,51 Leeuwenhoek’s ‘legacy’ was buried by the time of, and probably long before, his death. Folkes’ paper resembled an apology rather than a eulogy, and the early 1720s saw the last breath of seventeenthcentury microscopical research. While Leeuwenhoek’s posthumous papers were published in 1723, James Jurin, after improving the techniques of weighing and measuring blood corpuscles in the late 1710s, stopped his research. Patrick Blair’s work on vegetable physiology was published in 1720, a year before Bradley’s A Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature that included microscopical investigations. No one ventured to speak of animalcules any longer, and it was not until the late 1730s that new microscopical research appeared. Both simple and compound microscopes presented problems related to the vibration, the path of light, the fine adjustment screw and the manipulation of objects. At higher magnifications, the small distance between the specimen and the objective or lens considerably reduced the available light, and both Wilson’s and Culpeper’s microscopes prevented scholars from examining live specimens of larger creatures. Much later, in 1761, Haller was unable to observe parts of an egg as he was impeded by the tripod of his Culpeper microscope, so he asked Bonnet for other solutions.52 New microscopes invented between 1735 and 1745 had actually solved these problems (Fig.1.3). Robert Barker in 1736 and Smith in 1738, claimed to have improved upon Newton’s microscope, using two mirrors, de Philosophie et de Mathématique de la Société Royale de Turin [hereafter Mél. Soc. Turin], 4 (1766–69, pub. 1770): 1–46, p. 9; and C. Wilson, p. 90. 49 �� See Marian Fournier, ‘Personal styles in microscopy: Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam and Huygens’, in From Makers to Users, pp. 211–30, pp. 219–20. 50 �� Folkes, p. 453. 51 �� Hans Sloane, ‘An Account of Symptoms arising from eating the Seeds of Henbane, with their Cure’, PT, 38/429 (1733): 99–101, p. 100. 52 �� Haller to Bonnet, 28 December 1761, in The Correspondence between Albrecht von Haller and Charles Bonnet, ed. Otto Sonntag (Bern, 1983), p. 250.

Production and Visibility of Microscopes

29

while Newton’s had only one metal mirror. Both men fitted a large concave mirror with a two lenses eyepiece set in the middle, and the light was reflected in a second smaller mirror.53

Fig. 1.3 Barker’s 1740 improved catoptric microscope

53 �� Robert Barker, ‘A Catoptric Microscope’, PT, 39/442 (1736): 259–61; Smith, vol. 2, pp. 124–30.

The Quest for the Invisible

30

In Barker’s microscope, the distance between the object and the mirror varied between 9 inches and 24 inches, allowing space for manipulation as well as larger objects. Barker, who had his microscope made by Scarlett Jr and Jackson, submitted it to the Royal Society in 1736, which judged the instrument to be not especially efficient. A second model, released in 1740, was much better, and this microscope was sold for some years.54 It had three advantages over the common microscope: the object could be very close to the objective, the object did not need to be transparent, and it permitted magnification of small details of whole creatures, such as the motion of a live animal.55 While increasing the freedom of form and function of the instrument, the catoptric microscope made it possible to experiment on living beings and increased the possibilities of using light in better, more various and more flexible ways. If both the Wilson and Lefebvre-Joblot models were based on a 1694 screw-barrel microscope by Hartsoeker, its English and French developments supply a clear signal of its importance in both countries.56 Before the 1740s, the microscope à liqueur designated both the screw-barrel and the Huygens microscopes, and seems to have been used more for scientific work in France than the Wilson was in England. In France, Puget, Lamy, Poupart, the La Hire father and son, Joblot, Duhamel du Monceau and probably Réaumur singled it out.57 In England, George Adams Sr considered the Wilson microscope to have been abandoned soon after being invented, but actually several fellows of the Royal Society used it up to 1721.58 Other microscopes were also invented in the late 1730s. In 1738, during the English leg of his grand tour of Europe, the Berlin physician Lieberkühn demonstrated the concave mirror that carries his name, and both the solar microscope and the simple microscope for opaque objects, before

�� Robert Barker, ‘Second Mémoire touchant le Microscope Catoptrique’, Bibliothèque Britannique, 16 (1740): 163–71, p. 163. 55 �� Barker, ‘A Catoptric Microscope’, p. 260. 56 �� Nicolaas Hartsoeker, Essay de dioptrique (Paris, 1694), p. 175. See Daumas, pp. 63–7. 57 �� Puget, ‘Lettre au R.P. Lamy’, p. 66; François Poupart, ‘Histoire du formicaleo’, MASP (1704, pub. 1706): 235–46, p. 238; Philippe de La Hire, ‘Description d’un insecte qui s’attache aux mouches’, MASP (old academy), 10 (1693, pub. 1730): 425–7, p. 425, Gabriel Philippe de La Hire, ‘Observations sur les figues’, MASP (1712, pub. 1714): 275–8, p. 277; Joblot, part 1, pp. 10, 12, 19, 22; Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, ‘Suite de l’anatomie de la poire’, MASP (1731, pub. 1732): 168–93, p. 180. 58 �� George Adams Sr, Micrographia Illustrata, or, The Knowledge of the Microscope Explain’d (London, 1746), p. 12. William Cowper, ‘Description of the Extremities of those Vessels, and the manner the Blood is seen, by the Microscope’, PT, 23/280 (1702): 1177–201, p. 1181; C.H., ‘Microscopical Observations’, PT, 23/284 (1703): 1357–72, p. 1357; William Derham, Physico-Theology (London, 1720, 5th edn), p. 415; Richard Bradley, A Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature (London, 1721), p. 156. 54

Production and Visibility of Microscopes

31

certain craftsmen and fellows of the Royal Society.59 A few years later, improved versions were being sold by Cuff and by other English manufacturers. Along with the improved Wilson, the Cuff and the catoptric microscopes which signalled the revival of the market, the two models brought to England by Lieberkühn and other types (Martin’s drum microscope and several models by Sterrop, Adams, Lindsay), all enabled the instrument makers to sell at least five or six types of microscopes in the early 1740s. Thus available in the market, microscopes now acquired better visibility in titles of printed material. A period of fifteen to twenty years had been necessary to clear away the outdated seventeenthcentury methods of producing and managing the microscope.

59

�� Clay and Court, pp. 213–14.

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Chapter 2

The Study of Animalcules at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

This chapter examines the relationship between seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury microscopical research. As we saw in Chapter One, the dominant historiography alleges a sharp decline that erased the microscopical research of this epoch. Yet this decline was localized mainly in London, and an examination of other parts of Europe reveals an entirely different picture. The particular situation in London was not representative of the rest of Europe, and particularly not of France. Louis Joblot and a Neglected Treatise on Microscopical Research The first French treatise on microscopical research, by Louis Joblot, a professor of geometry and perspective elected in 1699 to the Académie de sculpture et de peinture, was published in Paris in 1718 as Descriptions et usages de plusieurs nouveaux microscopes. Recent historiography on Joblot is almost nonexistent, especially when compared to the substantial historiography on Leeuwenhoek and Malpighi. In an obscure 1895 book, Wlodimir Konarski claimed a pre-eminent place for Joblot in the history of protozoology, for identifying many animalcules not previously observed. Later historians disagreed over whether he plagiarized Leeuwenhoek. Later Jean Rostand, Hubert Lechevalier, Peter van der Pas and Marian Fournier drew attention to Joblot’s antispontaneist experiments.

�� Fournier, Fabric of Life, pp. 12–18; Ruestow, pp. 280, 284–5. �� Wlodimir Konarski, ‘Un savant barrisien précurseur de M. Pasteur, Louis Joblot (1645–1723)’, Mémoires de la Société des Lettres, Sciences et Arts de Bar-le-Duc, 3–4 (1895): 205–333, pp. 238–9. �� Clifford Dobell, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and his ‘Little Animals’ (New York, 1932), p. 372, spoke of ‘internal evidence of imitation’. Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Microscopical Researches’, p. 206, stated that Joblot followed the same pattern as previous observers. �� Fournier, Fabric of Life, pp. 182–4; Hubert Lechevalier, ‘Louis Joblot and His Microscopes’, Bacteriological Review, 40/1 (1976): 241–58, pp. 257–8; Peter W. Van der Pas, ‘Louis Joblot’, in Charles Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (16 vols, New York, 1970–80), vol. 7, pp. 110–12, pp. 110–11.

The Quest for the Invisible

34

Observing Invisible Bodies Joblot’s book required extensive research, for the observations he made were carried out over 36 years. He began his labours after a demonstration of animalcules given before the Académie des sciences by Christiaan Huygens and Hartsoeker during the summer of 1678, yet a major period of work was between 1710 and 1716 when his text was accepted for printing. He also collaborated with friends, such as the academician and instrument maker Amontons with whom he observed eels of vinegar. As a result, the book is divided into two parts, the construction of microscopes and the study of microscopical organisms, and the latter part is organized around the central issue of the experimental refutation of spontaneous generation. Joblot’s journal of experiments guided the chronological structure of the text, in the middle of which the antispontaneist hypothesis is interpolated. After reporting on 1680s experiments on eels of vinegar and pepper infusions after Hartsoeker, and on animals observed in 1710, he explained the crucial experiments on the infusion of hay carried out in October 1711. He thus proposed his hypothesis on the generation of those animals, complemented by detailed descriptions. To describe the animals, Joblot did not use methods like those of the Renaissance treatises, filling in entries �� such as names, morphology, generation, customs, and so on. With an open, category-specific approach, he was primarily drawn to ‘remarkable phenomena’, and ignored animalcules that he considered too common. Thus, with no systematic approach, he used a narrative through which he presented a wealth of information about animalcules. The leading discoverer of infusoria until 1773, he scrutinized the morphological aspects of animalcules, adapted names to shapes – a diagnostic scheme – among others, oval, sock, kidney, slug, swan, turtle. Like Leeuwenhoek, Huygens or, later, Baker or Eichhorn, Joblot did not use systematical reports, and paid no attention to names, despite historians’ claims to the contrary.10 Even the term ‘animalcule’ is absent; Joblot always uses ‘animals’, sometimes ‘insects’ but mostly ‘fishes’ to name the group – indeed they

�� Joblot, part 2, p. 5. �� Joblot, part 2, pp. 2, 5, 12–13. See Ruestow, pp. 25–6; Van der Pas, p. 110. On 30 July 1678, Huygens demonstrated the animalcules of pepper infusions, and the spermatic animalcules of dogs (Procès-verbaux de l’Académie des sciences de Paris [hereafter PV ASP] 1675–1679, f° 185r–185v). He reported them in Christiaan Huygens, ‘Touchant une nouvelle maniere de Microscope qu’il a apporté de Hollande’, MASP (old academy), 10 (1678; pub. 1730), pp. 608–9. The original letter was sent to Gallois, see Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 8, pp. 96–7. On the quarrel that followed, see Roger, pp. 302–4. �� Joblot, part 2, pp. 4–6. �� Ibid., part 2, pp. 39–40. �� See Chart 8.3. 10 �� Barbara M. Stafford, ‘Images of Ambiguity, Eighteenth-Century Microscopy and the Neither/Nor’, in David P. Miller and Peter H. Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 230–57, p. 233.

The Study of Animalcules at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

35

lived in water. Therefore he communicated on those minute or invisible bodies in vernacular language, which is not tackling communication as a scientific issue. Managing names for larger organisms was already the domain of syste�� matics, but Joblot ignored it; and, since Leeuwenhoek had used a similar narrative pattern, to characterize their writing pattern on animalcules, I will speak of a LeeuwenhoekJoblot narrative�� model.

Fig. 2.1

A plate showing the kinds of animals described by Joblot

The Quest for the Invisible

36

Joblot’s approach was mainly experimental. Altogether, he performed about one hundred experiments – most of these vegetable infusions – over six years, and described more than thirty species (Fig. 2.1), including details on morphology, behaviour and anatomo-physiology. He noted the standard length of many animalcules’ lives, their morphological changes after death, and investigated the causes of death by experimenting with liquids and temperature.11 Leeuwenhoek, and the Royal Society fellows Power and King, had previously used similar techniques.12 Joblot paid special attention to measurable variables such as time, motion, quantity of animalcules and temperature, and time is probably the most consistently variable throughout the book. He usually reported dates, hours and duration of the observations, experimental time used in the procedures, and the lifespan of the animalcules; and certain infusions were set aside for more than one year, to observe the succession of animals.13 Equally close attention was given to the types of motion, usually well described, and sometimes even compared to the performances of dancers, because motion served as a mark enabling one to distinguish between two species of eels.14 One of these ‘behavioural motions’ is mating, which Joblot acknowledged and engraved for many animals. He illustrated, by means of dotted lines starting from the centre of the animals, the various sorts of their motions and detected gyratory and straight motions, which he then engraved, with an iconographic technique close to that used to represent lines of force in magnets (Fig. 2.2, animals O and R).15 This interest in motion and its representation probably arose from his professional environment and personal interests. He indeed invented the first artificial magnet, and taught geometry at the Paris Academy of Arts. Joblot’s book is a good example of the experimental work that was achievable using a microscope at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In this work, he developed three topics: 1. Microscope making and research on the microscope; 2. Explaining procedures for using the microscope and the preservation of animals; 3. Supplying readers with good narrative descriptions of the observations. Let us now focus on the latter two topics. On several occasions, Joblot explained how to use the instruments and the procedures necessary to carry out accurate observations: for example, taking a drop, using a pipette, handling tweezers, sticking slides together with gum water, pinning insects to cardboard, fitting tadpoles into a glass tube, setting the glass tube into the microscope, using filters.16 He followed the practice of revealing secrets, making knowledge useful and transparent, a practice championed in the

11

�� Joblot, part 2, pp. 6, 15–16, 18–22, 28–9, 34. �� C. Wilson, p. 86; Fournier, Fabric of Life, p. 182. 13 �� Joblot, part 2, pp. 15–16. 14 �� Ibid., part 2, pp. 29, 35, 50, 56. 15 �� Ibid., part 2, pp. 13–14; see also ibid., part 2, pp. 64–5. 16 �� Ibid., part 1, pp. 8, 74–8; ibid., part 2, pp. 43, 62–3. 12

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academic milieu of Paris.17 He therefore depicted many tools, such as the pipette, tweezers, the glass-tubes and the ‘animalcule conveyor’ (Fig. 2.3).18

Fig. 2.2 Here Joblot used a dotted line to show the various motions of the animalcules 17

�� On utility in the Académie des sciences, see Christian Licoppe, La formation de la pratique scientifique: le discours de l’expérience en France et en Angleterre (1630–1820) (Paris, 1996), pp. 116–24; and especially Robin Briggs, ‘The Académie Royale des Sciences and the Pursuit of Utility’, Past Present, 131 (1991): 38–88. 18 �� Joblot, part 1, pp. 7, 16, 58–60; ibid., part 2, pp. 18–19, 60.

38

Fig. 2.3

The Quest for the Invisible

Joblot (1718) showed many tools in his engravings, such as ‘animalcule conveyors’ (top) and tweezers (bottom)

These engravings enabled the sharing of knowledge in the Paris social context, and Joblot often reported having done an experiment with unnamed people, demonstrating the ‘show’ of the animals to ‘several persons’, or observing sometimes with ‘a person of the higher ranking’. His friends made their own infusions, which Joblot reported to the public. People who saw the eels of vinegar through the microscope stopped eating salad, and he strove to convince them the creatures were so small as to be innocuous. Moreover, conversation showed itself to be a better locus for attaining conviction than the experimental report:

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39

I feel obliged to warn that a written explanation, however long it is, will never supply full understanding. In less than two hours of conversation …, one will learn more than one could in eight days of reading.19

In harmony with such a demand for social conciseness, Joblot clearly outlined the way to make infusions, with cold or hot water, and unfolded a whole education on seeing for the reader: how and what to observe, and with what means. He disclosed, for instance how to take advantage of natural conditions, such as waiting for a drop to start drying in order to slow down the motion of an animal, allowing easier observation.20 He similarly illustrated the means for conserving live animals by explaining what their normal living environments were.21 All of these concisely written details aimed at allowing others to reproduce his observations, and are important clues that point to his practice of sharing knowledge. Strategies for Disproving Spontaneous Generation Joblot’s primary goal was certainly the rejection of spontaneous generation, for he labels himself an antispontaneist in the first pages of his avertissement: ‘I cannot belong to the party of those who ascribe [generation] to putrefaction’.22 In the text, he gradually introduces the components of a crucial experiment suitable for the rejection of spontaneism before explicitly stating his hypothesis: the comparison of two jars, corked and uncorked, to test the generation of vinegar eels, and the heating of the vinegar that resulted in killing the eels. 23 Organizing the text in this way was a rhetorical device: various features were first put in place, one by one, to ensure a full understanding of the major experiment, the play then acted out in the middle of the book and immediately followed by its interpretation. Hence Joblot attacked spontaneous generation not only through ‘experiment and reasoning’, but also by using a pleasingly orchestrated method of organizing the information. While some historians believe Joblot performed the first experiment disproving spontaneous generation of animalcules, others consider him an imitator of Dutch authors.24 Yet the Italians influenced both the Dutch and Joblot, and only the latter’s experiments solved a problem already evaluated for insect generation by Redi.25 19

�� Ibid., part 1, p. 59. �� Ibid., part 2, pp. 63–4. Similar procedures would be used by Trembley and by John Hill. 21 �� Ibid., part 1, pp. 16, 78; ibid., part 2, p. 5. 22 �� Ibid., part 1, avertissement. 23 �� Ibid., part 2, pp. 5–9. 24 �� Van der Pas, p. 111; Lechevalier, pp. 257–8. For the opposite thesis, see Dobell, p. 372, and Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Microscopical Researches’, p. 206. 25 �� Leeuwenhoek’s protocol was based on Redi’s experiment that compared two corked and uncorked vessels; see Walter Bernardi, ‘Spallanzani e la controversia sulla generazione 20

40

The Quest for the Invisible

Staying true to historical chronology, testing the spontaneous generation of water animalcules must be ascribed to Huygens, who experimented in 1679 with cold corked and uncorked infusions of pepper.26 Both infusions generated animalcules after ten days and he believed that he had disproved spontaneous generation, maintaining ‘All these animals come from outside or … eggs of the animals that float in the air come into these putrid waters’.27 A year later, while Joblot focused on eels of vinegar,28 Leeuwenhoek reproduced Huygens’ experiment with hay, which he published in 1683, while those by Huygens were published posthumously in his 1703 Dioptrica.29 However, unexpected results made Leeuwenhoek engage in a personal campaign against spontaneous generation, which Edward Ruestow deciphered as a claim for social recognition.30 Without strong empirical data in hand to support his position, it seems that Leeuwenhoek did not grasp that his experiment did not demonstrate antispontaneism. Therefore, attention to the differences between Leeuwenhoek’s and Joblot’s styles of experimentation and their arguments permits us to shift our interpretation from imitation to original interpretative solution. Indeed, Joblot perceived the theoretical limitations of his experimental system, and captured what each single experiment allowed him to say. In fact, disproving spontaneism required two experiments. On 4 October 1711 he made two cold infusions of hay in separate jars, corked one and left the other open. Two days later three sorts of animals appeared in both infusions, and he deduced ‘that these animals were produced by eggs that other animals had laid on this hay, and not produced by those which were spread in the air’.31 Thus, he acknowledged that such an experiment did not test spontaneous generation, but only allowed resolution of the dissemination versus eggs-previously-laid hypotheses.32 Indeed, a week later, Joblot boiled an infusion of hay for 15 minutes, put it into two jars, and corked one immediately while keeping the other open. After a few days, he saw animals appearing in the open jar only, ‘and not even one in that, which had been corked’. He kept the latter closed for a ‘considerable time’, then opened it: spontanea: Nuove prospettive di ricerca’, in Walter Bernardi and Marta Stefani (eds), La sfida della modernità (Florence, 2000), pp. 37–61, pp. 41–4; Ruestow, pp. 219, 279; C. Wilson, pp. 199–203. 26 �� Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Microscopical Researches’, pp. 204–5. 27 �� Quoted in ibid., p. 205. Cestoni performed similar experiments, see Bernardi, ‘Spallanzani e la controversia …’, pp. 46–7. 28 �� Joblot, part 2, p. 2. 29 �� Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Microscopical Researches’, p. 204. 30 �� Ruestow, pp. 219–21. 31 �� Joblot, part 2, p. 39. 32 �� The eggs-previously-laid hypothesis had been already stated in the early Royal Society in 1662 (see C. Wilson, pp. 198–9) and by Gassendi (see Fazzari, ‘Redi, Buonanni …’, p. 105) to explain the generation of worms in decayed infusions.

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after a few days I saw insects, which made me understand that these animals were born from the eggs spread in the air. Indeed those that could have been in the hay had been totally destroyed by the boiling water.33

It is striking that Joblot did not infer at this point that he had disproved spontaneous generation, and only concluded that both the dissemination and the eggs-previously-laid theories were true. Eggs were laid on plants, and other eggs spread in the air, being but two manifestations of the same process. An experimental system linked the two experiments to the same goal, far from being only a hypothesis supported by a dogmatic feeling.34 The disproving of spontaneous generation was unified in another part of the books with a general interpretation that synthesized all experiments, reverting to the idea ‘that every animal, of whatever sort, comes from eggs.’35 This hypothesis was supported with four empirical arguments: 1. There is no synchrony between the decay and the production of animalcules; 2. Different species in one infusion do not appear simultaneously; 3. There is no proportionality between the number of animalcules and the progression of the decay;36 4. That animals feed on vegetables explains why they live on and lay eggs on the plants.37 Eventually he presented his positive ‘hypothesis’ – the polite term for theory – supported by the four principles: I will suppose a countless number of very small animals of various species fly or swim in the air close to the earth, which stick to the plants that suited them. They rest there, feed and give birth to their young, while others lay eggs in which new insects are enclosed. Lastly, these animals also drop young and eggs in the air they pass through … . Thus the infusion of such a plant will be able to facilitate the birth, and supply everything necessary to the development of all the various animals we will successively observe in it.38

Although Huygens had already stated some of these arguments in defence of antispontaneism,39 Joblot had found an empirical way to show it. And, with 33

�� Joblot, part 2, p. 40. �� On this interpretation see C. Wilson, p. 204. 35 �� Joblot, part 2, p. 44. 36 �� Ibid., part 2, pp. 44–5. 37 �� Ibid., part 2, p. 49; see also ibid., part 2, p. 45. 38 �� Ibid., part 2, pp. 45–6. 39 �� Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Microscopical Researches’, p. 204. 34

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42

this system of arguments – the same one later adopted by many antispontaneist scholars – Joblot could explain every result obtained. Indeed, rejecting speculations such as ‘ovism’ or ‘dissemination’,40 Joblot coalesced both competing antispontaneist explanations into one hypothesis and showed them to fit together. Both were right, but in order to show it, an experimental system had to be dealt with. Principally, the ‘or’ connecting the previously competing explanations of Huygens, Leeuwenhoek, Gassendi and others,41 was transformed into ‘and’. Some animalcules thus found food and means for subsistence, and laid eggs in rotten and non-rotten plants, on plants alive and dead, plants infused and not infused. Any infusion would accordingly let animalcules reveal themselves – and an evolving series of animalcules in proportion to the changes happening in the infusion – coming from eggs both previously and subsequently laid in it. Joblot’s two experiments embody his theory and therefore he went further than the Dutch scholars thanks to his combination of theoretical framework with experiments. Huygens’ corked cold infusion of hay effectively demonstrated the eggs-previously-laid option, and Joblot’s heating of two infusions, one of which was corked, established a complementarity and proved that the eggs-subsequently-laid option (dissemination) was equally valid. Trapped between the two experiments, spontaneism was crushed. Joblot’s Originality Three influences led to Joblot’s experimental system: Dutch, French and Italian. The first two shaped the microscopical experiments, while the Italian moulded both research on antispontaneous generation and the ovist programme based in Paris. Concerning the Dutch influence, Joblot was the first to bring coherent interpretation to this kind of experiment. Perhaps influenced by Leeuwenhoek’s Arcana naturae detecta published in 1695, Joblot’s position was actually a lot closer to that of Hartsoeker and Huygens, whose lectures he attended in 1678. There are also similarities in terminology and experiments that show a similarity to Huygens and Hartsoeker, who wrote in French: for example, the same term, ‘fish’, used to qualify animalcules, the use of pepper infusions, and experiments on cold and boiled, corked and uncorked infusions.42 Joblot was probably also influenced by Huygens who published Dioptrica in 1703 (in Latin), a discipline Joblot was well acquainted with and on which he published a paper the same year. It is likely he read Dioptrica, and this spurred on his 1711 experiments. Another incentive probably came from the Académie des sciences, for the summary by Fontenelle of a letter read by the academician Carré in 1707 also reveals striking similarities to Huygens’ and Joblot’s later experiments: �� In the book, Joblot uses neither ‘ovism’ nor ‘preformation’, not even synonyms. �� Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Microscopical Researches’, p. 204. 42 �� Huygens, ‘nouvelle maniere de microscope’, p. 608. 40 41

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43

This philosopher … boiled water and manure mixed together, and filled two same phials with it, which he left to cool until mild. He put two drops of water in one of these phials, which he had taken from a vase in which the water was already filled with animals. Eight days after he found this phial filled up with a huge quantity of animals of the same species compared to those of the two drops of water. In the other phial, he saw nothing, though apparently the manure could have yielded some animals. Both phials were very tightly corked. And thus we have established the multiplication of small animals in water.43

Such an experiment synthesizes well the influences of Italian, Dutch and French experimentalism. This experiment clearly shows the importance of Redi’s ideas to the early eighteenth-century Académie des sciences. Indeed, the initial hypothesis assumed by the anonymous ‘philosopher’ fits the interpretation of Redi’s experiment undertaken on flies during the summer of 1667,44 while the method is likely influenced by Huygens’ 1678 experiments. However, Joblot was ahead of his influences in creating a new experiment and finding a matching interpretation. Changing only minor points, his experiment was new and finally made it possible to test the Redian theory for microscopic bodies. The ‘philosopher’s’ experiment represents the first ever attempts to rigorously test the generation of animalcules, and to link the experiment to a consistent theoretical mapping. There is a break from previous experiments, because in 1680 both Huygens and Leeuwenhoek just applied the ‘Redian jars’ procedure, but did not boil meat, just covered it.45 Discovering that there were animalcules in the corked jars, the Dutch scholars continued their antispontaneist discourses. Joblot’s interpretation supported his experiments, and provided a result that could close the debate. The genealogy of the antispontaneist experiments is represented in Table 2.1:

�� Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, ‘Diverses observations de physique générale’, Histoire de l’Académie des sciences de Paris (1707; pub. 1708), pp. 8–9. 44 �� Redi, Esperienze, pp. 146–7. 45 �� Such was the label of the experiments by Vallisneri, ‘Secondo dialogo’, pp. 315, 317. For Redi’s influence, see Bernardi, ‘Spallanzani e la controversia …’, pp. 42–4; Ruestow, pp. 219–20. 43

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44

Table 2.1

‘Advances’ in the experiments on spontaneous generation of animalcules Date of work

Experiment

Infusion

Animalcule

Interpret

Huygens 1

1678

b.u. / f.u.

pepper

dead / dead

None

1703 Amst.

yes?

Huygens 2

1679

c. / u.

pepper

pres. / pres.

antispont.

1703 Amst.

no

Joblot

May 1680?

c. / u.

vinegar

pres. / abs.

air necessary

1718 Paris

yes?

Joblot

June 1680

b.

vinegar

dead

antispont.

1718 Paris

no

Leeuw.

1680

c. / u.

pepper

pres. / pres.

antispont.

1687 London

no

Huygens

1692

c. / u.

pepper

pres. / pres.

antispont.

–

no

Cestoni

1698

b.u. / u.

coral

dead / pres.

antispont.

–

no

Anon. Carré

1707

b.a.c. / b.c.

manure

pres. / abs.

mating

1708 Paris

yes

Joblot 1

Oct 1711

c. / u.

hay

pres. / pres.

e.p.l.

1718 Paris

yes

Joblot 2

Oct 1711

b.c. / b.u.

hay

abs. / pres.

e.a.l. /antisp.

1718 Paris

yes

Author

Date/place published

Coherent

Notes: Abbreviations and symbols used in the table: a. = animals added to the infusion; b. = boiled; c. = corked; f. = frozen; u. = uncorked; abs. = absent; e.p.l. = eggs-previously laid; e.a.l. = eggs actually laid; pres. = present. When not specified with b., the infusion was made with cold water. Each condition of the experiment is separated by a slash (col. ‘Experiment’) whose outcome appears in the column ‘Animalcule’.

The first experimental protocol that corked and boiled the infusion was created by the anonymous ‘philosopher’, but the first who combined boiling with both corked and uncorked samples was Joblot. Thanks to the four original procedures – Huygens 1678, Huygens 1679, Anonymous 1707 and Joblot 2 in 1711 – experimental creativity evolved through a cumulative process and produced interpretation-matching experiments. But it took more than thirty years to find the permutation that would eventually be accepted as the standard way of testing spontaneous generation.46 46

�� Lechevalier, p. 258.

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Who was that anonymous ‘philosopher’, friend of Carré, whose work shows similarities to Joblot’s? He acknowledged mating in the animalcules and his experiments demonstrated both the previously-laid and subsequently-laid egg theories. It is equally possible that Joblot read Huygens, ‘the philosopher’, both, or neither of them, but he was not the anonymous author. Indeed, according to the procès-verbaux of the Academy session for 18 May 1707, Carré received a letter from Lyon, probably from a friend of Puget who was known to Joblot.47 Thus the man was not Malebranche, as stated by André Robinet and by Walter Bernardi, because Malebranche was in Paris at that time and would have been referred to as an academician.48 Reception of Joblot’s Work and the Academic Context One year after the publication of Description des nouveaux microscopes, the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux, the main bastion of resistance to the Académie des sciences,49 showered Joblot’s book with praise. The 28-page laudatory review lionized both the author and the ‘yet unknown animals’, cited the ‘9,000 vegetables known by Tournefort’, each yielding different animalcules when put into infusions. As a reflection of civil society, the list of people who could be benefited by the microscope stretched from painters to florists, writing experts to manufacturers, artisans to scholars.50 Amazingly, the Jesuits accepted Joblot’s antispontaneist conclusions and the anonymous writer even reported the ‘hypothesis’ word for word. By publishing such a review, the Jesuits accepted a thesis rejected by two famous members of their order, Kircher and Buonanni. Such a positive paper was perhaps due to the common practice of allowing each author to review his own work. Joblot had already published two articles on optics in this journal, and he was a friend of Trévoux reporter Barthélemy Germon.51 Nevertheless, despite another similar review published in Journal des sçavans, no further discussion was to be found, even though Konarski thought that the book would be in demand and planned a second edition.52 To make sense of such a meagre PV ASP 1707, t. 26, f° 193–4. The title is ‘Expérience sur les petits animaux que l’on voit dans l’eau avec le microscope, extraite d’une lettre de Lyon’. On Joblot’s difficult relation with Puget, see Brocard, pp. 105–6, 134. 48 �� Robinet has named Malebranche as the author of the anonymous letter to Carré: Oeuvres de Malebranche, vol. 19, p. 771. But Malebranche attended the academy sessions on 7 and 14 May 1707; see ibid., p. 749. Bernardi, ‘Spallanzani e la controversia …’, p. 48, took Robinet’s interpretation as fact. 49 �� Roger, p. 181. 50 �� ‘Descriptions et usages de plusieurs nouveaux microscopes’, Journal de Trévoux (1719): 1397–425, pp. 1406–10. The list was inspired by Joblot, part 1, avertissement. 51 �� Lamy to Puget, 8 January 1704, in Brocard, p. 127. 52 �� Konarski, pp. 292–3, showed that the editor Collombat had glued the settings for each page, thus making them permanent, an expensive process used for reissues. 47

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46

reception, one might assume Joblot was too much of an outsider, not being a fellow of the Académie des sciences, a suitable body to acknowledge his work. In fact, the secretary Fontenelle quoted Joblot only once, in the 1731 Eloge of Geoffroy on artificial magnets, but not with reference to his microscopical research.53 Joblot’s colleagues at the Academy of Arts were painters, sculptors, engravers and architects, and did not provide a suitable peer group to receive his observations. Joblot also kept in touch with informal groupings of acquaintances, which scholars of the old Académie (1666–99) attended. He also belonged to scientific circles, perhaps the remnants of Académie Bourdelot during the 1680s, and to the circle gathered around the apothecary Mathieu François Geoffroy during the 1670s.54 There he met academicians such as Duverney, Homberg, Cassini I, and Father Sébastien,55 gaining the attention of the company by demonstrating his magnets. Geoffroy’s circle also shared an interest in microscopes and his son Etienne-François wrote a thesis on spermatic animalcules.56 Duverney corresponded with Malpighi, Redi, Bellini, Baglivi, Pitcairne, Bidloo, Boerhaave and Ruysch, and hence with the most famous microanatomists and physicians of the period 1660–1730.57 He championed collecting and anatomizing58 and even saved Swammerdam’s manuscript of Biblia naturae, which he wanted to publish, before he sold it to Boerhaave in 1727. Homberg, a physician who had been taught by Guericke, Boyle and de Graaf, also wrote an unpublished treatise on spermatic animalcules, and built microscopes.59 When in Rome around 1685, he invented a tripod support for the microscope that permitted focusing adjustment, which was quickly adopted by Campani.60 Other friends of Joblot’s were academicians such as Malebranche, who experimented on spontaneous generation with Joblot’s microscopes along with Maraldi, Conti,61 Carré, La Hire and Malézieu, all of whom were interested in 53

�� Fontenelle, ‘Eloge de M. Geoffroy’, Histoire de l’Académie des sciences de Paris (1731): 93–100, p. 93. 54 �� Ibid., p. 93. The Académie Bourdelot was a rival of the emergent Académie des sciences. 55 �� Ibid., p. 93. 56 �� Roger, p. 312. 57 �� See Howard Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (5 vols, Ithaca, 1966), vol. 1, p. 636; The Baglivi Correspondence from the Library of Sir William Osler, ed. Dorothy M. Schullian (Ithaca, 1974), p. 58, notes 4 and 5. 58 �� Hahn, p. 87. See the letter from Boerhaave to Sherard, 17 August 1727, in Boerhaave’s Correspondence, ed. Gerrit A. Lindeboom (3 vols, Leiden, 1962–79), vol. 1, pp. 153–4. 59 �� Roger, p. 310; Claire Salomon-Bayet, L’institution de la science et l’expérience du vivant. Méthode et expérience à l’Académie royale des sciences 1666–1793 (Paris, 1978), p. 130. 60 �� Bedini, pp. 399–400, 421. 61 �� Bernardi, ‘Spallanzani e la controversia …’, pp. 48–9.

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microscopical research. In his 1694 Traité des epicycloïdes, La Hire had inserted a leaflet from Butterfield on using the microscope, while Carré and Malézieu reported microscopical observations to the Academy. Although Joblot knew many of the academicians personally, none of his works would appear in the Mémoires de l’Académie as he himself was not a fellow. Outsiders might sometimes see their work reported by an academician, and, with luck, abstracted by Fontenelle in the annual report Histoire de l’Académie. However, by the 1720s this generation of scholars had died, and the work on microscopical bodies carried out with by Joblot and his friends really disappeared with them around 1720. Thus, although Joblot’s work towered above previous influences while creating and interpreting a genuine experimental system for the refutation of spontaneism, its impact on contemporary research was almost non-existent. Despite his cognitive pre-eminence, his sharing of procedures and mastering of the instrument, certain facts and social circumstances conspired to impede the wider circulation of his legacy. The social circumstances have been examined above; those other facts will occupy us next. Programmes of Microscopical Research c. 1700 How does Joblot’s enterprise relate to traditions of research on spontaneous generation and microscopical bodies? To Walter Bernardi, there is continuity from Redi to Joblot, who hinted at the former and performed antispontaneous experiments.62 Still one cannot just look at experimental procedure and presumed quotation, and historians have to specifically address how a tradition develops in order to map its impact. Thus the picture changes when explanation goes beyond analogy. The Early Italian Movement for Microscopical Research Redi’s famous 1668 disproof of spontaneous generation of insects in Tuscany proved to be a catalyst for a great deal of other research through a ‘horizontal series’, namely the analysis of numerous insects species by many scholars. These included Bonomo and Cestoni on Acarus, Cestoni on lice, Baglivi on spiders, Sangallo and Lancisi on mosquitoes, and even Lorenzini on Torpedo.63 Such systematic refutation of spontaneism abandoned the old system of classification that separated perfect from imperfect animals, in which only the former reproduced �� Bernardi, ‘Spallanzani e la controversia …’, pp. 46–9. �� On the scholarly context of the Tuscan court, see Paula Findlen, ‘Controlling the Experiment: Rhetoric, Court Patronage and the Experimental Method of Francesco Redi’, History of Science, 31/91 (1993): 35–64, and Luciano Boschiero, ‘Natural philosophizing inside the late seventeenth-century Tuscan court’, British Journal for the History of Science, 35/4 (2002): 383–410. 62 63

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through eggs. Yet, in the 1680s the quarrel was revived over the existence of germs on marine organisms and vegetable species, particularly fungi. Antispontaneist authors had been working on fungi since Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) that shows the first engravings of microfungi, followed by Malpighi who depicted them on putrescent substances in Anatome plantarum (1679), and by Leeuwenhoek who described beer yeast in 1680.64 Yet, the early 1680s saw a revival in favour of spontaneous generation, which Father Buonanni in Rome claimed for many species, including molluscs.65 Similarly, Trionfetti, a professor of botany at La Sapienza in Rome, challenged Malpighi’s ideas in a 1685 pamphlet Observationes de ortu ac vegetatione plantarum where he claimed that the generation of fungi and other plants came from putrefied matter. Malpighi quickly organized resistance in October 1685 and divided up the work among his friends Bellini, Redi and Cestoni, but none of them managed to identify the seeds of fungi.66 New attacks came in 1691 with Buonanni’s Observationes circa viventes showing new experiments accounting for the generation of insects and algae such as Lenticula palustris through putrefaction.67 As a first reply, a year later the apothecary Cestoni brought to light the seeds of another alga, Poseidonia oceanica.68 After Malpighi’s death in 1694, his pupil Antonio Vallisneri counterattacked with Dialogues on the curious origin of many insects (1696), opposing Pliny – thus Buonanni – and Malpighi. Vallisneri claimed that the eggs of animals and seeds of plants were but the same thing, a statement later repeated by Tournefort and Fontenelle, that became the basis for the new programme in the Académie des sciences. Meanwhile, a pupil of Malpighi, the physician Giorgio Baglivi joined the antispontaneist team in 1698 after identifying the eggs of tarantulas and oysters.69 And, in 1704, Vallisneri’s discovery of the method of generation of Lenticula palustris finally silenced Buonanni.70

64 �� Geoffrey C. Ainsworth, Introduction to the History of Mycology (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 58–60. 65 �� Filippo Buonanni, Ricreatione dell’occhio e della mente nell’osservation’ delle chiocciole (Roma, 1681), pp. 38, 41–3. 66 �� Fazzari, ‘Redi, Buonanni …’, pp. 117–19. 67 �� Filippo Buonanni, Observationes circa viventia, quae in rebus non viventibus reperiuntur, cum micrographia curiosa (Romae, 1691), pp. 125, 305. 68 �� Fazzari, ‘Redi, Buonanni …’, p. 122. Cestoni communicated his discovery to Redi on 30 July 1692; see Giacinto Cestoni: Epistolario ad Antonio Vallisneri, ed. Silvestro Baglioni (2 vols, Rome, 1940–41), vol. 1, pp. 57–60. Later, Duverney asked Baglivi for Cestoni’s published letter: The Baglivi Correspondence, pp. 57, 60–61 note 31. Vallisneri published it under Cestoni’s name in 1697: Epistolario a Vallisneri, vol. 1, pp. 61–6; Diacinto Cestoni, ‘Se l’alga marina faccia il fiore, ed il seme, o se nasca dalla putredine, o spontaneamente ne fondi del mare’, Galleria di Minerva, 2 (1697): 121–4, p. 121. 69 �� Baglivi, ‘De anatome, morsu, & effectibus Tarantulae’, pp. 550–52. 70 �� Antonio Vallisneri, ‘De arcano Lenticulae palustris semine, ac admiranda vegetatione’, Galleria di Minerva, 5/9 (1704): 239–51, pp. 250–51.

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The only class whose generation remained a headache for the Italians was fungi, for which the most skilled scholars – among them, Malpighi, Cestoni, Redi, Bellini, Marsigli, Landi, Lancisi and Vallisneri – had failed to discover a mechanism of reproduction, and acknowledged a halfway solution.71 Up until Micheli’s 1729 publication, the origin of fungi was thought to be either fermentation in the lymph of plants or abnormal growth of their fibres.72 A major factor in the ‘cryptogam quarrel’ was the experimental method, on which scholars strongly diverged. In 1691, Buonanni disparaged this method as powerless to provide understanding of spontaneous generation, an issue well grasped by Malpighi, who ‘did gather the true danger of [Buonanni’s] Observationes. They implicitly nullified the idea that experimenting could be of any help in deciding between the two theories.’73 This strengthened a strategy previously adopted by Buonanni, who refused to give credence to his opponents’ observations as long as he still heard reports defending his opinion.74 Therefore, although previous criticisms of Malpighi’s anatomical programme had discredited the microscope, now the instrument itself was not attacked, but rather was regarded by both parties as a routine tool for undertaking inquiries. Buonanni’s microscopes were indeed among the best available in Italy at the end of the seventeenth century.75 The French Academic Programme The scientific culture of the early eighteenth-century Académie des sciences attached much significance to mathematics, physics, technology, natural sciences and anatomy.76 In this milieu, the series of correspondences of Fontenelle, Tournefort, Duverney and Homberg, with the Italians had inspired the programme on microscopical seeds in France.77 Then, from 1700 to 1730, the younger generation of microscope users was accustomed to cite Malpighi, Redi and their pupils, along

�� Fazzari, ‘Redi, Buonanni …’, pp. 125–7. Marsigli sent to Lancisi, in 1714, Dissertatio de generatione fungorum (Roma, 1714) purporting that fungi came from earth and wood. Lancisi stated that, with few exceptions, the seeds did not account for their generation. Eventually Pier Antonio Micheli, Nova plantarum genera iuxta Tournefortii methodum disposita (Florentiae, 1729), pp. 136–9, discovered generation of fungi through ‘seeds’ (spores) in agarics in 1718. See Ainsworth, pp. 50–51, 66–9. 72 �� Vallisneri, Opere, vol. 3, p. 406. See also the letter from Vallisneri to Marsigli, 20 February 1705, in Antonio Vallisneri: Epistolario, ed. Dario Generali (2 vols, Milan, 1991–98), vol. 1, pp. 297, 301. 73 �� Fazzari, ‘Redi, Buonanni …’, p. 124. 74 �� Buonanni, Ricreatione dell’occhio, pp. 41, 45, 47. 75 �� Fazzari, ‘Redi, Buonanni …’, p. 118. 76 �� Roger, pp. 249–53; Salomon-Bayet, pp. 123–9. 77 �� Duverney knew Redi, Malpighi and Bellini personally, see his 1692 letter to Baglivi in The Baglivi Correspondence, pp. 55–63. 71

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with Dutch authors such as Swammerdam or Leeuwenhoek.78 During the first forty years of the century, the germ theory was the accepted and defended flexible system valid for many classes of organisms, supported by the main academicians and the secretary Fontenelle.79 So important was the system that the botanist Tournefort did not hesitate to identify germs as the regular method of reproduction for minerals! Fossils shaped like volutes were particularly intriguing.80 He stated, in 1702, that the germ of the stones and of the metals is a sort of powder that comes perhaps out of stones and metals during the time they still are alive, which is to say that they grow … . One can compare the dust we call the germs of the stones to the seeds of several plants.81

The prestige of Tournefort, as director of the King’s Jardin des plantes was sufficient to suppress criticisms of his ‘vegetating stones’, but after his death in 1708, his ideas were quickly challenged. In his Eloge, Fontenelle excused the man who ‘transformed everything into what he liked the most’, thus taking minerals for plants. In 1709, the young Réaumur analysed shells to confirm that no germs were present. Instead he detected microscopic ducts, leading to the belief that shell growth occurred by ‘intussusception’, adding small particles to each hole in the ‘riddle’.82 Physicians and botanists such as C.-J. Geoffroy and Sébastien Vaillant fed the criticisms, and later, in a work that split development processes into crystallization for stones and ‘organic mechanism’ for plants and animals, a naturalist from Neuchâtel, Louis Bourguet, noted that the germs of Tournefort soon vanished.83

78

�� Among others: Etienne-François Geoffroy, ‘Observations sur les analyses du corail’, MASP (1708; pub. 1709): 102–5, p. 102; Jean Marchant, ‘Observations touchant la nature des plantes’, MASP (1711; pub. 1714): 99–108, pp. 105–6; René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, ‘Description des fleurs et des graines de divers fucus’, MASP (1711; pub. 1714): 282–301, pp. 283–4; Claude-Joseph Geoffroy, ‘Observations sur les vessies qui viennent aux ormes’, MASP (1724; pub. 1726): 320–26, pp. 320–21; Duhamel du Monceau, ‘Anatomie de la poire’, p. 324. Réaumur, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes (6 vols, Paris, 1734–42), vol. 1, pp. 29–38. 79 �� See Fontenelle, ‘Diverses observations de physique générale’ (1707), p. 9; Fontenelle, ‘Sur les champignons’, Histoire de l’Académie (1707; pub. 1708): 46–50, pp. 49–50. On the egg doctrine, see Roger, pp. 364–84. 80 �� Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, ‘Description du labyrinthe de Candie, avec quelques observations sur l’accroissement & sur la génération des pierres’, MASP (1702; pub. 1704): 217–34, p. 223. 81 �� Ibid., p. 233. 82 �� Réaumur, ‘De la formation et de l’accroissement des coquilles des animaux’, MASP (1709; pub. 1711): 364–400, pp. 366, 370. 83 �� Bourguet, pp. 78–80.

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The Italian programme on the seeds of cryptogams, promoted in the Academy by Tournefort since 1692,84 agreed with antispontaneism, and was debated by nearly everyone in Europe. Scholars were aware of its connection with the microscope – ‘would we have ever discovered [the seeds] of the mushrooms and of the fern without the microscope?’85 – and many authors pursued this endeavour. A disciple of Tournefort, Father Plumier who made microscopes, illustrated the seeds of ferns in 1705.86 Between 1711 and 1713, several papers by C.-J. Geoffroy, Jean Marchant and Réaumur discussed the seeds of truffles, mushrooms, maple-trees fucus and lichens.87 But, Réaumur said that many seeds from fungi and lichens were still unknown and the research continued during the 1720s, while other scholars joined the programme.88 In 1728, Duhamel du Monceau produced a study of the seeds of truffles and used the microscope to identify the causes of diseases in wheat.89 In the early 1730s, Bernard de Jussieu observed seeds of fungi and lichens, while Réaumur identified marks in stones and plaster as lichens. Many academicians thus designated pre-existence and transmission of the species through the germ as a research programme that unified the work, because vegetable and animal germs were considered to be two sides of one generation process: ‘the seeds of plants and the eggs of the animals [are] the same thing under different names’. Ex ovo omnia was the programme that Fontenelle took over to put into general use in the Academy, and most of the related research required microscopes and lenses as routine tools of investigation.90 According to historians, microscopes were hardly used in the Académie, yet this apparent lack has more to do with the historians’ methods than with the sources.91 For instance, Réaumur wrote in 1718: ‘Since the use of the microscope has become familiar, we know that these dusts are worth paying attention to.’92 Indeed, within the Academy there was a little-publicized shared research programme aimed at �� Tournefort, ‘Réflexions physiques sur la production du champignon’, MASP (old academy), 10 (1692; pub. 1730): 119–26, pp. 121–4. 85 �� Fontenelle, ‘Observations botaniques’, Histoire de l’Académie (1702; pub. 1704): 48–52, p. 52. 86 �� Charles Plumier, Traité des fougeres de l’Amerique (Paris, 1705), pp. 2–3, 123, 143, pl. 2, 18, 19, 25, 142. 87 �� Claude-Joseph Geoffroy, ‘Observations sur la vegetation des truffes’, MASP (1711; pub. 1714): 23–35, pp. 26–31; Marchant, pp. 103–5; Réaumur, ‘Description des fleurs …’, pp. 293–4. 88 �� Réaumur, ibid., p. 282. 89 �� Duhamel du Monceau, ‘Explication physique d’une maladie qui fait périr plusieurs plantes dans le Gâtinois’, MASP (1728; pub. 1730): 100–112, p. 107. 90 �� Fontenelle, ‘Observations botaniques’, p. 52; idem, ‘Sur les champignons’, pp. 49–50. 91 �� Roger, pp. 183, 250; Salomon-Bayet, p. 130. 92 �� Réaumur, ‘Observations sur la matiere qui colore les perles fausses’, MASP (1716; pub. 1718): 229–44, p. 242. 84

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establishing natural phenomena, but investigating a variety of topics: regeneration, by the anatomist Perrault and Réaumur; hermaphrodites by La Hire, Amontons, C.-J. Geoffroy, Méry and Réaumur; parasitism by Tournefort, Réaumur, Geoffroy, Duhamel and Deslandes. All were microscopical subjects introduced at the turn of the century, which implies interaction between the various scholars who employed the microscope, and discussions at meetings. The attitudes towards microscopes in France and England highlight quite different approaches to using and publicizing this instrument. One can measure its importance to the Paris academic community of microscope users in comparison with the Royal Society during the same period. While between 1680 and 1723, Leeuwenhoek ‘accounted for about three-quarters’ of the microscopical papers in the Philosophical Transactions,93 after 1700 few scholars in London used the microscope, and Leeuwenhoek himself became isolated. The anonymous C.H. claimed in 1703 that Leeuwenhoek was a reliable observer, and repeated certain observations with a Wilson microscope, while the anonymous C. quarrelled with him over priority.94 But, letters from Leeuwenhoek to Jurin on blood globules were only published in the 1720s in the Philosophical Transactions. In complete contrast, the French experienced a critical mass, with enough scholars actively engaged in dynamic production of knowledge to maintain their experimental natural history programme. This difference is clearly shown in Table 2.2. The numbers of authors and papers are similar, with 35 authors of 104 papers in the Mémoires (including Fontenelle) and 36 authors of 110 papers in the Transactions, but the difference is how scholars assimilated the works within their scientific communities. Of the 110 papers, Leeuwenhoek – who lived in Delft – authored three-fifths (66). Yet, only the Académie reached critical mass because: (a) 19 scholars wrote more than one paper; and (b) there is continuity between the leader (Réaumur) and the base, mediated by Fontenelle who popularized science. The Royal Society shows a different pattern: only 7 authors wrote more than one paper, and there is a marked gap between Leeuwenhoek and the rest. Living in Holland, he was outside the social dynamics of the Society, whereas in Paris academicians were paid to attend the meetings. As for the microscopical topics examined, the French community discussed various issues, mainly vegetable physiology, and produced a steady number of papers. Between 1700 and 1730, there are peaks and declines for each academy. The period 1710–20 shows an increase in French production, with 4–5 papers per year, which coincides with the decline of microscopy in the Philosophical Transactions (see Chart 2.1).

93

�� Fournier, Fabric of Life, p. 17. �� C.H., p. 1358; C., ‘Two Letters relating to Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s Letter’, PT, 23/288 (1703): 1494–501, p. 1494. 94

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Table 2.2 Frequency of microscopical papers per author in Philosophical Transactions, and Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences, 1700–1730 Philosophical Transactions Texts No.

Authors

66

1 Leeuwenhoek

3

2 Derham, Jurin

2

5 Morland, Breyn, Cowper, Bradley, Sloane

Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences Texts No. 25 20 5 4 3

1 1 1 2 4

Authors Réaumur Fontenelle C.-J. Geoffroy La Hire, Marchant Tournefort, Carré, Duhamel, Helvétius

2

10 Littre, Guisnée, Jussieu, Petit, Poupart, Anon., La Hire II, Deslandes, E.-F. Geoffroy, Morand

1

28

1

16

110

36

104

35

Total

Note: Names of scholars who wrote only one paper are not included.

Chart 2.1 Frequency of microscopical papers in Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences and in Philosophical Transactions, 1700–1730 (per five years)

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These data confirm that the decline of microscopy was manifest in the Philosophical Transactions up to 1720.95 In twenty years, the number of papers drops to 10 per cent that of the previous century, while the English peak for 1720–24 is Leeuwenhoek’s final series of publications. Moreover, the slopes’ curves are almost symmetrical, a peak for one corresponding to a decline for the other. These divergent rhythms for microscopical publication confirm that London was not a model for the Paris Academy, which developed its own programme of microscopical research. The French peak in 1710–14 coincides with Joblot’s major research period, which he likely pursued with the cooperation of his many acquaintances. He was certainly aware of Tournefort’s research programme, for in 1718, when he acknowledged the discovery of several seeds by academicians, he repeated almost verbatim Tournefort’s 1702 words.96 On the other hand, Joblot’s findings fitted so well with the academy programme that one may ask why they did not have a greater impact. Spontaneous generation was one of those archaic superstitions that the microscope, according to Fontenelle, helped to dispel: ‘The moderns, either through the microscope, or by certain accuracy in their research, which characterizes them as well as the microscope, discovered the seeds of many plants that had always been believed not to have any.’97 Various Impacts on the Scientific Object This chapter has investigated, mainly in France, two features of the microscopical object at the turn of the eighteenth century. First, a neglected work that brought experimental expertise to the issues of microscopical bodies, and, second, the migration and development of a programme of microscopical investigation from Tuscany to the Paris Academy. Joblot and the academic programme were contemporaneous and both were localized in Paris academies, sharing parts of their networks. Joblot’s impact on the scientific realm was almost non-existent, while the academic programme expanded easily and rippled outwards among European scholars. Why such a discrepancy? Were his animalcules too similar bodies to spermatic animalcules, a sensitive issue that the Academy did not discuss?98 Joblot was an outsider from the Académie, but this does not really matter. (Indeed, 95 �� See Fournier, Fabric of Life, p. 17, and Renato G. Mazzolini, ‘L’illusione incomunicabile. Il declino della microscopia tra sei e settecento’, in Hans-Konrad Schmutz (ed.), Phantastiche Lebensräume, Phantome und Phantasmen (Marburg, 1997), pp. 197–219, p. 219. 96 �� Joblot, part 1, p. 45. 97 �� Fontenelle, ‘Sur les champignons’, p. 46. 98 �� Along with Leeuwenhoek and Hartsoeker, Nicolas Andry, De la generation des vers dans le corps de l’homme (Paris, 1741; 1st edn 1701), vol. 1, pp. 158–63, claimed spermatic animalcules to have a fecundating power. Scholars accepted ‘existence of these animals’,

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the ‘anonymous philosopher’ was also an outsider yet Fontenelle presented his research.) And although his narrative style favoured repetition of experiments, he was not cited for scholarly purposes before 1736 in the German countries and 1739 in Holland!99 Even if it occurred, the repetition did not take on a heuristic meaning, and its major value was the social extension of agreement about a phenomenon. To explain Joblot’s lack of impact, one needs to consider the role of the systematical tradition. Even with cogent physiological findings and a consistent interpretation, Joblot’s theory had no relationships with systematics. In his time, Latin-language natural history focused on sensible objects, plants, animals and stones. It was not that Joblot’s descriptions lacked morphological precision; rather, like his predecessors, he exploited the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot narrative model, but did not use systematics and was therefore ignored by this tradition. Above all, it was a feature of the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot model that the animalcules observed were not species, but specimens. They would have been transformed into species had someone had supplied instructions on how to establish their determination – which no one did. One must distinguish between repeating the procedure through experimental report and replicating the object thanks to the determination or systematical report. And indeed, though Joblot carried out a ‘horizontal series’, having observed many animalcules (some of them being seen for the first time), there were few opportunities for matching them to previous observations. Even with the help of drawings, these animalcules had no clearly established existence. In previous texts they had not been described with one unified standardized language and recognizable distinguishing marks. Modern biologists enjoy identifying such rotifer or bacteria in Leeuwenhoek or Joblot’s works, hence supplying a retrospective existence as species to these animalcules. But, such an attitude was invented in the 1750s and was totally unthinkable before. By contrast, the academic germ programme was supported because it combined the social forces of both systematics and experimentalism, and it brought precision both in the determination of species and in identifying their methods of generation. To put it simply, Joblot’s study was the culmination of a cycle of works on animalcules and antispontaneism that had begun in the late 1670s. Strictly speaking, he did not belong to the Redian antispontaneist tradition, for three reasons. First, to Redi, experimental organisms were true species, determined and classified in texts – by Gesner, Aldrovandi, Moffett, Bauhin and John Ray. Secondly, Joblot’s research was followed by a twenty-five year silence on animalcules, while the Academy developed the Italian programme on microscopical bodies. Although these two programmes overlapped in time, each represents a different epoch. Joblot’s works constitute the last breath of the seventeenth-century wave of but disagreed on its use for generation: see Bourguet, pp. 80–93. On that controversy, see Roger, p. 166; Bernardi, Le metafisiche dell’embrione, pp. 157–63. 99 �� Johann L. Frisch, Beschreibung von allerley Insecten in Teutschland (Berlin, 1720–40); Pieter van Musschenbroek, Essai de physique, trans. Massuet (2 vols, Leiden, 1739), vol. 2, p. 594.

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microscopical research on undetermined animalcules or invisible bodies, not species. In sharp contrast, the Academy expanded a developing programme on seeds and germs of determined and classified species. Moreover, the renewed Academy wondered which characteristics a microscopical object might display to become a shared object for a scholarly community. The first wave of undetermined bodies had pushed magnification as far as possible in the hope of discerning atoms; the new trend prioritized the social problem of sharing microscopical knowledge and thus balancing higher magnification with a requirement for sharing microscopical vision, therefore magnification decreased and observers pored over seeds and insects. Small-scale bodies provided the first microscopical objects, grounded on observations that every scholar managed to repeat easily. The first step in creating a new microscopical object was to agree on the rejection of the previous (seventeenth-century) unshared microscopical approach, of which the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot narrative model was probably seen as a symbol. As shown by Edward Ruestow, Catherine Wilson and Christof Lüthy, the microscope was something of a ‘philosophical tool’ during the seventeenth century, and the study of invisible animalcules commenced in the 1670s. Yet, Joblot and Leeuwenhoek, albeit for different reasons, failed to turn the microscope into a routine instrument. Other seventeenth-century observers, especially the Italians, Swammerdam and other insect observers such as the Swiss physician von Muralt, did this in parallel in the 1680s, regulating their technical performance through social boundaries. As early as the 1660s, the Italians cultivated this programme in order to build a unified field and oppose the milieu of ideas engendered by nonstandardized instruments. The Italians, supported by their international network, were the first scholarly community able to work on a microscopical object that obeyed modern rules: balancing magnification with shared vision, never increasing magnification if it diminishes the shared visibility, and incorporating work into an existing body of knowledge. Such a concept competed with the philosophical one, but the Italians did not really manage to develop it after 1700. Supported by their established institutions, the younger generation in France took up the programme. Their commitment to work on microscopic organisms led them to discuss systematics while entirely recasting the use of the microscope. For the first time ever, the microscope had begun to be used as a routine scientific instrument.

Chapter 3

Insects, Hermaphrodites and Ambiguity

Insects as Suitable Objects for the Microscope Historians have acknowledged that, in the eighteenth century, ‘insects proved especially rewarding objects for microscopical inspection’. Yet, this was not simply due to chance, but because investigating invisible bodies had proved to be a dead end. Due to the lack of a taxonomic and morphological framework that authorized their naming and classification, and thus having no means of ‘systematical report’, the naturalists avoided dealing with them, at least publicly. Since the study of invisible bodies did not suit the modern guidelines described above, it is possible that investigators still observed them, but without the goal of publication. For instance, while Buonanni had observed and even printed plates of animalcules in 1691, twenty years later Cestoni explicitly discouraged Vallisneri from working on spermatic and water animalcules, and in the 1710s several physicians were sceptical about spermatic animalcules. Insects, by contrast, had already been named, described and classified, and were suitable for microscopical examination. Standard differences among the orders –for example, dipterous, apterous, hexapod, tetrapod – supplied a sufficient sense of the objects’ identity, at least for the naturalists. The study of insects, begun in the Renaissance, had been unified by Aldrovandi and Moffett, then modernized by Swammerdam, Redi and Vallisneri, and again, from the 1720s, by Réaumur and Johann Leonhard Frisch. Yet, the examination of bodies better suited to the conditions of shared knowledge seems to be a retrograde step when compared to Leeuwenhoek’s descriptions or Joblot’s experiments. However, far from representing a decline or a step backward, such behaviour characterized the desire to socialize the use of the microscope by applying it to organisms everyone could see in the same way, thus creating a genuine domain for knowledge negotiation. As a consequence, these organisms could not be totally invisible. Because of their suitable size, insects and seeds were at the focus of the programme. Insects were sufficiently large to make successful microdissections, behavioural observations and experiments possible, and small enough to require the microscope. We must bear in mind that nationalist historiographies frequently depict as heroes prominent citizens of their own nations. Leeuwenhoek’s obvious virtuosity �� Fournier, Fabric of Life, p. 171. See also Dawson, Nature’s Enigma, p. 17; Roger, p. 184. �� Fazzari, ‘Incredibili visioni’, p. 40; Cestoni to Vallisneri, 20 January 1713, Epistolario a Vallisneri, vol. 2, pp. 655–6; Roger, p. 372.

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led historians to give him priority on parthenogenesis or to think that he first established the microscope as a scientific tool. Yet, the natural history tradition omitted Leeuwenhoek’s observations on animalcules up to the 1760s. One has to belong to a tradition to turn an instrument into a scientific tool, and Ruestow for instance, described the rejection of Leeuwenhoek’s work by Dutch physicians. As early as 1660–90 Italian scholars and their European network were shaping the methods and research objects that were developed later, through three main issues: parasitological studies, ambiguity of organisms and exceptions to rules in generation. Embodied, respectively, by specific objects – insects, worms and coral – these trends provided models and questions that framed naturalistic research as a tradition during the eighteenth century, and helped to establish the microscope as a routine scientific tool. Cochineal, Kermes and Coccus – between Ambiguous Organisms and Hermaphrodites The small organism named cochineal had been imported into Europe since the Spanish conquest of Mexico, where the natives used it for dying textiles. In Europe, its arrival reduced the use of Kermes (Coccus ilicis) and of Coccus polonicus (imported from Poland), as well as of other dyestuffs such as lichen. The Spaniards quickly took control of the inhabitants of the former Aztec empire who harvested this ‘red gold’, while leaving the social structure of these local communities more or less intact, in order to continue the production. Cochineal was smoked and dried in the sun, preventing spoilage even when shipped across the Atlantic. The boats landed in the southern part of Spain and their cargo was then distributed across the Old World to be sold by apothecaries. Arriving in Europe as dried grains resembling grape pips, the cochineal was thought to be the seed of an unknown plant, and, with the microscope on hand, scholars from several countries in the 1670s discussed its nature, whether vegetable or animal. In England, the question primarily turned on a 1691 report published in Philosophical Transactions, in which a Spaniard alleged that the presumed dried grains were beetles bred on the

�� Wouter H. Van Seters, Pierre Lyonet 1706–1789 (La Haye, 1962), p. 99; Fournier, ‘Huygens’s Microscopical Researches’, p. 207. �� Ruestow, p. 83. �� For Louis de Jaucourt, see ‘Lichen’, in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot et Jean d’Alembert (39 vols, Genève, 1777–80), vol. 19, p. 1022, ‘The use of cochineal replaced every dye that could be supplied by plants’. See also Guillaume Nissole, ‘Dissertation botanique sur l’origine et la nature du kermes’, MASP (1714; pub. 1717): 434–42, p. 441, and John Hill, Essays in Natural History and Philosophy. Containing a Series of Discoveries, by the Assistance of Microscopes (London, 1752), p. 5.

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cactus Opuntia. He reported how indigenous people killed insects by fumigation then dried them under the sun, which made the insect resemble vegetable seeds. In Tuscany, defining the various methods of reproduction also led scholars to consider other insects in the same way, and after 1668, a new quest for Redi was to discover whether some insects could be both viviparous and oviparous. During the late 1680s, Cestoni noticed the absence of mating in lice, as in Kermes, and wrote to Redi about that discovery. The news spread, and this exception to a supposedly general rule excited the scientific world. In 1693, the Paris academicians La Hire and Sedileau, citing Redi, studied the louse of the orange tree and showed that it was oviparous with sexual differentiation. They believed that these lice mated before attaching themselves to trees. When observing cochineal, La Hire deemed it to be the dried trunk of an insect. In 1695, Leeuwenhoek also examined the louse of the orange tree and the cochineal. Around 1704, the debate over exceptions in mating became topical in Paris, Holland, Italy and England. Leeuwenhoek referred to the above-mentioned paper by the Spaniard, with whom he shared some theories.10 Through microscopical observations and microdissections performed after those of La Hire, Leeuwenhoek claimed that the cochineal was the trunk of an insect minus its wings and feet.11 In fact, around that time he had had an argument with an Amsterdam merchant who claimed that the cochineal could not be an insect on the grounds that there were not enough people in the New World to catch and dismember the amount of cochineal that a single ship transported to Europe.12 Leeuwenhoek cited the techniques used by Jamaicans for refining the desiccation of the insects, and, once more, he repeated the microdissections.13 He found eggs, up to 200, in the abdomens, demonstrating their animality, but their heads were also missing, so that the common cochineal sold by apothecaries was indeed merely the trunks of insects.14 As usual, a draughtsman collaborated with Leeuwenhoek after he had set up a microscope. In Leeuwenhoek’s paper, two ideas require attention, for both were later rejected, and became symbolic of the Dutchman’s limitations in his microscopical �� Anonymous, ‘Observations on the making of Cochineal’, PT, 193 (1691): 502–4, p. 503. �� Carl de Geer, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes (7 vols, Stockholm, 1752–78), vol. 2, p. 46 recalled the question. Epistolario a Vallisneri, vol. 1, p. 32. �� Fontenelle, ‘Diverses observations de physique générale’, Histoire de l’Académie (1704; pub. 1706), pp. 8–12. 10 �� Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, ‘Concerning cochineel’, PT, 24/292 (1704): 1614–28, pp. 1615–16. 11 �� Ibid., p. 1615. 12 �� Ibid., p. 1614. 13 �� See also Ruestow, pp. 205–6. 14 �� Leeuwenhoek, ‘Concerning cochineel’, p. 1620.

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investigation of nature. First, on the cochineal being a trunk, Leeuwenhoek did not cite anyone other than the Spaniard, and omitted all previous research carried out at the Académie des sciences, in the German countries or in Italy, that showed it to be either a whole insect or a mere trunk. Leeuwenhoek’s case was later rejected on that point by part of the entomological tradition, partly because he did not cite previous papers by other scholars. The second idea exclusively concerned the generation of cochineal. He observed that several species of flies did not need to mate in order to breed offspring; in modern terms they were parthenogenetic species. In the same paper, he began to oppose his observations to ‘those that maintain there can be no animal generated without a copulation of male and female’,15 namely Redi, who had died seven years earlier, and his many disciples. Had he read their books, in particular those by Redi and La Hire, the Dutchman would have known that the parthenogenetic question had been an issue since Redi and Cestoni raised it during the 1680s.16 Moreover, in 1704, Leeuwenhoek could not find males; all insects yielded eggs, hence he inferred they did not mate.17 Two explanations were supplied to account for this, one analogical and the other derived from his microdissections and observations. Most likely he saw parthenogenetic phenomena in other species, thus inferred that cochineal, lacking males, followed the same method of reproduction, and concluded that several species practised female-only reproduction.18 Presented to the scientific community, this theory did not reach consensus. Leeuwenhoek was later criticized for being unable to discern organisms within a strict experimental setting, by Réaumur, Trembley, Bonnet and even by Ledermüller.19 However, Réaumur acknowledged his specificity in exploring 15

�� Ibid., p. 1619. �� See Cestoni, ‘Istoria della grana del kermes’, in Vallisneri, Opere, vol. 1, pp. 457–69. 17 �� Leeuwenhoek, ‘Concerning cochineel’, p. 1619. John Ellis, ‘An Account of the Male and Female Cochineal Insects’, PT, 52/2 (1762): 661–7, p. 665, described the male cochineal. To Daubenton (Encyclopédie, vol. 8, p. 334): ‘Nowadays there is no doubt that the cochineal is a desiccated insect’. 18 �� Leeuwenhoek, ‘Concerning cochineel’, pp. 1624–5; Van Seters (p. 99) has argued priority for Leeuwenhoek over Cestoni because Cestoni’s letters were published in 1733. But many letters were published under Vallisneri’s name, and quoted Cestoni: see Cestoni and Vallisneri, ‘Sopra la nuova scoperta dell’origine delle pulci’, Galleria di Minerva, 2 (1697): 293–6. 19 �� In a letter to Réaumur (1 November 1742) Trembley wrote that Leeuwenhoek did not go deep in his investigation on polyps: Correspondance inédite entre Réaumur et Abraham Trembley, ed. Maurice Trembley and Emile Guyénot (Geneva, 1943), p. 145. Bonnet, La Contemplation de la nature, in Oeuvres de Charles Bonnet (18 vols, Neuchâtel, 1779–83), vol. 8, p. 21, remarked that scholars neglected more critical assessments on Leeuwenhoek. Although he considered him a master, Martin Frobenius Ledermüller, Amusement microscopique tant pour l’esprit, que pour les yeux (3 vols, Nuremberg, 1764–68), vol. 2, p. 14, also criticized Leeuwenhoek. 16

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invisible objects, saying ‘Leeuwenhoek was much better able to see minute objects than those of a sensible size’.20 Such a characterization of Leeuwenhoek’s commitment to microscopical research clearly illustrates the new programme. Observing not ‘minute objects’, but ‘those of a sensible size’, so that anyone could share and control microscopical observations, was the new motto. Nevertheless, many of Leeuwenhoek’s observations on bodies of a sensible size were recorded by the tradition.21 During that same year of 1704, interest in the problem was greatly aroused in Europe. Journal de Trévoux published a paper from a Spanish Jesuit of the Imperial college of Madrid, Father Bartolomé de Alcázar, on collecting and breeding cochineal in Opuntia in Central America.22 At the Academy, the study of lice and cochineal fitted the microscopical programme on seeds. During 1703–06, 1710– 14 and 1728–31, many papers described the microscopical anatomy, physiology, morphology and behaviour of several species of insects.23 La Hire resumed his microscopical observations of the louse and cochineal in 1703, and, with a research method that combined experiments with systematics, he acknowledged the lack of metamorphosis and generation through eggs. He demonstrated that cochineal and the orange tree louse were two different species, because newborns that hatched from louse eggs placed in an Opuntia cactus left it. Other experiments showed that they still remained fertile eight months after mating.24 In the German lands as well, physicians were interested in the cochineal. Several related dissertations were discussed in Leipzig between 1701 and 1709. Later, the physician Lorenz Heister in Altdorf acknowledged Redi’s influence on his microscopical observation of the parasites of the fly.25 Nonetheless, such a European trend in studies on cochineal and related insects did not secure clear-cut differences between all the species. In fact, a general agreement was not reached among scholars. So strong was the disagreement among them as to the origin of these organisms, greenfly, Kermes, ‘gall insects’ and cochineal, that, in 1714, the Montpellier botanist Nissole wrote ‘there are almost as many notions regarding the origin of Kermes as there are authors who have written about it’.26

�� Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 4, p. 100. �� Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 31–2, vol. 2, pp. xxvij. 22 �� Father Bartolomé de Alcázar, ‘Observations sur la Cochenille & sur un petit limaçon des Indes, qui paroît être le Murex des Anciens’, Journal de Trévoux (1704): 1765–74, pp. 1768–70. 23 �� Among them: Fontenelle, La Hire, Poupart, Réaumur, Maraldi, C.-J. Geoffroy, Nissole and Maupertuis. 24 �� Philippe de La Hire, ‘Nouvelles remarques sur les insectes des orangers’, MASP (1704; pub. 1706): 45–8, p. 47. 25 �� Lorenz Heister, ‘De Pediculis sive pulicibus muscarum’, Acta physico-medica, 1 (1727): 409–10, p. 409. 26 �� Nissole, p. 436. 20

21

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In 1710 a new wave of studies emerged in Italy and reached France. Vallisneri, in his Consideration and Experiments on the Origin, Development and Behaviours of several Insects (1710), described the greenfly and its method of generation. At Vallisneri’s request, Count Marsigli studied the Kermes and confirmed, with microscopical observations and chemical analysis, that this insect came from eggs, an interpretation close to Malpighi’s.27 The Kermes, a parasite of the oak tree feeding on the oak apple, native to southern Europe and described by many naturalists since the Renaissance, was more readily available for observation than the Mexican cochineal. Marsigli’s thesis encouraged Cestoni and Vallisneri to publish microscopical observations made twenty years previously, which investigated the life cycle of the insect. Thus, Cestoni’s History of the Seed Kermes was inserted into Vallisneri’s pamphlet on the chameleon in 1715 and reinforced the thesis of the insect nature of the Kermes.28 During their collaboration that began in 1697, Vallisneri and Cestoni had already described the metamorphic cycle of the flea.29 They now showed that lice, cochineal and Kermes belonged to a similar class of organisms with similar methods of reproduction. Bourguet, the naturalist from Neuchâtel and collaborator of Vallisneri, acknowledged that link between systematics and experimental investigation in 1714: ‘Messrs. Vallisneri and Cestoni found that the small animals producing the seed Kermes, the cochineal, the bedbugs and the lice of plants ... all produced foetuses’.30 The French academicians could not ignore this question of ambiguity, for it touched on conceptions similar to the elucidation of the origins and transmission of species. A typical inquiry of that time studied organisms both through chemical analysis and microscopical observations, as done by Marsigli.31 Therefore Geoffroy published a series of experiments on cochineal and Kermes in 1717, where he inspected Kermes and various sorts of cochineal, from Poland, and from the Mexican cactus Opuntia, in order to find the best dye. But he also wanted ‘to prove that cochineal [was] an insect’.32 He put the cochineal in water long enough to rehydrate the organism and observed, ‘One can distinguish by a cursory

27

�� Marsigli, ‘Annotationes de granis tinctorum quae Kermes vocant in epistola ad Vallisnerium’, Acta physico-medica (Appendix), 3 (1733; 1st edn 1711): 33–48, p. 37. 28 Epistolario a Vallisneri, vol. 2, pp. 714–30. 29 �� Vallisneri to Cestoni, 28 June 1697, in Vallisneri: Epistolario, vol. 1, pp. 32, 177–8; Cestoni and Vallisneri, ‘Sopra la nuova scoperta …’, pp. 293–4. 30 �� Bourguet, p. 78. The original text was written in 1714. 31 �� Between 1709 and 1725, E.-F. Geoffroy, Marchant, C.-J. Geoffroy and Réaumur employed chemical methods. Marsigli studied chemistry to analyse coral, see Anita McConnell, ‘The Flowers of Coral – Some Unpublished Conflicts From Montpellier and Paris During the Early 18th Century’, History and Philosophy of Life Science, 12 (1990): 51–66, p. 56. 32 �� C.-J. Geoffroy, ‘Observations sur la gomme lacque’, MASP (1714; pub. 1717): 121–40, pp. 134–6, 138.

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viewing the head, the anus, the sorts of segments, and the place of the legs; all are clearly visible with the help of the microscope.’33 At the same time, Nissole read a paper at the Montpellier Academy published in the Paris Mémoires in order to strengthen the relationship between the two academies.34 He recalled the Montpellier tradition, referring to Johan Stephan Strobelberger, an early seventeenth-century German physician who claimed that Kermes came from little eggs, which Nissole confirmed.35 Not long afterwards, the Jesuit Bougeant reported Geoffroy’s and Nissole’s results in his popular book Observations curieuses sur toutes les parties de la physique. Thus, both the ambiguity and the origin of Kermes and cochineal could be considered as closed subjects in France by the early 1720s, as they were in Italy. So, between 1704 and 1720, many European scholars discussed and experimented on cochineal, lice and Kermes, with ambiguity of organisms and parthenogenesis being topical issues. Even though, generally speaking, academicians accepted the animality of these organisms, parthenogenesis was not really acknowledged, but more for lack of experiment than for lack of observations. In these studies, microscopes – which were continually in use – had found a respectable place among other instruments, such as scalpels, scissors, needles, retorts and air pumps.

The Microscope in Court Another episode that helped confirm the microscope’s status as a research tool occurred in the mid-1720s and involved people from Holland, Spain and Mexico. A Dutchman, Melchior de Ruusscher had the same argument which Leeuwenhoek had had previously with a merchant apropos the nature of cochineal. Ruusscher assumed that the cochineal was an insect and his friend claimed it to be a seed, but this time, the point of contention changed from a bet into a trial, appealing to the highest authorities. The disagreement reached Spain, which appointed a commission to inquire on the nature of the Mexican cochineal. Three notarial certificates ‘made before the judiciary’36 and vouched for by eight persons employed in the handling of cochineal were sent to Europe. They testified that cochineal were living animals which walked and climbed, fed, had offspring, eyes, mouth parts and legs, and reported the methods of breeding and collecting them. Cochineal was neither a fruit nor a seed, but a mere insect that did not undergo metamorphosis,37 and a notarial translation was provided which Ruusscher published in 1729 in a small French-Dutch pamphlet. Present in the court, the microscope held an important 33

�� Ibid., p. 137. �� See Hahn, p. 105. 35 �� Nissole, p. 437. 36 �� Melchior de Ruusscher, Histoire naturelle de la cochenille justifiée par des documens authentiques (Amsterdam, 1729), p. 7. 37 �� Ibid., p. 21. 34

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place within the juridical apparatus, because it substantiated written testimonies by providing a set of iconographic proofs that demonstrated, through morphological evidence, the animal nature of the cochineal (Fig. 3.1). It would seem therefore, that the microscope’s first ever appearance in a court of law was around 1728.

Fig. 3.1 Ruusscher’s plate demonstrating the animality of cochineal

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Ruusscher was made FRS in 1730, and the outsourced judgement of cochineal made an impression on scholars such as Breyn and Réaumur, and was remembered as an extraordinary civil event by the journalist who, in 1742, wrote in the Bibliothèque françoise that ‘in order to decide that question, there was a need not only for observations made through the microscope, but also to ask for juridical evidence’.38 Journal de Trévoux had reported similarly in 1739. Even later, in 1763, the champion of German microscopical research, Ledermüller, recalled what �� Réaumur had judiciously written: ‘This is perhaps the first case in natural history that had been examined by means of law’.39 He provided an illuminated plate with magnified figures of cochineal and a depiction of Mexicans collecting and drying the insects that summed up the whole process (Fig. 3.2), showing that the microscope was established as a reliable research tool in the 1730s. Its suitability for insects led scholars to ignore earlier seventeenthcentury investigation, not because it was poorly done, but mainly because it was not suited to being repeated. Leeuwenhoek and other users of the microscope were not rejected by chance or because of changes in ideas. During the first half of the century, scholars were reconstructing their scientific object and adopted shared microscope texts accessible to everyone, as opposed to the exclusive microscope texts of which Leeuwenhoek remained a symbol. A new generation of scholars assessed methods, observations, names and results in accordance with the new scientific standards. And, in the end, for many reasons, perhaps in part because Leeuwenhoek ignored his predecessors’ studies, most of them tended to forget him. Ruusscher’s book was reviewed in Philosophical Transactions by the secretary Rutty, who concluded that ‘the curious may be now assured of a thing which has been very uncertain for so many years, and indeed known but very superficially, even by those who have embraced the opinion, that the cochineals were really little animals’.40 Curiously enough, Leeuwenhoek�� was not quoted on this occasion, though Folkes had expressed the wish in 1723 that his work be carried on.

�� [Review of Réaumur’s 1740] ‘Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes, t. 4’, Bibliothèque françoise, 34/2 (1742): 185–213, p. 194. See Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 4, p. 89. 39 �� Ledermüller, Amusement microscopique, vol. 1, p. 73. Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 4, p. 89. 40 �� William Rutty, ‘Account of Histoire naturelle de la cochinelle’, PT, 36/413 (1730): 264–8, p. 268. 38

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Fig. 3.2

The Quest for the Invisible

Ledermüller’s plate with magnified figures of cochineal, and depicting the Mexican harvest

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Ruusscher’s confirmation of a controversial idea boosted research on the European cochineal, Coccus and Kermes, organisms which once straddled the border between the vegetable and animal kingdoms, an ambiguity now clearly resolved. Once their animality was established, new research was carried out, and typical entomological issues – parthenogenesis, metamorphosis, and the life cycle – previously touched upon by several authors, came back into focus. In 1731, the Dutch physician in Danzig Johann Philipp Breyn published Historia naturalis cocci giving evidence of the metamorphosis and method of reproduction of the Polish species of Coccus which was also used to dye textiles. The booklet circulated widely, being published also in the Nuremberg Acta physico-medica, and reviewed in German journals, and in Philosophical Transactions.41 Amendments followed two years later, in which Breyn set forth a full description of the metamorphic cycle of the Coccus, which, thanks to observations made of both sexes over the course of a year, he represented in a table (Fig. 3.3).42 The Nuremberg Leopoldine Academy of those Curious about Nature took this opportunity to dedicate an appendix of Acta physico-medica to the issue, and reissued the most significant papers on both animality and the life cycles of Kermes and Coccus. Flanked by Latin-translated papers from Marsigli, Nissole and Geoffroy, Breyn’s Historia naturalis cocci synthesized the tradition of Latin natural history, while merging together many trends: the botanical history of the Kermes; the Polish, Dutch and German entomological traditions; the Montpellier tradition; the English works by Sloane; the Italians; and the French works by La Hire, Sedileau and Geoffroy. Following Cestoni and other authors, Breyn incorporated the Coccus into the wider Latin natural history tradition, and, while giving systematical roots to the insect, he grouped several sorts of Coccus and cochineal into a family.43 Leeuwenhoek’s name was missing from the entomologists cited by Breyn and by his reviewers, while Ruusscher’s was included.44 Moreover, the omission of Leeuwenhoek did not provoke a reaction from the Royal Society, nor did the reviews of Ruusscher’s and Breyn’s works, written in the early 1730s by two Society fellows, mention Leeuwenhoek, who in 1704 had attested to both metamorphosis and the absence of mating in this genus of insect. Like Joblot, Leeuwenhoek’s partial exclusion from the tradition can be explained mainly by his ignorance of it, by the fact that he did not quote its authors and by the current changes in size of the microscopical object. Conversely, Breyn incorporated the microscope into a long-term observation of the annual cycle of reproduction of the Coccus, involving it at every stage. He was inspired by the example of Redi, 41

�� Johann Philip Breyn, ‘Historia naturalis cocci radicum tinctorii’, Acta physicomedica (Appendix), 3 (1733): 5–27 (1st edn Gedani 1731); Richard Middleton Massey, ‘An Account of Historia naturalis cocci radicum tinctorii’, PT, 37/421 (1731): 216–18. 42 �� Johann Philip Breyn, ‘Emendanda in Histor. Cocci radicum’, Acta physico-medica (Appendix), 3 (1733): 28–32, pp. 30–31. 43 �� Breyn, ‘Historia naturalis cocci radicum tinctorii’, pp. 7–11, 20. 44 �� Ibid., p. 22.

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who had systematically followed metamorphosis from the egg through to the transformation into insect, thus coupling the microscope with time categories, such as the cycle of life, the development of organisms and their generation. Breyn’s study positively synthesized a framework for the shared microscope, and defined a type of scientific object and a range of phenomena that the microscope, along with other techniques, had shifted to the forefront.

Fig. 3.3 Breyn’s table showing the coccus cycle in both sexes over the course of a year

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As Bonnet would recall in his Traité d’insectologie (1745),45 Breyn was also in tune with the requirement of the natural experimental tradition to follow things accurately and, one might add, to refer to a previous tradition of entomological studies. To be ignored can be worse than being rejected, for in the latter case one at least remains in the story. Probably the main reasons that Leeuwenhoek was discarded from this group of authors lie both in his being symbolic of nonrepeatable microscope use, and in his lack of reference to the natural history tradition. Indeed, even Cestoni, who published almost nothing under his own name, found a prominent place within the tradition. The world of microscopical research provided the ideal milieu for such private activities as correspondence, tutoring and private collaboration – and to procuring a respectable place among other scholars. Cestoni needed to be allied with physicians like Redi, Bonomo and Vallisneri, so that his findings could be included in their works or under their name.46 As a mere apothecary, he could not challenge the antispontaneist party made up of physicians, professors and religious men. Yet, although a seventeenthcentury Italian apothecary could not enter into public dialogue with physicians and professors, important lines of research followed by eighteenth-century scholars were actually developments of Cestoni’s work.47 A Genealogy for the Greenfly In his works, Breyn posed a general question on parthenogenesis: Physical question. Could it be possible to demonstrate, in an indisputable way, that among the natural things, there existed a truly androgynous species of animal? Which is to say, could it be possible that such a species propagates only through eggs that appear to be only fertilized by themselves, and without any support from the male of the same species?48

Thus, after forty years of investigation, in 1733 parthenogenesis had still not been clearly established, though several authors claimed that lice were parthenogenetic. The system remained dubious and, for instance, some authors believed that, to understand how the worms that destroyed the sea wall of Holland reproduced, one 45

�� Bonnet, Traité d’insectologie, pp. 99–100. �� Redi, Bonomo (p. 2), and Vallisneri (‘Secondo dialogo’, p. 297), quoted Cestoni’s discoveries. 47 �� Redi took his own part in active experimentation. A court physician, he led a programme supported by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (see Findlen, ‘Controlling the Experiment’, pp. 39–40). Cestoni contributed to the discovery of the generation of the insects through eggs. See Silvestro Baglioni, ‘Introduzione’, Giacinto Cestoni: Epistolario a Vallisneri, vol. 1, pp. 26–30. 48 �� Breyn, ‘Emendanda …’, p. 31. 46

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should not ‘resort to the unproven system where the two sexes are united in one animal to multiply without mating’.49 Public reaction soon welcomed Breyn’s proposal, and the advancements in insect research came to be known. After 1733, publication on insects and on parthenogenesis increased greatly. In 1734, Frisch, who had been working for fourteen years on insects in Berlin, observed mating in lice;50 the same year, Cuno in Augsburg published a booklet Observations on the microscopical structure of insects,51 and, in the early 1740s, the painter and naturalist Rösel von Rosenhof in Nuremberg began the publication of Monthly Entomological Entertainment, a serial publication which lasted until his death in 1759. Also in 1734, Réaumur produced a synthesis of all previous research on insects, and right from the first pages of the huge Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes, he reminded the reader that cochineal and Kermes had been definitely proven to be insects.52 Réaumur tackled Breyn’s question in 1735 by isolating a greenfly in order to observe whether absence of a mate would lead it to produce offspring, a procedure already used by C.-J. Geoffroy, who had previously established viviparity in the louse in 1724.53 Geoffroy had enclosed under a glass bell a louse, freshly taken from an elm-gall, that reproduced directly, without eggs. He thereby provided a crucial element to Réaumur’s experimental protocol, for that procedure enabled him to control presence or absence of previous mating. But, Réaumur’s greenfly died before producing their offspring so that he could not observe parthenogenetic phenomena. When Bonnet started to correspond with Réaumur in 1737, the French academician generously left the problem in the young man’s hands and, in 1740, he succeeded in observing parthenogenesis on several species of louse.54 The genealogical record of the parthenogenetic issue is set out in Table 3.1.

Journal de Trévoux (1734): 491–504, pp. 501–2. �� Van Seters, p. 99. 51 �� For an account of Cuno’s microscopical observations, see Geus, pp. 133–4; Keil, ‘Microscopes made in Augsburg’, pp. 60–62. 52 �� Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 1, pp. 5–6. 53 �� C.-J. Geoffroy, ‘Observations sur les vessies’, p. 322. 54 �� See Roger, p. 381; Dawson, pp. 77–81. 49

50

Table 3.1

Genealogical record of the parthenogenetic problem 1660

1680

1700

1710–14

1724–30

1735

1740

Method

Obs./exp. dissection

obs.

obs. dissection

obs. cycle dissection

obs./ exp. dissection

exp. fails obs. diss.

exp. succ.

Country

I–H–F

I–F

I–H–F

I–F

F–H–G

F–G

Ge–F–H

Creation

Garidel Cestoni→ La Hire→

Cestoni→ →La Hire →Leeuw.

→Nissole →Vallisneri →Marsigli →Geoffroy

→Breyn→

→Réaumur

→Geoffroy Ruusscher

→Frisch

→Bonnet →Bazin →Trembley Lyonet

Redi→ Swamm.*

1750

Europe

* To Bonnet (Contemplation de la nature, in Oeuvres, vol. 8, p. 375), Swammerdam had not proven that the louse was androgynous. See van Seters, pp. 98–104.

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Two things characterized the change after Breyn’s question – the systematical recourse to experimentation by Réaumur, and the routine use of the microscope. Réaumur helped to reintroduce Leeuwenhoek into the entomological tradition, for he used to quote everyone who had previously done research on objects under his investigation. Contrary to the discontinuous view of the history of parthenogenesis,55 the issue passed by many milestones between Leeuwenhoek and Bonnet, and crossed through four important final episodes – in the works of Geoffroy, Ruusscher, Breyn and Réaumur – all providing inspiration for further discoveries. By introducing the microscope into a court of law, Ruusscher established the animality of cochineal and credited the microscope with being appropriate for research. A further step was Breyn’s work asking whether true hermaphrodites existed in nature, a question that induced Réaumur to perform experiments on lice, using Geoffroy’s procedure. Réaumur indeed wrote, on parthenogenesis, that observations and similar methods were ‘too flimsy to establish an exception to a rule of such acknowledged generality’.56 The problem was then offered to Bonnet, who followed Réaumur’s footsteps and isolated the solution.57 His discovery of parthenogenesis crowned seventy years of research and synthesized works from various entomological traditions. Bonnet came full circle by referring, in his 1745 Traité d’insectologie, to Redi, Swammerdam, Malpighi, Leeuwenhoek, Vallisneri, and Réaumur – and to Breyn’s problem. Up to the 1730s the theoretical situation is not as simple as those historians who hold that ex ovo omnia was the accepted standard system would have us think. In fact, some scholars believed that spermatic animalcules had a role in the reproductive process, and exceptions sprang up everywhere. The seeds of fungi were dubious, as were the seeds of coral (considered a plant);58 cryptogams such as mosses and nostoc had no seeds, lice and greenfly somehow manifested a different method of generation; the regeneration of millipedes was discussed by an anonymous author in 1706; the viviparity of lice had been established. Full of the richness of Nature, Bourguet stated in 1722, that ‘there are an almost infinite number of insects and other animals that live on the earth and in the sea, of which each individual produces its own kind, with no distinction of sex’.59 In short, the only generally accepted law was the pre-existence of the germ, as opposed to spontaneism. The synthesis of the parthenogenetic issue by Breyn reset the entire subject of the generation of cryptogams and insects, and raised the standard required to study these subjects. When Breyn expressed his famous question,

55

�� Dawson, pp. 16–18. �� Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 6, p. 526. See John R. Baker, Abraham Trembley of Geneva (London, 1952) p. 20. 57 �� Bonnet, Traité d’insectologie, pp. viii–xi, 99–100. 58 �� Marchant, pp. 106–7; Réaumur, ‘Observations sur la formation du corail’, MASP (1727; pub. 1729): 269–81, p. 272. On coral, see Chapter Five, pp. 105–6 and 117–23. 59 �� Bourguet, p. 78. 56

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he solidified and expanded the pre-existentialist value of ex ovo omnia, which appealed henceforth to experimentation as a key step. The status achieved by the microscope during this period was far from its high profile of half a century before. Routine use of the instrument, present in every one of these papers, was not questioned at all. Considering the importance of the problems dealt with, mainly looking for exceptions to natural laws, scholars undoubtedly credited the microscope with the status of a research tool – one acknowledged by everyone, but seldom celebrated. During the first four decades of the century, the microscope found its object in small-scale microscopical bodies, insects and seeds, defined and shared by academics and scholars. The lower visibility of the microscope matched its new routine status, and explains why historians did not detect microscopes in this period. Indeed it belonged to the undocumented area of everyday usage, with no one-to-one correspondence between instrument and discipline, titles of papers and contents. In a sense, this was a period of users of the microscopes without a particular field, microscopes were cited but never emphasized in the research, while providing the basis for both iconographic and demonstrative strategies. This was no longer the age of the amazing marvels that the microscope had revealed to the astounded public gaze of seventeenth-century observers. Marvels were, for a while, kept under wraps within the academies, but it would not be long before new marvels would come into sight through the eyepiece. Réaumur indeed revealed in the 1742 sixth volume of Mémoires the existence of a strange microscopic animal that had the ability to fully regenerate after being cut.60 As we will see in Chapter Five, the polyp would soon enter into science and public life.

�� Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 6, pp. xlix–lv.

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Part II The Break with the Past 1740–1760s

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Chapter 4

Towards Marketing Strategies for the Microscope in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Henry Baker and New Strategies for an Emerging Market After insects began to provide a shared microscopical object in the 1730s, the demand for microscopes began to rise, leading to a sharp increase in their manufacture in the early 1740s. Although historians have placed no particular emphasis on this period, they have noted the invention of several new models of microscopes, the rising popularity of cabinets for physics and natural history instruments, the importance of the Cuff microscope, and the expansion of the London instrument trade. Yet, at the same time the growing English market was turning its back on an outdated style in the use and manufacture of the instrument, that of Leeuwenhoek. In 1740, Henry Baker examined Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes at the Royal Society, and added a description of their powers, after Folkes’ 1723 paper. Among the 26 microscopes then in the possession of the Society, and as per Baker’s computations, the highest-power instrument magnified 160 diameters. Folkes had already acknowledged that these microscopes provided a very distinct image, and indeed Leeuwenhoek preferred ‘brightness and distinction’ to powerful magnification. Among other observations, Baker compared them with a recent microscope made by Cuff that belonged to Folkes, with the following magnifications: 16–26–44–100–160–400. It was a Wilson pocket microscope, described in 1742 by Cuff. Although Baker acknowledged that Leeuwenhoek could have had higher magnification, he was led to reject the latter’s instru�� ments: �� Turner, ‘The London Trade’, pp. 8–11; Daumas, pp. 217–25; Clay and Court, pp. 136–41; John R. Millburn, ‘The Office of Ordnance and the Instrument-Making Trade in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Annals of Science, 45 (1988): 221–93. The main London microscope makers of the 1740s–1750s were Martin, Adams Sr, Cuff, Ayscough, Mann Jr, Dollond, Sterrop, Lindsay and Nairne. �� For a biography of Baker, see Gerard L’E. Turner, ‘Henry Baker F.R.S., Founder of the Bakerian Lecture’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 29/1 (1974): 53–79. �� I will cite powers of magnification in diameter notation. �� Folkes, p. 451. �� Henry Baker, ‘An Account of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s Microscopes’, PT, 41/458 (1740): 503–19, pp. 512–13; John Cuff, The Description of a pocket Microscope, with the Apparatus

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The Quest for the Invisible our present Microscopes are much more useful and convenient that these of his. … Let us reverence him as our great Master in this Art. But the World since must have been strangely stupid, if it could have improved nothing, where there was room for so much Improvement.

The improvements were not to the lenses, but to the morphological structure of the microscope and the methods of fixing objects. Leeuwenhoek was regarded as a skilled preparator, and many of his instruments held by the Royal Society had minute bodies attached, therefore Baker remarked that he made ‘an intire and separate microscope for every object he was desirous to keep by him in readiness to shew his friends’. Assuredly, this was not an economic way of proceeding, and this practice explains why he built so many microscopes. Baker’s paper highlighted the weakness inherent in Leeuwenhoek’s style of science: namely, neglect of both criteria of economy and a viable solution to the problem of the repetition of observation. Against this same lack of economy, Baker held up contemporaneous knowhow of microscopes and recent technical advances, for instance the invention of isinglass (elsewhere called ichthyocolla),10 a fine and transparent membrane of talc: ‘Had Mr. Leeuwenhoek known this way, it would have saved him a vast deal of expence and trouble’.11 Sliders were already available in the late seventeenth century, as evidenced in Zahn’s 1685 Oculus artificialis, in Buonanni’s 1692 microscope, and in Wilson 1702 paper.12 In their report on Baker’s paper, Dutch reporters acknowledged the gap between the old and new styles in manufacturing microscopes: ‘instead of the needles, on which he stuck his objects, leaves of mica had been contrived, between which the smaller bodies can be confined, without being crushed’.13 In Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes one cannot look at a specimen through different powers without being obliged to handle it and remove it from the pin, thereby altering it. In fact, he combined the two functions of observing and mounting, and bolted them into the same rigid structure, even though a recognized solution to this problem was to substitute the lens so as to avoid any contact with the object. Since the 1660s, mounting and observing had been separated and assigned to two thereunto belonging [London, 1743]; Henry Baker, The Microscope Made Easy (London, 1743), pp. 9–13. �� Baker, ‘An Account of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s Microscopes’, pp. 514–15. �� Smith, vol. 2, pp. 335–7. �� Baker, ‘An Account of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s Microscopes’, p. 515. �� Leeuwenhoek made more than 550 microscopes: see Ruestow, pp. 10–11. 10 Encyclopedia Britannica (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1768–71), vol. 2, p. 830: ‘Ichthyocolla’; ibid., p. 850, ‘Isinglass.’ 11 �� Baker, ‘An Account of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s Microscopes’, p. 515. 12 �� Bedini, ‘Italian Compound Microscopes’, p. 421. 13 Bibliothèque raisonnée, 36 (1746): 324–6, p. 325.

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distinct elements of the microscope – the stage and the tube – to which instrument makers, following Hooke and Divini, fitted interchangeable lenses. The Leeuwenhoekian conception of observation matched a rigid relationship between observing and fixing the object that led to stressing the uniqueness of the knowledge rather than sharing it. Indeed, each microscopical body was unique, for each affixed object could not be removed without alteration, therefore repetition by other scholars was impossible other than by using the specific microscope to which the body was attached. Furthermore, Leeuwenhoek continued building similar microscope-object apparatuses, thus showing that these issues were not important to him. He cultivated an individual approach, as he explained to the Royal Society in a letter in which he professed faith in his method as the best possible to corroborate a new discovery. He would attach an object to a microscope and left it there for years in order to let people see it.14 Certainly, he aspired to enable other scholars to repeat his observation, but only with his microscopes, which greatly restricted the advancement of repetition, and the richness of variability. In addition, not only had they to look through his – and only his – microscope, but he never left people alone with his devices. One is reminded of the exclamation of Constantijn Huygens, the brother of Christiaan, about his practice of isolated knowledge: ‘O che bestia!’ (‘What a beast!’)15 Such a narrow view of scholarly intercourse did not match the current framework of scientific repetition that tended in exactly the opposite direction; for, to be credited as such, a discovery made in one country had to be repeated elsewhere, and scholars were expected to supply the community with comprehensive instructions to qualify for the repetition of their observations.16 To Leeuwenhoek, the relation between the observer and the microscope was univocal, one microscope concurred with each observation, and the mere structure of the instruments was consonant with his method of discovery. He did not lend or give his microscopes to others, and thus missed the advantages of gift-giving, even when confronted with such an important patron of science and prince as Karl I, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who asked him for some microscopes.17 Although ‘Leeuwenhoek showed his discoveries to an astounding number of persons’, his practice remained local, it neglected the universality of knowledge, and his approach was similar to someone using a camera obscura to show a one-off exhibit to everyone who wanted to see it. Scholarly networks required that everyone should reveal their means of observation and the structure of their instruments, in 14 �� Leeuwenhoek, ‘Concerning the Muscular Fibres in several Animals’, PT, 32/371 (1722): 72–5, p. 73. 15 �� Constantijn Huygens to Christiaan Huygens, 5 November 1685, Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 9, p. 38. 16 �� Shapin and Schaffer, p. 59; Daniel Garber, ‘Experiment, Community, and the Constitution of Nature in the Seventeenth Century’, Perspectives on Sciences, 3/2 (1995): 173–205, pp. 195–6. 17 �� Constantijn Huygens to Christiaan Huygens, 5 November 1685, Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 9, p. 38.

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order that everyone else could do the ‘same’ thing in different places, so pool their observations. Baker’s paper acknowledged this contrast, pushing for improved microscopical practices, and this idea was clearly recognized, since a 1746 report on his paper noted that ‘the art of using the microscope has much improved since Leeuwenhoek’.18 Yet, Baker’s criticisms were also influenced by a social strategy, and several factors account for his commitment to the microscope, that became a fashionable topic in the late 1730s. He had attended Lieberkühn’s demonstration of new mirrors and microscopes in 1739,19 after which Cuff, who had some kind of business partnership with Baker, launched some new products. Baker advertised the new models of microscopes made by Cuff, and praised them as the very best available in England, at the same time claiming credit for requesting Cuff to improve the compound microscope.20 In 1742, Baker published The Microscope Made Easy, a handbook of ‘microscopy’, in which he compiled, abstracted and copied everything available about the instrument, even Leeuwenhoek’s plates found in the archives of the Society. It found a vast audience, and an enlarged edition quickly followed, which included the discovery of the polyp. The 1743 edition served as the original text for the French and Dutch translations, both dated 1744. Two years after its original publication, the book was widely available on the Continent, and three German translations appeared between 1753 and 1756. Yet the reception of The Microscope Made Easy on the Continent was tinged by its readers’ feeling that they had seen it all before. Reporters from the Bibliothèque britannique wrote that ‘Mr Baker had compiled here a quantity of facts, observations and experiments’.21 Other journalists were also aware of work already done in that field: ‘On that subject [Baker] gathered experiments of every kind, made on several sorts of animals; experiments that are nowadays known by everyone’.22 Baker’s strategy is not difficult to understand. He aimed at taking Leeuwenhoek’s place in the nascent market of microscopical research, by contrasting the latter’s technique to modern advances, and by using the Royal Society, which admitted him in March 1741, as leverage. He succeeded in undermining Leeuwenhoek’s reputation, to the benefit of his own image as ‘expert of the microscope’, and the Society was quick to regard him as an authority on microscopes and microscopical observations. Baker’s earliest relationship with the microscope may have been guided by ambition and commercial manoeuvring, but he showed his creativity in an original work on crystallization for which he was awarded the Copley Medal in 1744.23 However, it is possible that his strategy may have stifled other Bibliothèque raisonnée, 36 (1746), p. 325. �� Baker, ‘An Account of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s Microscopes’, p. 516. 20 �� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, p. 21; Clay and Court, p. 139. 21 Bibliothèque britannique, 20/2 (1743): 184–90, pp. 186–7. 22 Journal de Trévoux (1755): 695–707, p. 702. 23 �� Turner, ‘Henry Baker’, pp. 63–5. 18

19

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projects conceived during the same time, and at least one proposal analogous to The Microscope Made Easy was abandoned. A three-page leaflet describing a forthcoming Treatise upon microscopes by the London instrument maker Joseph Harris was published in Bibliothèque britannique in spring 1742. The book was to have treated the limits of vision, the building of simple, double, reflection and refraction microscopes, micrometry, the camera obscura, and microscopical discoveries.24 However, the treatise was never published. Baker, among others, used and quoted Joblot’s book, for which English scholars and instrument makers of the 1740s constituted a new audience. Joblot’s was indeed the first treatise that contained both comprehensive methods for making microscopes and observations of microscopic entities. Unlike Leeuwenhoek’s Arcana naturae, it was not a collection of reprinted papers. It also dealt only with microscopical subjects, omitting astronomical and other topics scrutinized by seventeenth-century authors such as Pierre Borel, Power, Hooke, Malpighi and Zahn. Moreover it combined three subjects: techniques of microscope-making, the methodology for using the instrument, and scientific experiments and observations. Before Joblot, these three topics had not been combined in one work, and excluding non-microscopical topics. Except for one plate,25 Leeuwenhoek’s Arcana naturae and Malpighi’s treatises did not deal with the making of instruments.26 Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), Father Buonanni’s Observationes circa viventia (1691), and Griendel von Ach’s Micrographia nova (1687) illustrated microscopes, yet gave little information on their construction. In Joblot, technical presentation, methodology and experimentation were united in the same book, with separate functions. This French book by a maker-scholar thus served as a prototype for several English texts on microscopes that were published between 1740 and 1800.27 In other words, Joblot created the genre of ‘handbook of microscopy’ that was imitated and adapted by makers such as Baker, Benjamin Martin and the Adamses to promote their wares. In Micrographia illustrata Adams Senior translated passages from Joblot and Trembley to provide examples of microscopical research, while Baker’s Microscope Made Easy advertised Cuff’s microscopes and displayed compiled scientific data. On the Continent, Joblot’s book had little effect in spreading knowledge of the microscope, except on Ledermüller, and only the major experimental naturalists – Needham, Trembley, Buffon, Lyonet, and Spallanzani – provided pictures of their instruments.

24 �� Joseph Harris, ‘Proposals for printing by Subscription a Treatise upon Microscopes’, Bibliothèque britannique, 19/1 (1742): 211–13, pp. 212–13. 25 �� Leeuwenhoek, Arcana naturae detecta (Lugduni Batavorum, 1722), p. 177. 26 �� Bennett, p. 64. 27 �� Schickore, ‘The Most Signal and Illustrious Instance …’, p. 279 called B. Martin and others ‘authors-makers’, and regarded Hooke as their model.

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Shaping Modern Instruments: from Wood to Metal In the middle of the century, the general demand for microscopes was twofold, asking on the one hand for more serviceable and functional instruments to meet the needs of scholarly researchers, and on the other for more impressive and highly ornamented devices to please a new aristocratic audience that included queens, kings and popes. Among the several optical instruments used for research the simple microscope – an easy-to-use cheap instrument – underwent major morphological and functional changes, as is shown by Fig. 4.1.

Fig. 4.1 Easier handling of the objects and better stability characterized the so-called Ellis-Cuff aquatic microscope (bottom) in contrast with the Wilson-Cuff (top) which required slides

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After the 1740s, French artisans forsook the various types of screw-barrel and simple microscope à liqueur, but the English, German and Dutch manufacturers were still building screw-barrel models up to the 1760s, and these continued for some time to be used for scientific observation.28 However, a new instrument appeared in the 1750s that quickly competed with the screw-barrel microscope and led to its gradual neglect. Advertised in John Ellis’s Natural History of the Corallines (1755), the Ellis-Cuff simple aquatic microscope (Fig. 4.1, bottom), in an earlier version, was actually invented�� by Trembley in 1745, and Cuff advertised it with a pamphlet in 1758.29 Both devices served to observe microscopical water animals, but the aquatic microscope allowed for better handling of the material and provided ‘aquatic motion’, tridimensional movement of the tube that allowed observations from every angle. Another factor in that competition was the position an observer was required to adopt in order to use the instrument. Simple microscopes like the microscope à liqueur or screw-barrel type (called in the German lands Hand Mikroskope, and in Italy microscopio leeuwenhochiano) were held up and directed towards the sky, a pose that prevented lengthy observations, for want of stability. As early as the 1730s several English makers had fitted stands to simple microscopes to make them more stable.30 Other morphologies existed, which better satisfied the needs of microscopical research, by combining the stability of a base with freedom in the observer’s position. After Samuel van Musschenbroek and Joblot, in the mid-1740s Trembley and Lyonet each improved a flexible structure, with ball-and-socket mounted lenses and a fixed foot or rack (Fig. 4.2). The stability of the instrument was indeed an issue. Following Italian and German designs, the French makers Passemant, Thomin, Marie, Siméon Menard, Jacobi, Magny, and the King’s optician Georges and his son produced, from the 1740s onwards, box compound microscopes (Fig. 4.3, top left) that helped to render the cheap simple microscope obsolete for a certain part of the market.31 Buffon acknowledged this approach in 1748 and praised the compound microscope, which addressed the need for stability, probably also of his aristocratic audience.

28

�� Daumas, p. 332. After 1760, the following authors cited the Wilson: Ledermüller, Della Torre, Delius and Clemens, Roffredi, Wilcke, Ellis, Magni, Blumenbach, Richter. 29 �� See Marc J. Ratcliff and Marian Fournier, ‘Abraham Trembley’s impact on the construction of microscopes’, in From Makers to Users, pp. 91–112; Clay and Court, p. 69. 30 �� Clay and Court, pp. 54–7. 31 �� Lualdi, ‘Microscope makers …’, pp. 116–17; on these makers, see Daumas, pp. 346–53; Fournier, Early Microscopes, pp. 74–5.

Fig. 4.2

The flexible structure, with socket-and-ball mounted lenses, of Joblot’s microscope (top left), Trembley’s microscope (bottom) and Lyonet’s microscope (top right)

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Fig. 4.3

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Microscopes made with wooden bases: in France, Thomin 1749 (top left); in Italy, Selva 1761 (right); and in Bavaria, Gleichen’s microscope, in Ledermüller 1762 (bottom left)

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Fig. 4.4

The Quest for the Invisible

The compound Cuff microscope (1744)

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Fig. 4.5

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Abbé Nollet’s figure of a wood and ebony compound microscope, an example of which was acquired by Bonnet in 1741

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Both because of its advertising strategy and its new morphology, the invention of the Cuff compound microscope (Fig. 4.4) around 1743 had a significant impact on manufacturing methods. Nollet, for instance, in a 1738 catalogue of instruments and in his 1743 Leçons de physique expérimentale, described a wood and ebony microscope like that purchased in 1741 by the Geneva professor of physics Jallabert on behalf of the 21-year-old Charles Bonnet (see Fig. 4.5).32 Yet after the Cuff was marketed, Nollet stopped the production of his wood microscope and advertised models inspired by Cuff. Some of the Paris makers, such as Claude Paris, Passemant and Magny, copied or improved the Cuff,33 but it was in the German lands that it inspired many opticians and practitioners.34 Nevertheless, the Cuff symbolized another kind of victory. It impelled makers to use metal – brass and copper-alloy – rather than traditional materials such as wood, ivory, vellum and cardboard.35 Thus, many models were built from brass from the 1740s onwards. In the interests of accuracy, wood gradually fell out of favour and was thereafter mostly used for boxes and pedestals: for example, in chest microscopes by Ayscough, Nairne, and the Dollonds;36 in simple microscopes after Trembley-Ellis-Cuff;37 in French box microscopes; in Dutch microscopes by Lommers, Paauw, Huysen and Reghter; in German microscopes by Gleichen, Brander, Tiedemann, Oppelt and Ring (see Fig. 4.3);38 and in dissecting microscopes where it served as a stage, such as in those by Lieberkühn in 1745 and by Lyonet in 1757. Even so, by the 1770s the base of most English and Dutch compound microscopes was made of brass, a trend the Continent followed by the end of the century. According to Lewis Munford, the passage from water/wood to metal/coke/ steam is one of the defining features of the emerging industrial revolution.39 As regards microscopes, whereas the English makers started to use metal in the 1730s, the French practitioners, opticians and manufacturers only began making their 32 �� On 1 August, 1741, Bonnet acknowledged receiving the Nollet microscope (Bonnet to Gabriel Cramer, Bibliothèque de Genève (hereafter BGE; formerly Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève [BPU]) Ms Suppl 384/3, f° 83), with which he performed certain observations for his 1745 Traité d’insectologie. 33 �� John Turberville Needham, Nouvelles observations microscopiques (Paris, 1750), contained a plate of the Cuff in a paper by Passemant. See Daumas, p. 218. 34 �� Those were Steiner (Zurich), Stegmann, Burucker, Meyen, Reinthaler, Ring, Schleenstein, Vennebruch, and Tiedemann. See Ledermüller, Nachleese seiner Mikroskopischen Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung (Nürnberg, 1761), pp. 2, 10, Ledermüller, Mikroskopische Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung (Nürnberg, 1763), p. 136; Harting, Das Mikroskop, p. 680; Clay and Court, pp. 150–54; Fournier, Early Microscopes, pp. 13, 104, 121; Pipping, p. 81 also cites Westberg. 35 �� Turner, ‘The London Trade’, pp. 8–9. 36 �� See Turner, Catalogue, p. 42. 37 �� I use this appellation instead of the Ellis-Cuff. 38 �� See Fournier, Early Microscopes, pp. 104–22, 210–14, 219. 39 �� Lewis Munford, Le Mythe de la machine (2 vols, Paris, 1974), vol. 2, p. 189.

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instruments from brass, bronze and other alloys around the 1740s. Passemant, Magny, Thomin, Le Canu, Georges and his son, Chiquet, Tournant, and other craftsmen conformed to the new distribution of functions for each material. The German lands adopted metal only gradually, although their advanced metal industry could have easily supplied scholars with good-quality cheap brass. Nuremberg workshops, for instance, continued to build cardboard and wood microscopes up to the mid-nineteenth century. Brander and Höschel, perhaps the most famous among the German makers, built ‘wood or brass’ microscopes in the 1760, presumably sold at different prices.40 During the second half of the century, most of the many scattered microscope makers gradually exchanged wood for brass and copper alloys.41 As in the rest of Europe, in Italy wood, ivory, and paper were the traditional materials of seventeenth-century craftsmen, and their successors continued to use them. The tubes of Patroni’s microscopes, dated between 1715 and 1726, and of a microscope by Baillou dated 1738, were in part made of wood, as were those of the achromatic microscopes by Bernardino Marzoli in 1802 and 1811.42 However, after the price of brass began to decrease in the 1760s, the professional Italian instrument makers made increasing use of it, in particular instead of wood for the mechanical parts, as is clear from Selva’s plate of 1761 (Fig. 4.6). Therefore, in spite of national differences, during the eighteenth century the general production standard in Europe gradually switched from wood to metal. The shift to brass would make it possible for microscopes to accommodate the wave of quantification that would soon overrun Europe. The microscope-makers followed the trend that had gradually substituted metallic materials for wood, ivory and cardboard in instruments and mechanical structures. In England, the shortage of wood coupled with the increasing demand for metals, contributed to the changeover, as their cost declined over the course of the century throughout Europe. By 1800, scientific instruments in almost every country were made of brass and metal, and the widespread use of metal alloys would soon increase the possibility of attaining greater precision and standardization in building microscopes. Eventually the shift to metal had another important consequence for the profession of microscope-makers. Woodturning, which had played a major role in the construction of microscopes up to the 1730s, became neglected with the advent of brass microscopes, and this slow mutation that varied considerably according to the various countries, contributed to the 40 �� See Fournier, Early Microscopes, pp. 195–204; Turner, Catalogue, p. 36; Keil, ‘Microscopes made in Augsburg’, pp. 68–9. 41 �� These included Meyen, Mitsdörfer, Vennebruch, Milchmeyer, Steiner, Kremer, Schleenstein, Sturte, Teuber, Burucker, Ring, Campe, Geißler, Hardy, Voigtländer, Duncker, Brander, Hofman, Brinkman, Oppelt, Reinthaler, Junker, Stegmann, Breithaupt, Baumann and Tiedemann. 42 �� Lualdi, ‘Microscope makers …’, pp. 114–20. See Turner, Catalogue, p. 50. A biographical note on Marzoli is in Commentari dell’Ateneo di Brescia, 1834 (Brescia, 1835), pp. 119–21.

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emergence of a clearer divide between amateur and professional microscopemakers. The increasing specialization of the latter meant that amateur makers had been almost entirely squeezed out by the early nineteenth century.

Fig. 4.6

Selva’s plate of microscopes (1761)

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Social and Political Cultures of the Microscope: European Styles of Producing and Advertising Microscopes When we study microscope making in European countries, important cultural differences emerge. A major take-off in production of microscopes took place in England during the 1740s and many countries of Europe followed the trend in the second half of the century, but with very different rhythms. It has been said that, compared to the dynamism in England, the production of microscopes was backward in France, the German lands and Italy during the eighteenth century. In fact, the French cultivated a self-sufficient conception of the production of microscopes, with restricted means of advertising, and this cultural difference is responsible for their lack of visibility. French privilèges that fitted their economic system based on the power of corporations lay behind this conception of marketing and advertisement, and Maurice Daumas and Paolo Brenni have explained the French ‘technological backwardness’ on the basis of the social organization of work, which masters controlled through corporations or guilds established in 1583. Each guild specialized in one profession – caster, glassmaker, founder, gilder, and so on – and had the power to prevent anyone who was not a member from doing similar work. After 1750, admission to the guilds grew increasingly difficult until it was almost only the sons of masters who were granted the privilege.43 Building a microscope required several craftsmen at a time when ‘such division no longer reflected the needs of a new type of production’.44 In England, although division of labour and much less powerful guilds also existed – in London, the Spectaclemakers’ Company grouped together optical instrument makers – the declared ideology of competitive entrepreneurship encouraged collaboration among practitioners. Subcontracted work was also quite common, and microscope makers sent wood and cardboard parts to be decorated in several bookbinding workshops.45 In France, subcontracting was possible only with the approval of the corporations and such tight control hampered the building of scientific instruments, particularly in Paris, where the trade organizations did not tolerate any competition. As shown by Daumas, the conditions of labour did not favour the French, at least not in development of industrial production. There were several ways of escaping the tyranny of the French guilds – religious protection, connections with the Academy, or obtaining Lettres patentes, 43 �� Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, ‘Edit du roi portant supression des jurandes’, in Turgot, Administration et oeuvres économiques (Paris, 1889; 1st edn 1776), pp. 170–97, pp. 173–4, denounced the established practice according to which some communities denied access to anyone other than masters’ sons. According to Daumas, p. 131, masters’ sons were exempted from creating the final chef d’oeuvre. 44 �� Brenni, p. 450. 45 �� Gerard L’E. Turner, ‘Decorative Tooling on 17th and 18th Century Microscopes and Telescopes’, in Turner, Essays on the History of the Microscope (Oxford, 1980), pp. 79–108, pp. 99, 103–6.

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permission delivered ad personam to disregard their rules. Magny in the 1750s freely built his microscopes because his workshop was located in a Paris abbey, a site exempted from corporate jurisdiction, and the Duc de Chaulnes, inventor and academician, protected him. Lettres patentes and royal privilèges existed from the mid-sixteenth century that protected the rights of an inventor over his invention for a period of twenty years.46 With privilèges in hand, the King’s engineers, opticians and mécanicien du Roi, as well as makers attached to the Academy could ignore corporatist barriers. A King’s engineer could freely advertise his instruments, usually in technical handbooks on optics or physics, or in scientific papers like those by Nollet, Thomin, Passemant, and Magny. Unlike the unknown masses of craftsmen, close in number and skills to those in London,47 the King’s engineers could make their names known through such publicity. Although it was not the French custom to advertise through separate leaflets, their promotions increased following the expansion of gazettes in the middle of the century. Makers of microscopes such as Passemant, Georges, Magny, Dom Nöel, Lange de la Maltière, Navarre, Boulogne le jeune, the optician Louvel who succeeded Thomin, and Letellier advertised their goods and inventions mainly in gazettes, like Avantcoureur.48 Even makers in other countries, such as Dellebarre who worked in Holland, the Swiss Mumenthaler, Hofman in Leipzig, and Clark in Edinburgh, advertised their goods in Paris gazettes during the early 1770s, showing that the city was becoming an attractive market for foreign microscopes.49 By tradition, in France the ‘fabricants d’instruments de mathématique’, the miroitiers, opticians and enamellers also made microscopes, and in Paris they were grouped in the faubourg Saint Antoine.50 From the 1770s onwards, Daumas notes a sharp increase in the production of instruments in France due to the new generation of instrument makers, the Lenoir, Mégnié and Fortin, and, particularly for optics and microscopes, Dellebarre, Louis Vincent Chevalier, 46

PV ASP 1727, f° 221. �� Other French opticians and microscopes makers were active in France from the 1730s: for example, Choppin, Gonichon, Segard, Maingault, Fonzonole, l’Etang, Legrand, Nodos, Dathée, Bézard, Choquart, the widow Caron, Cahuet, Blavet, Gayde, Say and Rabiqueau. See also the following note, the Webster Database, and Daumas, pp. 352–60. 48 Mercure de France, May 1751, p. 158 (Lange de la Maltière, ‘physio-techniope’, an improved solar microscope); La Feuille Nécessaire, 1759, p. 532 (Navarre, ‘des Microscopes, tant pour les solides que pour les fluides’); ibid., p. 534 (Passemant, for telescopes); Avantcoureur, 1760, p. 778 (Georges, for microscopes); Avantcoureur, 1761, p. 356 (Boulogne le jeune, ‘microscopes à la façon d’Angleterre’); Avantcoureur, 1771, p. 103 (Louvel, ‘Lunette microscopique’). See also Daumas, p. 353. 49 Avantcoureur, 1771, pp. 618–21 (Dellebarre, achromatic microscopes); Avantcoureur, 1772, p. 661 (Hofman, a six-lens microscope); Avantcoureur, 1773, pp. 276–7 (Clarck, subscription for a microscope); ibid., pp. 645–8 (Mumenthaler, an improved solar microscope). 50 �� Pierre Jaubert, Dictionnaire raisonné universel des arts et métiers (4 vols, Paris, 1773), vol. 3, pp. 145, 151; vol. 2, p. 655. 47

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Rochon, Letellier, the Dumotiez brothers, Charles, Rochette, Carochez, Huette, Lerebours, Grateloup, Putois, Jecker and Cauchoix.51 Daumas related this increase to the political endeavour to abolish monopolies and jurandes (corporations) by the French minister Turgot, that led to the establishment of optical workshops and of the company of patented engineers.52 In 1776, Turgot issued a liberalminded ruling formally dissolving corporations, a strong political act designed to free labour from privilèges, and to open the market to competition.53 However, this law encountered immediate opposition, and following the fall of Turgot in the same year the Ordonnance sur les jurandes was removed. Still, this attempt stimulated competition, advertisement, and the establishment of workshops – for instance Dellebarre, who worked in The Hague, came to Paris in 1776. A year later a Paris Société d’émulation pour l’art, le commerce et l’invention was founded and this assisted in the creation of important optical workshops. In 1778, Pahin de la Blancherie created the Salon de la correspondance générale, where many artists, scholars, manufacturers and engineers, including some women, met over the course of a decade. There scholars such as d’Alembert and Needham could met craftsmen, test Dellebarre’s microscopes and arrange closer collaboration with the manufacturers. The engineer Richer presented his glass micrometers as well as trying out Dellebarre’s microscope, and many practitioners demonstrated their devices at a 1782 exhibition of machines.54 Yet, although the power of the corporations was reduced, some makers were still hindered by them to the extent that their tools or products were seized or destroyed, and writers report that Dellebarre returned destitute to Holland in the late 1770s.55 As a reaction, in May 1787 a royal act established a professional body of engineers for optics, physics and mathematics, but it was not until March 1791, during the Revolution, that the Legislative Assembly definitively dissolved the jurandes, suppressing the major political and juridical obstacles to the manufacturing and free marketing of, among other goods, scientific instruments. The trading conditions in France had historiographical consequences; while there remain hundreds of leaflets and trade cards printed by English makers, in France this practice was seldom employed before the Revolution. This is an important factor in 51

�� See Daumas, pp. 353–77, and the entries in Beaudoin, Brenni and Turner, A Bio-bibliographical Dictionary (forthcoming). 52 �� Daumas, p. 354. 53 �� Turgot, ‘Edit du roi portant supression des jurandes’, pp. 178–84. 54 �� See Hervé Guénot, ‘La Correspondance générale pour les sciences et les arts de Pahin de La Blancherie (1779–1788)’, Cahiers Haut-Marnais, 162 (1985): 49–61; Hahn, pp. 106–7; and Henri-Gabriel Duchesne (ed.), Dictionnaire de l’industrie, ou collection raisonnée des procédés utiles dans les Sciences et dans les Arts (6 vols, Paris, an IX, 1801), vol. 4, pp. 269–70. Pahin de la Blancherie published a journal between 1779 and 1788, the Correspondance générale pour les arts et les sciences. 55 �� Daumas, pp. 132–6; Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (2 vols, Amsterdam, 1783), p. 89. Fournier, Early Microscopes, p. 207.

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an understanding of the ‘history of microscope-y’, which is biased by the fact that competitive advertising was common in England (and in Holland) at this period, whereas in France it was not possible. Information about eighteenth-century microscopes and their makers is therefore much more accessible for England than for France. As regards the Italian workshops, historians believe that instrument making was in a state of decline in Italy during the Enlightenment.56 However, the practices employed in Italy for advertising and selling instruments differed from those in both England and France because its social network of instrument makers extended over a wider geographical area. In London, instrument making became ever more centralized, manifesting competitive marketing and advertising, and Paris similarly housed the vast majority of French instrument makers. By contrast, and as in the German lands, the distribution of Italian instrument makers throughout the country softened market relationships, and makers probably made parts of their instruments to order. After 1740, lay craftsmen ran workshops and built microscopes, among other products, in Milan, Venice, Padua, and Vicenza.57 Opticians such as the Selvas in Venice and Giovan Stefano Conti in Lucca performed optical research in collaboration with scholars. Like continental academies during the 1760s–1780s, Lorenzo Selva, Conti and the mathematician Ruggero Boscovich were looking for the formula for flint glass, necessary for making achromatic objectives, and Selva marketed in 1761 a new ‘catodioptric microscope’, later presented to the Académie des sciences.58 Italian instrument making involves a unique feature, in that the workshops of religious craftsmen probably represented a significant portion of the total number of workshops, and competed de facto with laymen.59 The religious craftsmen took work the latter might otherwise have carried out, and made instruments at very low prices, some friars even working for free.60 This situation was a continuation from the seventeenth century: Zucchi, Kircher, Lana Terzi, Settala, Matteo Campani, Ciampini, Tortoni, Buonanni, and Chiarello, who worked for the astronomer

56

�� Daumas, p. 342. �� These are Baillou and his sons, Burlini, the Selvas, Bazzanti, Gilardi, Rodella, Gozzi, Purrini, and Merlugo. Lualdi, ‘Repertorio dei costruttori italiani’, listed more than 30 other eighteenth-century Italian optical makers, who made telescopes, lenses, and so on. 58 �� See Eugenio Proverbio, ‘La collaborazione di Giovan Stefano Conti e Ruggero Boscovich per la produzione di vetro Flint’, in Fabio Bevilacqua (ed.), Atti del X Congresso Nazionale di Storia della Fisica (Milan, 1991), pp. 311–48, pp. 326–7; Lualdi, ‘Microscope makers …’, pp. 127–131. 59 �� The following religious men made microscopes: Della Torre, Guevara, Frà Francesco da Fiorano (Emilia) in 1743; Father Reggio built optical instruments in Genova; the canon Fromond in Cremona; Father Guidi in Florence and Pistoia; Father Marzoli in Brescia, the Fathers Morini and Benincasa in Modena. Many other religious men were instrument makers. 60 �� Spallanzani to Giuseppe Rovatti, 6 December 1769, in Carteggi di Lazzaro Spallanzani, ed. Pericle di Pietro (12 vols, Milan, 1984–90), vol. 7, pp. 140–41. 57

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Bianchini, all known scholars who died before 1730 and who ground lenses, or built microscopes or optical instruments, were religious men.61 Of course there were also laymen, such as Fontana, Campani, Divini and Cellio. Yet, this division of work between clergy and lay craftsmen created serious obstacles to the professionalization of instrument making in Italy. Working in monasteries, the monks followed rules of discretion: they did not put their names on their microscopes, neglected advertising their models and had usually no commercial purpose. Some of them built microscopes to existing designs and others created new models: Della Torre, San Martino, Mazzola, Toffoli, even Marzoli, all were religious men who invented new microscopes. The community of Somascan Fathers from Naples, and the network of Lazzaro Spallanzani provide good examples of the clergy’s influence on microscope making in later eighteenth-century Italy. Himself a priest, Spallanzani developed an interest in microscopical research during his seminary years, and he stayed in touch with religious colleagues with whom he exchanged information about microscopes. He belonged to a network of north and central Italian lay and religious scholars who worked with the microscope,62 and he had close ties with less well-known friars who built microscopes, such as Frà Fedele and Frà Modesto. These two were Capuchin friars from Modena who specialized in making all sorts of scientific devices. They worked for many years supplying the female physicist Laura Bassi at the University of Bologna with scientific instruments and between 1770 and 1774 built several microscopes based on Lyonet’s model, for Spallanzani, Firmian and other scholars including Rovatti, Laura Bassi and perhaps Moscati and Senebier.63 In 1774, Count Carlo Firmian, Spallanzani’s patron, hired them as official instrument makers to the University of Modena. In Turin, other clergymen who corresponded with Spallanzani, such as the physicist Beccaria and the naturalist Roffredi, brought improvements to certain microscopes. Spallanzani was also interested in the simple microscope invented by the priest Giovambatista da San Martino during the 1770s. And, in Venice, as well as a pocket microscope, Father Bartolomeo Toffoli built a new lathe for grinding microscopical lenses in the early 1790s. In Naples, interest in the microscope dated back to 1640 and was later shared by Somascan friars. Frà Giovanni Maria Guevara succeeded in making spherular lenses by the early 1740s, and building microscopes. Along with other friars and scholars, Father Giovanni Maria Della Torre improved spherules and built 61 �� On those men, see Fazzari, ‘Incredibili visioni’, pp. 28–38, Bedini and Bennett, p. 107. 62 �� Felice Fontana, Targioni-Tozzetti (Florence), Vallisneri Jr (Padua), Corti, Benincasa, Rovatti (Modena), Roffredi and Beccaria (Turin), Moscati and Campi (Milan), Fortis, Griselini and Colombo (Venice). 63 �� See the letters from Spallanzani to Rovatti, 6 December 1769, and 18 September 1780, in Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 7, pp. 140–41, and 248; Spallanzani to Firmian, 20 April 1773, in ibid., vol. 4, p. 268; Spallanzani to Rangone, 22 January 1774, in ibid., vol. 7, p. 20.

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simple microscopes in the early 1750s. With his observations of red blood cells appearing as a ring divided into six sacs, Della Torre launched a quarrel in the 1760s which involved scholars from most countries of Europe. During the 1770s, new enthusiasts of the microscope appeared, such as Barba, Macrì and the optician Father Mazzola who both made spherules.64 With these microscopes, Barba, a professor of physics and chemistry to the Neapolitan military school carried out observations on the structure of cryptogams, and on the anatomy of the brain.65 More important, naturalists such as Cavolini, the physician Macrì and Cirillo used these microscopes to study the development of marine animals and vegetable tissues. Then in the early 1780s, Mazzola claimed he had built achromatic objectives for the microscope before leaving for Vienna where he set up as an optician and designed a new simple microscope.66 These two examples – the religious network of Spallanzani and the Somascan friars of Naples – are typical of eighteenth-century Italy, and illustrate a marketing milieu different from France or England, one showing commissioned production for a private ‘market’ of microscopes. Priests and friars working as craftsmen supplied handy microscopes suitable for research, and helped to fill the market with cheap instruments, thus reducing the demand for more expensive microscopes made by professional makers. As a consequence, the professionalization of microscope making was hindered during the eighteenth century in Italy, except in cities like Venice and Milan. The friars did not share the entrepreneurs’ relationship with the market, competition and visibility, and did not produce microscopes on a commercial basis. Only for new models of simple microscopes – such as those by Guevara, Della Torre, San Martino and Mazzola – was there some limited advertising, not through leaflets but in Della Torre’s handbooks of physics and microscopical research, in an unknown treatise on the microscope by the physician Lupieri in 1784 (Fig. 4.7) and in Barba’s book.67 The importance of those clerical amateur makers for the market, for shaping scientific research and for optical advances should not be underestimated. Indeed, they competed with professional makers, they filled in part the needs of scholars who used several types of microscopes, and it was a cleric, Father Bernardino Marzoli, who built one of the first achromatic microscopes in 1802. �� Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni microscopiche (Napoli, 1776), pp. 34, 40–41. 65 �� Antonio Barba, Osservazioni microscopiche sul cervello e sue parti adjacenti (Napoli, 1819; 1st edn 1807), p. 48. 66 �� Vincenzo Mazzola, ‘Lettera al N. U. il Sig. March. Balì Sagramoso Intorno all’effetto d’un obbiettivo acromatico aggiunto al microscopio’, Opuscoli scelti, 5 (1782): 328–30, p. 329. 67 �� Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni intorno la storia naturale; Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni microscopiche, p. 40; Giuseppe Maria Lupieri, Del microscopio (Vicenza, 1784). Barba, Osservazioni microscopiche, pp. 17–23, described Mazzola’s microscope with a plate. See also Harting, Das Mikroskop, pp. 620–21. 64

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Fig. 4.7 San Martino’s simple microscope Despite this, the production of those fathers, like that of Spallanzani’s friends, was not thought of in as part of the general market. This private regime of production explains why the astronomer Lalande, did not see many craftsmen at work during his trip to Italy in the mid-1760s. He should have gone to visit an abbey. Citing Microscope Makers in the Enlightenment: European Networks and the Emerging German Hegemony Historians acknowledged that only the English workshops produced instruments of international repute, mainly nautical ones: ‘For instruments of higher quality,

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the Dutch scholars, like their colleagues in other countries, preferred to ask English suppliers.’68 Many clues support this interpretation; for instance, the achromatic telescope made by John Dollond in 1758 could not be replicated by continental workshops almost until the end of the century. But, the production of microscopes was a special case and, as demonstrated above, it followed independent rhythms in the various countries of Europe. In order to measure the proportion of foreign microscopes circulating in a given country as against local production, research was carried out, using an underestimated source of information: the citations of microscopes and microscope makers made by scholars. Excluding leaflets, it was possible to muster more than 2,100 eighteenth-century printed sources that mention microscopes. Table 4.1 shows the number of citations of microscope makers (hereafter mm) by scholars – excluding leaflets – for each country, and related ratings Table 4.1

Citations of microscope makers by scholars per country, 1700–1800 (excluding leaflets)

No. of citations of mm from: Authors from:

n.

Germ.

Engl.

Italy

Fr.

Holl.

tot.

TOT.

% t/T

t/n

N

%n/ N

German lands

38

55

22

1

2

4

84

750

11.2

2.2

180

21.1

England

21

1

28

3

32

372

8.6

1.5

99

21.2

Italy

19

3

34

13

6

58

250

23.2

3.1

88

21.6

1

1

9

11

530

2.1

1.2

114

7.9

8

138

5.8

–

30

–

3

87

3.4

–

40

–

2127

2.1

551

16.9

2

France

9

Holland

3

2

3

Sweden

3

1

2

93

62

90

18

17

9

196

11

69

–

–

–

–

Total % heter.

3

Note: Explanations of the symbols used: n Number of authors per country who quoted one or more mm tot.

Sum of the citations of mm, per country

TOT.

Sum of the papers citing microscopes, per country

% t/T

Ratio of mm cited to the papers citing microscopes, per country

t/n

Mean of the number of microscopes cited by author, per country

N

Number of authors citing the microscope, by country

% heter.

Frequency of national makers cited by foreign scholars

A dash (–) Means that the amount of data is too small to be useful. 68

�� Daumas, p. 138.

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The first line (German lands) reads as follows: 180 German authors wrote 750 papers, 38 of these 180 authors cited 84 mm, among them 55 German mm, 22 English mm, 1 Italian mm, and so on. 55 German mm does not mean that these were 55 different makers, because some were cited several times. This table shows cultural differences between countries concerning the ways scholars and elite referred to makers. The French had the smallest ratio of mm cited per 100 papers (2.1), while the Italians (23.2) cited mm ten times the French. The German and English were approximately the same, with 11.2 per cent and 8.6 per cent of the papers quoting makers. The table also shows that English makers had developed an international market, albeit very small, that sold microscopes abroad: 11 per cent of references to German mm were by non-Germans, while 69 per cent of citations of English mm were cited by non-English authors (bottom line). Even so, this 69 per cent represents only 3.5 per cent of the total microscope market in the Continent.69 Regarding cultures of citation, the Germans, English and Italians were equal (%n/N = 21.1/21.2/21.6) although the total numbers of papers are not comparable. The Germans wrote twice as many as the English and three times as many as the Italians (750, 372 and 250 papers, respectively). France clearly shows itself to be a country where scholars did not quote instrument makers, although the amount of papers (530) came second, between the Germans and the English. An analysis of the citations of mm shows two distinct groups. The Germans come first, ahead of the English, with 20 and 17 names cited, respectively; the Italians and the French were almost the same but with half the mm cited, 10 and 7, respectively; while the Dutch had 3 mm cited.70 Although data are incomplete, they are enough to show that the reference to a maker reflects the cultural styles of relationships between scholars and craftsmen. In France, there were enormous discrepancies between the large number of craftsmen involved in microscope making, the number of papers published (tot) and the near absence of mm cited, with a ratio of authors citing mm out of those citing microscopes (%n/N) that drops to 7.9, while it is 21 for England, Italy and the German lands. Yet, not citing practitioners paradoxically reflects eighteenth-century routine microscopical practices, within local communities. In a closed community such as an academy, scholars assumed that everyone knew enough about the author’s instruments and their makers. Working with routine instruments on small-scale bodies made inclusion of this information superfluous, a style well exemplified by the Académie �� 2127 – 372 = 1755; 90 – 28 = 62; 62 / 1755 x 100 = 3.5 %. German mm, Baumann, Bischoff, Brander, Campe, Delius, Gleichen, Hofman, Lieberkühn, Milchmeyer, Meyen, Mitsdörfer, Reinthaler, Ring, Rudolph, Stegmann, Schmiedel, Steiner, Sturte, Streicher, Tiedemann. British mm, Adams, Ayscough, Cuff, Clark, Culpeper, Dollond, Ellis, Lindsay, Marshall, Martin, Mellin, Ramsden, Sterrop, Scarlett, Short, Watkins, Wilson. Italian mm, Bono, Campani, Della Torre, Falchi, Guevara, Mazzola, Merlugo, Patroni, San Martino. French mm, Joblot, Villette, Lebas, Lefebvre, Magny, Passemant, Georges, Dellebarre. Dutch mm, Lommers, Lyonet, Musschenbroek. 69 70

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des sciences. Italian scholars purchased some microscopes abroad (up to 13 per cent), but in France there are very seldom traces of English microscopes. The Germans actually accumulated the largest amount of works over the century (750), and an important number of microscope makers, comparable to France and England. Through price lists, leaflets, notes and instructions, the German scholars and craftsmen71 – Optikus and Mechaniker – advertised their microscopes from the 1770s onwards, in widely read journals such as Hannoverisches Magazin, Magazin für das Neueste aus der Physik und Naturgeschichte, Journal von und für Deutschland, Technologisches Magazin, and in dozens of others which were new forums for science. The data showed a trend that contributed to the optical German authority by the turn of the century, and the German countries had already started to compete with English optical hegemony in the 1760s, but did not compete for an international market.72 Historians have reported that the European production of optical instruments, particularly microscopes, was intended for the elite and aristocrats, and used as toys,73 but these assertions are biased. Indeed, since they belonged to aristocrats and the wealthy, the microscopes studied by these historians were more likely to survive and subsequently be conserved. A cheaper microscope, unadorned and without a signature, and bought by an anonymous scholar, would not have the same ‘probability of historical survival’ as those belonging to members of the aristocracy or wealthy bourgeoisie. Moreover, the main sources considered by these historians are the extant instruments, some papers on microscopes, handbooks, leaflets and occasionally correspondences.74 Thus the English were not so much the ‘leaders in microscope making’ but rather the promoters of an internationalist conception by which they imported raw materials and ideas from abroad, but never sold or revealed their technologies, only their products. The English culture of advertising promoted manufactured goods while indoctrinating everyone with the cliché of the optical empire. The Germans, on the other hand, promoted their internal market by increasing exchanges within the Vaterland, grounded in a national consciousness that was to emerge over the following century. Thanks to an abundance of translations, they absorbed and assimilated knowledge and technical practices from everywhere, and regarded microscopical research as an emerging discipline. The French conception was the �� For example, Brander, Goeze, Kästner, Hofman, Tiedemann, Stegmann, Junker, Burucker. 72 �� On Fraunhofer’s enterprise, see Myles W. Jackson, Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics (Cambridge, MA, 2000). Theoretical transformation also took places between 1780 and 1830: Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht, 1982), pp. 54–111; Ohad Parnes, ‘The Envisioning of Cells’, Science in Context, 13/1 (2000): 71–92. 73 �� Bennett, p. 72; Mazzolini, p. 219; Fournier, Fabric of Life, p. 2; Turner, ‘A Very Scientific Century’, p. 19; Daumas, pp. 346–7. 74 �� A striking exception is provided by Millburn, Adams of Fleet Street. 71

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opposite of the English one, for with few exceptions there is almost no visibility of the microscope in French scientific texts, although they published more texts than the English or the Italians. With almost no English microscope makers being cited in France, and vice versa, it seems that the old Anglo-French rivalry is manifest here. Italy presents a different pattern, where lack of visibility was based on another type of socio-economic regime. The Italians clearly did not aim at industrial production of microscopes, yet the amateur makers of microscopes satisfied, albeit sometimes with difficulty, the requirements of research. It is possible that more of these makers would emerge with further research, but the tendencies would probably not change significantly. England was a country where an economic logic close to capitalism was established in the eighteenth century, and historians took these categories for granted, considering that market visibility goes hand in hand with production. Examining three other economic contexts – France, Italy and the German lands – shows the limits of the capitalist model applied to history. Indeed, each of these countries dissociated visibility from production. Production and exchange of goods existed with little advertisement, microscopes circulated through local networks and correspondences, and their production depended on both amateur and professional makers. In particular, the Italian custom of making microscopes to order within lay and religious networks reduced advertising and market competition. In France, despite the heavy-handed presence of corporations, the French microscope makers produced enough instruments to both meet the national demand and to export a few as well. The English had indeed promoted an international market, but it represented more or less 3.5 per cent of all microscopes mentioned by scholars – thus only 3.5 per cent of the microscopes used for research! – outside of England. It is probable that more English microscopes existed in continental collections and cabinets, but those prestigious microscopes, the property of aristocrats and the curious rich, were seldom used for published research. The geographical dispersal of workshops in the Italian peninsula, ruled as it was by several political regimes, and the sharing of the work between two communities with different goals in terms of recognition, advertisement and professionalization, explain why other countries perceived microscope making in Italy as almost absent. The low-visibility regime in France was caused by regulation, while in Italy it resulted from the geographical and professional situation. The data help to evaluate the real production of microscopes in use per country (see Table 4.2). I suggest that the 458 authors (551 – 93) who did not cite the mm owned a locally made microscope. These data concern only microscopes used by scholars and are obviously underestimated, for many more makers and instruments existed than were cited. They are only clues to the total production of microscopes, which depended on many factors: surviving microscopes (with their various probabilities of survival), other sources such as leaflets, prices lists, correspondences, unpublished manuscripts and cabinets. Nonetheless, they confirm that the English promoted an internationally advertised conception of

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the market while the Germans were leaders in producing microscopes used for scientific purposes. Table 4.2

Number of microscopes used for scientific purposes produced per country, 1700–1800

N–n

Microscopes of local production

Exported microscopes

142

55

7

204

England

78

28

62

168

Italy

69

13

5

87

France

105

9

8

122

Holland

27

3

6

36

Sweden

37

0

0

37

German lands

Total

458

Total

654

The German lands provide the most intriguing surprise, with a large number of microscopes and microscope makers, by far the largest number of craftsmen cited between 1760 and 1800. As in France and Russia, mathematicians and physicists who debated the microscope’s advances, such as Euler, invigorated the market for these instruments. Far from being unknown (from its countrymen’s perspective), the German optical tradition and its workshops had enough resources and wealth to supply microscopes to its own scholars. Moreover, the price of an Adams microscope in 1782 was much higher than that of a German compound model of comparable quality.75 The number of craftsmen accords with the amount of work that, during the second half of the eighteenth century, made the Germanspeaking countries an area in which a method of microscopical research expanded so intensely as to lay the foundation for the future development of German natural sciences.

75

�� Johann August Ephraim Goeze, Versuch einer Naturgeschichte der Eingeweidewürmer thierischer Körper (Blankenburg, 1782), p. 451. On this, see Ratcliff, ‘Testing microscopes between market and scientific strategies’, in From Makers to Users, pp. 135–54.

Chapter 5

Abraham Trembley, the Polyp and New Directions for Microscopical Research

On the basis of his 1744 work on the regeneration of the polyp, Abraham Trembley has been considered the founder of biology. Born in Geneva in 1710, Trembley worked in Holland as preceptor from 1733 and started his research on the polyp in the summer of 1740. Accounts of Trembley’s discovery have emphasized the influence of the Dutch environment, his invention of many procedures for testing regeneration and his persuasive rhetoric. Certainly Trembley is a major figure in experimental design, and Holland supplied him with an excellent context for the production of microscopical texts, yet his attitude towards communication was also a major factor in his impact on the world of science. Trembley wove a strong international network through his strategy of communication. He was able to attract the attention of Réaumur with accurate reports of observations, while raising the question of the ambiguity of the body he investigated. His correspondence, first with Réaumur and then with the President of the Royal Society, Folkes, was the impetus for a new non-insect experimental object gaining in visibility. The polyp became the starting point for research on aquatic organisms (Fig. 5.1), and influenced later eighteenth-century research on infusoria, opening new areas for observation, and supplying users of the microscope with a new scientific object. The transition from insects to aquatic organisms and infusoria, which shaped microscopical research between 1740 and the 1760s, I therefore term ‘Trembley’s effect’.

�� Sylvia G. Lenhoff and Howard M. Lenhoff, Hydra and the Birth of Experimental Biology 1744 (Pacific Grove, 1986), p. 16. �� J. Baker, pp. 12–17. �� See Dawson, pp. 86–8, 183–4; On experiments, see J. Baker, pp. 170–87; and Marino Buscaglia, ‘The Rhetoric of Proof and Persuasion utilized by Abraham Trembley’, Archives des Sciences Genève, 38/3 (1985): 305–19; Lenhoff and Lenhoff, pp. 14, 20. �� Dawson, pp. 100–105.

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Fig. 5.1

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Trembley’s polyps in a glass (1744)

The �� polyp also fuelled public discussion, through metaphysical and religious arguments, and Aram Vartanian regarded it as one of the causes of the emergent materialism of the 1740s. Jacques Roger has also drawn lines of separation before and after the 1740s, believing that ‘the new scientific thought [was] a philosophy’. Other historians have emphasized the marvellous properties of polyps and lice on �� Aram Vartanian, ‘Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie and Seventeenth-Century French Materialism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 11/3 (1950): 259–86. �� Roger, p. 749.

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setting up a new naturalized metaphysics. Yet not one word relating to plastic forces, soul or metaphysical questions appears in Trembley’s 1744 Mémoires, or in his correspondence. Surely, cutting the polyp and hence ‘cutting its soul’ was a hot topic kindled by the discovery of regeneration, yet it must neither be confused with, nor occluded by, the influence of the polyp on the organization of scientific research. In fact, research on the polyp strengthened the distinction between scientific and metaphysical reasoning, and solidified the autonomy of the practice of experimenting on small living bodies. It helped to reinforce the separation of two spheres, the public sphere in which dangerous questions� such as the material soul were debated, and the specialized and technical realm, which was strengthened by a dramatic increase in visibility and the production of microscopical research. A Model for Scientific Communication: the Dissemination of the Polyp throughout Europe and the Strategy of Generosity One problem that had not been successfully resolved during the seventeenth century was the circulation of microscopical animals. For larger animals, whether alive, dead or stuffed, transportation had been improving since the Renaissance and, although problems plagued the conservation of the bodies, numerous specimens brought alive or dead from abroad survived to enrich museums and zoological gardens. In the early eighteenth century, collectors and scholars found ways to send one another small organisms intended for microscopical observation, such as insects and their parts, worms and seeds, all of which circulated across Europe through correspondences.10 Yet no one tried to send aquatic bodies alive, to the degree that, in the preface to Marsigli’s Histoire physique de la mer (1725), Boerhaave even explained that obtaining living aquatic organisms required one to travel to the coast, and negotiate with seamen to bring in these creatures.11 In December 1706, near Marseille, Marsigli had immersed coral in a large glass jar �� Giulio Barsanti, ‘Les phénomènes “étranges” �� et “paradoxaux” �� aux origines de la première révolution biologique (1740–1810)’, in Guido Cimino and François Duchesneau (eds), Vitalisms from Haller to the Cell Theory (Florence, 1997), pp. 67–82, pp. 68–70; C. Wilson, p. 203. �� Abraham Trembley, Mémoires, pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce, à bras en forme de cornes (Leide, 1744), p. 309. See Lenhoff and Lenhoff, p. 37: ‘The Mémoires say nothing regarding preformation.’ �� See Ratcliff, ‘Abraham Trembley’s Strategy of Generosity and The Scope of Celebrity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Isis, 95/4 (2004): 555–75. 10 �� Puget, ‘Lettre au R.P. Lamy’, pp. 66, 74 (dried cornea of insect); Sloane, p. 100 (a maggot). 11 �� Hermann Boerhaave, ‘Préface’, in Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Histoire physique de la mer (Amsterdam, 1725), pp. iii–iv.

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filled with seawater, placed the jar in a room at sea temperature, and let it settle so as to observe it undisturbed. Thanks to this forerunner of the aquarium, he observed minute things coming out of the ‘branches’, the flowers of the coral.12 Previously thought by some, the botanist Boccone for example, to be a mineral, coral then appeared to be a vegetable, thanks to this procedure of putting marine specimens in containers of seawater on land. Although the director of the Paris Academy, Jean-Paul Bignon, received the discovery in 1710, Histoire physique de la mer was not published until 1725.13 Two years later, in 1727, Peyssonel, a former collaborator with Marsigli, claimed that the supposed flowers of coral were actually small animals and sent a paper to the Académie des sciences.14 While reviewing it, Réaumur required evidence, which lead to the first long-distance transportation of living coral, from Marseille to Paris over more than 500 miles.15 But, since ‘the material naturally reached him in a decayed condition’,16 Réaumur could not reproduce Peyssonel’s observation and strongly opposed its publication in the Mémoires de l’Académie. In these circumstances, when everything related to the transportation of live aquatic creatures had to be created from scratch, early in 1741 Trembley succeeded in preparing transportable microscopic animals, regardless of the distance. �� In the summer of 1740 he had discovered in the ponds of Sorgvliet a small organism shaped like a tube, which he cut in two in order to determine whether it belonged to the vegetable or the animal kingdom. The strange creature reproduced both parts, the radiating head and the body; resulting in two organisms from one bisected original. Trembley had thoroughly studied Réaumur’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes and thought of him as his scientific role model,17 on the advice of his nephew Bonnet he therefore wrote to Réaumur to ask whether he knew of the unknown body.18 Very excited by news of this creature, Réaumur, in a letter dated 15 January 1741, asked Trembley to forward him some samples of it and suggested that he ‘send them in a very small bottle filled with water, through the post’.19 One month later, Trembley sent the first parcel, containing fifty polyps, which Réaumur received on 27 February. As the polyps were dead, Réaumur suggested that the Spanish wax that sealed the bottle had deprived the organisms of air �� Marsigli, ‘Touchant quelques branches de corail qui ont fleuri’, Journal des sçavans (suppl.) (January 1707): 59–66. For more on Marsigli, see J. Baker, pp. 118–9; and McConnell, p. 57. 13 �� See McConnell, pp. 56–8, 63. 14 �� A detailed account of Peyssonel’s discovery is in McConnell, pp. 63–5. 15 �� Réaumur, ‘Observations sur la formation du corail’, pp. 270–71. Peyssonel was not quoted in it: see PV ASP 1727, t. 46, f° 280–87v. 16 �� J. Baker, p. 119. 17 �� Ibid., pp. 17–19; Dawson, pp. 100–105. 18 �� Trembley to Réaumur, 15 December 1740, Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, pp. 9–15. 19 �� Réaumur to Trembley, 15 January 1741, ibid., p. 17. See also Dawson, pp. 100–102. 12

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and proposed that a cork be used instead. Meanwhile he asked for Trembley’s permission to read in public his letter describing the first experiments on the polyp’s regeneration, which in due course he did three times before the Académie des sciences on 1, 8 and 22 March 1741.20 On 16 March, Trembley tried again, sending twenty polyps to Réaumur, but this time, in order to be sure of the packaging, he had experimented with the assembly of the bottle by putting three polyps inside it and taking them for a ride of seven leagues (25 miles).21 As the polyps seemed fine after this ‘experimental trip’, he then dispatched them to Paris, a journey of between four and seven days. The creatures arrived alive and Réaumur immediately repeated the experiments, before showing the regenerating phenomena to the ‘entire academy’ and, with it, to ‘the Court and the city’22 between 22 and 25 March. After consulting with Jussieu, who knew a similar red species, Réaumur placed them in the animal kingdom and named them Polyps. Until 1743, further packages of polyps were sent,23 while Trembley continued to invent new experiments: creating a hydra with seven heads; making one polyp swallow another polyp; grafting two different half-polyps together; and turning polyps inside out,24 an experiment started in July 1741 that eventually succeeded in autumn 1742.25 The demonstration before the Paris Academy was repeated in England two years later. Although Buffon had informed Folkes of it in July 1741, and scholars published two notes on the subject in Philosophical Transactions, the issue was left largely untouched in England until March 1743. Even so, these animals ‘which, being cut into several pieces, become so many perfect animals’,26 inspired criticisms, jokes and caustic irony, particularly from certain poets in Cambridge. Folkes obtained some polyps on 10 March 1743, and the following day he demonstrated them at his home, ‘before the lens and the microscope’, for twenty fellows of the Royal Society. Then, at the Society’s meeting of 17 March, he exhibited regenerating polyps and they were seen by more than 150 people.27 Two years after Réaumur’s demonstration in Paris, on 24 March 20

PV ASP 1741, t. 60, f° 76, pp. 80, 88. Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, pp. 50–53. 22 �� Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan, ‘Animaux coupés & partagés en plusieurs parties, & qui se reproduisent tout entiers dans chacune’, Histoire de l’Académie (1741, pub. 1744): 33–5, p. 35. 23 �� On 6 April 1741, Trembley sent another twenty polyps to Réaumur, and more on 8 August 1743: Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, pp. 73–4, 174. 24 �� Lenhoff and Lenhoff, pp. 14, 20; Dawson, pp. 122–7. 25 �� Trembley to Réaumur, 1 November 1742, Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, pp. 134–6. 26 �� This passage is taken from Johann-Friedrich Gronovius, ‘Concerning a Water Insect, which, being cut into several Pieces, becomes so many perfect Animals’, PT, 42/466 (1742): 218–20. 27 Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, p. 166. 21

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1743, along with Baker, Parsons and an ‘optician’ – probably Cuff – who brought ‘a good microscope’, Folkes demonstrated the regeneration of the polyp before an astonished audience. In March 1743, Philosophical Transactions issued Bonnet’s experiments on regenerating worms, which increased the sense of wonderment; other fellows who vouched for the budding and regeneration of polyps, included Count William Bentinck and his brother Charles, Charles Lennox 2nd Duke of Richmond, and Baker. At this occasion Folkes reported that the ‘unbelievers’ – in French, les incrédules – were silenced, and sceptical jokes about the ‘marvellous animal’ ceased. Indeed, among the expressed reasons set forth by Réaumur and Trembley for experimenting on polyps, the issue of the unbelievers emerged several times. Réaumur wrote a few pages on the polyp in the preface to the sixth volume of his 1742 Histoire des insectes, in order to ‘have a ready answer to the questions from the unbelievers, which I am flooded with’.28 Trembley regarded both Réaumur’s and Folkes’ notes on the polyp as the strongest evidence to be used in defence against the unbelievers, because even in Leiden, many people still did not believe polyps reproduced after being cut.29 The summer of 1742 marked the beginning of Trembley’s ‘strategy of generosity’, according to which he dispatched polyps and instructions to anyone asking for them so as to repeat the experiments, a fast track to silencing the unbelievers. In Leiden, the sceptics had been defeated by the experiments carried out in 1742 by academicians such as Albinus, and the physicists Pieter van Musschenbroek and Allamand.30 But as late as 1744, the Leiden professors Albinus and Gaub were still invited to witness those experiments. Two kinds of unbelievers emerged during the early 1740s. The polyp awakened scepticism about regeneration and these sceptics were called unbelievers – incrédules; they did not espouse materialistic sympathies, but simply did not believe that an animal could still live when cut. A second type of unbelievers – mainly French Philosophes, materialists and freethinkers – appeared during the 1740s, and awakened debates over the material soul through clandestine literature in France and Holland. Proposing materialistic explanations of life and soul, with plastic and vital forces, spontaneist issues, and random combinations of atoms, Philosophes like the Chevalier de Saint Hyacinthe, La Mettrie, Maupertuis, Diderot and others sometimes discussed the polyp to back up their ideas.31 Another consequence of Trembley’s policy of communication was that, within a few years, the long-distance dispatch of aquatic bodies became common throughout Europe, and was extended to other microscopic animalcules. Restricted �� Réaumur to Trembley, 25 June 1742, ibid., p. 130. �� Trembley to Réaumur, 11 January 1743, ibid., p. 153. Trembley to Folkes, 31 May 1743, Royal Society, Ms Folkes 250, Fol. II, l. 17. 30 �� Gronovius, p. 219. On the Leiden scholars, see J. Baker, pp. 13–14. 31 �� These were Maupertuis, La Mettrie, Buffon and Diderot. On the link between materialism and the polyp, see Vartanian, ‘Trembley’s Polyp’, p. 263. 28 29

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to specialists such as Réaumur and his circle of disciples up until 1742,32 the shipping of live creatures was delocalized and generalized to other animalcules from 1743 onwards. Besides Réaumur, Folkes, Count Bentinck (one of Trembley’s patrons), Jan Frederik Gronovius in Leiden and Lieberkühn in Berlin, many other unknown scholars received polyps from Trembley,33 who wrote to Folkes in July 1743: ‘I am entirely occupied with dispatching polyps to one place or another’.34 Naturalists in England soon adopted the method, and the practice of using bottles to send live specimens became generally applied to other species, thus boosting the circulation of minute organisms. Baker, likewise, asked for microscopic creatures from his countrymen and developed a network of correspondents who sent parcels that were central to his 1753 Employment for the Microscope. Folkes, who sent out polyps to many people, including Baker and Parsons, and received cutworms and other minute bodies, complained in April 1743 that he was short of them, having handed out almost all his specimens. Trembley soon forwarded new and different species to restock his jars, so that, in November 1743, Folkes was able to pass on polyps and instructions to the mathematician Colin McLaurin in Edinburgh; and their circulation expanded. Polyps had led to a method of transportation, which, once delocalized and generalized to other bodies, provided a standard procedure for the exchange of minute or microscopic aquatic creatures, very different from insects. Particularly in the case of England, the above facts helped to correct distorted interpretations of the polyp’s fate in England, because certain historians of microscopy believed that Baker invented the experiments on the polyps.35 As acknowledged by Folkes in his correspondence to Trembley, Baker received polyps, copied Trembley’s instructions, repeated his experiments, and then effectively plagiarized them to publish his book before Trembley’s own. Folkes, who was aware of what was going on, warned Trembley in June 1743, and delivered a hostile account of his colleague’s attitude in several letters.36 Baker’s Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype was printed at the end of 1743 but, even supported by a 1744 French translation, it received only an unenthusiastic reception, in no way comparable with Trembley’s Mémoires published eight months later. On the Continent, everyone knew who the discoverer of the polyp was, and Baker’s work was ignored by continental scholars, bringing him the reputation of ‘philosopher in the little things’. Devising a standard format for the successful delivery of his parcels of specimens required attention to technical detail on the part of Trembley, both 32 �� Bonnet sent Réaumur insects and worms, and his regenerating worms in February 1742: Réaumur to Bonnet, 28 February 1742, BGE Ms Bo 42, f° 35. 33 �� Gronovius received the polyps in the summer of 1742, and Lieberkühn in spring 1743: Trembley to Folkes, 23 April 1743, Royal Society, Ms Folkes 250, Fol. III, l. 65. 34 �� Trembley to Folkes, 16 July 1743, Royal Society, Ms Folkes 250, Fol. II, l. 66. 35 �� Ford, Single Lens, p. 109. 36 �� Folkes to Trembley, 19 May 1745, Ms Trembley, p. 100.

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regarding how to preserve the animal-environment system during the journey, and the instructions for success in preserving and sending specimens. Focusing on the animal-environment system was not a new concept. Indeed, Joblot had circulated animalcules in Paris, and designed a small phial for this purpose (see Fig. 2.3) although nothing indicates that it was used after 1712. Marsigli also thought in terms of animal-environment systems when he placed coral in a jar, but the jars did not travel elsewhere. He had simply reproduced a marine environment on the seashore, while Trembley managed to dispatch aquatic living systems to the intellectual centres of Europe. In every shipment of polyps there were actually three things travelling: the polyps, their environment and proper food, and the instructions both for the conservation of the system and the reproduction of the experiments. These elements were deemed sufficiently important for them to be mentioned in the letter Folkes sent to Trembley on 30 November 1743 to award him the Copley Medal: We are no less sensible of your great candour, and the Readiness you have shown not only to transmit to us faithful abstracts of your own experiments, but also to send us over the Insects themselves, whereby we have been enabled to examine by our selves, and see with our own Eyes the Truth of the astonishing Facts, you had before made us acquainted with.37

Trembley’s ‘experimental journey’ also illustrated that he was as clever in sending live polyps as he was brilliant in inventing extraordinary experiments, for it was rare for such attention to be simultaneously paid both to experiments and to the strategy of communication. His scheme for communication was explicit knowledge, as he pointed out in the preface to his important 1744 work Mémoires, pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce à bras en forme de cornes: I made it my duty to communicate my discoveries, in proportion as I carried them out. I gave polyps, as much as I could, to those who desired to repeat my experiments; and I explained to them how I managed to perform the experiments. Thus it came about that the polyps were widely known in a short time, and that, in several places, people were made able to verify a part of my experiments. This is what Mr. Baker did last summer in England for a few of them.38

As a further step in the expansion into general practice, sending an animalenvironment system was adopted for creatures other than aquatic ones, and the diffusion of this practice allowed scholars to report on previously unknown species and specimens. In 1757, in order to describe the male of the Carolinian cochineal, �� Folkes to Trembley, 30 November 1743, Ms Trembley, pp. 91–2. �� Trembley, Mémoires, pp. v–vi. On Baker, An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype (London, 1743), see Turner, ‘Henry Baker’, pp. 62–3. 37 38

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John Ellis simply asked a friend in Carolina to send him some ‘joints of the cactus Opuntia, with the insects on it’.39 Otto-Friedrich Müller publicly described how to send an animal-environment parcel for collecting entomostracans.40 During the second part of the eighteenth century, other variations appeared in the practice of sending similar items – for instance, the dispatching of samples containing vaccines – and authors such as Ellis invented other procedures, including one for preserving or ‘fixing’ marine animalcules. Fixing a tiny organism like the polyp was intended as a means of conveyance and observation, but also for convincing the unbelievers that coral was built by polyps.41 This is in marked contrast with the previous scientific framework, if we recall that the objects Leeuwenhoek donated to the Royal Society were permanently fixed to the microscopes, desiccated and dead. In his bequest, the only entire organisms were the animalcula in semine and a desiccated embryo of cochineal, otherwise he sent only fragments of animals, from flies’ eyes to elephants’ ivory. The Society did not receive any living systems or live animalcules from him, and the inability to send such systems displays another limitation of the seventeenth-century wave of scientific research. Establishing the practice of sending living systems anywhere created a small revolution in the circulation of scientific objects and in the practices of scientific proof. Indeed, between 1741 and 1744 the standard parade of witnesses, brought in since the seventeenth century to settle academic issues was �� made redundant by networks that could distribute similar evidence anywhere, delocalizing scientific discovery.�� Indeed the possibility that any society or individual scholar could obtain living systems gave them the opportunity to be considered on the same footing as those who experimented on the colour spectrum. In other words, the standards for microscopical research were increasingly exacting. The �� increased speed at which information could be shared and the enhanced level of communication brought about by the parcels containing polyps meant that witnesses were now everywhere.� Inspired by Réaumur, whose role was absolutely crucial,42 Trembley invented an efficient way of circulating microscopic living systems, and thereby established an epistemological rift with the previous regime, as regards both the needs for proof and the speed with which information could reach a targeted person. The regeneration of the polyp was the first enduring microscopical discovery that attracted unanimous European endorsement in such a short time. Indeed, the advances in dispatch methods that facilitated the exchange of specimens added to traditional written means of communication a resource for scholars to respond more speedily to scientific information. These developments, among others,

39

�� Ellis, ‘An Account of the Male and Female Cochineal Insects’, p. 662. �� Otto-Friedrich Müller, ‘Observations on some Bivalve Insects, found in common Water’, PT, 56/1 (1771): 230–46, p. 242. 41 �� John Ellis, An Essay towards a natural History of the Corallines (London, 1755), p. xiv. 42 �� Dawson, pp. 179–83; J. Baker, pp. 186–7. 40

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brought conditions that were essential for the microscope to be highlighted and publicly recognized as a scientific instrument. Trembley’s Laboratory and its Effect on the Practices of the Microscope Sending live specimens had two effects on scientific communication. By reducing geographical distance, it widened scientific cooperation, diminishing the need for costly trips for the purpose of verifying something. It also helped to establish common practices in using the microscope, to standardize the vision, enabling many people to see similar things. From 1741, the polyp was the topic that eclipsed all other scientific, and even political, issues in Europe, even in the midst of the war for the succession of Austria. In August 1741, Réaumur wrote that ‘never did an insect cause so much uproar than do the polyps’.43 Scholarly England was enthralled throughout 1743, and, for the first time, a full issue of Philosophical Transactions, no. 467, discussed only one topic, the polyp – as was remarked on by Dutch reporters in autumn 1743.44 In 1742 the craze had reached Rome and other Italian cities.45 Other countries, such as Sweden, acknowledged the polyp a few years later, when Linnaeus coined the term Hydra to designate its genus in 1746. The same year, a fellow of the Swedish academy even began a paper saying ‘Apart from electricity, naturalists did not deal with anything this year other than the polyp.’46 The Swedish scholars Baron Carl de Geer, Löfling and Kähler all published papers on the polyp between 1747 and 1754. Lieberkühn had demonstrated the polyp in Berlin in 1743, but the main research on polyps in the German lands was undertaken during the 1750s. Up until the French Revolution, scholars recalled the discovery of the polyp as an extraordinary event that had overturned many aspects of European scientific, cultural and public life: ‘the discovery of the polyps and of reproduction by cut is so important in Physics [Physique] that nations fought over the honour of having made it’.47 In 1775, Necker, the court botanist of the Palatine Elector, said ‘there is no animal which inspired more research among physicists than the polyp.’48 In Hannover, Blumenbach also acknowledged the importance of Trembley for the

�� Réaumur to Trembley, 30 August 1741, in Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, p. 106. 44 Bibliothèque britannique, 22/1 (1743), p. 159. 45 �� Ginanni, p. 255. 46 �� A.B., ‘Kurze Nachricht von Wasserpolypen, auf Veranlassung derer, die um Stockholm gefunden worden’, Abhandlungen der Königlischen Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 8 (1752; Swedish original 1746): 203–20, p. 203. 47 �� Jean-Etienne Guettard, Mémoires sur différentes parties des sciences et des arts (5 vols, Paris, 1768–83), vol. 2, p. 515. 48 �� Noël-Joseph Necker, Physiologie des corps organisés (Bouillon, 1775), p. 43. 43

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genesis of marine zoology.49 In Florence, in 1781, Felice Fontana recalled that ‘we needed a Trembley and a Bonnet to disillusion us from general axioms, and from the idea of a necessary law common to the generation of every animal’.50 To the Paris naturalist Guettard, the polyp had impacted at every level of culture, and caused ‘a major revolution in the habits of many naturalists, and even of metaphysicians, moralists and physicists’.51 Sending animalcules also required much preparation in the laboratory. Indeed Trembley’s care in preparing polyps demanded a long time and many experiments on feeding and conservation. His research formed the starting point for methods of preserving small organisms so that scholars might have sufficient live organisms to perform series of experiments, and this attention to detail paid to the conservation of living beings shaped the experimental naturalistic laboratory of the 1740s. For instance, Trembley claimed that he had assembled more than 140 labelled jars containing polyps, which needed to be carefully observed daily or weekly. Historians of the laboratory have characterized such organization as ‘an organic, growing, slowly changing movement, a network of intertwined problems which themselves develop’.52 However, Trembley’s was not an isolated example, and other scholars carried out series of experiments during the 1740s. In Tuscany, Count Francesco Ginanni tried regeneration experiments on water worms. He cut in half sixty worms and put them into sixty labelled jars of which he opened one per day in order to measure the progress in regeneration.53 In Geneva, Bonnet worked on many species of louse, and observed parthenogenesis up to the ninth generation, providing the scholarly world with a discovery that became almost as renowned as Trembley’s. Still, an important difference distinguished these two experimental enterprises. On the one hand, Trembley’s strategy of generosity, combined with tight control as to experimental method, was applied to a new object, the unknown polyp on which almost no research had been previously done. In contrast, Bonnet’s work crowned seventy years of research on one particular issue, a field that had slowly made increasing use of the experimental method. Thus, Bonnet concluded a previously existing scientific issue, while Trembley revealed a new world. The coincidence of their publications in the mid-1740s multiplied the efficiency and visibility of experimental systems in combination with the microscope. Usually furnished with several microscopes, and many series of instruments and tools, to say nothing of items such as glass poudriers, bottles, jars, labels, 49

�� Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, ‘Von den Federbusch-Polypen in den Göttingischen Gewässern’, Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Litteratur, 1 (1780): 117–27, pp. 119–23. 50 �� Felice Fontana, Traité sur le vénin de la vipere (2 vols, Florence, 1781), vol. 1, p. 87. 51 �� Guettard, vol. 4, p. 125. 52 �� Frederic L. Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life. An Exploration of Scientific Creativity (Madison, 1985), p. xx. 53 �� Ginanni, pp. 295–304.

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compasses, scalpels, scissors, needles, watch-glasses and brushes; with hundreds of live organism-environment systems; with books and journals of experiments and sometimes instruments such as camera obscura, thermometers, blowtorches and air pumps, from the 1740s onwards the natural experimentalist laboratory began to acquire its distinctive modern physiognomy, of riotous life in a circumscribed space. The many jars containing infusions, plants, insects, worms, batrachians, eggs, and so on, ensured that teeming nature and the processes of ageing and decay could be subjected to the constraints of scientific investigation and to the naturalist’s gaze. A practitioner’s laboratory provided a half-private environment, one open to friends, patrons and other enthusiasts, in which the microscopes and other instruments, as well as the large number of organisms, all required conscientious maintenance and routine inspection, thus encouraging the practice of series experiments and hence production of new scientific facts. If contingent social processes have an impact on the production of scientific facts in the laboratory, it is nevertheless, as Larry Holmes and Timothy Lenoir have shown, a ‘highly structured contingency’.54 Structuring this contingency demanded time, but also the construction of new experimental forms of practice, such as experimenting in series, which strengthened the relationship between the scholar and the laboratory, through the obligation to spend more and more time there. Trembley was able to condense the circumstantiated details of phenomena, avoiding the prolixity of the classic experimental report. Compression of data and economy of words were the new rules for the experimental-microscopical report that he had to reinvent in order to deal with the increased volume of data. Like Trembley, Bonnet also used unambiguous recording techniques, such as tables – he solicited his professor of mathematics to help him – to condense information on the several generations of one louse. Using experimental systems in natural sciences required a change of direction in the scientific literature, thus, in contrast to the verbosity and detailed accounts of the previous experimental report,55 the 1740s ushered in a less wordy method of reporting experiments and observations. In the 1770s, GleichenRussworm informed that he would avoid a ‘tedious prolixity’ for the reports of his fifteen years of microscopical observations.56 Bonnet also became aware of this and recalled, in 1776, how he had been influenced by Réaumur’s verbosity. The works of the latter ‘were contagious. They influenced my first works. Like him, I devoted myself completely to details.’57 During the 1740s, �� Trembley’s writing, especially, turned the cluster of details gleaned from his long-term research into an organized narrative pointing toward a particular kind of outcome:�� a scientific law. The �� practice of conducting experiments in series set a standard that stood comparison with the experimental 54

�� Holmes, p. xvi. �� Shapin and Schaffer, pp. 63–5. 56 �� Wilhelm Friedrich von Gleichen, Abhandlung über die Saamen-und Infusionsthierchen (Nürnberg, 1778), p. 67. 57 �� Bonnet to Duhamel du Monceau, 22 January 1776, BGE Ms Bo 74, f° 239v. 55

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procedures detailed by Newton�� in Optics, and it served as a model for dozens of Europeans scholars using microscopes at that period.58 Gradually shaped through their writings, procedures and instruments, the natural experimentalist laboratory assumed its own identity as a discrete and very different environment from the museum, the cabinet of marvels, the physics instrument cabinet, the workshop, the chemist’s laboratory, the botanical garden, or the zoo. From Trembley’s strategy of transparent communication resulted a general influence that strengthened the 1740s take-off of microscopical studies and natural experimental research all over Europe, by supplying it with a new scientific object. Shipping polyps with instructions had provided a new microscopical object, and such a need for observation intensified the demand for microscopes and microscopical research. Consequently, other objects for the microscope emerged, such as cryptogams in England.59 As a symbol of the links between the polyps, the microscope and transportation, Folkes, in March 1743, offered Trembley a Cuff microscope.60 In �� contrast to many other discoveries, which were kept secret until their public announcement in some suitable scholarly setting, everyone knew about the polyp and its discoverer was famous long before his major work was published�� . The polyps were observed through the microscope by hundreds of people, of whom obviously very few published reports of their observations. Trembley delayed publishing his definitive book because he wanted it to be complete, and he continued to invent new experiments and produce new facts in pursuit of that goal. Réaumur, Folkes, and others badgered him to publish a full account of his work. In a letter dated 14 December 1742 Réaumur complained about Trembley’s seemingly endless series of experiments and discoveries: ‘�� I’m beginning to wish you would stop making discoveries on polyps, until you have published all those you have already made’.61 One major impact was that public perception of the microscope changed. People stopped scoffing at microscopical investigations – the unbelievers fell

58

�� These included Ginanni, Haller, Della Torre, Parsons, Ellis, Hill, Hunter, TargioniTozzetti, Schaeffer, Hewson, Müller, Wolff, Spallanzani, Adanson, Wrisberg, Saussure, Fontana, Gleichen, Corti and Cavolini. 59 �� Noël-Antoine Pluche, ‘Concerning the Smut of Corn’, PT, 41/456 (1740): 357–8; Roger Pickering, ‘Concerning the Seeds of Mushrooms’, PT, 42/471 (1743): 593–8; John Turberville Needham, ‘Concerning certain chalky tubulous Concretions, called Malm’, PT, 42/471 (1743): 634–41; Needham, An Account of some new Microscopical Discoveries (London, 1745); William Watson, ‘Some Remarks occasioned by the precedeing Paper [about seeds of fungi]’, PT, 42/471 (1743): 599–601; Richard Badcock, ‘Microscopical Observations on the Farina foecundans of the Holyoak’, PT, 44/479 (1746): 150–58; Henry Miles, ‘Concerning the green Mould on Fire-Wood’, PT, 46/494 (1750): 334–8. 60 �� This microscope is preserved at the Musée d’Histoire des Sciences in Geneva, no. 10. 61 �� Réaumur to Trembley, 14 December 1742, Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, p. 151.

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silent – and the instrument’s visibility began to increase again between 1742 and 1744. In March 1743, Folkes could only acknowledge the absence, in his country, of ‘natural history made in this way’62 (that is, experimental natural history), of which Réaumur and Trembley were, in his eyes, the best representatives. Less than two years later, in October 1744, Folkes happily said, ‘recently, people gained a lot of pleasure here from the microscope, and it led the craftsmen to improve this instrument.’63 Indeed the microscope featured in every paper relating to the polyp. By then, the topical relation between visible and invisible production of microscopical texts, typical of the 1730s (the visibility being virtually non-existent), was reorganized with the take-off of microscopical research that had begun in 1741, as is shown by Chart 5.1.

Chart 5.1 Number of positive and negative titles per year for all Europe, 1730–1759 Note: The chart shows increased production of microscopical texts in the early 1740s, as opposed to the 1730s. Between 1740 and 1743, production multiplies by 4. The increase in visibility (and production) is maximal in 1743, after which visibility reaches a mean of 5 positive titles per year during the decade. The years 1745 and 1746 indicate a fall in production, but not in visibility.

�� Folkes to Trembley, 11 March 1743, ibid., p. 166. �� Folkes to Trembley, 26 October 1744, Ms Trembley, p. 138.

62 63

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These results are consistent with the above ideas and highlight Trembley as the major driving force for the 1740s take-off in microscopical research. During 1745–46, a fresh discovery drew the attention of scholars away from the microscope – namely, electricity and the Leiden jar, on which Trembley himself reported in the 1746 Philosophical Transactions. That 1743 peak is due to the polyp, discussed in two-thirds of the papers concerned with microscopes and their use published in Europe, clearly demonstrates that Trembley was renowned before his 1744 publication. Since the 1740s show a watershed, it appears that Trembley’s polyp also had a strong effect on the social representation of the microscope, which even the public now considered a routine research tool. To be sure, the microscope had continued to be used as such in France and the German lands, albeit mainly within the elite circles of the academies, but in the 1740s, and for the first time in the Enlightenment, a microscopical object was offered for the gaze of people other than scholars, as is widely documented. Opening up this visual pleasure to everyone, thanks to the strategy of generosity, had a major effect both on how microscopes were used and how they were represented, and the mention of Trembley’s name in almost all of the microscopic-zoological papers throughout the rest of the century leaves no doubt as to his influence. This new positive representation of the instrument created a demand that contributed significantly to the increase in the production of microscopes. And, besides having an impact on instrument making and use, the polyp, allied to the re-emerging microscope, was also to influence the creation of new disciplines. In particular, the field of marine zoology was soon to be modernized thanks to its heuristic links with the polyp. An Underwater World Revealed: from the Polyp to Marine Zoology From 1741 onwards the polyp helped to consolidate a field that quickly became autonomous. Indeed, the communication of the discovery to the main intellectual centres of Europe had enabled naturalists to break the deadlock in the field of marine zoology, which had remained without significant contributions since Marsigli’s discovery of the ‘flowers’ of the coral. After Peyssonel’s episode, marine zoology mainly developed classifications and systematics, such as the method of distribution of the sea urchin by Klein in 1734 and the 1736 publication of Artedi’s classification of fishes by Linnaeus. Similarly, the anatomo-physiology of marine organisms was neglected between 1721 and 1740, except for the worms that destroyed the wooden piles of the Dutch seawalls in the late 1720s. Two scholars, Rousset de Missy and Massuet, experimented on their method of reproduction in order to eradicate the worms, yet the issue lasted a long time, because no one could find an effective means of eliminating them.64 Nevertheless, few scholars acknowledged the importance 64 �� Job Baster, ‘A Dissertation on the Worms which destroy the Piles on the Coasts of Holland and Zealand’, PT, 41/455 (1739): 276–88.

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of marine zoology for understanding the nature of organic laws and variety in nature. As Bourguet put it, ‘there are an infinite number of insects and marine animals … of which each individual produces its own kind’,65 like zoophytes, oysters, sea urchins, starfish, etc. But generally, between the 1720s and the 1740s, research on marine organisms was either poor or avoided. On the 3rd of December 1741, Réaumur wrote an oracular sentence to Trembley: ‘The class of polyps ... is much more all encompassing than we had imagined.’66 Indeed, in the summer of 1741, after Réaumur’s demonstration of the polyp, Jussieu had travelled to the Normandy coast of France where he observed ‘with the lens, and the microscope’ four species of coral, previously thought to be plants.67 Because he observed coral with the polyp as a model,68 Jussieu reported on the existence of animals rather than ‘flowers’ in the coral before the Académie des sciences in November 1742.69 Other scholars such as Guettard were sent to the coast of Poitou by Réaumur to reproduce Jussieu’s observations. Coral was therefore a sort of shell housing colonies of polyps, and not the stem of a marine vegetable. This discovery gave marine zoology a fertile foundation, it demonstrated the multiplicity of species and new avenues to be found in nature by further investigating the aquatic environment. With the physiological and ‘environmental’ model of the polyp in mind, scholars would look now at animalcules with a different eye, for a large field of research was opened up where microscopical observation met underwater life. In particular, as the polyp was taken as a prototype of a class of marine animals with contracting arms, this was the beginning of a marine zoological programme to determine the similarity between the polyp and other organisms. Réaumur wrote to Bonnet in November 1742: ‘This class of insects [polyps] is one of the larger classes of species, and it is perhaps the strangest, given the peculiarities it embodies’.70 The variety of the aquatic world continued to interest Trembley who wrote, in a 1756 report of Donati’s History of the Adriatic Sea in which the sea was regarded as an immense reservoir of bodies that encouraged discoveries of new laws of nature: ‘The sea contains a prodigious number of organized bodies ... extremely different, in many

65

�� Bourguet, p. 78. �� Réaumur to Trembley, 3 December 1741, Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, p. 116. 67 �� Bernard de Jussieu, ‘Examen de quelques productions marines qui ont été mises au nombre des Plantes’, MASP (1742, pub. 1745): 290–302, p. 291. 68 �� Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan, ‘Sur quelques productions marines qui ont été mises au nombre des Plantes’, Histoire de l’Académie (1742, pub. 1745): 1–7, pp. 6–7; Jussieu, p. 293. 69 PV ASP 1742, t. 61, f° 421, p. 427. 70 �� Réaumur to Bonnet, 11 November 1742, BGE Ms Bo 42, f° 41. 66

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respects, from the plants and animals of the earth; and which, for that reason, must necessarily discover to us new laws in nature’.71 Up to the 1740s, the tradition of Latin natural history had mainly cultivated concepts and classificatory methods to give accounts of the variation of the natural world. After 1742, many authors proposed reforms to the marine zoological classification, including Linnaeus, Ellis, Pallas, Blumenbach, Olivi and Baron von Wulfen. Previously, plant morphology had been used as a model for grouping the corals and Ellis changed this criterion in 1755, looking at both the microscopic composition of the substance and the morphology of the polyps inhabiting the coral. Despite the support of the Paris Academy, Jussieu’s thesis that coral was the host for colonies of polyps did not receive unanimous backing from European scholars. Indeed, although spreading all over the Continent, Jussieu’s thesis provoked a stream of negative reactions, even though regeneration had been well received thanks to Trembley’s communication strategy. In France, the thesis was accepted thanks to the authority of the Academy, and several naturalists, including the Paris anatomist Hérissant and the priest Dicquemare, pursued the path opened up by Peyssonel and Jussieu.72 In Bavaria, along with Ledermüller, the Regensburg minister Schaeffer repeated Trembley’s experiments and also accepted Jussieu’s thesis in the mid-1750s.73 Nevertheless, certain prestigious scholars such as the Danzig naturalist Klein – an authority on marine zoology and botany – were not convinced by Jussieu’s demonstration, and continued to include coral in the vegetable kingdom, as did Pallas with corallines in his Elenchus zoophytorum (1766).74 The issue remained unresolved in 1775 when Necker gave a comprehensive overview of the coral controversy and the debate over the animal nature of coral lasted up to the 1780s when Jussieu’s thesis was definitively accepted everywhere.75 In Italy, the arrival of Jussieu’s thesis soon divided scholars into two camps: on one side the physician naturalist Plancus, in Rimini, who accepted the discovery; and on the other side scholars who rejected it, above all those in Florence where a dispute in the society la Colombaria showed that it was rejected by academicians in 1746.76 Also in Florence, the physician Targioni-Tozzetti, a skilful user of the microscope who would later carry out microscopical observations that yielded new �� Abraham Trembley, ‘An Account of a Work containing, An Essay towards a Natural History of the Adriatic Sea’, PT, 49/2 (1756): 585–92, p. 586. 72 �� Charles Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, in Oeuvres, vol. 8, p. 464. 73 �� See Keil, ‘Microscopes made in Augsburg’, p. 66. 74 �� Peter Simon Pallas, Elenchus zoophytorum sistens generum adumbrationes generaliores et specierum cognitarum succinctas descriptiones (Hagae-Comitis, 1766), pp. 13, 418–19. 75 �� Necker, pp. 172–250. 76 �� Anton Francesco Gori, ‘Lettera di Anton Francesco Gori al Signor Cavalier de Baillou’, Memorie della Società Colombaria fiorentina, 1 (1747): 155–9, pp. 157–8. 71

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insights into the cause of rusted wheat, was sceptical about Jussieu’s discovery. In his Travel in various parts of Tuscany (1753), Tozzetti confessed he was not convinced by the new argument, placing coral in the animal kingdom, and the 1755 Journal étranger purposely placed the review of his book just after that of Ellis’s Natural History of the Corallines, in order to compare the two opinions.77 At first, the Turin physician and naturalist Donati, who continued the Italian tradition of studies on marine life and hydrogeology, also remained sceptical of Jussieu’s thesis in his 1750 Natural Marine History of the Adriatic Sea, but he came round to the new thesis after having been personally convinced by observations made with Trembley during the latter’s journey to Italy in 1755. In the 1780s, the works of Spallanzani and Cavolini encouraged the general acceptance of the thesis,78 so that from 1750 onwards the renewal of non-ichthyologic marine zoology in Italy was evident in the works of a dozen authors.79 Indeed, the trend spread over the whole of Europe, and the researches of Pallas, Baster, Burman and Slabber demonstrate that marine zoology had been also carried on in Holland. In Sweden, several of Linnaeus’s students – including Fougt and Löfling – enrolled in the programme he launched in marine zoology and botany, or studied particular marine organisms. Therefore, in the second half of the century, marine zoology had laid down a disciplinary foundation, and many important European cities had at least one naturalist specializing in this field.80 The generation born for the most part between 1720 and 1750, succeeded a previous generation of scholars whose careers had been established before the polyp, that of Boccone (Sicily and Tuscany), Marsigli (Bologna), Bon (Marseilles), Plancus (Rimini), Petiver (London), Réaumur and Jussieu (Paris), Klein (Danzig), Linck (Leipzig), Artedi (Amsterdam) and Linnaeus (Uppsala), most of them working on many other topics. In England, the announcement of Jussieu’s thesis was delayed by the war and Trembley reported to Folkes in August 1743: The polyps ‘led MM. de Jussieu, de Réaumur and Guettard to the beautiful discovery they made on these sea polyparies that were up to now taken for plants’.81 Immediately, many scholars rushed to perform experiments, including Needham who studied the regeneration Journal étranger (August 1755): 83–110, p. 84. �� Filippo Cavolini, Memorie per servire alla storia de’ polipi marini (Napoli, 1785), p. 32. 79 �� These were Plancus, Vianelli, Griselini, Donati, Dana, Spallanzani, Fortis, Maratti, Macrì, Cavolini, Wulfen, and Olivi. 80 �� For example, Hérissant, Guettard, and Broussonet (Paris), Dicquemare (Le Hâvre); Peyssonel and Badier (Guadeloupe); Ellis and Hill (London); Bohadsch (Prague); Donati and Dana (Turin); Macrì and Cavolini (Naples); Spallanzani (Pavia); Griselini and Olivi (Venice); Fichtel and Moll (Vienna); Gaertner (Tübingen); Löfling, Modeer, Swartz (Sweden); Herbst (Berlin); Bolten (Hamburg); Müller (Copenhagen); Baster and Pallas (Holland). 81 �� Trembley to Folkes, 13 August 1743, Royal Society, Ms Folkes 250, Fol. I, l. 35. 77 78

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of the arms of the starfish.82 Baker acknowledged the studies of the regeneration of aquatic worms by Bonnet, Lyonet and Réaumur, and of starfish and urtica marina by Jussieu, Guettard and Needham, and he also added a note on Jussieu’s thesis to his Microscope Made Easy.83 Yet, although Folkes and other fellows quickly supported the thesis, it was not until the 1750s that coral became an issue in England, when the apothecary John Hill twice attacked the Royal Society, which had not accepted him as a fellow.84 Hill claimed to have identified fructification in coral,85 and so a reply from the Royal Society was organized through John Ellis, an apothecary well acquainted with the microscope. Many of his observations concerning marine zoology had originally been published in Philosophical Transactions, before he gathered them into his 1755 Essay Towards a Natural History of the Corallines. This book was intended as a reply to Hill and as confirmation of the value of Jussieu’s thesis, but Ellis did not scruple to claim it was actually his own discovery. Indeed, although he quoted Trembley’s discovery,86 he did not cite Peyssonel or Jussieu on the coral but claimed the honour for himself.87 It was only in the 1756 French translation of Essay, published in The Hague by Allamand, that Réaumur, Trembley and Jussieu were given their rightful dues. The bookseller, Pierre de Hondt, mentioned in a preliminary note that Trembley’s discovery of the polyps, followed by the observations of Jussieu, led Réaumur to change his mind about coral. In the eyes of de Hondt, Ellis’s place was among those who systematically confirmed the discovery, thus dissipating final doubts, and extending it to other classes of marine animals.88 Launched by the polyp, the study of regeneration continued to be a popular object for microscopical observations and, following Trembley, Jussieu and Réaumur’s lead, many scholars turned their attention towards this area of research, cutting many animal creatures to see if they regenerated. In 1743, Linnaeus initiated a programme to study regeneration in starfish, worms, crayfish, lizards and sea urchins. In England, Baker and Needham studied the polyp and the starfish. In Holland, Baster worked on starfish, coral and zoophytes, and studies in regeneration expanded gradually. Inspired by Bonnet and Lyonet’s investigation 82 �� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, pp. 96–7; Needham, Nouvelles observations microscopiques, pp. 6–7. See Barsanti, ‘Les phénomènes “étranges”’, pp. 70–71. 83 �� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, pp. 98–9. 84 �� Hill, A Review of the Works of the Royal Society (London, 1751), attacked Baker specifically, and derided the thesis of equivocal generation (ibid., pp. 8–9). On Hill’s attacks, see Turner, ‘Henry Baker’, p. 61; and George Rousseau and David Haycock, ‘Voices calling for Reform: the Royal Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, Martin Folkes, John Hill, and William Stukeley’, History of Science, 37/4 (1999): 377–406. 85 �� Hill, Essays in Natural History, pp. 27–9. 86 �� Ellis, Natural History of the Corallines, pp. xvi–xvii. 87 �� Ibid., p. vii. 88 �� Avertissement du Libraire, in Ellis, Essai sur l’histoire naturelle des Corallines, trans. J.N.S. Allamand (La Haye, 1756), p. vii.

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of regeneration in animals other than zoophytes, Italian, French and German naturalists extended their labours to other animals – such as worms, snails, naiads, salamanders, sea-anemones, crayfish, crabs and some fish – making frequent use of the microscope.89 In addition to Donati’s Natural Marine History of the Adriatic Sea (1750), Bohadsch’s On several marine animals (1761), Pallas’s Catalogue of zoophytes (1766) and Ellis’s books of 1755 and 1786, the main inspiration behind the launch of marine zoology had come from discussions of Trembley’s polyp, regeneration and Jussieu’s thesis.90 In most marine zoological works of the period, the microscope was a routine instrument, so much so that marine zoology was considered to be a suitable context in which to advertise new instruments. In Essay, Ellis took the opportunity to advertise a new simple microscope with a particular type of articulation (the aquatic movement he claimed to have requested from Cuff), a type that was to endure for a century.91 In fact, the aquatic movement had been invented by Trembley who asked Cuff to make a microscope incorporating it in 1745, as recent manuscript evidence has shown.92 Lenses and microscopes were used as magnifiers for drawing the shape of these bodies, and the instruments took their places in a very common natural history pattern, by bringing solutions to morphological issues which appealed to naturalistic iconography.93 More specifically, within the field of marine zoology, the microscope helped three research topics interact with each other: regeneration, ambiguity of organisms and classical naturalistic issues, which included morphological, behavioural and classificatory studies. Of the three issues, it was coral and regeneration that aroused most public notice, although naturalists’ interest in the marine element probably provided the main momentum towards further research on infusoria. As well as regeneration, subjects such as the ambiguity of zoophytes were a driving force for research during the whole century, and were enough of a motive for the major marine zoologists to improve on a specialization that Trembley had best embodied.

89 �� Many genera were cut to test regeneration: worms (Ginanni, Bonnet, Dicquemare); snails (Spallanzani, Schaeffer, Rovatti, Adanson, Bonnet, Senebier), see Maria Teresa Monti, Spallanzani e le rigenerazioni animali (Florence, 2005); naiads (Müller, Necker); salamanders (Spallanzani, Bonnet, Adanson); sea–anemones (Dicquemare, Lefebure des Hayes); mussels (Le Masson Le Golft); crayfish and crabs (Badier, Cavolini); and other fish (Broussonet). 90 �� Donati’s book was translated into German (Halle, 1753) and French by Allamand (La Haye, 1758). Ellis’s into French by Allamand (La Haye, 1756), Dutch (S’Gravenhage, 1756) and German (Nürnberg, 1764, 1767). Bohadsch’s into German (in 1769, and in 1776 by Leske). Pallas’s into Dutch (Utrecht, 1768) and reported in Journal de Physique. 91 �� Clay and Court, p. 173: this ‘aquatic movement was introduced by Cuff on the request of Ellis about 1750’. 92 �� See Ratcliff and Fournier, pp. 110–12. 93 �� Regarding naturalistic iconography, see Chapter Seven, pp. 151–5.

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Dicquemare published many papers on sea anemones between 1772 and 1777,94 Bohadsch compiled several monographs on marine animals, Ellis described corallines, sponges and sea anemones, while the Italian scholars, Macrì, Griselini and Vianelli described jellyfish, scolopendridae and minute marine bodies such as noctiluca.95 Thanks to this trend of specialization, the microscopical animalcules were gradually separated off from research on marine animals, and this is a part of Trembley’s effect. Pallas, who had defended since 1766 the existence of true zoophytes against Bonnet, illustrated the close relationships between marine zoology and the study of animalcules, because he took the shape of the polyp as the type for a class, and applied it irrespective of the size of the organisms. Seventeen genera in his 1766 Elenchus zoophytorum contained microscopic animals that were classified later as infusoria by Müller. By the 1770s, helminthology, marine zoology and infusoria were separated disciplines. Along with increased visibility and production of microscopical texts that was at least tripled compared to the 1730s, Trembley’s polyp opened an avenue for new disciplines such as marine zoology, vegetable anatomo-physiology and animal anatomo-physiology in several countries. The polyp revealed both the variety of the world and the fundamental importance of marine zoology for providing a key to better understanding of nature and of life in general. Such new avenues contributed a great deal to the renewal of research on infusoria. Yet, at the same time, linked to the rise of materialism, there appeared in France a second wave of unbelievers. Needham and Buffon, with a new style of microscopical research, were knocking at the door.

�� This was also acknowledged by Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, in Oeuvres, vol. 8, p. 469. 95 �� Giuseppe Vianelli, Nuove scoperte intorno le luci notturne dell’aqua marina (Venezia, 1749); Jean-Antoine Nollet, Leçons de physique expérimentale, 3rd edn (6 vols, Paris, 1743–61), vol. 5, pp. 33–4; Jacques-François Dicquemare, ‘Observation sur la lumière, dont la mer brille souvent pendant la nuit’, Journ. Phys., 6 (1775): 319–31. 94

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Chapter 6

The Disputes over Authority and Microscopical Observations

Pre-existence of Germs as a Symbol of the Enlightenment In the first part of the eighteenth century, the antispontaneist view – the pre-existence of germs – was a symbol of the widening Enlightenment that gradually relegated spontaneist theories to the rank of obscurantist beliefs. Proposed as a general alternative, the pre-existence of germs was not detached from widespread European awareness that future generations would be dealing with new identities, such as the savant, and new forms of knowledge. The previous commitments of Malpighi, Redi, Lister, La Hire, Leeuwenhoek and Bradley to antispontaneism were not mere voices in the wilderness, their views were taken as the true explanation of generation. In 1702, at the Royal Society, the anonymous C.H. declared the generation of animalcules to be regular and compatible with a parental method of generation, since ‘most of them are the product of the Spawn of some invisible volatile parents’. Antispontaneism was also well represented in books, including the Boyle Lectures in defence of natural theology by Derham in the early 1710s, Lesser’s Théologie des insectes (1742), handbooks of physics and even illuminated books designed for a wealthy readership. Experiments had also changed the investigators’ conception, and certain scholars such as Bourguet regarded the axiom ‘corruption produces generation’ and related experiments as simply ‘false’. Nevertheless, there remained a few bastions of resistance on the side of spontaneous generation, among them the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux. For instance, in 1701, in a review of the Dutch painter Goedart’s book on insects the reporter was pleased to note that ‘some of them also seem to be generated from corruption.’ The Jesuits supported a Catholic neo-Aristotelianist belief for which certain classes of beings were ‘superior’ and others ‘inferior’, and those differences determined a being’s method of generation. Mating and the transmission of characteristics by

�� C.H., p. 1366. �� Andry, pp. 13–20; Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720), preface; Derham, Physico-Theology, pp. 373–5; van Musschenbroek, vol. 1, p. 9; Friedrich Christian Lesser, Théologie des insectes (La Haye, 1742), pp. 55–62; George Adams Sr, Micrographia Illustrata, p. 95. �� Bourguet, p. 77. Journal de Trévoux (July–August 1701): 85–98, pp. 97–8.

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parents were only imputed to superior creatures, while inferior beings – insects, worms, cryptogams and marine vegetables – originated from earth, putrefaction, decay, chance, recombination or some other method. Yet, antispontaneism was considered to be the main framework in which naturalistic research should be carried out, and a quarrel between Réaumur and the Trévoux Jesuits in the mid-1730s captures the extent of antispontaneism. In the opening volume of his Mémoires, Réaumur sought to free the public from the burden of the Ancients, for whom insects ‘emanated from the decay of bodies of different species’. He directly attacked the Jesuits Kircher and Buonanni, and a recent book by Vidussi which supported a revival of spontaneous generation. The account of this text in the 1735 Journal de Trévoux was by and large favourable, except on the breaking point of spontaneous generation. Insect research was indeed useful, the reporter argued, thanks to ‘the microscope and the discoveries it allows nowadays’. Yet, in a plea in favour of the Ancients, the author explained how corruption separated bodies and reorganized them, through ‘plastic power’, to shape an insect: ‘Such a system was in broad agreement with the kind of fortuity that gives birth to such a variety of insects.’ This Jesuit’s rationale in the 1730s sounded not very far from the arguments of certain materialists of the 1740s; and both also opposed Réaumur and antispontaneist views. In fact, the Trévoux fathers were defending members of their own community. Kircher and Buonanni had long been opposed to Redi’s antispontaneist thesis, and Buonanni’s demonstrations were fresh in the minds of the Jesuits. All this was exasperating enough for Réaumur to reply with shocked surprise in the face of such credulous beliefs and he opened the 1735 second volume of Mémoires with a strong refutation of their obscurantism. Dutch reporters who observed the quarrel saw it as Réaumur battling against superstition, and praised him for curing ‘people of superstitions, which we should be ashamed to have believed for so long a time’.10 Réaumur reminded his readers of the measured diffidence one should cultivate towards trust in witnesses, and criticized blind faith in systems.11 He reported the Kircherian experiments of spontaneously generating worms, insects and scorpions, which he had vainly attempted to reproduce by sowing a desiccated powder of worms.12 But, more importantly, he established four fundamental principles of stability and generation for organisms:

�� Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 1, p. 29. �� Ibid., vol. 1, p. 30. Journal de Trévoux (1735): 1116–37, p. 1117. �� Ibid., p. 1120. �� Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 2, pp. xvj–xxxi. 10 Bibliothèque françoise, 25/2 (1737): 342–64, p. 361. 11 �� Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 2, pp. xxxiv–xxxv. 12 �� Ibid., vol. 2, pp. xxxv–xxxviij. See Roger, p. 191.

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1. Species are either oviparous or viviparous. 2. No insect hatches from decayed matter, which often provides suitable food for young insects. 3. An insect only generates the same species. 4. Morphology of species is invariable, therefore a species cannot become another species, even when fed differently.13 Réaumur thus crowned the antispontaneist position with a precise determination of the relation between the constancy of the species and the pre-existence of germs, a formalized theory missed by the seventeenth-century observers of animalcules. Scholars were dealing now with species and no longer with specimens. Between the 1680s and the early 1740s antispontaneism was the main theoretical framework for generation throughout Europe, and through it scholars shared a common knowledge and experimental background. Furthermore, scholars continued to experiment on the generation of certain species. In 1737, the Nuremberg Acta physico-medica, which provided a German audience to authors such as Vallisneri, published a paper by the professor of mathematics to the Sapienza in Rome Diego Revillas on the generation of mosquitoes. The issue had been left untouched since Sangallo’s experiments in 1679, and Lancisi who theorized that mosquitoes carried cholera. Thanks to the microscope through which he observed mating, sexual parts, eggs and their development, Revillas could ‘confirm in these animalcules the hypothesis of generation ex ovo’, thus refuting Kircher. 14 Other trends, such as the expansion of enlightened Dutch literary journalism between 1720 and 1740, influenced the diffusion of antispontaneism greatly. Reviewing Merian’s posthumous publication in 1730, reporters from the Bibliothèque françoise praised both the microscope and the discoveries of Redi, Malpighi, Leeuwenhoek and Vallisneri, and disparaged spontaneism: ‘If we have abandoned these prejudices, … we are thus obliged to those who employ the microscope’.15 In 1733, when marine worms were destroying the Dutch sea walls, a reporter wrote about Rousset, a physician who was observing the worms: ‘There is cause to hope that he will discover that these worms lay a quantity of eggs, and that he will not tend towards the crushed system of putrefaction, which definitely would not do him credit’.16 The Dutchs fulminated against spontaneism, and indeed Pieter van Musschenbroek held that true spontaneous generation would be a miracle.17 Friends of Trembley were equally critical and cited experiments that supported the �� Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 2, pp. xxxix–xlj. �� Diego Reviglias, ‘De Culicum generatione’, Acta physico-medica, 4 (1737): 14–18, p. 17. 15 Bibliothèque françoise, 15/1 (1731): 159–68, p. 161. 16 �� Anon., ‘Lettre critique sur quelques ouvrages touchant les vers de mer’, Bibliothèque françoise, 18/1 (1733): 147–67, p. 154. 17 �� Van Musschenbroek, vol. 1, p. 9. 13

14

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pre-existence of germs even in animalcules. Indeed, in his critical footnotes added to Lesser’s popular work Natural theology of insects (1742), Lyonet explains Leeuwenhoek’s failure to test spontaneism in his microscopical experiments: Leeuwenhoek should at least have boiled the water and the pepper together in the tube itself, and closed it straight away. If, some days after, he had found animals in this peppered water, there would certainly have been something there able to disconcert the modern naturalists. But it is that which I am convinced would never have happened.18

In the face of so forceful an Enlightenment symbol as the pre-existence of germs, new beings such as the polyp and the greenfly became incorporated into the revival of earlier belief systems. Indeed, those minute bodies supplied examples of ‘inferior creatures’ that demonstrated non-standard methods of generation, thus agreeing, in part, with the previous Catholic neo-Aristotelian belief. It was not long before certain scholars, specifically Catholic ones, resuscitated the Aristotelian scheme of separating superior beings from inferior ones, and reifying the latter in a class that demonstrated anomalous methods of generation. For their discoverers, the polyp and the greenfly were unconnected with this debate. Nonetheless, philosophers and some scholars incorporated those creatures into a so-called new system by means of a strategy that can be broken down into four stages: 1. Taking the polyp and the green fly as models of a new class of inferior creatures that underwent anomalous methods of generation. 2. Claiming, within academic frameworks, to use experimental systems and the microscope. 3. Concealing any link between the previous theistically-based spontaneist ideas and their own theories. 4. Changing strategies of communication and restoring the exclusive microscope. Thus, during the 1740s, a major change occurred in the naturalistic theoretical framework. Before the polyp, antispontaneism was considered obscurantist, defended by old-fashioned Jesuits. After the polyp, a new discourse cast aside the previous religious connotations and, with few changes and an astonishing semantic reversal, thus laicized it came to support the materialist ideology. Breaking the Ice: the Rebirth of Spontaneous Generation The renewal of spontaneism owed much to the resumption of microscopical works on animalcules, abandoned after 1720. The standard view of historians relates 18

�� Lyonet, footnotes in Lesser, pp. 59–60.

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the 1740s revival to La Mettrie’s and Maupertuis’s materialist claims that argued in favour of the random emergence of life, and to the works of Needham and Trembley. Shirley Roe also stressed the fact that Needham’s transmutationism was sensitive to the growing materialistic context.19 I will argue that the bigger changes that Buffon and Needham succeeded in bringing about were in scientific communication and representation of the microscope. In England, during the 1740s, Baker’s Microscope Made Easy had given impetus to microscopical research on invisible creatures. Skilful in imitating and synthesizing the thoughts of other scholars such as Leeuwenhoek, Bonomo, Joblot and Trembley,20 Baker was also undoubtedly supporter of antispontaneism, which he related to the invention of the microscope.21 Animalcules also started to be promoted by microscope makers as being a suitable object for research. Cuff, with his Description of a pocket microscope (c. 1743), included a set of items secured between glass slides,22 and also two unused slides ‘useful to observe the animalcules which are in the infusions’.23 Adams Sr translated Trembley’s and Joblot’s books – including the latter’s antispontaneist experiments – in his 1746 Micrographia illustrata,24 which presented polyps and animalcules as the new objects most suitable for microscopical observations. The polyp had opened the way for animalcules to be readmitted to the domain of science – the last step of the Trembley effect – and indeed, there was little if any research on them in the two decades before 1743. With Trembley’s distribution of his polyps, the interest in aquatic animalcules increased greatly in England, and Baker and his circle of friends, among them the Reverend Miles, and Needham who participated in the revival of microscopical observation, were soon describing new species. In August 1743, at Folkes’ request, the latter presented his discovery of microscopical eels brought to life by a drop of water poured upon smutty wheat, and had it published in the Philosophical Transactions.25 Although Needham had communicated how his observations could be repeated, they remained difficult to reproduce.26 Nevertheless, encouraged by the prompt publication of his first paper, Needham started to send descriptions,

19

�� Shirley Roe, ‘John Turberville Needham and the Generation of Living Organisms’, Isis, 74 (1983): 159–84, pp. 183–4. 20 �� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, pp. 67–98. 21 �� Ibid., pp. 148–9. 22 �� Cuff, Description of a pocket Microscope, plate. 23 �� Ibid., p. 3. 24 �� George Adams Sr, Micrographia Illustrata, pp. 122–3. 25 �� John Turberville Needham, ‘Concerning certain chalky tubulous Concretions …’, pp. 640–41; Renato G. Mazzolini and Shirley Roe (eds), Science against the Unbelievers: The Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham 1760–1780 (Oxford, 1986), p. 10. 26 �� Needham, An Account of some new Microscopical Discoveries, p. 86. Baker, Employment for the Microscope (London, 1753), pp. 252–3.

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objects and interpretations to Folkes, for instance his discovery of microscopic animals emerging from mildew. The eels became, in effect, Needham’s destiny – Voltaire even nicknamed him l’Anguillard – the Eelmonger. In previous microscopic observation, the eels of flour paste and of vinegar represented a classic issue which Baker did not fail to summarize in 1742.27 This probably helped a London surgeon, Sherwood, to cast doubts on the standard method of generation, for he regarded eels in paste as viviparous, an observation Needham and Parsons witnessed. Early in 1746, the Royal Society credited Sherwood with the discovery, considering it to be a new example of non-standard generation to add to that of the polyp, although there was nothing mysterious in this method of reproduction. Many scholars besides Réaumur acknowledged that viviparity existed in nature. Bonnet had even recently demonstrated that lice were viviparous in autumn and oviparous in spring.28 Even so, Sherwood planned to carry out experiments, using Joblot’s protocol of vessels of boiled paste covered and not covered, to test whether or not eggs in the air were deposited on the paste.29 As shown by a letter to Trembley, it was Folkes who suggested the experiment, and covering the paste ‘from the moment boiled water was poured upon the flour, which should, I suppose, destroy everything of an animal nature in the flour. We will see what comes out of it.’30 Sherwood promised new experiments on the issue, but nothing took place. It is not surprising that flour paste was connected with the experimental protocols used to test spontaneous generation. Indeed, as revealed by Baker, the paste should be made from a boiled mixture of flour and water, and the occurrence of eels depended on just leaving the paste exposed to air for several days in open vessels.31 Baker, who defended the pre-existence of germs, reported neither on experiments with heated infusions, nor on Joblot’s experiments, even though he quoted him. He merely covered, or left uncovered, several sorts of cold infusions and accounted for any difference in the resulting number of animalcules by saying that the eggs were either ‘deposited by their own parents, as I above suppose, or … brought along with the air’.32 Recommended by Folkes to several French scholars, in summer 1746 Needham visited Paris where he got in touch with Réaumur and visited his famous Cabinet, but Needham’s connection with Buffon drove a wedge between him and Réaumur.33 In 1739, Buffon had asked the Navy Minister, Maurepas, for the �� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, pp. 81–2. �� Bonnet, Traité d’insectologie, pp. 196–201. 29 �� James Sherwood, ‘Concerning the minute Eels in Paste being viviparous’, PT, 44/478 (1746): 67–9, p. 69. 30 �� Folkes to Trembley, 13 February 1745/1746, Ms Trembley, pp. 149–50. 31 �� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, p. 81. 32 �� Ibid., p. 70. 33 �� Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (36 vols, Paris, 1749–88), vol. 2, p. 170. Philip Sloan, ‘Organic Molecules Revisited’, in 27 28

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appointment of Intendant du Jardin du Roi, a prestigious position supposedly reserved for Duhamel du Monceau, Réaumur’s close friend and collaborator, and a bitter and unequal contest for the control of natural history at the Paris Academy had ensued.34 Needham’s debut in the scientific scene was clearly inspired by Trembley, whom he met during the latter’s journey to England in 1745.35 But from 1747, he came close to Buffon’s views, and in March 1748 both scholars set out to prove that spermatic animalcules and microscopic organisms were machines resulting from chance combinations of organic particles. Two months later Needham did his utmost to test another theory, that ‘microscopical beings were the result of decomposition in the infusion and not produced from eggs deposited from the air’.36 With this hypothesis, Needham hardened his theoretical position in a 1748 paper on microscopical observations. Spermatic or otherwise, the animalcules were now seen as the products of a vegetative force acting on a dead substance.37 Even heat could not destroy the ‘productive principle’, as vouched for by his experiment on boiled infusions and on heated mutton-gravy. Needham’s idea was soon seen as being in direct opposition to the antispontaneist framework and awakened reactions from scholars. Indeed, when translating Needham’s 1745 Account of New Microscopical Discoveries into French, Allamand added critical footnotes that cast doubts on Needham’s ideas on generation. He observed little ‘cases’ that were, according to him, not vegetable matter that transmuted into eels, but vegetable matter that contained germs or eggs of eels.38 The following year, Needham reinterpreted Allamand’s ideas and focused on the transformation of a decaying fibre of blighted wheat into globules and then into eels.39 This was a new, perhaps unconscious, yet original, rebuttal of the third principle set down by Réaumur according to which a species produces only the same species.

Jean Gayon et al. (eds), Buffon 88; Proceedings of the International Buffon Conference (Paris, 1992), pp. 415–38, pp. 416–18. Roe, p. 161; Roger, pp. 696–7 and Mazzolini and Roe, p. 15, found evidence for Needham’s relationship with Réaumur up to April 1747. For a recent biography of Needham see Marta Stefani, Corruzione e generazione. John T. Needham e l’origine del vivente (Florence, 2002). 34 �� See Claude Viel, ‘Duhamel du Monceau, naturaliste, physicien et chimiste’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences, 38/1 (1985): 55–71, p. 62. 35 �� Needham, An Account of some new Microscopical Discoveries, p. 8. See Roger, p. 497. 36 �� Roe, p. 162. 37 �� Needham, ‘A Summary of some Late Observations upon the Generation, Composition and Decomposition of Animal and Vegetable Substances’, PT, 45/490 (1748): 615–66, pp. 644–5. 38 �� Jean Nicolas Sébastien Allamand, footnotes added to Needham, Nouvelles découvertes faites avec le microscope (Leide, 1747), pp. 102–3. 39 �� Needham, ‘A Summary …’, p. 648.

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From Changes of Idea to Changes in Style of Communication Far from epigenesis, the main theoretical framework that Trembley condemned in the 1740s was the universality of ideas and general rules – the system, in the Enlightenment term – and the rigid classificatory scheme of animality.40 In fact, he argued that natural history should embrace microscopic specimens as true species and advised scholars to abide by what their experience had shown them and to discard spontaneous generation, for ‘Once we began to distrust such a prejudice, and we started to observe, we saw these animals producing eggs or young, like many others’.41 Réaumur’s texts, the journalists’ writings, Trembley’s work and that of many other scholars all made a stand against prejudices and systems, and especially censured those who built general rules out of particular cases. Réaumur, Trembley and Bonnet’s public commitment was to philosophical issues opposed to speculation, and emphasized exceptions to general rules. Strictly speaking, ex ovo omnia was not ‘wrong’, but rather allowed for exceptions,42 a claim that begged scholars not to judge by appearances. In the 1750s, a Swedish disciple of Réaumur, de Geer, echoed this formulation of principle in his own Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes in describing lice, ‘which seem to be insects deliberately made to silence every system and reasoning, or to make an exception to the most general rules of generation’.43 One can thus perceive why the hopes aroused by Trembley’s polyp were, in 1743, directed against the spirit of system. Reviewing Gronovius’s account of the polyp, one reporter wrote: ‘Natural history offers every day new wonders that defy the most beautiful systems, and which should cure people of the illness of believing in systems too easy to construct and too inflexible to defend.’44 At the opposite pole, Buffon and Needham repeatedly said they were so convinced by their own system as to be directed by it in all of their reasoning.45 The antipathy to systems was also due to acknowledged disagreements on metaphysics, although scholars could agree and share knowledge on empirical grounds. The polyp had strengthened the distinction between the descriptive reporting style adopted by academicians and the metaphysical style of the public sphere. In France, the emergence of materialist ideas, loaded with cultural meaning, in the Salon and on the fringes of the Académie was also linked with the reorganization of communication which arose on Fontenelle’s retirement in 1741 after forty years as secretary of the Academy. Therefore, hidden behind the attacks 40

�� Trembley, Mémoires, pp. 301–3. �� Trembley, Mémoires, pp. 308–9. 42 �� C. Wilson, p. 221. Bonnet, Traité d’insectologie, pp. xix, 116–17; Trembley, Mémoires, pp. 194, 311. 43 �� de Geer, Mémoires, vol. 2, p. 31. 44 Bibliothèque britannique, 21/2 (1743): 353–58, p. 353. 45 �� Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 2, p. 201. 41

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of materialism on cultural and scientific values lay another issue, the manner of communication. These two divergent styles of communication – I’m not speaking here of politeness – represented a major scientific issue of the time, one that in the first stage involved big names – Buffon, Needham, Baker, Ellis. In private correspondence and manuscripts, Folkes, Réaumur, Trembley, the royal censor Malesherbes, Nollet and d’Alembert regarded them as plagiarists, or amateurs who fancied themselves to be infallible authorities in reporting experiments.46 These changes in communication, in which the shared functioning of scientific communities was at stake, related to the mixing of metaphysic and scientific issues, which most scholars were careful to avoid up to the mid-1740s. For instance, Lyonet had emended Lesser’s Theology of insects, criticizing his wide use of an anthropocentric theological finalism, and academies avoided speaking of the soul of the polyp. Trembley’s writings especially were representative of the naturalistic experimental report, for he carefully avoided speculation, while Needham and Buffon, on the other hand, combined the two styles from 1745 onwards. Before Needham’s mixing of scientific and metaphysical issues, some scholars considered it their duty to reply in the same vein; therefore in reply to Needham’s materialist argument on the origin of life, Allamand said that God ought to create new souls.47 Needham’s heterogeneous style was indeed adaptable, but he had probably engaged in metaphysics in the manner of Molière’s ‘Monsieur Jourdain, qui fait de la prose sans le savoir’. Indeed there soon appeared accusations that Needham had also mixed the sacred and the profane, and, although he refuted these claims in 1750,48 his writings bore out the accusation. Needham acknowledged Maupertuis’s and Buffon’s ideas without considering them materialist, and took classical materialist arguments as evidence for God’s existence, because God embodied the vital force in each atom of substance.49 Progressively, metaphysics became his main raison d’être, as illustrated by a late letter to Bonnet, devoted only to metaphysical and religious preoccupations.50 On the other hand, Needham was certainly a sympathetic collaborator with whom to carry out observations. He attracted many scholars, and was asked to act as a witness for microscopical experiments and observations in most of the countries he visited. In the mid-1740s, he observed polyps along with Trembley and Baker, eels with Sherwood, and coral with Ellis and Hill. Then he travelled across Europe, where, in Naples in 1762, he observed blood cells in company with Father Della Torre;51 and, in Geneva in August 1765, participated in Saussure’s 46 �� On 16 November 1747, Abbé Nollet wrote to Jallabert that academicians remarked that Buffon’s Mémoire on burning mirrors plagiarized several authors: Correspondance entre Nollet et Jallabert, p. 159. 47 �� Allamand, p. 97. 48 �� Needham, Nouvelles observations microscopiques, Preface, pp. xv–xvi. 49 �� Needham, ‘A Summary …’, pp. 645, 664–5. 50 �� Roe, pp. 182–3. 51 �� Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni intorno la storia naturale, p. 107.

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microscopical experiments testing the spontaneous generation of infusoria. This involvement in communal experiments helped him to distance himself from his previous position, because he was receptive to others’ suggestions. After eagerly performing shared microscopical observations, he would readily agree with his colleague within the context of their mutual collaboration, yet once away from that context and left alone to report his experiments, he reverted to his own interpretations. Before the works of Shirley Roe and Philip Sloan, many historians of biology considered Needham to be the loser in the quarrel over generation and a ‘bad microscopist’.52 However, it is necessary to take into account his psychological processes to understand the continuous vacillation in Needham’s ideas and social relationships. He was inclined to replace the outcome of his observations with ideas he curiously appeared to set aside during interaction with his peers, and disregarded certain dimensions of the scientific work, which scholars considered standards for the accurate communication of knowledge. Although he said he kept journals of his experiments, it is likely that he seldom did so with a view to publication. He also promised several times to provide new observations that never materialized, and scholars did not forget such promises.53 After rebuttals of his theory appeared, he vowed, for instance, to substantiate his belief that all bodies are ‘formed by vegetation’, saying this could be easily demonstrated ‘if I were to publish, in their entirety, the journals on the productions from each different infusion’.54 Bonnet directly reproved him for his habit of recounting scientific memories with few written notes, and quoting authors from memory,55 a routine Needham recognized: ‘when I wrote my book I neither had before me your book nor that of any other author, as is always my routine, whether good or bad’.56 As a consequence, he was unremitting in rejecting others’ ideas, and reverted to his main atomistic and vitalist lines of thought, as several examples show. After agreeing with Sherwood, who never believed in transmutationism, Needham regarded the eels as coming directly from the paste; after experimenting with Buffon, he launched his 52

�� Sloan, p. 415, lists authors who argued against Needham. �� When reading Needham’s 1769 Notes to Spallanzani’s book, Roffredi was astonished not to find the microscopical observations promised by Needham, Nouvelles observations microscopiques, Preface, p. x, but instead, a ‘treatise on metaphysics.’ See Roffredi, ‘Lettre à M.r L. C. D. S. sur les nouvelles observations microscopiques de M.r Néedham’, Mél. Soc. Turin, 4 (1766–1769): 109–60, p. 111. Gleichen, Abhandlung, p. 20, criticized Needham’s notes in a similar way. 54 �� Needham, Nouvelles observations microscopiques, p. 200. 55 �� Bonnet to Needham, 10 September 1765, 26 December 1768 and 8 April 1769, Science against the Unbelievers: The Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham 1760–1780, eds Mazzolini and Roe (Oxford, 1986), pp. 228, 262, 269. See also Bonnet to Spallanzani, 1 April 1766, and 17 January 1771, in Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 2, pp. 16–17, 167. 56 �� Needham to Bonnet, 31 December 1768, Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham, p. 264. 53

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own system; after meeting Spallanzani, he rejected the latter’s observations; when present at Saussure’s 1765 microscopical experiments, he admitted the division of infusoria as a reproductive method, but, in 1769, reverted to believing division to be merely decomposition.57 Jean-Jacques Rousseau entered relationships with enthusiasm, but usually ended them by rejecting his erstwhile friends – for instance Diderot or Hume – and Needham exhibited similar behaviour with his collaborations followed by theoretical rejections.58 One of the behavioural processes typical of Needham was the transformation of his readings and memories into what he thought were new ideas, probably because he rarely returned to his own, or others’, texts and observations. In a sense, he lacked the up-to-date and cumulative readings necessary to adapt to the changes in accumulated scientific data. Thus, he misrepresented others’ views by omitting certain aspects, or truncating citations, probably unintentionally, as Bonnet pointed out. Another feature was taking ideas from one context and attempting to validate them in another. For instance, he claimed in 1748 to have detected a new class of beings with a special kind of generation through transmutation of one species into another. Soon extended (with metaphysical consequences) in his 1750 Nouvelles découvertes microscopiques, this class became ‘vital beings’ around 1765.59 Obviously it related to Trembley’s and Réaumur’s suggestion that the polyp was an example of a new class of creatures with an anomalous mode of generation. A striking change that occurred between Needham’s first paper of 1743 and that of 1748 concerned his style of reporting experiments. In 1743 and 1745, Needham used mainly the descriptive style of the natural experimentalist tradition, and his accounts were usually precise enough to make it possible for his experiments to be reproduced. Indeed, Allamand was able to reproduce them, and subsequently observed the milt-vessels in squid, though the interpretations he derived were different from Needhams’. Reporters also remarked on his admirable style. However, from 1748 onwards, Needham neglected description, and his reports no longer provided the comprehensive descriptions needed for the reproduction of the experiment. For instance, a passage such as ‘A fresh Infusion of the same animal or vegetable Substance I apply’d before, will give me again in a little time the very Kind I am enquiring after, and that as often as I think proper to add new Matter’60 �� Needham, ‘A Summary …’, pp. 635–47; On Saussure, see Needham, ‘Notes’ to Lazzaro Spallanzani, Nouvelles recherches sur les découvertes microscopiques, trans. Abbé Regley (Londres et Paris, 1769): 139–298, p. 188; and Ratcliff, ‘Temporality, Sequential Iconography and Linearity in Figures: the Impact of the Discovery of Division in Infusoria’, History and Philosophy of Life Science, 21/2 (1999): 255–92. 58 �� Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris, 1971), pp. 188–91. 59 �� Needham, ‘A Summary …’, pp. 629–30, 638; see Roe, pp. 163, 166; Stefani, pp. 171–2. The last 200 pages of Needham’s Nouvelles observations microscopiques are a treatise on metaphysics. 60 �� Needham, ‘A Summary …’, p. 631. 57

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contrasts strongly with the descriptive and referencing style of experimental report adopted by Réaumur, Bonnet, Trembley and many others. Reading Needham’s text, few were able to replicate the experiment – that is, repeating the process with exactly the same motions, procedures, techniques, material, instruments, substances, species, morphological descriptions, quantities used, types of water, time, duration, temperature, ambient conditions, all factors which Needham seldom spoke of. Even experienced scholars were unable to reproduce them, for he omitted morphological traits and features of species, and gave imprecise descriptions of the spatial and temporal aspects of the experiments. In particular, in an experiment where he boiled mutton broth before observing it, Needham did not tell the reader how long he had heated it for.61 Moreover, Buffon’s data did not mention the mutton and contradicted Needham’s.62 By contrast with the natural experimental tradition, those texts did not enable scholars to easily repeat experiments. Trembley, Bonnet and Réaumur intended their experiments to be reproducible, and they were duly repeated thanks to the shared microscope. Indeed, the work of all three conformed to the standards of communication and social validation of the knowledge that were defended as scientific values by the natural experimentalist tradition. Needham and Buffon’s change in communication style strongly affected the image of the microscope, and presaged the return of the exclusive microscope. There, the exclusive microscope relied on the style used to report observations and on the priority given to theoretical assumptions – the ‘system’ – rather than the method and control of observations. Indeed, after having reported one experiment, with mutton broth, and hinted at infusions, the details of which he did not want to trouble the reader with, Needham said he ‘neglected every precaution of this kind, as plainly unnecessary’ and did not report on any further experiments on infusions.63 One experiment thus sufficed to prove the entire theory. This manner of proceeding was certainly not accepted in the Académie des sciences, where, at about the same time, the anatomist Ferrein carried out microscopical experiments on the structure of the liver. Not satisfied with the manipulations and method of observation, he added five pages headed ‘instructions for verifying the observations’.64 Needham’s attitude demonstrated a departure from the experimenting style adopted in the 1740s and illustrated by Trembley’s laboratory and 140 jars, moving towards experimenting in series, a trend confirmed by a great deal of other research in the 61

�� Ibid., pp. 637–8. �� Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 2, p. 257. 63 �� Needham, ‘A Summary …’, p. 639; Same topos in Needham, ‘Mémoire sur la génération’, in Mazzolini and Roe, pp. 338–9, p. 338; and Needham, ‘Notes’, p. 197: ‘Je n’entre pas ici dans le détail nécessaire pour instruire le Lecteur sur la maniere de s’y prendre pour répéter nos observations.’ 64 �� Antoine Ferrein, ‘Sur la structure des viscères nommés glanduleux, et particulièrement sur celle des reins et du foie’, MASP (1749; pub. 1753): 489–530, pp. 521–6. 62

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second half of the century. In fact, although Needham had made ‘three or four scores of different infusions’, he gave no further information about them.65 The laboratory tightened focus on scientific work and provided accredited technical inscriptions – the laboratory journal – for recording facts.66 Even when he did perform microscopical experiments in series, Needham did not report their procedures with a carefully constructed narrative. While other experimenters painstakingly developed a technical vocabulary to enable them to record accurate descriptions of phenomena, Needham satisfied himself with phrases such as: they ‘constantly gave me the same phaenomena with little variation, and were uniform in their general result’.67 This vagueness was echoed in his claims of priority for his discoveries, as a sealed envelope given on 9 July 1748 to the secretary of the Académie des sciences, Grandjean de Fouchy, testifies.68 Needham thus began to make enemies, such as Buffon.69 Indeed, wary of plagiarism of his ‘discovery’ of the ‘seminal liquor in the testicle of the female’, two months earlier Buffon had put a sealed envelope in the secretary’s hands,70 a procedure usually employed only for a patent or a competition, and Buffon’s action was consistent with his authoritarian behaviour. Moreover, their collaboration became a crucible seething with authority and suspicion, though concealed under protestations of mutual friendly cooperation. Also, using a sealed envelope shows that Needham had already started to be diffident about his own capacities to write and complete the discovery. He who formerly rushed to publish unfinished projects – as shown by the many promises of further work and the sealed envelope incident – now acts as if he himself does not believe in his discovery, but wants to gain prestige. His unfinished papers often include arguments from accepted autorities in order to conceal the weakness of his own argumentation. Needham was aware of his ineptitude in exploiting all the literary techniques available for the writing of scientific texts, and many authors, including his biographer Mann, reproached him for his obscure and confused writing style.71 Needham’s dynamism was rooted in a conception of experimentation that could be termed the ‘revealed experiment’, of which the mutton broth experiment is representative. A revealed experiment, with religious overtones, was a unique performance, one impressive enough to destroy both any opposing ideas and the �� Needham, ‘A Summary …’, p. 639. �� On laboratory inscriptions, see Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, La vie de laboratoire: La production des faits scientifiques (Paris, 1988), pp. 38–45; Holmes, pp. 352, 488. 67 �� Needham, ‘A Summary …’, p. 639. 68 �� Needham, ‘Mémoire sur la génération’. The mémoire was an abstract of the ‘discovery’ published in Philosophical Transactions. 69 �� Stefani, pp. 64–7. 70 �� Buffon, ‘Découverte de la liqueur séminale dans les femelles vivipares’, MASP (1748; pub. 1752): 211–28, p. 227. 71 �� Stefani, pp. 78, 95. 65 66

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need to supply other scholars with suitable means to allow for repetition. Since the experiment was true, revealed and unique, there was no need for repetition; and certain observers such as Trembley, were aware of this factor. In an unpublished review of Needham’s 1749 Observations, Trembley requested more experiments and remarked on the Englishman’s use of a ‘single fact’ to demonstrate his theory.72 Another indication comes from Father Della Torre in Naples, who reported in 1763 that, when they jointly observed blood cells, Needham shouted suddenly ‘experimentum crucis!’ when he saw six sacs in a blood cell, being clearly unaware that the image could be artefactual.73 If there was any conflict between religious thinking and scientific style, it was not only in Needham’s ideology of vital force, but also in his practice of taking the solitary and revealed experiment as a model for scientific communication. In this respect, Needham was closer to Buonanni than to Trembley. With the renewal of spontaneism, even if presented in an analytic style, the analogies with the previous religious claims of the 1730s became too obvious for everyone who knew the recent history of that tenet. And Voltaire, satirizing Needham, declared him to be secretly a Jesuit.

A New Direction for Research It is common for historiographies of spontaneous generation to pass from Needham and Buffon’s 1749 research to Spallanzani’s 1765 work as if nothing – and particularly no empirical research – had taken place during those years.74 In addition, historians have argued that spontaneous generation was supported by experimental evidence, ‘while only dogmatists felt safe in ruling against it’,75 although there was discussion of Needham and Buffon’s work that was entirely based on observations and experiments. Like Buonanni for Malpighi and Redi, Needham catalysed further microscopical research on spontaneism. Historians still focus on Needham and Buffon’s ‘effort to frame a new theory of generation’,76 unaware of their attack on scientific communication and its consequences: neglecting accurate reports, replacing it with the cult of self-authority, hypothesis and seductive language, and undermining the foundations of scientific communication.

72 �� ‘Le seul fait qui se trouve dans le mem.re de M.r Needham, qui puisse servir à les expliquer est celui des petites anguilles de la pâte’, BGE Fonds Trembley 25, env. 18, f° 6. 73 �� Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni intorno la storia naturale, p. 107. His simple microscopes were made of tiny spherical glasses with strong powers of magnification, and presented images with aberrations. 74 �� Roger, p. 725; Roe, pp. 164, 177–80; John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore and London, 1977), pp. 24–5. 75 �� C. Wilson, p. 204. 76 �� Ruestow, p. 281; Thierry Hoquet, Buffon: Histoire naturelle et philosophie (Paris, 2005), pp. 425–6.

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As maintained by Shirley Roe, the theories of Maupertuis, Buffon and Needham were rejected because of their ‘materialist implications’,77 although there any many indications that their ideas were widely diffused throughout Europe, and even well received. The first to react to Needham’s 1747 Nouvelles découvertes – a translation of his 1745 work – was one of the watchful reporters of Bibliothèque raisonnée who had read Réaumur’s History of insects and Trembley’s work. He summarized Needham’s discoveries, integrated with the cumulative epistemology of the period,78 yet noted the ‘return to [the system of] the mixing of the two liquors’, male and female, and added ironically: ‘Such is the system of a philosopher who likes to make out that he accepts none of them’.79 Although Needham was against that system, no materialistic or metaphysical discussion took place in his paper.80 Another account in Journal de Trévoux underlined Needham’s good faith and avoidance of systems.81 Perhaps the transmutationist ideas of the priest Needham were new evidence for the Jesuits’ spontaneist thesis. As it happened, things went better than was deemed possible for Needham’s 1748 work, published in Philosophical Transactions. An account was given in Journal étranger by a reporter who subscribed entirely to Needham’s theses: demolishing both systems, of the spermatic animalcules and of the pre-existence of germs; discovery of a new class of transmutable beings; and existence of a vegetative force in each atom of matter, controlled by God. The reporter added, ‘in this system, we must not be afraid of falling into the equivocal generation.’82 Another report in Journal économique was similar in tone, but by contrast with those reporters of the mid-century, many academics and scholars supported the classical view on the pre-existence of germs. Malesherbes, the enlightened minister who had extended freedom of speech in France, was shocked by Buffon’s attack on the academic forms of communication; others, like de Geer or Bonnet, were loyal to Réaumur and many others – among them Nollet, Brisson, Bazin, Hill, Wright, Beccaria and Fontana – replicated microscopical experiments before again supporting or denying pre-existence. Yet, Needham’s new class of transmuting organisms, and Buffon’s new class of ‘intermediary beings’,83 did not fit in with the Latin naturalist framework, which based the whole system of nature on the stability and transmission of species. Needham himself was far from being recognized as a naturalist by the Latin community of scholars, being unable to apply to genus and species the morphological categories and the systematical report recently reformed by Linnaeus. If species and their transmission were not constant, how could complete knowledge of Nature be achieved? 77

�� Roe, p. 158. Bibliothèque raisonnée, 39 (1747): 35–47, p. 37. 79 �� Ibid., p. 43. 80 �� Ibid., p. 44. 81 Journal de Trévoux (1750): 858–71, p. 868. 82 Journal étranger (August 1756): 200–216, p. 213. 83 �� Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 2, p. 263. 78

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In addition to an attack on the fixed essence of the species, the naturalists could only fear a return to a ghostly Aristotelian distinction of superior versus inferior creatures, over which the binome species versus genus – drawn up by Ray, Tournefort and Linnaeus – sounded like an advance. Buffon’s ideas, particularly scornful towards smaller species – ‘the viler, the more abject’ – were in line with his attack on the Protestant and Jansenistic theological discourses on the wonders of nature.84 His conception was based on a moralistic Catholic-aristocratic assumption, such as: ‘almost all the creatures engendered in corruption, perish entirely in it; as they are born without parents, so they die without issue’.85 Historians too quickly have regarded Buffon as a reformer similar to Diderot.86 However, the former demonstrated an insatiable thirst for power, above all in its aristocratic form, being an ‘industrial capitalist’ and brilliant manufacturer of cannons.87 Buffon’s son went to the guillotine during the Revolution only because of his name. As for species, it can be no surprise that many naturalists took a classical natural theological stance on the issue. In Sweden, de Geer read Needham’s 1747 book,88 and from the beginning of his Histoire des insectes, he reiterated the antispontaneist credo: ‘In no manner do insects take their origin from corruption or chance; they perpetuate themselves through a well-ordered generation’.89 In France, the opposition was organized by a friend of Réaumur, Father Lignac, who repeated the microscopical observations and experiments before launching sweeping criticisms of Needham and Buffon that mixed personal, scientific, metaphysical and religious arguments, which he published anonymously.90 Like his enemies, Lignac combined the two styles – descriptive reports and metaphysical ideas – into an amalgamation that was studiously avoided by the Académie des sciences and by many European scholars. In order to avoid repercussions from the authorities on the Continent, people entered the fray by publishing the reports on their microscopical experiments anonymously. In December 1751, the Paris Journal économique published one such paper on the smut of corn, the conclusion 84

�� Ibid., vol. 2, p. 14. John Ray and Derham were clergymen of the English Church, Lesser was a Protestant theologian, and Pluche was Jansenist. 85 �� Buffon, Histoire naturelle, supplément (7 vols, Paris, 1774–89), vol. 4, p. 342. 86 �� Roger, pp. 703–4. 87 �� Serge Benoit and Francis Pichon, ‘Buffon métallurgiste: Regards de l’historien et du technicien’, in Buffon 88’, pp. 59–84, pp. 59–61. In 1768, Buffon was asked by the French Government to experiment on cast iron for cannons, see ibid., p. 64. 88 �� Carl de Geer, ‘Untersuchung von einer besondern Art kleiner Wasserthierchen’, Abhandlungen der Königlischen Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 9/3 (1753; Swedish original 1747): 229–34, p. 233. 89 �� de Geer, Mémoires, vol. 1, Préface, (n.p.). de Geer was among the major entomologists before Fabricius, and possessed a microscope by Magny, made in 1752; see Pipping, p. 221. 90 �� Roger, pp. 691–705; Hoquet, pp. 57–8.

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and narrative style of which were close to Needham’s. Produced by a ‘force’, an infusion of wheat generated small threads, or ‘the same minute eels I have observed over so many years in smutted wheat’.91 By way of reply, in March 1752, another anonymous author argued that an infusion of pepper always produced the same species of animalcules, for mother animalcules choose a suitable place to nourish their offspring. Joblot’s book, which supported antispontaneism, was also republished in 1754 with an updated title: Observations d’histoire naturelle faites avec le microscope. Shortly afterwards in Italy, following the orders of the Duke of Savoy, Beccaria, the professor of physics in Turin, carried out microscopical experiments testing Needham’s views, but did not publish his results before 1793.92 Later in Florence, in 1766, Felice Fontana published work on blood cell experiments that challenged Needham’s views on spontaneous generation by showing that boiled and sealed infusions remained free of any animalcules.93 But these experiments were published only after Spallanzani’s much renowned 1765 book, whose system of experiments radically and publicly attacked Needham’s transmutationism.94 In England, in the early 1750s, in immediate reaction to Needham and Buffon’s publications, Hill, who had collaborated with Needham, began experiments on animalcules to disprove their purported origin in putrefaction.95 In reporting these experiments, Hill discussed anonymous theses by French and English scholars, viewed as ‘too hasty naturalists’ claiming erroneous conclusions.96 He had in mind the refutation of two views – spontaneism and the one-to-one relation between a plant and an animalcule, a thesis he ascribed to Joblot and Baker. But Hill misunderstood Joblot, who never claimed such a one-to-one relation, and even Baker had given an accurate account of the varieties appearing there.97 To back his ideas, Hill collected the seeds and leaves of thirty different species, which he bruised, separated into two groups, and put into sixty jars full of water. This shows that, contrary to Needham’s ‘revealed experiment’, Hill carried out series of experiments. One set of thirty jars was left open, the other was sealed with wet bladder, and each was labelled and placed in a room under a cover, without 91 �� Anon., ‘Observations touchant la nature et l’origine de la nielle dans le froment, le seigle, et les autres grains’, Journal œconomique (December 1751): 68–72, p. 72. The ‘filaments were all zoophytes, they inflated thanks to the action of a force enclosed in each of them,’ (ibid., pp. 69–70). 92 �� Spallanzani, Opuscoli di fisica animale, e vegetabile (2 vols, Modena, 1776), vol. 1; On Beccaria’s experiments, see Stefani, pp. 147–9. 93 �� Felice Fontana, Nuove osservazioni sopra i globetti rossi del sangue (Lucca, 1766), p. 15. 94 �� Lazzaro Spallanzani, Saggio di Osservazioni microscopiche concernenti il sistema della generazione (Modena, 1765). 95 �� Hill, Essays in Natural History, p. 91; Needham, ‘A Summary …’, p. 634. 96 �� Hill, Essays in Natural History, p. 92. 97 �� Joblot, part 2, pp. 82–3; Baker, Microscope Made Easy, p. 87.

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heat. He was thus able to refute ‘the observation, that every vegetable produces a different animalcule’, as some infusions exhibited up to eight animalcules.98 Interestingly, he also related the species of the animalcules to a plant genus rather than to the species: for instance, the leaves of anemones and ranunculus that belong to the same genus produced the same insects, distinct from those that bred in parsley and carrots. This and other evidence helped to refute Needham’s transmutationist thesis, because the vital force he promulgated was theoretically indifferent to the species created and could produce any species. Another way to disprove spontaneous generation was to show that the animalcules fed on the same infused seeds of the plant that produced them.99 Hill did not hesitate to point out the errors of others, and initiated the longlasting tradition of attacks on the famous satyr-faced animalcule depicted by Joblot (Fig. 2.1), whom, contrary to Baker, he accused to having used imagination rather than senses. ‘It would be enough to deter people from the use of the microscope, to enumerate the falsities that have been advanced by authors who have written on the subject.’ Obviously, ‘in general the French are more full of error than the English’, and moreover, the English errors came from ‘false views, bad light, or the imperfections of their apparatuses … whereas the errors of the French writers were known to be such by the people who advanced them’. In other words, English ‘errors’ were the fault of the instrument, while a ‘Country fond of Miracles’ such as France was too liberal in imagination.100 This view matches perfectly with the stereotype of the Englishman being a utilitarian technician as opposed to the supposedly overimaginative Frenchman, which seems to have already been widespread. Although substantially reviewed by Matthew Maty, Secretary of the Royal Society, Hill’s Essays in Natural History and Philosophy (1752) was not widely circulated in England, probably because of the efforts of those opposed to his attack against the Royal Society, which was mounted the very same year. But his book did circulate on the Continent, in Holland with a 1753 translation, and in the German lands where it was fully translated between 1753 and 1758, in Hamburgisches Magazin, and Haller, who read everything, mentioned Hill’s experiments in his Bibliotheca anatomica.101 Hill was sufficiently integrated in the continental framework to influence, among others, German scholars. Around the same time, another English scholar was repeating Needham’s microscopical experiments. A letter by Edward Wright Esq. was read at the Royal Society early in 1756, on the subject of Buffon and Needham’s claims, which Wright synthesized saying that the productive force formed the animalcules. To shed new light on the subject, in summer 1752 he had begun microscopical experiments with infusions of animal and vegetable substances that he sealed 98

�� Hill, Essays in Natural History, p. 93. �� Ibid., pp. 105–9. 100 �� Ibid., p. 95. 101 �� Albrecht von Haller, Biblioteca anatomica (4 vols, Tiguri, 1777), vol. 2, p. 456. 99

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in boiled jars. He noticed that animal substances ‘yielded sooner or later great numbers of microscopical animalcules’, while the vegetable fermented with no sign of life. He also half-filled a small phial with millipedes, covered them with boiling water, corked it and kept it in a pocket. Eleven hours later he checked a drop of the infusion with the stronger magnifier of a microscope built by Clark, and found a swarm of similar animalcules, which he thought were of the same species, with spontaneous motion.102 Contrary to Needham’s reluctance to provide information necessary for others to repeat his experiments, this was an important aspect of Wright’s research. Not only did he report the duration of each procedure, but time itself turned out to be a heuristic factor, because he measured how long it took for the infusion to yield animalcules. After making an infusion, he observed a drop under the microscope looking to see how many animalcules appeared, but always pointing out the time to the reader. For instance: ‘before the end of the third hour, the infusion contained a great number of them. They continued however to increase in number for an hour or two afterwards.’ As he continued to observe over a few days, Wright noticed their transformation into the smaller animalcules indicated by Buffon and Needham, but he took the precaution of reporting the two competing interpretations of the phenomenon: either the animalcules were very soon decomposed into smaller ones, to speak according to the doctrine of Mess. Needham and Buffon, or, as others would rather incline to express it, succeeded by smaller ones, these again by others still smaller, and so on, until in a few days, the highest magnifier of my microscope could exhibit nothing distinct to the eye. 103

In other words, Wright showed that just observing the succession of smaller animalcules was not sufficient for deciding in favour of either one of the two explanations. Intended to keep a safe distance from speculation, such methods provided a new methodology for understanding the production of animalcules. Thus, other methods were necessary to map the development, and perhaps the origin, of animalcules. He began to combine chemical trials with microscopical observations, infusing cantharides into spirit of wine and other liquors, or dropping certain salts into the infusion, in order to observe the effects on the animalcules. Baker had made similar suggestions and Wright carried them through in examining the limits of the animalcules’ life according to the environment.104 Through his measurements of time, Wright was able to establish a kind of law: Whichsoever of these opinions we embrace [the vital force or the eggs], thus far seems to be certain, that the earlier or later appearance of microscopical �� Edward Wright, ‘Microscopical Observations’, PT, 49/2 (1756): 553–8, pp. 553–4. �� These quotations, ibid., p. 555. 104 �� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, pp. 74–5. 102

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animalcules is always in proportion to the degree of tendency to putrefaction in such substances as afford them …

This fact he generalized by appealing to Redi’s classic experiments on maggots in meat ‘which all the world knows to be produced from the eggs of flies’.105 He thus clearly brought a pre-existentialist point of view to the issue, following the ideas of the physician James Parsons, in a work on the analogy between reproduction in animals and vegetables.106 Moreover, using a half-quantitative analysis leading to a new solution for the spontaneist issue, enabled Wright to move from metaphorical explanations to the research of laws describing not the origin, but the increase of microscopical creatures. Hill had formulated something similar when he claimed that the same animalcules were produced by a genus of plants. Through the new interpretation focusing on time measurements, the decomposition hypothesis clearly did not sufficiently describe the phenomenon. Another important element Wright referred to was the chemical tradition, which he knew quite well, and, to explore the correlation between time, putrefaction and production of animalcules, he experimented on substances known to be antiseptics, such as castor. With castor in an infusion, he observed the infusion with the microscope every day for a few months, but never detected a single animalcule. Thus, he could confirm that animalcules were connected to putrefaction, disregarding cause or effect. His research matched a current trend of the Royal Society, where putrefaction and septic substances were important issues at this time, because John Pringle had recently obtained the Copley Medal in 1752 for his experiments on septic and antiseptic substances. Wright, especially, added to the chemical analysis a microscope, an alliance that linked chemical research with microscopical inquiries, saying ‘I am of opinion, that such microscopical observations made with care and accuracy, might be usefully applied in the investigation of the septic and antiseptic qualities of animal and vegetable substances’. Moreover, the relationship of animalcules and putrefaction was no doubt useful for curing people, and the microscope was an important instrument in this inquiry: ‘Here seems to be pointed out a new and interesting field of enquiry for those, who delight in microscopical researches’.107 Therefore, unlike many microscopical inquiries on spontaneism, Wright’s connected chemistry, natural history, pharmacy and the microscope. Although he made an appeal for a new programme of research, his suggestion did not meet with success, mainly because his fruitful insight into this complex relationship appeared at a time when both chemistry and microscopical research were developing autonomously. Pringle’s experiments were expanded to series of substances over thirty years before 105

�� Wright, p. 556. �� Ibid., p. 556; see James Parsons, Philosophical Observations on the Analogy between the Propagation of Animals, and that of Vegetables (London, 1752). 107 �� All these quotations, Wright, p. 557. 106

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Lavoisier’s chemistry,108 while the microscope followed the path of Trembley’ effect, via aquatic zoology, helminthology and taxonomy. With their specific objects better defined, chemists and apothecaries ceased using the microscope, although there is some evidence it was still being used in the 1770s. For example, in the spring of 1770 in Danzig, the physician Johann Wilhelm John experimented with the microscope on antiseptic wood (Cortex peruvianus, quassia) infused with flesh, blood or serum.109 The same year, in Sweden, Zetzell also combined the microscope and chemistry when studying serum but, after the chemical revolution, the microscope’s role was dwindling. In 1788, J.C. Mayer studied cinchonabark, and experimented to understand antiseptic properties, but the microscope’s presence in the chemistry laboratory could no longer be taken for granted. Among other little-known authors, Hill and Wright show attempts to disprove spontaneism with experiments, before the more visible research of Spallanzani. Some naturalists and apothecaries were not content to leave antispontaneist claims unverified, and soon after 1750 many considered Needham and Buffon as the losers in the quarrel over generation, but not for their materialist claims. Yet, although their theories did not withstand further empirical tests, their work had boosted microscopical research, and helped Hill and Wright to devise new experiments and evidence, and use methodologies later adopted by Müller and Spallanzani. Among Hill’s interests was the study of morphology, a concern that foreshadowed future work in Denmark and the German lands. Wright explored another fascinating dimension, the relationship between animalcules and putrefaction, and hinted at its clinical and pharmacological value. In particular, the attempt to quantify the relationship between animalcules, time and putrefaction, was new. Therefore, like Buonanni, whose historical impact had been to reinforce antispontaneist experiments in Italy, Needham and Buffon had enabled many scholars to develop original research interests that inaugurated a new era in the study of animalcules. Needham, more than Buffon, who was a dangerous man to criticize, was the target of many criticisms, but again, with the exception of Lignac, scholars seldom raised religious or metaphysical arguments against him. Obviously there were religious and philosophical debates over Needham’s transmutationism and Buffon’s renewal of atomism. The Faculty of Theology at La Sorbonne in Paris censured Buffon’s works.110 Allamand discussed regeneration in terms of soul. Father Lignac, priests and Philosophes entered the controversy over materialism. It is likely that anyone who knew of the French quarrel over spontaneism between Réaumur and the Trévoux Jesuits – a debate reported in many journals – would be greatly tempted to regard the Catholic Needham as a Trévoux Jesuit. Voltaire �� Many authors worked on septic and antiseptic substances between 1750 and 1780, for instance Mme Thiroux d’Arconville. See also Salomon-Bayet, pp. 448–50. 109 �� Johann Wilhelm John, ‘Versuch mit dem Quassienholz’, Neue Sammlung, von Versuchen und Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Danzig, 1 (1778): 174–99, p. 176. 110 �� Roger, pp. 542, 560–62. 108

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used this strategy to ridicule Needham in the mid-1760s, at a time when the Jesuit Order was much weakened, before its dissolution by Pope Clemens XIV in 1773. But, if, as for the polyp, the issue fit into larger debates in society, the scholars had also learned, particularly in dealing with the microscope, to protect their work from the invasion of metaphysical or public discourse. Scholars attempted to keep metaphysics out of the closed worlds of laboratories, cabinets, academies and scientific networks where experiments were employed as weapons in the academic wars. Such was the price of re-establishing scientific communication for microscopical research, both against the mixed style adopted for Needham’s unique and ‘revealed experiment’, and against the authoritarian style of communication favoured by Buffon who, according to Trembley, ‘presented conjectures that were thus used as demonstrative principles’.111 By manipulating experiments and improving reports to reproduce their observations, and through the search for naturalistic laws enabling them to grasp the occurrence of animalcules, Hill, Wright, Beccaria, Musschenbroek and others eventually set up a strengthened, although less visible, shared microscope in opposition to Needham’s and Buffon’s exclusive microscope.

111 �� Trembley to Bentinck, 9/20 January 1750, in Correspondance entre Réaumur et Trembley, p. 330.

Part III Infusoria and Microscopical Experiments The True Invisible Objects 1760s–1800s

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Chapter 7

The Quantifying Spirit in Microscopical Research and ‘Keeping Up’ with Invisible Objects

The concept underlying this chapter is that, presented with the microscopical image of invisible objects, the eighteenth-century reader ‘lost his footing’ (French perdre pied), like a non-swimmer out of his depth. ‘Keeping up’, or staying afloat, was the solution found by those who learned to swim, in this case the users of the microscope, while others retreated to shallower waters or to dry land. Iconographic Techniques and the Microscope: Naturalizing Images and an Initial Approach to Quantification Although iconography is a fundamental issue for eighteenth-century microscopical research, presupposing a particular relation between vision, representation and drawing, few studies have actually tackled the subject since the pioneering work by Barbara Stafford, and little has been done on the iconography of inferior beings in the works of French, Italian and German naturalists. Certainly, it is known that scholars deliberately used iconography to make their arguments more convincing to their readers, mainly within the seventeenth century, but we understand little of the impact and function of the microscope and optical machines on visual representation within the framework of scientific activity. Among the various uses of the microscope, the drawing of minute organisms held an important place in the naturalistic culture of the late Ancien Régime. Scholars had to solve particular technical problems when drawing animalcules, �� See Stafford. On Swammerdam’s iconography, see Cobb, pp. 121–35; On the Dutch tradition see Ruestow, pp. 48–80; Alpers, The Art of Describing. See also on the making of images in science, Norton Wise, ‘Making Visible’, Isis, 97/1 (2006): 75–82, and Pamela Smith, ‘Art Science and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe’, Isis, 97/1 (2006): 83–100. �� Ruestow, pp. 282–4. On insect anatomy during the eighteenth century, see the works of Puget, Réaumur, Bazin, Rösel, de Geer and Roffredi. �� See Cobb, pp. 135–41; for Hooke see John T. Harwood, ‘Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia’, in Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (eds), Robert Hooke: New Studies (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 119–47, pp. 134–8.

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specifically when representing time sequences unusual to engravers. Indeed, few texts on insects lacked engravings, including magnified images. While it was mostly men who engraved the plates, they shared drawing ‘after nature’ with women, and illumination of the engravings was entrusted to workshops, where female painters worked under the supervision of a master painter. Women sometimes made their name by drawing insects, like Maria Sybilla Merian. In Réaumur’s research team, a woman played a central role in the works of Brisson, Guettard and Father Ménon (conservation of objects); of Nollet (instruments); of Mlle du Moutier (drawing); and of Simonneau, Haussard and Lucas (engraving). This important, though unobtrusive, place for women in the process of scientific publication, lasted until the nineteenth century, when new instruments and techniques, such as the camera lucida, daguerreotypes and, eventually, photography, changed the standard methods for the production of images. Many naturalists using the microscope were drawers, such as Mark Catesby, George Edwards, Rösel von Rosenhof, Lyonet, de Geer, Ledermüller, Wrisberg, O.F. Müller’s brother and many others. In the creation of their plates for scientific works, some drawers used optical machines, such as portable camerae obscurae as devised by the Nuremberg mathematician Sturm in his Collegium Experimentale (1676) and Zahn in his Oculus artificialis (1685). The Nuremberg school had cultivated the drawing of natural objects since the Renaissance, and this tradition relied much on the microscope from 1750 onwards with the works of Rösel, Ledermüller, Gleichen and the painter Esper. Meanwhile, leaflets and catalogues of instrument makers circulated throughout Europe and depicted camerae obscurae and solar microscopes used for drawing. Many makers sold various models of camerae obscurae, an indication that the machines were indeed widely used. In the late seventeenth century, when they were first applied to the observation and drawing of tiny bodies, these machines introduced artists, drawers and engravers

�� Ratcliff, ‘Temporality, Sequential Iconography’. �� See Jean Torlais, Réaumur (Paris, 1961), pp. 81–2, 99, 224–5. �� On the early nineteenth-century new production of images see Jutta Schickore, ‘Misperception, Illusion and Epistemological Optimism: Vision Studies in Early NineteenthCentury Britain and Germany’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39/3 (2006): 383–405; Iwan Rhys Morus, ‘Seeing and Believing Science’, Isis, 97/1 (2006): 101–10; and Erna Fiorentini, Camera Obscura vs. Camera Lucida (Berlin, 2006). �� See Johann Christoph Sturm, Collegium experimentale (Nurnberg, 1676), p. 161; Zahn, p. 756. On the camera obscura and devices like magic lanterns in the seventeenth century, see Koen Vermeir, ‘The magic of the magic lantern (1660–1700): on analogical demonstration and the visualization of the invisible’, British Journal for the History of Science, 38/2 (2005): 127–59. �� From 1711 to 1791, these sellers included s’Gravesandes, Musschenbroek, Nollet, Thomin, Lange de la Maltière, Pézenas, Sigaud de la Fond, Cuff, Martin, the Adamses, Mann and Ayscough, Dollond and Ditta, Della Torre, Burlini, Selva, Valentini, Gleichen, Brander, Burucker, Häseler, Reinthaler, Wiedeburg, and Junker.

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to a new world that required non-verbal communication. The machines enabled a new framing of live images, envisioned through telescopes, stereoscopes, polemoscopes (periscopes), binoculars, camerae obscurae, magic lanterns and microscopes. Semioticians and art historians have rightly insisted on the novelty of framing visions that optical machines, in particular the camera obscura, brought into public and private spheres during this epoch. Being a relevant scientific instrument, the camera obscura for drawing was also listed among the equipment carried on scientific expeditions. Users of the microscope tackled a problem different from that of the artist using the camera obscura, as the artist’s camera obscura usually does not magnify its object. The microscope had indeed opened up a world beyond common sense, as discussed by philosophers such as Locke and Berkeley, and this process altered both the status of vision and the place of iconography in culture.10 As in verbal discourse, images had to earn credibility with respect to their ability to represent minute realities, and on this point, artists played a key role when they devised iconographic techniques to enable people to take in the visual patterns provided by the microscope. Since the 1660s, iconographic methods suited both the function of ‘keeping up’ and the optical knowledge of the time. Two techniques were used for the magnification of images, which I have labelled ‘natural comparison’ and ‘series comparison’. They inaugurated a regime of naturalistic iconography legitimating the drawing of tiny but visible organisms, as opposed to invisible ones. Insects and worms in particular were appropriate objects, being of suitable size. Dating back to the first half of the seventeenth century, ‘natural comparison’ was employed in the 1660s–1680s11 and became widespread during the Enlightenment, crossing every cultural frontier, although its use was more common in some scientific fields, and in some time periods, than in others. It is not seen as often in Italian and English works as in the Dutch, French and German. In eighteenthcentury texts, many plates depicting insects and worms included figures consisting only of small black dots, a tiny dash, or a thin short line. The caption notes that this represents an insect in its ‘natural size’, or less frequently, seen with ‘naked’ or ‘unarmed eyes’. Depending on its size, one recognizes it as an insect and not a dot (Figs 7.1a and 7.1b), usually placed close to the corresponding magnified images. I call the technique of depicting such a coupling of images a ‘natural comparison’, whose functions split in three.

�� Mazzolini, p. 212; Ruestow, pp. 260–61. �� Mazzolini, pp. 211–14; C. Wilson, pp. 247–8. 11 �� Redi, Esperienze, plates on pp. 177, 179; Jan Swammerdam, Ephemeri vita (London, 1681), pl. III, figs I and II; Buonanni, Ricreatione dell’occhio, p. 59.

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Figs 7.1a and 7.1b The natural comparison iconographic technique, from the time of Swammerdam to that of Müller. One image is drawn in ‘natural size’, the other is magnified

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First, the natural size helped to anchor the depicted animal to reality, among the visual constituents in the rhetoric of conviction that substantiated the representation of the minute world. Seeing the figure of a tiny black dot resembling an insect provides a sensory grounding for its existence. Moreover, although an insect shown natural size reveals no precise morphology, it does engender curiosity about its true appearance. Thus, the insect in its actual size does not appear as a true organism, and turns out to be a symbolic platform for the magnified insect. Indeed, the eye only remains a brief moment on the dot, a transitory element that impels the reader to move to the magnified figure. And, as the goal of this visual progress, of which the means is the naturally sized image, the magnified figure becomes naturalized as an actual organism, even though it is only a representation. The reality of the insect is transferred from the naturally sized figure to the magnified one. Through such a shift in the reader’s attention we can see a second function, namely the naturalizing of magnification, a transformation that affects the process of vision, as well as reality. Of the two figures, one assumes the more ‘real’ is the naturally sized image. Yet, in terms of intellectual perception, the magnified image is the more real one. Moreover, natural size corresponds to the beginning of a visual-cognitive process, the magnified figure being the final real thing that supersedes the naturally sized image. Indeed the latter most commonly precedes the magnified image in the figures’ order of presentation.12 The naturalization of the magnified body is therefore a cognitive construction created during the visual process. These two functions, anchoring the minute organism and naturalizing the magnified images, featured a visual component in the construction of a new microscopical reality, that effectively embodied the way scholars and engravers solved the problem of balancing size with shared vision. They filled the distance from the naked and shared vision of the real insect to the magnified images with the naturally sized image. The third function of natural comparison addressed measurement issues. Indeed, if natural size compared the same organism, magnified and not, eighteenthcentury scholars actually identified and labelled this dichotomy. The natural size and its magnification were conceived of respectively as the real magnitude and �� Redi, Esperienze, pp. 177, 179, 187; Jan Swammerdam, Histoire générale des insectes (Utrecht, 1685), pl. II, a, b; Marsigli, ‘Annotationes de granis tinctorum’, figs a, A; b, B, etc.; Vallisneri, Opere, vol. 1, pl. 51, figs 1–4; Réaumur, Mémoires, vol. 2, pl. XXXVIII, figs 22–23, vol. 6, pl. VI, figs 8–9; Jakob Christian Schaeffer, Die Blumenpolypen der süßen Wasser (Regensburg, 1755), pl. I, figs ii, iii. Job Baster, Opuscula Subseciva (2 vols, Harlem, 1759–65), vol. 1, pl. IV, figs IIa, b, c. Otto-Friedrich Müller, ‘Nachricht von der vielgestalteten Vortizelle’, Beschäftigungen der Berlinischen Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde, 2 (1776): 20–27, pl. I, figs 1–6; Clas Bjerkander, ‘Zwo neue Phalänen und ein Ichneumon deren Larven sich auf Espenlaub aufhalten’, Neue Abhandlungen der Königlischen Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 11/2 (1792; first pub. 1790): 124–7, pl. VI, fig. 2, a, b; Franz von Paula Schrank, Sammlung naturhistorischer und physikalischer Aufsäze (Nurnberg, 1796), pl. V, figs 6–8; L. von Fichtel and J.P.C. von Moll used natural comparison in the 24 plates of Testacea microscopica (Wien, 1798). 12

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the apparent magnitude of objects, a common distinction outlined in many books on optics and microscopes.13 Real magnitude was a physical phenomenon, the dimensions of the object, in points, lines and inches, corresponding to the natural size. Apparent magnitude related to a perceptual phenomenon, thought of in terms of both the magnification and the angle of the field of vision, in accordance with the following law: the larger the angle, the bigger the image of the object. The same object seen at ten feet appears smaller than at ten inches, and when placed at one inch, it is larger, but becomes indistinct. To each of these three distances correspond major angles of vision. Lenses and microscopes were not only known to enlarge the angle, but also to eliminate the confusion of sight due to such an increase.14 On that point, eighteenth-century microscopical iconography was in agreement with its optical knowledge, and the natural size and its magnification embodied the coupled notions of real and apparent magnitudes. Thus, the pair of figures induced a comparison, and a natural comparison supplied knowledge of magnitudes, although this iconographic technique presented two limitations for quantification. First it showed no precise quantification of the image, and provided qualitative information – in fact, comparing the two images replaced quantification. Second, minute things are not invisible, and the border between the minute and the invisible outlined a second limitation to the use of natural comparison. Indeed, it was impossible to illustrate invisible organisms too small to be captured in natural size. Consequently, the requirements for ‘keeping up’ and naturalizing the representation were not satisfied when drawing figures of invisible organisms. The credibility of these microscopical figures was more difficult to pin down, because of their invisibility and for lack of suitable methods to control their ‘degree of invisibility’. One reason for this is because natural comparison was created within a technological context in which scholars did not need precise measurement. Although it was employed in entomological works in the second half of the seventeenth century, this technique was little used until the 1730s, when insects proved to be the best microscopical object. As a matter of course, natural comparison was neglected for invisible organisms; Joblot, for instance, never used the technique. Natural comparison was an ideal technique for representing minute bodies as a whole. To depict details, however, a rather similar technique was used, which I call ‘series comparison’. It consisted of a natural comparison, to which a more magnified detail of the enlarged image was added (Fig. 7.2). This technique combined the anchoring function with stronger powers of magnification, and thus provided a solution to illustrating the details of magnified images. Practised by both Ruusscher and Réaumur in the 1730s (Fig. 7.2, top left), the series comparison was present in naturalistic books and papers of the second half of the eighteenth 13 �� For example, in treatises and papers by Jurin, Robert Smith, Benjamin Martin, Baker, Della Torre, d’Alembert, Kluegel, Sigaud de la Fond and Adams Jr. 14 �� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, p. 6; George Adams Jr, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (5 vols, London, 1799), vol. 1, pp. 546–7.

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century and shows that shared magnification had increased during this period with respect to the natural comparison used from the late seventeenth century.15 Though it presented figures as more magnified than natural comparison, this method still replaced quantification and avoided the need for numbers. In the 1740s, de Geer explained how it supplied steps for the imagination (Fig. 7.2, top right): ‘One can envision, through comparison, how small these polyps must be’.16

Fig. 7.2 For the series comparison in these illustrations, the draughtsman added a more magnified detail to a natural comparison

�� Ruusscher, p. 47, figs 1–4; Geer, ‘Untersuchung von einer besondern Art kleiner Wasserthierchen’, pl. VI, figs 2–4; Needham, Nouvelles découvertes, pl. V, figs 8–15; Otto-Friedrich Müller, Von Würmern des süssen und salzigen Wassers (Kopenhagen, 1771), pl. I, figs 1–4; Goeze, ‘Beschreibung eines höchst seltenen, wo nicht gar noch ganz unbekannten Wasserthierchen’, Beschäftigungen der Berlinischen Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde, 1 (1775): 359–79, pl. VIII, figs 1–6; Martinus Slabber, Natuurkundige verlustigingen behelzende microscopise waarneemingen (Haarlem, 1778), pl. 3, figs 1–3; Schrank, Sammlung naturhistorischer, pl. V, figs 9–13. 16 �� de Geer, ‘Untersuchung ’, p. 234. 15

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While most scholars in the late seventeenth century did not consider the communication of their microscopical data to be a scientific problem, others, such as Redi and Swammerdam, managed to find a solution through iconographic techniques. Yet, faced with unsettling images, apparently without any link with sensible reality, that made the reader feel out of his depth, the seventeenthcentury audience declined, partly because of the difficulty in reproducing observations and partly for lack of naturalistic iconography. The latter method was used throughout the eighteenth century (and later) to illustrate insects and worms, while magnification and quantification started to be linked from the 1740s onwards. Indeed, research on invisible organisms, which the naturalistic iconography could not capture, boosted demand for a better determination of those microscopic bodies, such as Needham’s atoms, Buffon’s organic molecules and Hill’s animalcules. Quantifying the magnification of invisible organisms proved to be invaluable as it aided in the repetition of observations, improved microscopical research and enhanced credibility. This was a new trend in reporting microscopical data that competed with the naturalistic iconographic regime. In fact, both supplied information on magnification, but on quite different grounds; as we shall see: the one was concrete and visual, the other abstract and digital. From Minute Approximation to Standards of Measure Measuring microscopical bodies, units and magnifying powers was central to modern instrumentation, and was also among the problems instrument makers and scholars discussed while dealing with microscopes. Malpighi, La Hire, Hooke, Griendel von Ach, Swammerdam and Leeuwenhoek had tackled this kind of problem when attempting to measure the minute or invisible bodies they observed. Eighteenth-century scholars continued this research, but did not manage to achieve full standardization, partly because they encountered so many obstacles. The wide range of varying units of measure operated in many regions throughout Europe constituted a major difficulty. Although attempts had been made from the 1740s to standardize local measures, for instance liquids in Paris, a foot did not represent the same length in Paris, Rhenany, Rome and London. There was no international standard for measurement such as the metre, defined in 1795 and imposed on France and then on the rest of Europe during the Napoleonic wars. Many units of measure referred to a rough quantification based on the human body. Indeed, Linnaeus, in his 1751 Philosophia botanica, used the body and ‘the hand to serve as unit of measure’.17 This set of embodied measures freed botanists from the inconvenience of taking a ruler with them into the field. Not only the inch/thumb (both pouce in French), but also the line, or twelfth of an inch, had a physical instantiation in the white half-moon of one’s fingernail, while a horsehair instantiated a twelfth of a �� Carl von Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica (Vienna, 1763; 1st edn 1751), p. 266.

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line.18 The line, a unit in the goldsmith’s trade (± 2.5 mm), was the smallest shared measure, and if some authors used the point, discrepancies existed over its value – a tenth, a twelfth, or a sixth of a line.19 The problem was important enough for the German mathematician Kästner to take up the issue in a 1758 paper.20 Smaller measures, close to the modern pica, were discussed, and typographers such as Father Sébastien attempted to define the point around 1700. But in practice, the line served as the more reliable standard. Some groups of scholars who used microscopes familiar to everyone adopted the line while observing small-sized objects; for instance, they simply cited the size of organisms, as the French academicians did before 1740.21 Probably because the relation between the point and the line was unstable, many scholars used fractions, a custom that proliferated after 1750.22 Trembley for instance, in a 1744 memoir, gave the average size of the bell-shaped polyps as: 1/ 20 of a line (= 0.125 mm).23 A major problem raised by the microscope related to the lack of standardization, and research on minute measurement continued during the Enlightenment in an attempt to fill this need. One solution was to use objects that were relatively consistent in size as conventional standards, and Leeuwenhoek is known to have used grains of sand, beard hair and animalcules to which to compare microscopic 18

�� Ibid., p. 266. �� Francis H. Eyles Stiles, ‘Letter concerning some new Microscopes made at Naples’, PT, 55 (1765): 246–9, p. 248. 20 �� Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, ‘Anmerkungen über die Zusammensetzung der mathematischen Linie aus Punkten’, Hamburgisches Magazin, 21 (1758): 90–97. 21 �� A few of the objects measured in lines are in Jean de Hautefeuille, Microscope micrométrique (Paris, 1703), p. 7: 1/ 50 of a line; Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, ‘Observations sur les maladies des plantes’, MASP 1/ 50 ½ (1705; pub. 1706): 332–45, p. 339: gall of the oak, 2 lines; Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, ‘Diverses observations de physique générale’, Histoire de l’Académie (1711; pub. 1714): 14–18, p. 18: leg of a midge, 1/ 15 of a line; Réaumur, ‘Description des fleurs …’, p. 292: seed of the Fucus, 1/ 2 line; Jussieu, p. 299: 1/ 2 line. 22 �� Among others, see Roffredi, ‘Mémoire sur la trompe du cousin’, p. 9: 1/ 9 of a line; Michel Adanson, ‘Mémoire sur un mouvement particulier découvert dans une plante appelée Tremella’, MASP (1767; pub. 1770): 564–72, p. 571: 1/ 400 of a line; Bonaventura Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche sulla tremella (Lucca, 1774), p. 13: 5/ 12 of a line; Fontana, Traité sur le vénin de la vipere, vol. 2, p. 259: 1/ 13,000 of an inch; Michele Colombo, ‘Osservazioni microscopiche intorno a varie spezie di polipi di acqua dolce’, Giornale per servire alla Storia ragionata della Medicina, 4 (1787): 1–11; 41–8; 81–90; 125–9; 165–77, p. 47: 1/ 48 of a line; Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, ‘Description de deux nouvelles espèces de trémelles’, Journ. Phys., 37/2 (1790): 401–9, pp. 403–4: 1/ 80, 1/ 200, 1/ 400, 1/ 800 of a line; Jean-Pierre Vaucher, Histoire des conferves d’eau douce (Genève, 1803), p. 197: 1/ 600 of a line; Dominique Villars, Observations microscopiques sur les globules du sang (Lyon, 1804): pp. 101, 119: 1/ 200, 1/ 500 of a line. 23 �� Abraham Trembley, ‘Observations upon several newly Discover’d Species of Fresh-water Polypi’, PT, 43/474 (1744): 169–83, p. 172. 19

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organisms.24 At the turn of the century, other scholars applied this method to measure objects, and to express the power of their magnifiers. In August 1702, the anonymous C.H. used a hair to gauge the magnifiers in his Wilson microscope, which he determined to be 640×.25 Microscopic objects, such as the spores of fungi, were measured using these ancestors of test-objects, and other research by Jurin in the late 1710s attempted to measure blood cells. Increasingly, authors began to raise the problem of standardization while criticizing the inadequacy of some test-objects. In the 1750s, at the Society for Natural Research in Danzig, Hanow tested Leeuwenhoek’s methods. When using a hair as the unit of measure, he noted that it varied in relation to where or whom it was taken from: One will discover it to be no small problem to suppose, with Leeuwenhoek, that the hairbreadth is as small as 42 1/ 2 or 43 parts of a Parisian line. For one will find only half a hairbreadth in a line, for larger hairs taken from adults.26

In 1750, the Duisburg physician Withof had raised a similar problem and showed, with a microscope, that the hair’s diameter depended on its colour: black hairs measured 1/ 147 of the Rhenan inch, brown ones 1/ 162 and blond ones 1/ 182. In addition, the hair’s breadth varied from 1/ 130 to 1/ 193 of an inch according to the part of the body it was taken from.27 Another research study looking for objects more reliable than the hair, published by Lyonet in 1762, provided an interesting solution to the measuring of microscopical objects. Famous for his dexterity, Lyonet detached the cornea of a dragonfly’s eye and stuck it to a glass slide. 38 hexagons were equal to one line, and with one hexagon he measured the powers of his lenses and many details while dissecting the caterpillar of the willow (Cossus ligniperda (Fab.)).28 The Germans also did not abandon the issue. In a 1778 paper, Hanow adopted a new method to tackle the hair and measurement problem, and investigated the optical and perceptual conditions necessary for seeing tiny objects. He measured optical impressions, looking at what the breadths of a hair seen at different distances

�� Baker, Microscope Made Easy, p. 41. �� C.H., p. 1358. 26 �� Michael Christoph Hanow, ‘Von einem allgemeinen Maasse Korperlicher Grossen’, Versuche und Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Danzig, 2 (1754): 301–49, p. 317. 27 �� Johann Philipp Lorenz Withof, ‘Anatomie des menschlichen Haares’, Hamburgisches Magazin, 13 (1754): 171–94, pp. 188–9. Ledermüller, Mikroskopische Gemüths-und Augen-Ergötzung, p. 12, recommended Withof’s dissertation De pilo humano (1750). 28 �� Van Seters, p. 82. 24 25

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were,29 and compared the data in a table. This long paper on the psychology of perception also aimed to improve the methods of artists and miniature painters who commonly used the solar microscope.30 Fostering the public production of images that were social rather than individual, the solar microscope had broken the ascendancy of the classical microscope as an asocial instrument where one individual’s vision excluded that of others.31 It was greatly praised in the German countries after 1760, and facilitated measurement by projecting images against a wall. However, measuring images through the microscope raised other problems that were in part solved with micrometers.32 Also in 1778, Hanow reverted to his favourite subject – microscopical measurement standards – in another paper. There he reproduced Withof’s results and showed how the breadth of a hair varied by as much as a factor of 2, between 1/ 40 and 1/ 20 of a line.33 These were further evidence that the hair was not a suitable object to be used as standard. Nevertheless, although these researches demonstrated the limits of seventeenth-century microscopical units of measure they were primarily known in the German lands, and Lyonet’s test-object was not put into general use. Quantification of Power, Magnification and Natural Size Given the quasi-artisanal nature of microscope production, many serious problems were bound to crop up along the path to reliable and standardized measurement of magnification, and many strategies were developed to combat this problem. In France, mathematicians measured the geometrical properties of light: for example, the academician Guisnée’s 1704 work on the measurement of the focus of a lens. Several authors reported not one, but three measurements – diameter, surface and volume magnified – and huge magnitudes were soon attained with the square and cube of diameter. However, measuring a body was not so common a practice. Malézieu, in his 1718 work, referred to animals 27 million times smaller than a

�� Hanow, ‘Neue Bemerkungen von dem Gebrauche des Gesichts’, Neue Sammlung von Versuche und Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Danzig, 1 (1778): 1–70, pp. 24–7. 30 �� Ibid., pp. 30–32, 57–8. 31 �� Anon., ‘Versuch, über die Vortheile des Sonnenmikroskops’, Neue Hamburgisches Magazin, 20/118 (1781): 457–79, pp. 459–60. 32 �� Ibid., pp. 478–9. See also Martin Frobenius Ledermüller, Versuch zu einer gründlichen Vertheidigung derer Saamenthiergen (Nürnberg, 1758); Hanow, ‘Neue Bemerkungen’, pp. 30–32. On test-objects in the nineteenth century, see Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye, pp. 105–32. 33 �� Hanow, ‘Sichere Bestimmung der Feinigkeit der Haare und Fadenchen’, Neue Sammlung von Versuche und Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Danzig, 1 (1778): 83–92, p. 85. 29

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louse (= 300×), a measurement still referred to fifty years later.34 The diametersurface-volume comparison served as a rhetorical device and people were awed by these very large numbers, which provided the illusion of a successful quantification of microscopical data. This system fell out of use in the nineteenth century. Besides Baker’s widely read Microscope Made Easy, Encyclopédie also provided tables of current magnifications. These abstract numbers reinforced the erroneous belief that standardization had been attained for the microscope,35 and Buffon used it with this aim. Cosmetic effects aside, real problems remained, among them the measurement of the power of strong lenses and magnification in the double microscope. Optics had fixed a standard for measurements, a basis to quantify the differences between the real and apparent size, and opticians and mathematicians agreed on ‘the rule of the eight inches’, a criterion held to be valid throughout Europe during the Enlightenment. Eight inches defined the minimal distance at which one was able to see an object distinctly. A smaller distance caused blurring, and a greater distance decreased the apparent magnitude of the object. This rule appeared in almost every treatise on physics, optics and microscopes, regardless of country.36 Apart from a few scattered exceptions – in England in 1702, in France in 1718 and in the German lands in 1727 – there was no quantification of magnification before the 1740s.37 In the whole of Europe, few scholars measured the powers of their magnifiers except when they dealt with invisible objects, which occurred very rarely. However, this lack of measurement was well suited to the use of naturalized iconography, which, as we saw above, served as a qualitative measurement for discernible yet microscopical objects. It was in the 1740s that the English scholars launched a quantifying trend that influenced their European colleagues. Robert Smith’s Compleat System of Opticks (1738) inaugurated it with comprehensive tables of magnitude, resolution and diffraction of microscopes.38 Then Baker’s 1740 paper compared the computations of Leeuwenhoek and Wilson microscopes, and three years later his Microscope Made Easy disseminated simple methods for quantification. Thus, the movement gained impetus and some observers began to be more precise when quantifying magnifiers. Reviving their tradition of building microscopes, the Neapolitan religious scholars in the 1740s made spherical lenses

34 �� Charles Bonnet, La Palingénésie philosophique, in Oeuvres, vol. 15, pp. 177–8. The original was reported by Fontenelle, ‘Sur des animaux veus au Microscope’, Histoire de l’Académie (1718; pub. 1719): 9–10. 35 �� Lupieri, p. 74; see also Jaucourt, ‘Microscopique, objet’, in Encyclopédie, vol. 21, pp. 829–36, p. 831. 36 �� For example, in the books and papers by Smith, Baker, Della Torre, Passemant, Magny, Trabaud, Nollet, Ferguson, Fuss, Brisson, the Adamses and Barba. 37 �� C.H., p. 1358; Fontenelle, ‘Sur des animaux veus au Microscope’, p. 10. Georg Erhard Hamberger, Elementa physices (Ienae, 1735), pp. 139, 159. 38 �� R. Smith, vol. 2, p. 130.

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and announced powers greater than 400 diameters.39 In 1741, Muys, a professor of medicine in Franeker, presented, in a book on the microanatomy of muscles, his system of magnifications that embodied quantification in a concrete pattern. For each magnification, wrote Muys, ‘quam 1 ad x’, x being a variable between 10 and 400.40 This method was the exact quantified transposition of the natural comparison, which coupled natural size (equal to 1) with the magnified figure (of which x represented the magnification). At the same time, Miles, Needham, Parsons and Arderon, all fellows of the Royal Society and Baker’s friends, followed his lead and reported the number corresponding to the powers used, which ranked the increasing powers.41 Some also reported the magnitude of organisms.42 As in the case of the French scholars, their proximity to each other helped them to gauge the approximate magnification, following Baker’s directions. In Bavaria, where the Nuremberg tradition of applied mathematics was still active, Mercklein attempted in 1737 to improve the quality of optical glass, and in 1742 he and the Coburg mathematician Boniface Henri Ehrenberger independently published new methods of measuring the focus of lenses.43 In Berlin, even the amateur Horch specified the focus of his simple microscope when he examined a flea.44 Nevertheless, in France, Baker’s impact was limited, because scholars there avoided long references to the instrument, and used qualitative expressions such as ‘a good microscope’, or ‘a lens with a weak focus’. English microscopes were rarely used in France before the early 1750s, when Passemant, Magny and Georges advertised new microscopes, and adopted the system of multiple-ranked powers.45 Ranking the magnifiers was 39

�� Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni microscopiche, pp. 33–4. �� Wyer Guglielm Muys, Investigatio fabricae, quae in partibus musculos componentibus extat (Leyden, 1741), pp. 24, 46–7. The magnifications given by Muys are 10, 18, 100, 200, 400. 41 �� Henry Miles, ‘Some Remarks concerning the Circulation of the Blood’, PT, 41/460 (1741): 725–9, pp. 725–6; Needham, ‘Concerning certain chalky tubulous Concretions …’, p. 640; James Parsons, The Microscopical Theatre of Seeds (London, 1745), pp. 101, 161; Badcock, ‘Microscopical Observations’, pp. 155–7; William Arderon, ‘The Substance of a Letter from Mr. Arderon to Mr. Baker’, PT, 45/487 (1748): 321–3, p. 322; Miles, ‘Concerning the green Mould’, p. 335. 42 �� Miles, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 726. 43 �� Albert Daniel Mercklein, ‘De Refractionis ratione in unoquoe frustro vitreo facillime invenienda’, Acta physico-medica, 6 (1742): 117–28, p. 120; Boniface Henri Ehrenberger, ‘De Speculis quibusdam vitreis causticis’, Acta physico-medica, 6 (1742): 128–47, pp. 129–30. 44 �� Friedrich Wilhelm Horch, ‘De pulice canariae’, Miscellanea Berolinensia ad incrementum scientiarum, 6 (1740): 111–17, p. 113: focus of 1/ 4 of a line. 45 �� Claude-Siméon Passemant, ‘Description et usage du microscope’, in Needham, Nouvelles observations microscopiques, pp. 1–29, pp. 19–21. Magny, ‘Sur le Microscope composé’, p. 74, said that Réaumur had a Cuff microscope. Later, references to the powers became more frequent. Adanson, pp. 566–7, used a microscope by Georges with ten powers. 40

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typical of English microscopes, as confirmed by Klein in 1726 when he wrote about working on worms ‘viewed through those microscopes, which in the English Apparatus bear the second and third number’.46 Buffon also used quantification for microscopical measures in a 1748 paper in which he announced his discovery of the ‘testicles of the female’. However, he used Baker’s measurements, and presented in a table the latter’s measures based on a Wilson simple microscope, as if he himself had used that microscope.47 In his 1749 Histoire naturelle, where he reprinted the same observations, Buffon revealed his use of Needham’s compound microscope and praised the compound over the simple microscope, because of the former’s stability.48 Comparing these texts, Philip Sloan has argued that the microscope Needham lent to Buffon was a simple Wilson model, made by Cuff.49 Yet, Buffon explicitly claimed that he used a compound microscope,50 and Needham himself provided information about his microscopes, which were simple and double reflecting microscopes, not the Wilson.51 The question is thus one of Buffon’s reliability. Either he first used a simple microscope and changed his mind later, or he used Needham’s double microscope and, in 1748, wanted to impress people with computations. Moreover, in 1749 he omitted the earlier table, which contradicted the computations made from the compound microscope. On the lookout for any gap in the emerging market of microscopical research and natural history, Buffon sang the praises of the compound microscope, placing it on the opposite side of a recent debate on deception led by the Göttingen professor of physics Hollmann in 1745. According to historians, scholars could not repeat Needham and Buffon’s results, because they lacked their good microscopes,52 but actually this interpretation clearly shows how Buffon reintroduced authority and the exclusive microscope. Indeed, while many scholars, heeding the constraints of balancing size and shared vision, published only reproducible observations, Buffon favoured whatever might enhance his kudos through his brilliant writing, and did not concern himself with enabling other scholars to reproduce his observations. Thus, in the case of the so-called discovery of the ‘testicles of the females’, Buffon, although not medically qualified, dared to assert that anatomists had been deceived. The danger of discrediting both the social representation of the microscope and the academic reputation of certain �� Jakob Theodor Klein, ‘An Anatomical Description of Worms, found in the Kidneys of Wolves’, PT, 36/413 (1730): 269–75, p. 271. 47 �� Baker, ‘An Account of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s Microscopes’, p. 513; Buffon, ‘Découverte de la liqueur séminale’, pp. 227–8. 48 �� See Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 2, pp. 170–74. 49 �� Sloan, p. 424. 50 �� Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 2, pp. 173–4. 51 �� Needham, An Account of some new Microscopical Discoveries, pp. 65–6, 69, 89, said he used a common double reflecting microscope for the observations of plate V, figs 2, 3, 6, 7. 52 �� Sloan, p. 434. 46

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colleagues whom he had attacked, such as Réaumur, was indeed very high, and a backlash against Buffon followed – not a good state of affairs in which to promote use of the microscope as a scientific tool. Later, unable to achieve supremacy with the microscope, Buffon abandoned it and belittled its heuristic prospects: The discoveries we can carry out with the microscope are reduced to a few things; indeed it is thanks to the mind’s eye, and without a microscope, that we see the true existence of all these small beings, to which it is useless to pay any particular attention.53

Following the English move towards presenting measurement data within tables, the 1750s marked the beginnings of a European trend toward the systematical measurement of powers and microscopical objects. In 1750, the French instrument maker Passemant published comprehensive tables of measurement for the model he marketed, showing the magnification of the microscope and of each objective; and Magny did much the same in 1753.54 Bavaria followed with a 1758 book by Ledermüller that refuted, through repeated observations, Buffon’s account of spermatic animalcules, and included a table of magnifications.55 Ten years later, Ledermüller’s colleague Gleichen provided a similar table, in which he indicated magnifications in the figures by giving the powers in Roman numerals.56 This emerging standard for measurement had yet to prove itself against previous iconographic strategies, and indeed the Zurich naturalist Gesner, in a plate with classic natural comparison, used a cross against a figure to indicate magnification (Fig. 7.3).57

53

�� Buffon, Histoire naturelle, supplément, vol. 4, p. 338. �� Passemant, ‘Description et usage du microscope’, pp. 21–2. Magnifications were: 400, 248, 160, 96, 64, 40, 24, respectively 50, 31, 20, 12, 8, 5, 3; Magny, ‘Sur le Microscope composé’, pp. 61–6, 71–4. 55 �� Ledermüller, Versuch zu einer gründlichen Vertheidigung derer Saamenthiergen, p. 28. The magnifications were: 17, 28, 49, 84, 164, 189, 320. On this see Jutta Schickore, ‘Ever-Present Impediments: Exploring Instruments and Methods of Microscopy’, Perspectives on Science, 9/2 (2001): 126–46, pp. 128–30. 56 �� Gleichen, Abhandlung, pp. 106–7, reported the same method and a table of magnifications on p. 108. Powers: 16, 26, 33, 61, 114, 200, 500. 57 �� Johann Gesner, ‘Abhandlung über die verschiedenen Arten das Getreyd zu bewahren, und derselben Auswahl’, Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich, 1 (1761): 231–320, p. 318, pl. 1. 54

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Fig. 7.3

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In this 1761 plate showing natural comparison a cross added to the letter and number referring to a figure indicates the magnification of the figure

In Holland, Lyonet provided another kind of standard in his Traité anatomique de la chenille du saule (1762) in which he included a letter to the physician Le Cat, already published five years earlier in a Dutch academic journal but not widely circulated. In addition to measuring the six powers of his simple dissecting

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microscope, Lyonet wrote a masterful essay that combined mathematical and empirical methods of measurement.58 He compared the expected measurement, provided by mathematical measure of curve and focus for the lenses, with the empirical estimation his ‘test-object’ supplied. The results, put into a table (Fig. 7.4), were astonishingly similar. Even before Gleichen did so, Lyonet stopped referring to magnification in the text and mentioned only the magnifiers. Favourable reviews of the book, which appeared in several journals, reinforced acknowledgement that the microscope could be used successfully in a quantified way. It was the first time that systematic measures linked together powers, ‘test-objects’, mathematical methods and the object measured.

Fig. 7.4 Lyonet’s 1762 table comparing the practical and theoretical methods of measure of his own microscope 58 �� Pierre Lyonet, Traité anatomique de la chenille, qui ronge le bois de Saule (La Haye, 1762), pp. 10–20.

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This trend increased in naturalistic texts from the 1760s onwards, and European scholars reported microscopical magnification in an almost systematic way. In Sweden, Bergman had not reported magnification in a 1756 paper on Coccus aquaticus, but he did in 1763. Moreover, he indicated small magnifications – 10, 20 and 25× – suited to natural comparison; another example showing the competition between iconographic natural comparison and abstract quantification.59 In the 1760s, his colleague Wilcke also quantified his research, although this did not immediately catch on in the Swedish academy, devoted as it was to Linnaeism, chemistry and agronomy. However, magnification was clearly more than just a specialist issue, for when reviewing scholars’ papers, even reporters made reference to the magnifications. At the other end of Europe, in Naples, Della Torre also quantified his observations, including details with reports of the magnification.60 He argued that, for the sake of reproducibility, the magnification of a figure should always be mentioned, and Lupieri, a physician from Vicenza, attempted to translate this advice into a standard for microscopical research in 1784.61 His book Del Microscopio was reviewed in a Venetian medical journal, in which three years later the priest Colombo published a study on polyps, where he mentioned the powers of his magnifiers.62 Neapolitan scholars such as the professor of physics Barba and the naturalist Cavolini systematically noted magnifications, as did other Italian scholars63 and also many observers in the German lands and Sweden.64 Thus, the reporting of measures as practised first by the English and the French was then also current in the German lands, Holland and Italy. In England, the fellows of the Royal Society pushed forward the quantifying trend for microscopes, as if each power were standardized, which was far from being the case. Baker was the motivating force behind launching the delocalization of the shared method used at the Royal Society for reporting microscopic �� Torbern Bergman, ‘Anmerkungen über falsche Raupen und Sägefliegen’, Abhandlungen der Königlischen Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 25/2 (1766; first pub. 1763): 165–86, p. 186. 60 �� Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni intorno la storia naturale, pp. 52–6, 83, 103–6, et passim; idem, Nuove osservazioni microscopiche, p. 43. 61 �� Lupieri, pp. 67–8. 62 �� Colombo, pp. 46, 90, 127, 172–6. 63 �� Cavolini, Storia de’ polipi marini, pp. 30–31 reported magnifications of 64 and 100× and later, Memoria sulla generazione dei pesci e dei granchi (Napoli, 1787), pp. 201–2, of 64 and 180×. Barba, Osservazioni microscopiche, pp. 33–71, reported magnifications of 120, 200, 600, 1000, and 1280× (!) for observations made in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Roffredi, ‘Mémoire sur la trompe du cousin’, p. 12: 270×; Roffredi, ‘Mémoire sur l’origine des petits vers ou anguilles du bled rachitique’, Journ. Phys., 5 (1775): 1–19, p. 6: 120×; Roffredi, ‘Seconde lettre ou suite d’observations sur le rachitisme du bled’, Journ. Phys., 5 (1775): 197–225, p. 213: 380×; Fontana, Traité sur le vénin de la vipere, vol. 2, pp. 252–5 : 700×; Colombo, p. 46, 90×; p. 90: 150 and 700×; pp. 172–6: 110, 150, 250, 300, 700×. 64 �� For instance, Goeze, Hacquet, Swartz, E.J.C. Esper. 59

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measurements. This was followed, albeit to a limited degree, by the spreading of tables of magnification across Europe. The exemplary measurement system created by Lyonet was probably too precise for the needs of the period, and there was competition from other methods of measurement, such as naturalized iconography and micrometers.65 Certain disciplines, like botany, were resistant to quantification up until the nineteenth century, botanists being satisfied with naturalized iconography. The need for a standardization of measure proved necessary for invisible organisms, but the higher the measurements the more the doubts raised about the results. Della Torre and Lupieri spoke of magnifications of 2600× and 8000×! It was known that these were too high to present distinct images, and Baker criticized Torre’s microscopes in 1766.66 Nonetheless, in the 1780s, quantification spread. The Leipzig physician and botanist Hedwig first reported on his microscope – a compound made by Reinthaler – and described the magnification of its seven objectives, numbered, as was common in the German countries, with roman numbers from I to VI, plus 0. In his figures, he always specified the magnification with the number of the objective.67 In Quedlinburg, the minister Goeze used the same method for the anatomy of worms, and many others followed.68 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Justin Girod-Chantrans provided technical information about his microscope and magnification, and, in 1803, Vaucher in Geneva did the same.69 Reporting magnification, or else the size of the bodies observed, was now among the standards feasible for microscopical research.

�� Müller, Würmern, plates I, V and IX used naturalized iconography for worms; Marcus Elieser Bloch, Traité de la génération des vers des intestins et des vermifuges (Strasbourg, 1788), pp. 27, 102, both used the micrometer and reported the numbers corresponding to the power of his Hofman microscope. Many works on botany, helminthology and entomology still utilized naturalized iconography. 66 �� Henry Baker, ‘A Report concerning the Microscope-glasses’, PT, 56 (1766): 67–71, p. 69. 67 �� Johann Hedwig, Fundamentum historiae naturalis muscorum frondosorum (Lipsia, 1782), p. 10. 68 �� Goeze, Versuch einer Naturgeschichte, p. x. 69 �� Justin Girod-Chantrans, Recherches chimiques et microscopiques sur les conferves, bisses, tremelles, etc. (Paris, 1802), p. 12, used the Dellebarre microscope. Vaucher, p. v, did not mention the maker, but said he everywhere used the same magnification, about 50 diameters. Dominique Villars, Mémoires sur la topographie et l’histoire naturelle (Lyon, 1804), apperçu; and idem, Observations microscopiques, pp. 94–7, used microscopes and lenses by Dollond, Lyonet and Rochette. 65

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The Quest for Instrumental Precision: Micrometers and Instruments of Division Another way to standardize microscopic measures was provided by the micrometer, introduced in astronomy around 1660.70 Astronomers had been interested in microscopes, used early on in Paris to read astronomical limbs, as they appeared to be useful tools for achieving more precision in determining micrometric data. The French astronomer Picard used them in 1667 to ascertain, for instance, the diameter of planets. Microscopes improved readings of astronomical micrometers, leading to a precision of 1/ 30,000 of a foot (0.01 mm), necessary to measure the diameter of the moon. In the first decades of the century, Hautefeuille, Lefebvre, Louville and Grandjean de Fouchy published on or invented new micrometers, and Maupertuis also used a micrometer microscope to measure the curvature of the earth. The method was thus in use in the eighteenth century, but it did not achieve sufficient accuracy before the 1750s, and became standardized only around the 1770s.71 The application of the micrometer to the microscope was first carried out in the mid-1670s by the French instrument maker Hautefeuille in his Microscope micrométrique, and later at Erlangen by the professor Theodor Balthasar in 1710.72 In Halle, Hertel also fitted a microscope with a micrometer in 1716.73 A testament to the dynamism and independence of optical research in the German lands, the micrometer surfaced at a low point in microscope sales. It offered geometric and quantitative precision at a time when serious research on insects and cryptogams did not require total accuracy, and scholars contented themselves with naturalistic iconography. Although Balthasar’s Micrometria was reported in Journal de Trévoux in 1710, the micrometer only really attracted interest when the English market took off in the late 1730s. There, Smith emphasized the instrument’s usefulness in microscopical investigations.74 In the same year, Benjamin Martin fitted his pocket microscope with a micrometer and research on the micrometer popped up in England, the German lands and France. Subsequent to inventions by Cuff and other practitioners,75 Folkes discussed the convenience of fitting a micrometer onto a double microscope in a paper included in one of Baker’s books. Following Balthasar and Hertel, the Germans were active in building micrometers, for instance in Göttingen. In the 1745 Philosophical Transactions, �� Huygens and the French astronomer Auzout took part in the rediscovery of Gascoigne’s in 1639, who did not use it at the time. See Randall C. Brooks, ‘The Development of the Micrometer in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 22 (1991): 127–73; and Daumas, pp. 69–71. 71 �� Daumas, pp. 75, 201, 238. 72 �� Theodor Balthasar, Micrometria, hoc est, de micrometrorum tubis opticis (Erlangen, 1710). 73 �� Clay and Court, pp. 155–6. 74 �� R. Smith, vol. 2, pp. 337–8. 75 �� Clay and Court, pp. 139–40. 70

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Hollmann presented a silk micrometer placed at the focus of a double microscope. In 1752, a Göttingen professor of mathematics, Segner, presented another one to the Academy, and the physicist Johann Tobias Mayer and his son also worked on micrometers.76 From this time onwards micrometers played a role in promoting double microscopes, for a micrometer could not actually fit the simple microscope. Passemant’s copy of a Cuff type accepted two micrometers, made by Magny and the Duc de Chaulnes.77 But, because of the lack of calibration, using a micrometer was not enough to provide a consistent unit of measure. For instance, even with his micrometer, Hollmann could not precisely measure the spermatic animalcules, and concluded, thanks to the qualitative method of ‘nesting’, that more than 15 million spermatic animalcules could fit into the space occupied by a greenfly!78 Earlier, Leeuwenhoek and Andry had used similar computations, and a review of Hollmann’s micrometer in Bibliothèque raisonnée said the latter had computed the animalcules’ size.79 Micrometers, for both telescope and microscope, were used for several kinds of measures. They continued to be produced and improved mainly in England (the Adamses, Dollond), France (Rochon, Boscovich, Richer, Dellebarre, Haupois) and the German countries, and from the 1770s onwards featured in many works. During the 1780s, the French optical engineer Haupois provided better accuracy for a lattice micrometer designed specifically for the microscope. And the Sicilian astronomer Piazzi used micrometer microscopes with Ramsden’s instruments to assist his discovery of the asteroid Ceres in 1789.80 Another type of micrometric measure had also been invented in the late seventeenth century. The microscope served to increase precision not only for reading but also when engraving micrometric divisions. In the 1670s, La Hire gave a geometrical method for the division of limbs, in which he probably used lenses or microscopes to verify the precision, and at the same time Lebas, optician to Louis XIV, was also working with this method. Soon after, the Rouen priest and instrument maker Jean de Hautefeuille proposed the first method to divide astronomical circles using a micrometer microscope, but it was not published until 1703. Hautefeuille’s Microscope micrométrique demonstrated for the first time a method that linked together the two practices of magnifying with the microscope and measuring with the micrometer.81 Sixty years later, the Duc de Chaulnes used

Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (1779): 265–6, p. 265. �� Daumas, p. 218; Passemant, ‘Description et usage du microscope’, pp. 15–19. 78 �� Samuel Christian Hollmann, ‘Epistola de subitanea Congelatione, de Igne electrico, de Micrometro Microscopio applicando’, PT, 43/475 (1745): 239–49, p. 248. 79 �� Andry, pp. 155–7. 80 �� Michael Hoskin, ‘Bode’s Law and the Discovery of Ceres’, in J. Linski, and S. Serio (eds), Physics of Solar and Stellar Coronae (Dordrecht, 1993), pp. 21–33, pp. 31–2. 81 �� Hautefeuille, p. 3. 76 77

Fig. 7.5

The Duc de Chaulnes’s dividing machine with a microscope

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an improved similar device with two micrometric microscopes, to ensure equal spaces between each division (Fig. 7.5).82 Dividing a mathematical instrument required particularly stable and heavy machines, and Daumas said that it was ‘one of the most delicate problems encountered by instrument makers’.83 Linked to it was the goal of finding methods for establishing standardized accuracy, tackled by many scholars and makers. For instance, in Danzig, Hanow regarded the microscope as an indispensable tool for the most skilled artists, useful for engraving precise measurements. Indeed, mathematical instrument makers divided instruments into inches, degrees and lines, with a skilled naked eye. But when it came to the seconds of a degree, or dividing a line (1/ 12 of an inch) into 12 points or less, then the microscope enabled greater precision. After Hautefeuille, Hanow defended this idea in 1754,84 and various kinds of devices for the division of mathematical instruments were built in many parts of Europe during the second half of the century: by Ramsden, Bird and Troughton in London; Chaulnes, the clockmaker Pattier, Richer, Fortin, Lenoir and Jecker in Paris; Voigtländler in Vienna; and Geißler in Zittau.85 In the 1760s, the Duc de Chaulnes applied the microscope to the task of division, and successfully made divisions equal to 0.125 mm.86 With two movable micrometric microscopes fixed to a slide, he managed to divide the ruler and the circle with increasing precision,87 and his machine inspired other artisans. Moreover, the machine became known abroad because Fontana used and improved it for the cabinet of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Saussure described it when he visited Fontana in 1772.88 Another type of machine, the circular dividing engine, was developed in England, and Ramsden’s model in particular was soon famous.89 But, while the English makers used vernier and mechanical machines, the French followed Hautefeuille’s path, and preferred to use micrometers and microscopes to engrave and control divisions. Another method was to engrave micrometric lines on a slide, and certain makers, such as Lefebvre, soon succeeded in creating crude glass micrometric slides in 1705.90 Hautefeuille used threads of sealing wax, which he applied to a

82

�� Albert d’Ailly, Duc de Chaulnes, Nouvelle méthode pour diviser les instruments de mathématique et d’astronomie (Paris, 1768). 83 �� Daumas, p. 249. 84 �� Hanow, ‘Von einem allgemeinen Maasse Korperlicher Grossen’, p. 306. 85 �� Duchesne, vol. 4, pp. 130–32. 86 �� Chaulnes, pp. 15, 18, 38; see Daumas, p. 201. 87 �� Daumas, pp. 261–4. 88 �� Saussure, ‘Journal d’un voyage en Italie’, 18 November 1772, BGE: Arch. Saussure 28, n.p. 89 �� See John Brooks, ‘The Circular Dividing Engine: Development in England (1739–1843)’, Annals of Science, 49/2 (1992): 101–35. 90 �� Daumas, p. 106.

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glass slide.91 Later, Smith spoke of this method but did not say whether micrometric glass had been achieved in England.92 It was a more reliable tool than the lattice micrometer, providing makers with the greater precision in mechanical division that was attained after 1760. Indeed in the late 1760s the Augsburg instrument maker Brander created a good-quality glass micrometer, and using a diamond succeeded in engraving micrometric lines of about 1/ 200 of a line (± 0.0125 mm), with a length of 1/ 10 of line (0.25 mm), on glass.93 In Berlin, the mathematician Lambert welcomed this invention,94 one of the first glass micrometers to be marketed. Along with several microscopes, Brander sold a glass micrometer to the Geneva minister Jean Senebier in 1777 for the price of 3 Florins.95 Senebier reported it had squares measuring 1/ 120 of line, and forwarded it to Spallanzani one year later.96 Several kinds of micrometers must have been produced, as Wilcke analysed another ‘perspective micrometer’ by Brander in 1772, intended also for the microscope.97 Other examples show that scholars and practitioners dealt with similar devices during that period. In France, in 1767, Rochon succeeded in making a rock crystal micrometer and, in 1784, Baron de Marivetz vouched for the existence of micrometers engraved on tortoiseshell, with divisions of 1/ 60 of a line (= 0.04 mm). At the same time, Richer engraved glass micrometers with lines divided into 50, 100 or 150 segments, said to have been verified thanks to Dellebarre’s microscope.98 Dellebarre used specially prepared membrane from a flower bulb as a micrometer, arriving at a division of 200 parts of a line, but he did not reveal his method for preparing it.99 In Italy, Lupieri reported on a micrometer by San Martino, which Colombo used to measure the mouths of polyps.100 By dividing the slide – a tool suited to the microscope – the glass micrometer brought about a revolution in the methodology of measurement. It supplied observers with a quantitative, as opposed to qualitative, method for measuring microscopical objects, and challenged existing iconographical techniques. The glass micrometer, a tool believed to have been invented around 1840, in fact provided the microscope with a new autonomy from 91

�� Hautefeuille, p. 4. �� R. Smith, vol. 2, pp. 337–8. 93 �� Daumas, p. 335. 94 �� Johann Heinrich Lambert, Anmerkung über die Brander’schen Mikrometer (Augsburg, 1769). 95 �� Brander to Senebier, s.d. (1777), BGE Ms Suppl. 1039, f° 103. 96 �� Senebier to Spallanzani, 13 September 1777, in Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 8, p. 62. Spallanzani received it on 5 December 1777: ibid., p. 66. 97 �� Johann Karl Wilcke, ‘Versuch eines neuen Perspectivmikrometers’, Abhandlungen der Königlischen Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 34/1 (1776): 56–60. 98 �� Duchesne, vol. 4, p. 270. 99 �� Ibid., vol. 4, p. 270. 100 �� Etienne-Claude de Marivetz, Physique du monde (5 vols, Paris, 1780–1785), vol. 3, p. 326; Lupieri, pp. 80–3; Colombo, p. 46. 92

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the 1770s onwards. It probably also shaped and embodied post 1770, in France and the German lands, the technical basis for the micrometric plates engraved seventy years later by nineteenth-century makers such as Nobert.101

The Microscope as an Economic Resource Throughout the eighteenth century, the microscope filled many practical applications. As early as 1705, the Geneva astronomer Fatio de Duillier applied it to verification of the shape of holes in jewelled watches, a technique invented by him and still in use today. Réaumur and other scholars also applied it to research on alloys, steel, dyes and artificial pearls, to identification of sand that contained gold, to methods of protecting buildings from fungal attack, and to numerous other uses.102 The attempts at manufacturing new kinds of paper made by Réaumur, Schaeffer, Guettard, Léorier Delisle and John Strange between 1720 and the 1780s also took advantage of the microscope. In archaeology, it was employed to identify substances, for instance those used to make Roman dice. In addition to its continuous use in agronomy, microscopes were used in libraries to identify the insects that destroyed manuscripts and old books. Daumas also mentioned the use of spherular microscopes in the workshops of metal workers, opticians, haberdashers and enamellers.103 Simple microscopes were used by craftsmen such as watch-makers, goldsmiths, jewellers and jewel setters to verify the polish of glass, jewels, or the curve of a metallic piece, to make burins, stamps, dies and stamps, to check materials and finish, and for many small tasks that required better visual precision. Hautefeuille and Joblot indeed promoted the microscope as a useful instrument for many professions.104 Probably the profession where the microscope contributed the most to social change was instrument making. During the 1760s, new methods of mechanical and optical measurement coupled with increasing precision in making tools led to a change in the profession, involving new scientific, technological, management, educational and social practices.105 In particular at this time, the demand for precision in astronomical and nautical instruments was not being met by the traditional methods of craftsmen, and research on instruments turned what had 101 �� On Nobert, see Matthias Dörries, ‘Balances, spectroscopes, and the reflexive nature of experiment’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 25 (1994): 1–36, pp. 25–9. Fraunhofer failed in his attempts to measure micrometric lines (ibid., p. 24). 102 Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences de Paris published papers on these subjects by Réaumur, C.-J. Geoffroy, Nissole, Duhamel and Jussieu between 1714 and 1730. 103 �� Daumas, pp. 128–30. 104 �� Hautefeuille, p. 7; Joblot, part 1, avertissement. 105 �� See John L. Heilbron, ‘Introductory Essay’, in Tore Frängsmyr, John L. Heilbron and Robin E. Rider (eds), The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 1–23, p. 3.

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hitherto been an artist’s domain into mechanical competence. As shown above, from the early 1770s onwards machines dividing astronomical circles and other tools had been improving in Europe, mainly in London, Paris, the German countries and Austria. These mechanical devices continued to replace artisanal technologies and, by the end of the century, had come into general use.106 More generally, measure, exactitude, precision and, from 1780, technology became the keywords for establishing quantification as a shared trend: the quantifying spirit.107 And, despite not being one of the most advanced members of the class of research instruments, like telescopes or dividing machines, the microscope nevertheless played a role in this transformation, by providing increased precision and supplying better visual resolution. Chaulnes identified the change that these new devices and the microscope helped to bring about among instrument makers as diminishing the effect of the human factor responsible for imprecision. Indeed an error of 0.1 mm in the division of an instrument could yield errors of thousands of miles in astronomical measures. As Chaulnes put it: The perfection of the division of mathematical instrument until now has been based on the fineness and dexterity of artists who were responsible for making it. [But], they can never attain the precision of a mechanical motion, and the prodigious improvement that optical instruments provide to the natural faculties of man.108

The editor of Journal de Physique, abbé Rozier, who commented in 1773 on Ramsden’s dividing machine, summed up this major transformation of the worker into the controller of a machine thus: ‘With this machine, a woman, a child, and even a blind person, can divide mathematical instruments, circles or quadrants, with as much precision as the best artist’.109 The fundamental transformation of the human being’s role from skilled worker to precision machine operator is a classic feature of the industrial revolution. The hundreds of new machines invented for the production and transformation of goods from 1750 onwards needed similar sorts of operators, and absorbed the increasing number of unqualified people – men, women and children – moving from countryside to cities. Like the price of goods, the price of manpower decreased, hence the production of goods increased dramatically. For instance, in Encyclopédie, Chevalier de Jaucourt discussed the impact of new machines on a ‘virtual demography’: ‘thanks to the industrial machines, one man does what would be done without machines by two or three men, which is

106

�� Daumas, pp. 257–70. �� Heilbron, ‘Introductory Essay’, pp. 1–23. See also Licoppe, pp. 255–7. 108 �� Chaulnes, p. 1. 109 �� Jean-Baptiste François Rozier, ‘Précis d’une machine inventée & exécutée par M. Ramsden’, Journ. Phys., 1 (1773): 147–8, p. 147. Duchesne, vol. 4, p. 131, copied this commentary. 107

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doubling or tripling the number of citizens’.110 Historians of scientific instruments have highlighted a general trend toward quantification and measurement that was to develop from the 1760s throughout northern Europe, and the transformation of the craftsman into a machine operator provides links between the quantificatory spirit and the industrial revolution. Daumas remarked that ‘contemporaries were struck by the quality of mechanization in eliminating the personal factor of the worker’, which Hautefeuille had recognized in 1703,111 and a similar reaction was shared by Thomin, Ledermüller, Brander and other savants or scholar-makers when they spoke of the camera obscura making drawing easier for people. The small world of instrument makers also experienced social changes while artisanal work was progressively turned into mechanical and technical work.112 This chapter has highlighted particular problems that the eighteenth-century scholars had to face. Up to the mid-seventeenth century, measuring small creatures was not an issue, but later became important for natural history through microscopical imagery. Informing the reader both of the morphology and the qualitative measure of small-scale bodies, naturalized iconography established shared microscopical vision relating to insects, obeying the rule of balancing size with shared magnification. However, in the 1740s, the new microscopical objects – polyps and aquatic animalcules – changed that balance. For instance, Trembley did not favour naturalized iconography, but communicated his experiments through his writings and through realistic images, hiring one of the best, that is to say most realistic, artists of the century, Pierre Lyonet. With the change in the microscopical object in the 1740s, ‘keeping up’ demanded a new framework for sharing vision. In various forms – rhetorical computation, micrometers, test-objects, mentioning powers, measures of focus, powers and objects – quantification presented itself as a good way for the microscopical observer to comprehend new and smaller objects that were less and less visible to the naked eye. Around the same time, the old iconographic method of natural comparison was refined by series comparison, but it was still not an accurate quantifying way of measuring microscopical bodies. Then, in the second half of the century, attempts at measuring microscopic objects were conceived as a new solution promoting shared vision, complementary to the accurate reporting of facts and circumstances that scholars had been developing since the 1660s. The 1760s saw the beginning of a more systematic exploitation of the quantificatory spirit in the practices of the microscope throughout Europe, providing definitive evidence that microscopical research was not isolated from the general scientific and socio-political trend toward measuring that expanded during the same period. Nor were the so-called ‘toy’ microscopes and microscope making discrete from the technological advances of the industrial revolution.

110

�� Jaucourt, ‘Industrie’, in Encyclopédie, vol. 18, pp. 648–9, p. 649. �� Daumas, p. 268; Hautefeuille, p. 6. 112 �� See Millburn, Adams of Fleet Street. See also Benoit and Pichon, ‘Buffon métallurgiste’, p. 63. 111

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Chapter 8

The Emergence of the Systematics of Infusoria

The Rivalry between Hill and Baker for Control of Research on Invisible Bodies Before the middle of the eighteenth century, no one attempted to classify microscopical species, grouping animalcules of infusions according to their morphology, thus the classificatory method adopted in Hill’s 1752 History of Animals was a new departure. Previous authors, such as Joblot, distinguished species and genera, but without any character particular to genera; they did not adopt criteria for distinguishing species, and employed private terminology. This absence of a shared terminology was a crucial impediment to the repetition of an observation on the same organism. Hill’s method was a first attempt at delocalizing the knowledge of animalcules; that is, uncoupling such knowledge from a particular locality. Ideally, these bodies would no longer be randomly referred to as poissons, fish, animaux des liqueurs, animalcula, insects, Insekten or animaluzzi, rather they would be ‘animalcules’, and nothing else. While allocating them to a kingdom, Hill introduced the Linnaean order – names and classifications – into the microscopical Chaos: ‘I have arranged them into a regular method, and given them denominations’. Moreover, the microscopic animalcules were there included into a larger classificatory programme for the animal kingdom. Hill provided illustrations (Fig. 8.1) and divided the animalcules into three classes, eight genera and 35 species, with names reserved only for classes and genera (Table 8.1). Morphology, tail and limbs were the keys to the genera. But, although he used morphological keys, the ‘kingdom’ of animalcules was distinguishable from other kingdoms thanks to the microscope, which was crucial in providing their definition as ‘only seen by the assistance of microscopes’. The microscope was the means by which one could enter what Hill labelled the ‘animalcule kingdom’.

�� John Hill, A General Natural History (3 vols, London, 1748–52), vol. 3, preface, n.p. ‘Method’ here means classification. �� Ibid., p. 1. �� Ibid., p. 2.

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Fig. 8.1

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Hill’s illustration for the ‘Animalcule Kingdom’ (1752), without binomial nomenclature

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Table 8.1

179

Hill’s 1752 classification

Class

Genus

No. of species

Character

Enchelides Cyclidia Paramecia Craspedaria

4 4 4 3

cylindrical shape roundish shape irregular oblong shape apparent mouth

Brachiuri Macrocerci

5 8

tail shorter than body tail longer than body

Scelasii Brachioni

2 5

visible legs apparatus of arms

Gymnia, no tail, no limbs

Cercaria, tail, no limbs

Arthronia visible limbs

Such a choice partially explains why this first endeavour was abandoned in further Latin classifications. Indeed, for a naturalist, creating a new kingdom from almost nothing was simply impossible, and to do so Hill had discreetly dropped a level of organization – the order – from the standard hierarchy. He adopted a group hierarchy of class, genus and species, while the authoritative hierarchy was class, order, genus and species. If strictly followed, Latin natural history rules called for a class, or better an order of animalcules – never a kingdom – with Gymnia, Cercaria and Arthronia as three subdivisions. Trumpeting the arrival of a new kingdom was thus putting the cart before the horse, and Hill went as far as elevating the microscope to the status of a ‘character’ that establishes a class. This was unacceptable to naturalists for whom characters were natural and not artificial features. By choosing the microscope as the major character for differentiating the animalcules from other animals, Hill defied the strict morphological essence of the character as upheld by the two-centuries-old tradition of Latin natural history. Hill’s classification received a poor reception in England, which demands an analysis of his strategy of communication, taking into account the fierce rivalry for prestige that dominated English microscopical science. Hill, for instance, criticized Baker on the genus ‘Rotifer’, saying that the ‘apparatus … has been greatly misunderstood by the microscopical writers’. Baker replied, quoting �� See Linnaeus, Fundamenta botanica (Amsterdam, 1736), pp. 18–19. �� Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica, pp. 132–5. �� Hill, A General Natural History, vol. 3, p. 10.

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‘some gentlemen’, and standing firm on the other party having confused the type of animalcule. Still, Hill adopted an aggressive scheme in his work, and criticized other authors, either directly or through allusions. He argued that species had been poorly identified, authors describing and depicting ‘things they never saw’. Hill targeted Linnaeus, the Royal Society and particularly Baker, about whose microscopical works he publicly expressed doubts. Yet, this atmosphere of rivalry permeating the Royal Society – Hill’s application for membership was rejected the same year – is probably among the motivations for a new attitude towards classifying animalcules.10 Indeed, several scholars competed for the leadership of microscopical research, among them Baker, Needham, Parsons, Ellis and Hill. With The Microscope made Easy, Baker had achieved an important place as microscopical observer in the Society, and Needham had also gained a European reputation. Hill probably aimed at usurping Baker’s leadership position in ‘microscopy’. Although he mastered the Latin tradition, Hill certainly misunderstood some of its features, particularly when he bestowed upon himself the right to declare a tabula rasa on the names of animalcules, ‘the greatest part of them had none before’.11 Such a rejection of many previous works demonstrates Hill’s misunderstanding of the cumulative and referencing aspect of the natural history tradition. Many animalcules already had names, given by Leeuwenhoek, Joblot, Baker and others, which the tradition called vernacular names. Animalcules indeed had no Latin names. But, since Bauhin, the major naturalists had developed a method for linking vernacular and Latin names – that is, synonymy – which agglomerated every previous observation for the purpose of keeping the body of knowledge unified.12 In ignoring synonymy, Hill could avoid quoting previous authors, thus assuming for himself the prestige of so-called discoveries without giving credit to earlier observers, a criticism Maty raised against in his review of the Essays.13 Müller later criticized Hill in the same way: ‘he did not quote their figures, their synonyms, and did not cite the names of these authors’.14 Besides not directly quoting the authors he criticized, Hill suggested an amendment to scientific witnessing that went in the opposite direction to that followed by European microscopical research. In order �� Baker, Employment for the Microscope, pp. 284–6. �� Hill, A General Natural History, vol. 3, p. 1. �� Ibid., preface. On Hill and Baker rivalry see Turner, ‘Henry Baker’, p. 61. 10 �� On John Hill’s opposition to the Royal Society, and to Baker in particular, see Rousseau and Haycock, pp. 387–91. 11 �� Hill, A General Natural History, vol. 3, preface. 12 �� Caspar Bauhin’s seminal work Pinax theatri botanici (Basilea, 1623) contained a comprehensive synonymy of the names used in all previous botanical studies. 13 �� Matthew Maty, [Review of Hill’s] ‘Essays in Natural History’, Journal britannique, 9 (1752): 184–219, p. 203. 14 �� Müller, Animalcula infusoria fluviatilia et marina, ed. Otto Fabricius (Havnia, 1786), p. 91.

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to prevent microscopical deception, he thought that he could pay ‘a very limited credit to those [observations] which we receive on the testimony of others’.15 In addition to not citing the works of people, this method harked back to the early days of microscopical research when one man’s word would be taken as proof that something was true. One year later, Henry Baker published Employment for the Microscope, concerned with ‘various animalcules never before described’, in which he synthesized many years of microscopical observations with material collected between 1743 and 1747. In contrast to his previous compilation, Employment presented new observations on animalcules. Upset by Hill’s attack, Baker re-established his primacy by demonstrating, perhaps a bit too late, his abilities as an observer. In the book, ignoring the Latin tradition, he named many animalcules – oats, eels, protei, globe animals, satyrs, wheel-animals, and so on – hoping ‘to be indulged the liberty of giving such [names] to these hitherto unnoticed animalcules, as [would] correspond in some manner to their appearances’.16 Although both deal with animalcules, the two works have little in common. Baker’s was an easy-to-read popular book in octavo; Hill’s a prestigious, heavy and expensive, in folio, with illuminated engravings and in the technical language of naturalists. The main difference is that Baker did not use a systematic method, Latin or classification for animalcules, an exclusion strategy that was perhaps a reply to Hill’s Latin names and classification. Instead, Baker wrote his book according to the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot model of describing the features, size, motion and behaviour of animalcules, in a narrative that frequently relied on anecdotes. Every animalcule was the hero of a story, and provided the dominant structure of Baker’s text, in contrast to Hill’s work, where the section that dealt with animalcules was a fifteen-page study on determination and classification. Although Essays and Employment were both reported in Journal britannique,17 after 1753 the topic lost its appeal and scholars instead turned to marine zoology or anatomo-physiology. Baker halted his microscopical research; Folkes died in 1754; Needham was nearly silent on the topic after 1750, as were Parsons and the FRS devotees of the microscope. Hill kept himself busy with vegetable microanatomy, invented a primitive microtome, returned his focus to insects and translated Swammerdam’s Biblia Naturae. Exit the animalcules. Once more the English were unable to capitalize on the microscopical knowledge they inaugurated, or to launch a heuristic field of research. How can this second English decline in the study of animalcules after 1753 be explained? Apart from their rivalry, in terms of scientific communication, Hill and Baker developed opposing methods. Hill adopted a tabula rasa approach with regard to prior research, while Baker chose to cultivate polite knowledge, giving 15

�� Hill, A General Natural History, vol. 3, p. 1. �� Baker, Employment for the Microscope, p. 232. 17 �� Maty, [Review of Hill’s] ‘Essays’; Maty, [Review of Baker’s] ‘Employment for the Microscope’, Journal britannique, 10 (1753): 243–64. 16

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credit to his network of friends – Needham, Miles, Arderon, Sherwood, Greenlease, Sparshall and Harmer – for sending him their specimens. Why, one might ask, did this strategy not encourage further research on animalcules in England? First off, the level of standards required had increased following Trembley and Hill’s works. Baker virtually ignored both experimentation and classification, which, after 1750, created a disciplinary niche. He spoke sweepingly without distinction of worms, animals, animalcules and insects, while, for the naturalists, worms and insects were two classes mutually exclusive of one another. He discussed interesting issues, the limits of life, the varying shapes of the proteus, and the ‘wheel insect’ later taken up by continental scholars.18 But he was not a creative experimenter and did not devise new experiments, saying, for instance, on identification of the locus of life in eels: ‘this question future experiments alone can answer’.19 Compilation and plagiarizing were no substitute for creativity, even if Baker was located at the heart of an English network of users of the microscope.20 As Leeuwenhoek’s intellectual heir, he exploited the LeeuwenhoekJoblot narrative model, an old-fashioned style of reporting observations, showing all the difficulties inherent in social communication on animalcules. Baker’s minute impact demonstrates that durable knowledge does not naturally stem from social conviviality. Truth was there a social, rather than a heuristic, phenomenon. Reduced to politeness, communication was not asked to fit into the scientific framework or to be reworked by it. Employment for the Microscope was not a programme for microscopical research because it did not supply heuristic models for experimenting, classifying or communicating. By contrast, Hill discarded the polite and social aspect of science, and misconstrued the notion that, within a tradition, a scholar has to ‘credit his colleagues with what is due them’.21 His reporter, Maty, did not fail to remark the contradiction between Hill’s claim of priority and his silence on unquoted authors.22 Hill did not comprehend that politeness in the Latin tradition was not just a social phenomenon, but it had been turned into a heuristic system of learning.

�� Baker, Employment for the Microscope, pp. 254–5, 260–65; Spallanzani, Opuscoli, vol. 2, pp. 182–200; see Ratcliff, ‘Wonders, Logic and Microscopy in the Eighteenth Century: A History of the Rotifer’, Science in Context, 13/1 (2000): 93–119, pp. 108–10; Giulio Barsanti, ‘Spallanzani e le “Resurrezioni”. Rotiferi, tardigradi, anguillule e altre “besticciuole”’, in La sfida della modernità, pp. 171–95. 19 �� Baker, Employment for the Microscope, p. 255. 20 �� The Royal Society hosted many networks during the Enlightenment, see Andrea Rusnock, ‘Correspondence networks and the Royal Society, 1700–1750’, British Journal for the History of Science, 32 (1999): 155–69. 21 �� Holmes, p. 73; see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, 1994). 22 �� Maty, [Review of Hill’s] ‘Essays’, p. 203. Maty highlighted Hill’s repeated claims for priority (ibid., p. 188), while not citing previous observers (ibid., p. 203), not even Trembley from whom he clearly copied a discovery (ibid., p. 213). 18

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Two other factors account for the second decline, the status imparted to the microscope, and a tension between Latin and non-Latin naturalists as, behind the English rivalry, a schema gradually shaped and distinguished social groups. The skilled Latin naturalists, including Ellis, William Watson, Parsons and Hill, all looked to Linnaeus, and corresponded within a Latin network.23 Apothecaries or physicians, they introduced Linnaeism to England and published works close to the standards of the Latin naturalist tradition, conforming to the formalist style of scientific communication promoted by Linnaeus who trained people with the same naturalistic background. In contrast, Baker was not a Latin naturalist and ignored these methods. Therefore, behind the Hill-Baker rivalry, was that of the local versus the international circle of naturalists, with their particular styles of communication. Baker mainly quoted English observers and Royal Society fellows, while Parsons, Ellis and Watson quoted in their works the authors of the tradition regardless of their national origin. This social division of labour between amateur and Latin naturalists was already taking shape in the early 1740s and the second decline was in tune with it. Indeed, when the FRS Pickering claimed to have discovered the seeds of mushrooms in 1743, Watson felt obliged to point out that Micheli had already done so, thus exposing a gap in Pickering’s knowledge of previous research.24 This isolationism that neglected continental authors and Latin tradition allowed the English amateurs to believe they were launching a new microscopical discipline. If every discovery had to be made anew, no disciplinary field would ever emerge, and the Latin tradition had been shaped to answer this problem, among others. It was the main cumulative, cognitive and socially organized transnational framework for regulating naturalia. Another obstacle came from the English advertising system. Paradoxically, the well-developed market for the microscope in England created obstacles to microscopical research because it represented the instrument as a heuristic tool without substantiating its usefulness. There was a tendency to use the microscope not as a means to an end, a tool of research, but as a kind of fetishized, prestigious and technical instrument per se, whereas this position was usually reversed for continental scholars. Trembley, who invented the aquatic movement did not claim the invention and contented himself with establishing a new microscopical object. But, Hill’s choice of the microscope as a character for establishing the ‘kingdom of animalcules’, or Baker’s and Ellis’s advertisements for microscopes, argues for both the fetishized and commercial nature of the instrument in England. This even demarcated the field in which communication operated, so that many English scholars temporarily expanded their sociability thanks to the microscope. Yet, such a short-term conception accompanied neither a programme of research nor the establishment of a discipline – which requires transforming communication into a scientific tool. Polite science left open the door to social contingencies that were primarily oriented towards gaining short-term prestige and the social operation 23

�� Hill corresponded with Haller, Ellis with Linnaeus. �� Pickering, pp. 595–6; Watson, p. 599.

24

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184

of the microscope.25 For the most part, naturalists in England were slaves to their mythologized culture of optical empire, and had to wait for the instrument to be optically standardized with achromatism before microscopy could be launched there as a heuristic field of investigation during the 1830s. Lack of experimental creativity, the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot narrative model, the unrelieved tension between Latin and non-Latin naturalists, and the overriding commercial exploitation of microscopical knowledge were thus the major obstacles to microscopical research on animalcules in England, a field that expanded only in countries – and within transnational networks – where these problems were either overcome or absent. Between 1760 and 1780 the major networks that used the microscope as a research tool had two personalities at their centres, Müller in northern Europe and Spallanzani in Italy. These two central figures are representative of two different naturalistic cultures – systematics and experimentalism – and both considered the microscope to be a tool subordinate to their research agendas. As was the norm elsewhere in the Continent, they worked within a scientific culture that prevented both mere sociability and fetishism of the instrument-merchandise from establishing themselves as guidelines for scholarly activity. The Rise of Microscopical Research in the German Lands A decade after the general acknowledgement of the polyp, German scholars reproduced the typical ‘steps’ of Trembley’s effect, moving from insects to polyps before launching research on infusoria, and certain naturalists previously interested in insects began publishing on polyps in the 1750s. The 1755 issues of Rösel von Rosenhoef’s entomological monthly Der monatlich-herausgegebenen Insecten-Belustigung were mainly dedicated to the polyp,26 and the Regensburg naturalist Schaeffer closely followed this lead. After works on fungi and on insects, caterpillars and parasitic worms, in the mid-1750s he published three books on various species of polyp, that provide the first classification of polyps in the German lands, including both marine and freshwater animals.27 These scholars did not emphasize the microscope itself, but the description and classification of microscopical creatures. At around the same time, the Brandenburg legal adviser Ledermüller took up microscopical research and endeavoured to establish it as a new scientific field, according as much significance to the instrument as to the tiny organisms. Such a strategy matched the belief, shared by German Catholics 25

�� On a similar decontextualization of instruments by English physicists of the 1720s, see Licoppe, pp. 147–60. 26 �� August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, ‘Die Historie der Polypen der süssen Wasser und anderer kleiner Wasserinsecten hiesiges Landes’, Der monatlich-herausgegebenen Insecten-Belüstigung, 3 (1755): 433–624. 27 �� Schaeffer, Die Blumenpolypen, p. 6.

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and Lutherans, that the microscope was the ideal tool through which to discern the minutest secrets of God’s Creation.28 If the polyp had supplied conditions similar to England’s attempts a decade earlier to establish the microscope at the heart of a new field of research, Ledermüller first took the bull by the horns in repeating experiments on spermatic animalcules. Buffon had recently challenged Leeuwenhoek’s observations, saying that spermatic animalcules had no tails and represented a new kind of being, made out of a simple accumulation of organic molecules.29 After making many observations, Ledermüller, in his Physicalische Beobachtungen derer Saamenthiergens (1756), rejected both Buffon’s theory of organic molecules and his morphological account of the spermatic animalcules. In 1760, Ledermüller launched Mikroskopische Augen-Ergotzung, the only eighteenth-century periodical devoted to microscopical research. This venture, of which he was the sole author, was advertised in a widely read journal and was supported by the propitious circumstances of the Nuremberg milieu, favourable to natural history, drawing and practical optics. Even so, transforming the microscope into the tool essential for a particular scientific trend was not a trivial task. Ledermüller regarded his journal as offering information to the ‘amateur of nature’, actually a wealthy audience able to afford a huge number of illuminated engravings in quarto, at a price three times that of a similar book with simple engravings. Previously, the Fränkische Sammlungen, a journal edited by the physician Heinrich Friedrich Delius, served as a platform for microscopical studies, and half a dozen scholars led by Delius, Ledermüller and Gleichen published papers on microscopical bodies in the late 1750s.30 Ledermüller repeated hundreds of experiments before friends and witnesses and functioned as a conduit transferring information from previous microscopical works to his German audience. For instance, he repeated Sherwood and Needham’s experiments on eels of paste, studied the structure of hair, nerves and skin, observed Acarus

28 �� See Thomas P. Saine, ‘Natural Science and the Ideology of Nature in the German Enlightenment’, Lessing Yearbook, 8 (1976): 61–88. 29 �� Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 2, pp. 176–80, 275. 30 �� Heinrich Friedrich Delius, ‘Erläuterungen mikroskopischer Beobachtungen und Anstalten’, Fränkische Sammlungen von Anmerkungen aus der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit und Oekonomie, 4/23 (1759): 371–85; Gleichen, ‘Sendschreiben von einigen neuern Beobachtungen des Saamens und der Saamen-Thierchen’, Fränkische Sammlungen, 3/15 (1757): 195–204; Martin Frobenius Ledermüller, ‘Beobachtung der Aale im Kleister, und der Saamen-Tierchen’, Fränkische Sammlungen, 3/17 (1758): 387–406; F.C. Mahling, ‘Schreiben eines Freundes aus Copenhagen, die Beobachtung einiger Infusionsthiergen betreffend’, Fränkische Sammlungen, 5/25 (1759): 45–56; F.C. Mahling and M.F. Ledermüller, ‘Mikroskopische Beobachtungen der Kleister-Aale und der Thierchen in Fleischbrühe’, Fränkische Sammlungen, 6/33 (1761): 221–32.

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(crab louse), produced animalcules from infusions, showed colonies of polyps, and so forth.31 As a matter of fact, Ledermüller was designing a kind of handbook for ‘microscopy’ that described many features of microscopical research. Besides making known the way to perform experiments, dissections, abstracts of many topics and good iconography, Ledermüller actively promoted citation of scholars and craftsmen, which turned his books into rich sources of information. Citing as many authors as possible, he epitomized the German naturalist tradition that promoted an international culture of citation, so different from English isolationism. Klein in Danzig, for instance, wrote texts with quotations in five languages: Latin, German, French, Italian and English.32 Learning these languages, as per pre-Linnaean natural history tradition, was time-consuming – ‘time that could be spent in learning sciences’, as d’Alembert put it33 – but this multilingual method allowed an author to make a systematic review of available literature before writing anything. The German scholars also benefited from an ongoing trend for many journals to publish translations and reports of every piece of European writing that concerned natural sciences. Among their titles were Hamburgishes Magazine, Commercium litterarium and Göttingischen Anzeigen. From the late 1740s onwards, journals were platforms for scientific papers in which microscopical research played a part, sometimes more prominently than electricity. The Germans had created audiences composed of both scholars and amateurs for these works, whom Ledermüller attempted to cater for. This tendency to include international works is highlighted in Table 8.2.

31 �� Ledermüller, Mikroskopische Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung, pp. 33–6, 67–8, 88, 174–5. 32 �� Jakob Theodor Klein, ‘Vom Bau dem Wachsthume und der Schilderung der Schneckenschalen’, Versuche und Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Danzig, 2 (1754): 1–68, pp. 2–17. 33 �� Jean le Rond d’Alembert, ‘Sur l’harmonie des langues, et … sur la latinité des modernes’, in Oeuvres complètes de d’Alembert (5 vols, Paris, 1805; 1st edn 1753), vol. 4, pp. 11–28, p. 26.

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Table 8.2

187

Number of authors per country quoted by Ledermüller (1764) and Baker (1753) Ledermüller (1764) No.

%*

Baker (1753) No.

%

German lands Italy Holland France England Geneva Switzerland Sweden Other

16 8 7 7 6 1 1 1 1

33 17 15 15 13 2 2 2 2

1 4 3 3 21 1

3 12 9 9 67 3

Total

48

100

33

100

* Percentages are approximate. Note: The titles referred to are Ledermüller, Amusement microscopique tant pour l’esprit que pour les yeux (Nuremberg: Winterschmidt, 1764) vol. 1 and Baker, Employment for the Microscope (London: Dodsley, 1753).

Ledermüller’s system of references was international; it sought to be all-inclusive, and it did not miss German scholars. By contrast, Baker’s system of references was English in style and rather ignored scholars from other countries. Ledermüller gave information about the market, mentioning inventors and microscope makers from various cities, while Baker referred only to English makers, to Cuff and Lieberkühn. Ledermüller took his material from seventeenthcentury and current authors, including physicians, but Baker ignored the medical milieu. Ledermüller demonstrated thus an aristocratic and enlightened amateur vision of the microscope, and upheld the sharing of knowledge. When Rösel discovered Trembley’s 1744 Mémoires, he and Ledermüller immediately repeated the experiments before accepting their author’s expertise, and acknowledged that Trembley had ‘faithfully communicated to the amateurs of natural knowledge all the means with which he performed his observations’.34 Respected by the academic milieu, Ledermüller actively participated in the academic life of the Bavarian societies, and published several papers in various scientific journals. But, his project came to an end when Fränkische Sammlungen ceased publication 34 �� Ledermüller, Amusement microscopique, vol. 2, p. 46; Ledermüller, Mikroskopische Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung, p. 130.

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around 1766 and no successor continued his work after his death in 1769. Even though he gave spermatic animalcules back their tails and animality, no new experiments enabled him to test their role in generation; he just repeated antispontaneist ideas.35 His narrative framework, the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot, was analogous to Baker’s – it cultivated experimental repetition, narrated in detail the adventures of the Infusionsthierchen and encouraged social sharing of knowledge. Despite its international scope and audience, with the microscope fetishized the culture of social repetition of others’ experiments was crippled by the absence of a framework unifying the observations, and by the lack of experimental creativity. Ledermüller’s efforts sustained public recognition of the microscope, but, once more, this endeavour symbolizes the difficulties in a scholarly community attempting to spontaneously generate a new area of research from mere sociability. Shaping the microscopical object required a network of communication among scholars that could go beyond a mere common social quest.

Roots for the Systematics of Invisible Animals The first wave of study of animalcules had taken place mainly in Holland, England, Italy and France, from the 1670s to the late 1710s. After a second wave in England and France in the mid-eighteenth century, the topic shifted location and a third wave occurred in the central part of Europe – the German lands, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Austria and the Geneva Republic. However, it was during the 1750s and 1760s that scholars’ explorations of the microscopic aquatic world reached a critical mass, and new directions of research were crystallized when two books by Spallanzani and the physician Wrisberg were published in 1765. Observers now commonly spoke of bodies ‘invisible to the naked eye’, ‘invisible without a microscope’, or ‘only seen with the assistance of microscopes’, a common expression used by many scholars in their books after the 1740s.36 A sign of this new trend was the coining of the Latin term animalcula infusoria to designate the previously named animalcules. Contrary to authors of the early nineteenth century who studied infusoria, such as Jean-Baptiste Bory de SaintVincent and his followers, Wrisberg did not coin the term infusoria, which he did not use separately from animalcula but only in the compound term animalcula infusoria, a translation of the German Infusionsthierchen used by Ledermüller.37 35

�� Ledermüller, Mikroskopische Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung, p. 88, pl. 48. �� Lesser, p. 9; Hill, A General Natural History, vol. 3, p. 1; Müller, ‘Von unsichtbaren Wassermosen’, Beschäftigungen der Berlinischen Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde, 4 (1779): 42–54, pp. 43, 45; Vaucher, p. v; Georges Cuvier, Le Règne animal (4 vols, Paris, 1817), vol. 4, pp. 6, 89. 37 �� Jean Rostand, Les origines de la biologie expérimentale et l’abbé Spallanzani (Paris, 1951), p. 23; Jean-Baptiste Bory de St-Vincent, Essai d’une classification des animaux microscopiques (Paris, 1826), p. 11. Dobell, p. 379, complained about this. 36

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More importantly, Wrisberg’s book granted legitimacy to infusoria by treating the subject within a Latin context accessible to many educated European scholars. Picking up the thread, northern scholars applied the natural history deontology of quoting every known previous author who had supplied repeatable descriptions and/or figures, gathering descriptions under synonymy, establishing characters, classifying and naming species. Linnaeus and Pallas, were the first two authors to classify animalcules after Hill.38 Pallas, a Berlin doctor of medicine, started his career in Leiden where he described marine zoological species and produced a thesis on intestinal worms. Then, in 1766, he published Elenchus zoophytorum, a Linnaean catalogue of marine animals that launched discussion on the natural method in zoology.39 To classify zoophytes or plant-animals, he applied morphological criteria irrespective of the size of the organism and thus eliminated the boundaries between visible and invisible marine animals. Pallas thus gave vision aided by the microscope a status similar to that of normal sight, for Latin naturalists. Indeed, finding the same shape in microscopical and discernible organisms bridged the two worlds of the visible and invisible. Pallas’s works revealed the close interaction between the polyp, marine zoology and animalcules, and illustrated Trembley’s effect. The seventeen genera of Elenchus included microscopic animals: for instance, in his first genus, Hydra or the polyp; in the fifth genus, Brachionus where he cited mainly Trembley and Baker; and in an ‘ambiguous’ genus, the Volvox studied by Baker, de Geer and Rösel.40 Many were later considered to be infusoria by Müller, such that, by 1773, marine zoology and infusoria began to be treated as distinct fields. Latin natural history actively promoted the abstraction, decontextualization and universalization of knowledge.41 For a specimen, inclusion in Latin natural history implied a change in status towards a more abstract conception, complying with rules that governed communication. A specimen was detached from the local circumstances in which it was collected, and using the codified morphological description distanced the scholar from perceptual intuition. Once the cultural factor accounting for the local name of a specimen was eliminated, the latter was recorded and linked to other vernacular names through comprehensive synonymy, before the creature was baptized with a Latin name. It was as though too-pagan nature had to be sanctified by this renaming, a cultural practice which was at the 38 �� For an overview of the reception of Linnaeus’s and Pallas’s systematical works in Germany, see James L. Larson, Interpreting Nature. The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore, 1994), pp. 28–98. On France, see Daniel Roche, ‘Natural History in the Academies’, in Nick Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 127–44; Pascal Duris, Linné et la France (Geneva, 1993), pp. 19–99. 39 �� Pallas, pp. vi–xiv, 3–24. 40 �� Pallas, pp. 25–32, 89–105, 416–18. 41 �� Slaughter, pp. 43–8.

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heart of the naturalizing process. Classification eventually increased the abstract status of the species, for, to be retrieved, a species required to be located at a place within a system that linked together formal and hierarchical entities such as classes, orders and genera. This formal model was called into question in many debates over the ontology of classification, from Ray to Cuvier.42 When, through synonymy, an animalcule was identified as the same object described by authors from four or five different countries, the reader did not have the impression of dealing with the actual creature collected by one particular scholar. Thanks to Linnaeus’s scrupulously minute pigeon-holing of every character of every genus and species, the result of gathering and comparing several specimens of each, an abstract conception of the species was constructed, independent of space and time. Latin natural history tradition transformed specimens into species, granting to a collection of specimens the status of a species. Thus, the incorporation of animalcules into that tradition was a strong indication of integration, which supplied the organisms with both recognition and existence as true species. A species was not the specimen found by Leeuwenhoek, Joblot or Baker any more, but a particular expression of a genus. It now gained its existence from the top of the ‘natural’ hierarchy, and not from the bottom of observations. Bruno Latour believed that microbes had not existed before Pasteur’s discovery. I dare say that, before the 1770s, animalcules did not exist as species, but only as specimens, being excluded from the normative framework of natural history that controlled the methods that effected such a transformation, including the social approval of an international community. Not that inserting animalcules into the corpus of natural history was easily accomplished. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae emphasized the obstacles there were to their courtship of the dignified lady that was the natural history tradition. Small-scale animalcules had been taken into account by Linnaeus, who mentioned Furia infernalis and Volvox globator in Fauna suecica (1761).43 In 1758 he had described eleven species of Hydra, of which nine came from Rösel’s observations, and he included the chaos as a species of the genus Volvox.44 Small-scale animalcules were thus part of zoological research, being visible to the naked eye, and their morphological parts could be distinguished with a lens or a microscope. Linnaeus also considered the microscope a helpful instrument in botanizing, one to be taken along to the herbatio, the collecting of plants.45

�� On these debate, see Slaughter, pp. 208–17; Foucault, pp. 137–41, 150–56; Henri Daudin, Les méthodes de la classification et l’idée de série en botanique et en zoologie: de Linné à Lamarck (1740–1790) (Paris, 1926), pp. 115–44; Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 1, pp. 13–18. 43 �� Linnaeus, Fauna suecica (Stockholm, 1761; 1st edn 1746), pp. 503–4, 544. 44 �� Linnaeus, Systema Naturae 10th edn (2 vols, Holmiae, 1758–59), vol. 1, pp. 816–18, 820–21. 45 �� Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica, p. 297. 42

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Invisible or barely-visible animalcules were another matter, because the naturalist was entirely dependent on the microscope for their morphological determination. However, being dependent on the microscope was not the same as granting it the status of a character. By no means could the naturalist’s quasi-divine work of reading and interpreting a sacred Nature be dependent on an artificial and imperfect instrument built by craftsmen. Scholars were pursuing the true order of nature, and should never accept the Diktat of any artificial instrument. Like Pallas, Linnaeus did not use the microscope as a character for grouping new organisms, because that was the task of morphology, which allowed comparison between minute animals and larger ones. In the eyes of naturalists, the discontinuity between microscopic and visible animals, which Hill had attempted to establish, could not work, and indeed, in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, some genera, like Vorticella, grouped tiny organisms with others the magnitude of a plum (Vorticella ovifera).46 Similarly, disregarding Hill’s new kingdom, Pallas, Linnaeus and Müller placed the minute and invisible animalcules in the well-established class of worms. The critical mass of works of the 1760s by, among others, Hill, Baker, Ledermüller, Rösel, Baster, Schaeffer, Wrisberg, Spallanzani and Pallas, led Linnaeus to assign infusoria a limited place within the Systema Naturae. In the 1767 twelfth edition of Systema Naturae, the last to be overseen by Linnaeus, Chaos was now a genus with five ‘species’ – redivivum, protheus, fungorum, ustilago and infusorium – and it was placed right at the end of the worms, the lowest level of the animal kingdom.47 But if Linnaeus eventually accepted the Chaos infusorium, at least as a name referring to a microscopical something, throughout this genus all the basic rules of classification and nomenclature were altered and the disorder was manifest both in the characters and in the communication. Indeed, while all other genera were given positive characters, this genus was the exception, being defined by negative characters – no limbs, no sense organs. Here, the binomial names did not designate only a single species, as everywhere else in Linnaeus’ works, but could refer to more than one. Chaos redivivum embraced both Needham’s reviving eels of paste and eels of vinegar (which do not undergo revivification), two species distinguished by several authors.48 Small animals undergoing morphological transformations were grouped under Chaos protheus, whose ‘proper form cannot be determined’.49 The genus also included species transmuting from animal to vegetable and vice versa, notably C. fungorum (‘seeds’ of fungi) and C. ustilago (‘powdery vegetable fructification’). Chaos infusorium was presented as one species, while Linnaeus cited many naturalists, implicitly drawing on hundreds of observations. Eventually, Chaos infusorium was defined by its environment (an infusion) and not, like other species, from morphology. All this confusion made the species of Chaos extremely difficult to determine, socially speaking. �� Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 12th edn (3 vols, Stockholm, 1767), vol. 1/2, p. 1319. �� Ainsworth, p. 23. 48 �� Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 12th edn, vol. 1/2, p. 1326. 49 �� Ibid., p. 1326. 46

47

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As a consequence, although Linnaeus had formulated his clear-cut standards so as to encourage recruits to his ‘army of naturalists’, he came to make extensive compromises when dealing with these animalcules. Because of their invisibility, deviant morphology, methods of generation and speciation, infusoria obliged Linnaeus to change his standard forms of communication, demonstrating how difficult it sometimes was to tackle a communication issue as a scientific problem. Quite possibly the name Chaos was in part chosen to reflect the considerable confusion of communication Linnaeus encountered with his species. Nomenclature, definition, determination and synonymy of authors were all turned upside down, becoming, respectively, equivocal, negative, ambiguous and presented without abbreviation or references. Indeed, for the C. infusorium, instead of regularly quoting authors with abbreviations and references for the sake of synonymy, Linnaeus contented himself with a chronological list of ‘micrographic authors’50 (see Fig. 8.2). All these alterations show the close interdependence between the forms of communication and the writing models used to present invisible bodies. The resistance of the microscopic creatures to classification under the traditional natural history categories obliged Linnaeus to adopt a chaotic method of presentation. Once more, microscopic bodies drove scholars to reflect and act on the level of the forms of communication in order to position them correctly within the scientific framework. Linnaeus’s classification, conceived as a system open to every new discovered species, was unsuited to accommodating infusoria and thus required to be changed. To show the contrast, Linnaeus grouped the non-invisible species into four genera of zoophytes – Vorticella, Volvox, Hydra and Furia – and adopted there standard methods, with positive definitions, synonymy and references. Using standard forms of communication and highlighting authors whose observations everyone could repeat was also adopted in an MD thesis presented before Linnaeus in 1767 by Johann Carolus Roos. But, for invisible organisms, Linnaeus and Roos only cited a list of authors dealing with invisible bodies, as in Systema Naturae.51 Although it does not conform to the Linnaean standards, this system of references confirms that, by this time, interest in small-scale animals had travelled from England to the German lands, notably thanks to the works of Pallas, Rösel and Ledermüller (Table 8.3).

50 �� Ibid., p. 1327: Harris, Hooke, Griendel, Buonanni, Leeuwenhoek, Cuno, Baker, Needham, Adams, Hill, Joblot, Walker, Rösel, Ledermüller. 51 �� Carl von Linnaeus and Johann Carolus Roos, ‘Mundus invisibilis’, Amoenitates Academicae, 7 (1769): 385–408, p. 395.

Fig. 8.2 Linnaeus’s description of Chaos infusorium, which shows the change in his usual writing rules

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Table 8.3 Number of observations and of authors cited by Linnaeus in Systema Naturae (1767) for the five genera Vorticella, Volvox, Hydra, Furia and Chaos No. of observations German lands England Sweden Geneva Holland Russia

50 18 14 8 3 1

% 53 19 15 9 3 1

No. of authors* 7 6 8 1 2 1

* The numbers of observations cited per author are: Pallas 18; Rösel 15; Ledermüller 9; Trembley and Baker 8; Linnaeus 6; Schaeffer and Ellis 4; Baster, Thomas Brady, C. de Geer, Needham and Münchhausen 2; Brown, George Edwards, Gronovius, Leeuwenhoek, Mylius, Roos, Solander, and Wilcke 1 each.

Establishing the Systematics of Infusoria Müller’s Vermium terrestrium et fluviatilium (1773) In 1773, Otto-Friedrich Müller published Vermium terrestrium et fluviatilium, ... non marinorum, succincta historia in Copenhagen, establishing infusoria as a distinct group of worms. Born in Copenhagen, where his father was a musician in the Danish court, Müller studied theology and law and became, in 1753, tutor to a young Danish nobleman. He travelled with his young charge and became a member of several academies before marrying a rich widow in 1773. Financially independent, he devoted himself to his scientific pursuits, maintaining a copious correspondence with his network.52 His earlier works of the 1760s were on botany and entomology, before his interests moved on, under the influence of Trembley’s effect, to minute aquatic worms and then to invisible infusoria. By 1773 he had published in local and prestigious journals, such as Philosophical Transactions and the Paris Observations sur la physique, and contributed many papers to the scientific journals of Berlin and Halle. A proponent of the Linnaean method, his interest in microscopical zoology developed during the 1760s, while studying annelids. His 1771 Würmern des süssen und salzigen Wassers showed the worms’ peculiar methods of reproduction.

52 �� For a short biography of Müller see E. Snorrason, ‘Otto-Frederik Müller’, in DSB, vol. 9, pp. 574–6.

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Fig. 8.3

195

Müller’s 1771 table showing the reproduction of naiads through spontaneous division

Fascinating scenes unfolded before the ‘armed eye’, including a mother naiad containing ‘several generations nested together’, each fully formed, and one understands whence the emboîtement theory took its concrete images!53 With tables of the worms’ multiplication, Müller demonstrated that they reproduced thanks to spontaneous division (Fig. 8.3).54 The Vermium took a new look at infusoria and was explicitly restricted to the zoology of terrestrial and fresh water inferior beings, as indicated by the title phrase non marinorum. In it, Müller examined three orders of these worms – helminthes, molluscs and infusoria – divided into 13 genera and 149 species (see Table 8.4)

53

�� Müller, Würmern, pp. 34–8. �� Ibid., pp. 39–42.

54

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Table 8.4 Number of genera and species of infusoria in 1773

Genus

No. of species

Character

1. No external organs thick sac

Monas Volvox Enchelis Vibrio

with membrane

Cyclidium Paramaecium Kolpoda Gonium Bursaria

3 6 11 15 7 2 5 4 2

form of a point spherical cylindrical elongated oval form elongated sinuated angulated hollow

2. With external organs nude with tail no tail ciliated

nude

Cercaria Trichoda Vorticella Brachionus

8 8 10 6

hairy

Trichoda

32 to tail

ciliated

Vorticella

30 nude [no tail]

Müller transformed one of Hill’s ‘classes’ into a genus (the Cercaria) and adopted four of his eight genera (Enchelis, Cyclidium, Paramaecium and Brachionus) while Volvox and Vorticella came from Pallas and Linnaeus. He also invented six genera (Monas, Vibrio, Kolpoda, Gonium, Bursaria and Trichodae), but rejected several of Hill’s and Linnaeus’s. Against Linnaeus, Müller considered the previous Chaos infusorium to be robust enough to constitute an order. Infusoria was an order of true animal species, and no longer a genus of ambiguous and negatively defined bodies. In the 1770s, advances in infusoria research had secured in part the discarding of spontaneous generation in favour of propagation through eggs, foetus and gemmation, as was already known. Spontaneous division, later called binary fission, was a new process recently established by Geneva scholars. As recalled by Müller, Trembley had first discovered longitudinal division (in 1747); after Bonnet had discussed it, Saussure detected transversal division in 1765.55 Although Müller �� Otto-Friedrich Müller, Vermium terrestrium et fluviatilium, seu animalium infusoriorum, helminthicorum et testaceorum, non marinorum, succincta historia (2 vols, Hafniae, 1773–74), vol. 1, p. 8. On Trembley’s discovery, see Trembley, ‘Observations upon Several newly Discover’d Species of Freshwater Polypi’. See Bonnet, Considérations sur les corps organisés, in Oeuvres, vol. 5, p. 220. On Trembley and Saussure’s discoveries, 55

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accepted transmutationism for some species, he extended pre-existence through division to other animalcules, as did Ellis in 1769, Corti in 1774 and Spallanzani in 1776.56 In particular, division provided Müller with a new explanation for the speed with which life multiplied in infusions, and permitted further criticisms of microscopical observers such as Leeuwenhoek and Wrisberg.57 Among the problems encountered in transforming specimens into species, the morphological mutability of some animalcules, which many authors had noticed, raised major difficulties.58 The mutating shape of Vorticella was an unsettling experience for a Linnaean naturalist because it defied the morphological constancy of a species. Indeed, defining the Proteus’s character as ‘gelatinous, polymorphous-mutable’59 was an exception to the morphological fixity that as a rule marked a limitation of Linnaean thought. Still, Müller included Linnaeus’s character of the variation of shape into the main definition of infusoria, namely as animals demonstrating spontaneous motion, multiplicity and ability to flee from danger, with heart and intestinal motion, with excretion and a mutable shape.60 The polymorphism of some Vorticella also became a research topic, and Müller discussed it in later papers.61 Thus the morphological fixity constitutive of the species definition was seriously challenged, since an entire order was defined by, among other things, mutability of form. In addition, some psychological characteristics were added to gauge the animality of these water animalcules, such as their capacity to ‘feel death coming’ with the evaporation of the drop.62 In particular, he opposed to Buffon and Needham the whole series of observations by authors quoted in his Vermium. Certain contradictions soon appeared in the classification, for instance the presence of a heart was a classic character for the worms, and should therefore be present in all infusoria, which was far from being

see Marc J. Ratcliff, ‘Forms Shaped by Functions? Using, Improving and Conceiving Microscopes during the 1740s’, in Bart Grob and Hans Hooijmaijers (eds), Who Needs Scientific Instruments? (Leiden, 2006), pp. 235–44, Ratcliff, ‘Temporality, Sequential Iconography …’, and Henry Harris, The Birth of the Cell (New Haven, 1999), pp. 56–9. 56 �� John Ellis, ‘Observations on a particular Manner of Increase in the Animalcula of vegetable Infusions’, PT, 59 (1769): 138–52; Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, pp. 72–7; Spallanzani, Opuscoli, vol. 1, pp. 154–61. 57 �� Müller, Vermium, vol. 1, pp. 11–12. 58 �� Ledermüller, Mikroskopische Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung, p. 88. 59 �� Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 12th edn, vol. 1/2, p. 1326. 60 �� Müller, Vermium, vol. 1, p. 7. 61 �� Müller, ‘Nachricht von der vielgestalteten Vortizelle’, pp. 21–4. 62 �� Müller, Vermium, vol. 1, p. 7.

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demonstrated. Spermatic animalcules were also included in Müller’s Infusoria after Hill,63 and it is Lamarck who separated them from the infusoria in 1815.64 A consequence of Hill’s use of the microscope as a character was the rejection of some of the small-scale creatures. Contrary to this view, Müller distributed the large genus Vorticella (40 species) in proportion to their degree of visibility – 16 species visible and 24 invisible – but only to help observers to identify the species.65 Moreover, he deliberately distanced himself from what he identified as a popular way of using the microscope, showing that the infusoria research field had begun to be demarcated: After the invention of the lenses, at a small price, and with a minimum of effort, new kinds of animals appeared. They were called microscopica, for they could be seen only with a magnifying lens, infusoria because they were found in water filled with particles of animal and vegetable matter; however they are not synonymous, for many infusoria can be clearly seen with the naked eye, while only a few microscopica live outside of infusions.66

Müller thus captured the difference between Hill’s use of the microscope as a criterion and Linnaeus’s environmental character, chosen while the microscope was regarded only as a means to reach such an invisible world. The Second Spreading of Infusoria and Microscopical Research in the German Lands Müller’s Vermium was well received in the German countries, Italy, Sweden and Geneva, and it was recognized as a new tool. Müller was even nicknamed the ‘Danish Pliny’ by the Bavarian naturalist Paula Schrank, just as Buffon had been called the French Pliny and Linnaeus the Swedish Pliny.67 Reviewers believed it could be among the best examples of advance in natural sciences, scholars were ‘avidly waiting’ for the figures, and some complained about the absence of plates.68 (Vermium was in fact presented in the purest Linnaean tradition, that is, without 63 �� Hill, A General Natural History, vol. 3, pp. 8–9, placed them in the Macrocerci, while Müller, Vermium, vol. 1, p. 64, and Animalcula infusoria, p. 119, placed them in the Cercaria. 64 �� Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (7 vols, Paris, 1815–22), vol. 1, pp. 444–6, excluded spermatic animalcules from Cercaria. 65 �� Müller, Vermium, vol. 1, p. 97. 66 �� Ibid., vol. 1, p. 2. 67 �� Franz von Paula Schrank, ‘Nachricht von einigen kaotischen Thieren’, Neue philosophische Abhandlungen der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2 (1780): 467–92, p. 476. 68 Commentarii de Rebus in Scientia Naturali et Medicina Gestis, 21/1 (1775): 18–39, pp. 18–19; Gleichen, Abhandlung, p. 124.

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figures.) Müller sent several copies to Bonnet and Spallanzani discussed some of Müller’s ideas in his 1776 Opuscoli di fisica animale, e vegetabile, an experimental book on microscopic bodies awaiting publication since 1771.69 Bonnet, always critical of nomenclature and systematics, then added a chapter on animalcules to his Contemplation de la nature, emphasizing that ‘a skilful observer, Mr. Müller succeeded in characterizing hundreds of their species’.70 Besides Müller’s plan to publish an augmented edition – issued posthumously in 1786 – German studies on infusoria and microscopical research were launched in earnest in Halle with the journal Naturforscher, and in Berlin. From 1760 onwards, the proliferation of journals written in German offered a forum enabling discussion of the new topics, and many of the scholars publishing in these journals debated controversial aspects of the subject. In 1777 and 1779 Goeze contributed two papers on Vibrio anguillula, whose vibrating motion was queried by some naturalists. Müller’s nomenclature was utilized by others; for instance, in 1777, the Dresden astronomer Johann Gottfried Köhler adopted his synonymy, and Goeze published similar research on comparative synonymy for most of Joblot’s and Ledermüller’s species.71 In addition to Naturforscher, the Beschäftigung der Berlinischen Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunden, journal of a society created in 1775, was a major forum for microscopical research. While an average of 5–10 per cent of the papers in eighteenth-century journals contained references to microscopes, more than 25 per cent of the papers published annually in the Berlin Beschäftigung did so. Moreover, many members of the society were acquainted with the microscope, including in their number the best and most renowned naturalist microscope users of the mid-1770s. In 1775, three-quarters of them had already published research that used the microscope, or were about to; and this held for both the Berlin members (Bloch, Martini, Gleditsch, Pelisson, Herbst), and the foreigners.72 The discipline thus demarcated itself because medical users of the microscope, such as Wolff, Delius, Mascagni, Caldani, Moscati, Scarpa, Hunter, Monro or Hewson, did not belong to the society. The journal became a forum for microscopical naturalistic research, thus producing in Berlin an emergent professional version of Ledermüller’s previous project in Nuremberg. The critical �� Bonnet repeatedly demanded the publication of Spallanzani’s Opuscoli; see his letters from 1772 to 1776 in Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 2. 70 �� Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, Oeuvres, vol. 8, pp. 222–3. 71 �� Johann Gottfried Köhler, ‘Microscopische Beobachtungen einiger kleinen Wasserthiere’, Naturforscher, 10 (1777): 102–7; Goeze, ‘Infusionsthierchen, die andre fressen’, Beschäftigungen der Berlinischen Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde, 3 (1777): 375–84, pp. 376–9. 72 �� Among the foreign members were the following scholars who wrote either about microscopes or about microscopical organisms: Aepinus, Banks PRS, Beckmann, Bolten, Bonnet, Chemnitz, Erxleben, Goeze, Hedwig, Leske, Medicus, Meidinger, Meinecke, Müller, Olivi, Pallas, Saussure, Schaeffer, Schrank, Schreber, Spallanzani, Stegmann, Targioni-Tozzetti, Titius and Tode. 69

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mass of people was reached, not only for microscopical research, but also for the study of infusoria. So great was their number that, in 1777, Gleichen attempted to establish in Nuremberg a rival society for microscopical observation of infusoria.73 The study of infusoria was only part of the microscopical activity of the Berlin society, which included fields such as parasitological helminthology, plants and cryptogams, insects, conchology and mineralogy. Vermium had not only helped to crystallize the entire study of infusoria, but it also advocated the microscope once more as a convincing research tool. Embedded in a larger emerging trend of microscopical research, studies on infusoria were not limited to the Berlin milieu. Within Europe, the German-speaking world was the most active in the study of infusoria, with Paula-Schrank in Munich, Goeze in Quedlinburg, Wrisberg in Göttingen, Beseke in Mitau, Gleichen in Nuremberg and the minister Eichhorn in Danzig. In Vienna, Meidinger and Prochaska were also active; in Holland, Slabber and Leendert Bomme investigated water-animalcules; while in Italy, partially overseen by Bonnet, Spallanzani, Roffredi, Fontana, Corti, Father Guanzati and many others experimented on infusoria, ignoring for the moment the sharp increase in microscopical helminthology and cryptogam studies by the 1780s. Nevertheless, Latin tradition was by no means uniformly victorious throughout Europe, and some important scholars resisted Linnaeism as the leading programme for the natural sciences. Also, while many amateurs were turning to Linnaeism in the 1780s, infusoria were still the type of subject an amateur could attempt to investigate on his own. From the viewpoint of the Latin tradition, which considered itself to be the universal language of God placed in the hands of men, these amateur works had to be brought within in the framework. Typical of non-Linnaean research was that of Eichhorn, in Danzig, who carried out observations between 1769 and 1783, and published several editions of a book on water animalcules in 1775, 1781 and, with additions, 1783. He observed about seventy species of water animalcules and supplied the reader with good-quality iconography (Fig. 8.4). However, although from 1773 onwards anyone working on infusoria could put his observations into a Latin context, Eichhorn disdained the international network and presented himself as the champion of local knowledge.74 Claiming to write only for the people of Danzig, he used the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot narrative model, giving, as Joblot did sixty years earlier, vernacular and diagnostic names to animalcules, such as blackbird, water-goat, pork-head, tiger animal, crocodile, water-bear, and so on.75 Although he had no expertise in nomenclature and classification, his descriptions and drawings were so good that in 1777 Müller

73 �� Wilhelm F. von Gleichen, ‘Beobachtungsplan einer mikroskopischen Gesellschaft zu Beobachtung der Infusionsthierchen’, Neue Mannigfaltigkeiten, 4 (1777): 491–500. 74 �� Johann Conrad Eichhorn, Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der kleinsten Wasserthiere in den Gewässern in und um Danzig befinden (Berlin, 1781), p. 8. 75 �� Ibid., pp. 49, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60, 64, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74.

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was able to establish Latin synonymy for Eichhorn’s illustrations of infusoria. and again in 1779.76

Fig. 8.4 Eichhorn’s realistic drawings of animalcules allowed them to be identified by Müller 76 �� Otto-Friedrich Müller, ‘Synonymen aus den unsichtbaren Thierreiche’, Naturforscher, 9 (1776): 205–14; Müller, ‘Von unsichtbaren Wassermosen’, pp. 51–2.

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Moreover, even confining himself within the boundaries of local knowledge, Eichhorn validated his own assertions by multiple observations. He said that he had observed 70 species between 10 and 30 times each – between 700 and 2100 observations – thus was working also with series observations.77 If, since Trembley’s time, the laboratory had adopted experimental series among the main methodologies, the systematists also worked on series of observations in order to better establish the description of a species. Series applied both to the systematics and experimentalism of microscopical bodies, being criteria that eventually became prescriptive. Goeze, for example, spent seven years using the microscope to elucidate the structures of hundreds of worms, and many other examples of that kind could be added. Therefore, although he had declared himself an amateur, Eichhorn’s work was included in Müller’s systematic scheme, because his descriptions and brilliant iconography allowed good repetition of his determinations. Inclusion of a local work in his universal project chimed with Müller’s intention to collect all data deemed fruitful for the advancement of microscopical knowledge. Contrary to Hill, who had rejected synonymy, Müller applied synonymy to integrate lesserknown work. Further, in a 1771 paper published in Philosophical Transactions, in which he gave an account of a water-animalcule, the monoculus, he invited ‘all naturalists to communicate their observations, which I shall not omit to give them the credit of’.78 The Definitive Foundation: Müller’s Animalcula infusoria (1786) The increasing number of studies on infusoria would be gathered together by Müller in a new book, Animalcula infusoria fluviatilia et marina, that was in fact rather more than a substantially enlarged edition of the 1773 Vermium. The number of species was multiplied by 2.6, from 149 to 379, infusoria, both marine and freshwater, took up 367 quarto pages, and it included 50 plates depicting 823 infusoria drawn in various positions (Fig. 8.5). To write Vermium, Müller had deconstructed the works of Hill, Pallas and Linnaeus, before reconstructing a classification from top to bottom. By contrast with this organizational work, Animalcula infusoria was based on a cumulative scheme, which the similarities between the 1773 and the 1786 versions demonstrate clearly (see Tables 8.4 and 8.5).

77

�� Eichhorn, p. 8. �� Müller, ‘Observations on some Bivalve Insects’, p. 242.

78

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Fig. 8.5

203

Müller’s 1786 plate showing the division of a Kerona (figs 5, 6, 7, 8)

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Table 8.5 Number of genera and species of infusoria in 1786

Genus

No. of species

Character

1. No external organs thick sac

Monas Proteus Volvox Enchelis Vibrio

10 2 12 27 31

form of a point variable form spherical cylindrical elongated

with membrane

Cyclidium Paramaecium Kolpoda Gonium Bursaria

10 5 16 5 5

oval form elongated sinuated angulated hollow

nude

Cercaria Trichoda Kerona Himantopus Leucophra Vorticella

22 89 14 7 26 75

with tail hairy horn-shaped fringed everywhere ciliated top ciliated

hidden head

Brachionus

22 top ciliated

Total

17

2. With external organs

378 (+ 1)

Testament to the newly established field of research on infusoria, no previous genera were rejected from this new work, as they had been from Vermium. Müller reorganized certain genera and added four, one from Linnaeus (Proteus) and three new ones for infusoria with external organs (Kerona, Himantopus and Leucophra). In many genera the number of species was multiplied by factors of two to three (Monas, Volvox, Enchelis, Vibrio, Paramaecium, Kolpoda, Bursaria, Cercaria, Trichoda,Vorticella). Given that increased number of species, the structure of some genera inevitably required reshaping. Certain species previously belonging to Brachionus were redistributed among new genera, while Brachionus itself was better defined than it had been. Problems emerged while reorganizing certain genera that shared several characters, a problem Müller had encountered in 1773 with Vorticella, the largest genus (40 species). Indeed, while one character – elongated shape – served to specify Paramaecia, several criteria concurred to define Vorticella: either ciliate, with tail, no tail and with foot. But contradictory criteria brought confusion, as shown by Table 8.6.

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Table 8.6 Characters for Vorticella* with tail

ciliated

ciliated

nude (no tail)

* Müller, Vermium, vol. 1, p. 24, right column.

Vorticella belonged to different subgroups, ‘with tail’ and ‘ciliated’, but also ‘ciliated’ and ‘nude’ as shown in the table, and another subdivision was also included in a footnote, containing more systematic and exclusive characters ‘no tail, no foot’, ‘with tail’, ‘with foot’.79 The genus’ definition was thus confused for Brachionus and Trichoda. In 1786 Müller eliminated the confusion and stressed that Vorticella had just a ciliated top. He thus subordinated the remaining characters (limbs and their types) that became hierarchized and exclusive as shown in Table 8.7.

Table 8.7

Müller’s 1786 table for the subdivision of Vorticella*

Character no tail no foot with tail with foot

No. of species 33 17

– simple – composed

20 5

* Müller, Animalcula infusoria, pp. xxvi–xxvii, 254.

Contrary to the combination of characters for Vorticella in 1773 that confused the criteria of the ciliated, the 1786 table could be summarized in a hierarchical tree (Table 8.8).

79

�� Müller, Vermium, vol. 1, p. 96.

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Table 8.8 Logical tree of Müller’s 1786 chart for Vorticella

top ciliated

no limb with limb 33 17 foot simple composite 20 5

The research field of infusoria was also increased by Müller’s system of referencing authors, and comparing the citations of authors between Vermium and Animalcula infusoria shows this strong increase. Chart 8.1 compares the number of citations of authors, distributed by country.

Chart 8.1

Number of citations of authors per country in Müller’s works of 1773 and 1786

Key: [Black] = 1773, [White] = 1786 Note: Except England and Sweden, all countries saw an increase in observations cited, with different slopes of increase. Holland, France and Italy did not exceed forty observations in 1786, while the German lands and Denmark (Müller) had 159 and 241 observations respectively.

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Thus, belonging as he did to the Latin natural history tradition, Müller based his references on a large international network of scholars interested in microscopical research and infusoria. Nonetheless, he missed out on perhaps a third of the available data on infusoria – for instance Huygens’ Dioptrica (1703) – so not every mention of a microscopic water animalcule was included. Indeed, two primary factors limited Müller’s gathering of information. First, citing an observation depended on its availability, and as Müller could not cover everything he missed out on some important research. The best example is a 1774 Italian book on Tremella by Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche sulla tremella, a quarter of which was dedicated to microscopic animalcules, with good drawings and descriptions of about ten species (Fig. 8.6).80 Corti, notably, was the first to publish figures showing the spontaneous division of infusoria into four animalcules (Fig. 8.6, nos I, II, III).81 Second, Müller would only quote an observation provided that the determination was repeatable. A description making the species recognizable, even following the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot narrative, had to be cited, and good iconography was an aid to description, sometimes even replacing it. Müller actually cited Joblot more often than Leeuwenhoek (24 times against 13, respectively, in 1773; 33 against 15, in 1786). Famous scholars such as Buffon and Needham were cited only once, while lesser-known ones, such as Hermann, Goeze and Eichhorn, were, like Spallanzani, cited more than 20 times each. Müller’s systematics of infusoria contained a social geography of European users of the microscope and redistributed their roles and levels of importance in line with the new shared rules promoted by the Linnaean social and scientific philosophy. Anyone could become a member, provided that he accepted the new social code, doing science through regulated communication. The schema underlying Müller’s collection of data proceeded from a larger conception supported within the milieu of Linnaean natural history, and his system of references still supplies the best historical database for Ancien Régime microscopical research. Two further charts, based on the same data, more precisely show the period and countries in which infusoria were mainly considered. Chart 8.2 demonstrates the three waves of studies on animalcules, then infusoria, distributed per country; Chart 8.3 shows the authors cited by Müller, distributed per year of birth.

80 �� Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, pp. 69–93. Parts of his manuscript works were published, see Corti, ‘Osservazioni su gli animaluzzi delle infusioni’, in Brignoli (ed.), Notizie biografiche e letterarie in continuazione della Biblioteca Modonese del Tiraboschi (2 vols, Reggio Emilia, 1834), vol. 2, pp. 364–86. For more on Corti’s work on animalcules, see Monti, ‘Gli “animaluzzi” di Bonaventura Corti: microscopia spallanzaniana o alternativa d’eccellenza?’, in From Maker to Users, pp. 289–324. 81 �� Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, pl. 2, fig. 3.

Fig. 8.6

Good-quality drawings of several animalcules by Corti, among which figs 1, 2, and 3 show animalcules dividing

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Chart 8.2

209

The three waves of studies on animalcules, then infusoria, 1670–1786 (per country and period of publication)

The data for Chart 8.2 are the same as for Chart 8.1, each author being put into one of three periods according to the dates of his publications. The first period (1670–1739) represents the first wave of studies of animalcules, and includes Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Hooke, Power, Borel, Buonanni and Joblot. It shows that, notwithstanding historians’ claims that Leeuwenhoek was the ‘founder of protozoology’ or the ‘father of microbiology’,82 Joblot’s researches were dominant over those of the Dutch and English. The second period (1740–64) opened with the polyp, followed by Hill’s and Baker’s works, and ended with Rösel, Schaeffer and Ledermüller. This was the second wave of studies on animalcules, with similar numbers of observations to the first wave, but led by English scholars. The third wave (1765–86) began with works by Spallanzani, Wrisberg, Pallas and Gleichen and continued with the Germans and Müller. For the first time, a critical mass of research lead to a demand for a systematic description of animalcules, a trend that Müller’s Vermium and Animalcula infusoria capped off. Animalcules were there transformed into infusoria and into true reproducible species, and in this third wave Müller was helped by an increasing number of studies by German scholars. The data he gathered represents eight times the amount of each previous wave (on average 420 observations against ± 54). �� Dobell, p. 362; Ford, Single Lens, p. 3.

82

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The Quest for the Invisible

Chart 8.3 depicts cited authors distributed by year of birth and reveals the gap between the first two waves. During that time, situated historically between 1720 and 1740, the microscopical research was rebooted with insects and seeds, absent in this chart.

Chart 8.3 Frequency of observations per authors cited, distributed by year of birth, with a logarithmic scale Note: The chart shows two clusters of scholars quoted by Müller (not including one identified only as P. and three anonymous). Those in the first cluster were born between 1620 and 1645, clearly separated from the second group containing scholars born between 1698 and 1750.

The gap was also a generational gap. A period of fifty years – two generations – was necessary to reconstruct new methods and new microscopical objects in accordance with the shared vision before launching the second wave. The second and third waves of studies on animalcules, then infusoria, geographically located, are included in the second cluster. The critical mass of research shows up for the authors born in the period 1700–50; but those born before 1720 are mainly non-Germans, while those born after 1720 are mainly Germans.

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211

Impact of the Systematics of Infusoria According to historians, Müller had ‘no heir of significance’. In fact, no ‘heir’ was necessary, or even possible, because the natural history tradition was the main channel for transmitting knowledge to further generations and it did not need one. Such an attitude is rooted in the narrative, criticized by Catherine Wilson, according to which ‘the conceptual profundities of seventeenth-century science are followed by the taxonomic trivialities of the eighteenth’.83 Still the main issue was not systematics, but one of addressing the problem of establishing conventional communication for a shared object. The natural history tradition had taken on a definitively Linnaean shape from the 1780s on and anyone could understand Müller’s text provided that they were trained in Latin natural history. The real importance of the systematic model lies in looking beneath its scientific operation, hence within its ability to tackle a communication issue as a scientific problem. It was not the classificatory model, but its codified language that provided a tool for controlling the contingent social processes permeating the monde savant and particularly the growing number of amateurs in science. Latin natural history supplied a shared language to actors, thus eliminating the contingent aspect while submitting communication to a system of rules. Contingent social processes and their impact on the production of scientific facts represent an issue not only for laboratory science, as it arises from discussion among social historians of experimental science, but also for systematists, in particular those of Latin tradition. This was an irreducible dividing point with the amateur naturalist tradition, against which a new attitude took root that would eventually open up the area for future professionalization. If the genius of Linnaeus was to be first in addressing the nebula of problems related to communication and building an efficient conventional system of rules to solve them, Müller’s originality was in finding the means to apply this reform to the microscopical world. The development of the systematics of infusoria matched the extension of Linnaean systematics recognized by historians in the second half of the eighteenth century.84 Moreover, from the viewpoint of a Linnaean naturalist after the French Revolution, and thus from the viewpoint of practically all naturalists, the main work had been carried out by Müller, as acknowledged by Bruguière, Lamarck, Cuvier and others,85 because he had subjected known microscopic species to the canons of modern natural history: synonymy, binomial nomenclature, classification, characters, definition and even iconography. Everything was organized into a system and, once accepted, no reformation of such importance could ever touch on infusoria, because, following Linnaeus, Müller’s was both a cognitive and a social reformation of the knowledge on those 83

�� C. Wilson, p. 36. �� Roche, ‘Natural History in the Academies’, p. 143, Duris, pp. 39–67. 85 �� Lamarck, Histoire naturelle, vol. 1, p. 406; Cuvier, Règne Animal, vol. 4, p. 94; Bory de St-Vincent, Essai d’une classification, pp. 5–8. 84

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creatures. From this viewpoint, there had to be a Müller: that is, a scholar, or group of scholars, who managed to apply Linnaeism to infusoria. If the science of infusoria had continued to be studied with the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot narrative model, we would still be waiting for such a unifying reformation, waiting for the specimens to be transformed into species almost unambiguously accessible to everyone trained, hoping for the knowledge to be universalized. Yet, even if no one could reframe the framework crafted by Müller, many could change things within the classification, reformulate it or create sub-divisions, all of which actually was done by certain ‘heirs of significance’. Gmelin, in the thirteenth edition of Systema Naturae, included Müller’s infusoria. In the 1789 Encyclopédie méthodique Bruguière wrote ‘infusoria are one of the most curious discoveries of our century’,86 adopted Müller and added some corrections. In Venice, Olivi planned his 1792 Zoologia Adriatica to include ‘Vorticellae, Volvox, Hydrae’ and generally ‘the order of the infusoria’.87 Lamarck, in his 1815 Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, transformed infusoria into a class distinct from worms and rotifers.88 Thanks to the natural method and the subordination of characters, Lamarck also attempted to base the classification of infusoria on organization, from the simplest animalcule to the most organized infusoria.89 Through the European and then the worldwide diffusion of Linnaeism, the abstract knowledge of infusoria was theoretically accessible to everyone, a knowledge that entered the schools through handbooks (by Herbst, Erxleben, Blumenbach and Leske in the German Lands; the Encyclopédie méthodique and Louis Cotte’s in France; by Spallanzani and Olivi in Italy; by George Adams Jr and the Linnaean Society in England). At the turn of the century, while systematicians and teachers signalled and discussed the existence of infusoria, thus continuing the main lines of the classification, new empirical research and dozens of new actors came into sight in many important cities of Europe, fascinated by the always novel world revealed by the microscope.90 86 �� Jean-Guillaume Bruguière, Histoire naturelle des vers, in Encyclopédie Méthodique (3 vols, Liège and Paris, 1789–1830), vol. 1 [wrongly ‘tome 6’], p. ii. 87 �� Giuseppe Olivi, Zoologia Adriatica, ossia catalogo ragionato degli Animali del Golfo e delle Lagune di Venezia (Bassano, 1792), p. 295. 88 �� Lamarck, Histoire naturelle, vol. 1, pp. 392, 407–8, 449. 89 �� Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 449–50. On the natural method and subordination of characters, see Foucault, pp. 275–6, Larson, pp. 36–9 and Stevens, pp. 25–62. 90 �� Those were, among others, Swaving (Haarlem); Schrank and Necker (Munich); Prochaska (Vienna and Prague); Koch (Magdeburg); Schadeloock (Rostock); Sir Everard Home and the MP Dillwyn (London); Bosc, Bruguière, Lamarck, Cuvier (Paris); Villars (Grenoble); Girod-Chantrans (Besançon); Saussure, Senebier, Vaucher, Jurine, Candolle (Geneva); Olivi, Colombo, Amici, Guanzati, Rusconi, Losana, Delle Chiaje (Italy); and Terechowsky (St Petersburg). See for instance Georg Prochaska, ‘Mikroskopische Beobachtungen über einige Räderthiere’, Abhandlungen der königlischen böhmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 2 (1786): 227–34; Luigi Guanzati, ‘Osservazioni, e

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213

However, old habits of working were also prevalent and resistant to the new trend, more or less so depending on country, and some Italian scholars were still unacquainted with Müller’s categories in the 1790s.91 Moreover, up until the end of the century, the English microscope makers continued to mix the commercial with the scientific. In George Adams junior’s Essay on the Microscope (1787), Müller’s infusoria appeared among the many ‘microscopical objects’ which helped to sustain his instrument-making business, such as flea-eyes, butterfly wings or fish scales.92 Used for reasons of advertisement, such a practice combined scientific work, advertisement and amusement. Müller’s book, on the other hand, was directed to the virtual community of trained naturalists, belonging to a tradition that linked past and future with improved knowledge of natural beings. Making this tradition visible was accomplished through the system of cumulative references. In Adams’s Essay, there were few indications of this tradition, for when he presented Müller’s hundreds of species, many references were omitted and he retained citations of only a dozen animalcules, those studied by the English scholars. Müller’s book was thus reduced to the level of local tradition, and a plate with detailed engravings jumbled together all the infusoria (Fig. 8.7). By contrast, supported by the critical mass of studies on infusoria, Müller’s work offered a universalized framework of knowledge, now that he had standardized the tool enabling scholars to communicate unambiguously on microscopic beings. To scholars of the following century, certain errors in Müller’s classification were obvious. They excluded spermatic animalcules from infusoria (Lamarck) and ruled out vegetables such as diatoms and Volvox globator (Bory). Species changed genera, while characters were becoming better defined as the resolving power of nineteenth-century microscopes increased. These scholars had standardized microscopes at their disposal, as well as new iconographic techniques such as the camera lucida. Technological and physiological advances, embodied in the increasingly established science of infusoria, then protozoology, allowed for these changes. But, this dynamic process was already extant and was being developed in Müller’s work, as shown by the increase in the number of species, the addition of genera, their partial reorganization and the refinement of certain characters between 1773 and 1786. Although not the first to classify animalcules, Müller was nevertheless the first to classify them in a Linnaean way and in accordance with the physiological knowledge of his time; for instance, the division of animalcules or Spallanzani’s 1776 failure to discover the fecundating power of spermatic sperienze intorno ad un prodigioso animaluccio delle infusioni’, Opuscoli scelti sulle Scienze e sulle Arti, 19 (1796): 3–21; Abraham Coenraad Swaving, ‘Verhandeling over de infusiediertjes’, Natuurkundige verhandelingen, Bataafsche maatschappy der wetenschappen, 1/1 (1799): 49–84. 91 �� Colombo, ‘Osservazioni microscopiche’, and Guanzati, ‘Osservazioni e sperienze’ did not use Müller’s nomenclature. 92 �� George Adams Jr, Essays on the Microscope (London, 1787), pp. 469–651, translated Müller’s book into English, with additions and omissions.

Fig. 8.7

Adam’s plate of animalcules taken from Müller

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215

animalcules. The latter are indeed animalcules living in a liquid, microscopic beings with tails, that display spontaneous motion and that die under certain conditions. Before physiological advances could meet systematics anew in the European communities of microscopists of the first decades of the nineteenth century, Müller’s successful Animalcula infusoria served as no less than a foundation for microscopical zoology for more than half a century to come. Therefore, the end of the third wave of microscopical research did not occur with Müller’s death in 1784, but in the 1820s. In 1827, Bory was still using Müller’s method. In the 1840s, although still based on Müller’s, the works of Ehrenberg represent a new continent. At this time the improvements and standardization of the microscope opened new areas in which certain irreversible superstructures would show up: cellular theory, embryology, protozoology, bacteriology and so on. As a necessary prerequisite to this new trend, Müller’s work had licensed an open community to constitute itself around a new object, the infusoria, thanks to a common language and a systematical model which allowed that community to solve the problems of communication within a scientific framework, and to absorb the increasing amount of data available by that time. Transforming the animalcules into species and removing them from their status as local specimens was the operation that demonstrated the heuristic and socio-cognitive power bequeathed by the meeting of Linnaeism and the microscope.

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Chapter 9

From Spontaneous Generation to the Limits of Life: The Microscopical Experimentalist Research from the 1760s to 1800

Parallel to the birth of systematics, an experimental trend developed for new microscopical objects, and new research subjects emerged during the 1770s, such as the ambiguity of microscopical species (whether certain algae are animals or vegetables), green matter, ‘reviviscent’ animalcules (rotifers, tardigrades), or criteria that would distinguish animal from vegetable on a microscopic scale. Historians also established that spontaneism was not dead, although various methods of generation had been described. All these issues enlarged the communities of users of the microscope and provided the experimental basis for nineteenth-century work. The manifold problems encountered led researchers to establish instrumental, methodological and communication rules for microscopical observation. Yet the relationship between research and communication betrays the presence of a major crisis in microscopical research between the 1770s and the 1800s. Growth, Climax and Decline of the Interest in Generation The Spontaneous Generation Dispute The eighteenth-century spontaneous generation quarrel had been treated as a subject limited to the debate between Needham and Spallanzani, and popping up later in the field of helminthology, when the Berlin naturalist Bloch was awarded a prize in 1782 for his demonstration of spontaneous generation in tapeworms. In fact, the quarrel spread almost everywhere, and illustrates the obstacles scholars faced when dealing with this issue. While in Rome in 1762, Needham conducted �� Farley, pp. 28–30; Ruestow, p. 279; H. Harris, pp. 56–62. �� On nineteenth-century microscopy, see L.S. Jacyna, ‘Moral Fibre: The Negotiation of Microscopic Facts in Victorian Britain’, Journal of the History of Biology, 36/1 (2003): 39–85; Parnes, ‘The Envisioning of Cells’; Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye; Ann F. La Berge, ‘Debate as Scientific Practice in Nineteenth-Century Paris: The Controversy Over the Microscope’, Perspectives on Science, 12/4 (2004): 424–53. �� Farley, pp. 34–5.

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an epistolary argument with Bonnet about the generation of animalcules, in the course of which he stated that ‘a professor from Reggio’ would soon confirm his theory. Bonnet replied in Considérations sur les corps organisés that these expected experiments would probably contradict Needham’s theory. Spallanzani was the man who, at that time, seemed to support Needham’s conception that animalcules took their origin from vegetable matter changed into an animal substance through transmutation processes driven by a vegetative force. However, while carrying out the experiments Spallanzani changed his mind about the vegetative force and historians have debated the motivations for this ‘conversion’ from an epigenesist (actually spontaneist) to a preformationist (antispontaneist) standpoint. Spallanzani’s Saggio di osservazioni microscopiche, published in Modena in 1765, included a broad experimental system that replicated Needham’s experiments. Many of the observations were consonant with each other, but this harmony ended with the final experiment of boiling sealed and unsealed infusions. Having sealed the necks of twenty jars, Spallanzani boiled them for one hour. The animalcules still being absent after a few days, he concluded, against Needham, that the production of animalcules was not due to vegetative force. Without animalcules, the vital force was no longer an explanation but seemed a vestige of more superstitious times. The 1765 Saggio established that there is no transmutation of organisms for animalcules and that a parent of the same species is needed to give birth to an animalcule. Although Saggio was not widely welcomed, it influenced subsequent discoveries. Upon his arrival in Geneva in August 1765, Needham brought copies of Saggio for Haller and Bonnet, which the latter lent to his nephew Saussure, recently elected professor of physics at the Geneva Academy. The latter, who had read Needham’s works, launched a series of microscopical experiments in his laboratory, which Needham attended, and, in mid-September Saussure observed a new method of generation. He could see the animalcules dividing themselves into two equal parts over the course of twenty minutes, and when, to control the observation, he isolated one animalcule from others he still saw the division. Then, Needham and Bonnet were invited to jointly observe the phenomenon. However, this discovery, in the sense of being considered as such by the circle of scholars, did not circulate in print for another four years. In London, in late 1768, Saussure narrated his experiments to several Royal Society fellows and in particular to John Ellis. In early 1769, having found a species of plant suitable for the infusion, Ellis repeated Saussure’s experiment and published it in Philosophical Transactions,

�� Needham to Bonnet, 13 February 1762, Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham, p. 214. See Stefani, pp. 152–4. �� Spallanzani, Saggio, pp. 3–4. �� Carlo Castellani, Un itinerario culturale: Lazzaro Spallanzani (Florence, 2001), p. 84. �� Saussure to Haller, 11 September 1765, The Correspondence of Haller and Saussure, ed. Otto Sonntag (Bern, 1990), p. 212.

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recalling Baker’s treatment of Trembley. However, Ellis did not put one animalcule under isolation and, having missed out this step that would neutralize the impact of other animalcules, he considered division to be an erratic process arising from the physical shock of the animalcules being together. By contrast, Spallanzani regarded Saussure’s procedure as an experimentum crucis that demonstrated the regularity of the division as a method of generation. Meanwhile, in 1766, Needham had arrived in Paris and got in touch with Father Regley who was to translate Spallanzani’s Saggio into French.10 Needham was preparing a reply, which the scholarly world thought would be a batch of original experiments, but instead he just added theoretical footnotes and a separate section called ‘On Religion’ to the translation. Nonetheless, although scholars were extremely disappointed by this book,11 once more, Needham was the catalyst to fuel further publications by the experimentalists. To Spallanzani he replied with arguments already raised against himself by Lignac in 1751, which Spallanzani had actually taken into consideration.12 According to Needham, Spallanzani heated the air too much and for a too long time, which ‘destroyed the vegetative force’.13 Thus Needham rejected once more the pre-existent conclusion that the animalcules came from a parent of the same species, and asked for new experiments. Antispontaneism was not yet demonstrated. Moreover, Needham revealed the method of generation he had been witness to in Geneva, division.14 Yet, according to him, the animalcules were dividing ad infinitum, transforming themselves into smaller animalcules in a continuous process that ended only when the minutest levels of organization of the matter were reached. Then, according to his 1749 theory, once the matter reached its limit, the atoms followed the reverse course, transmuting themselves into a vegetable or animal substance. Needham focused on one part of Saussure’s experiment while overlooking the broader experimental system, which Bonnet summed up soundly and concisely: ‘You focus only on one side of an object, and when something hits you, it is always in such a strong way that you do not have enough attention to spare to examine things closely’.15 Saussure’s procedure of isolation was also devised to clear up the ambiguity of division: was it a division ad infinitum or a method of reproduction? Was the division one among multiple bisections, an eternal division process that reduced an animalcule to smaller animalcules and then atoms, or was such a split a sort of birth

�� Ellis, ‘A particular Manner of Increase’, p. 143. �� Spallanzani, Opuscoli, vol. 1, p. 165. 10 �� Spallanzani, Nouvelles Recherches. 11 �� See Chapter Six, note 72. Trembley refused to read it: Bonnet to Needham, 8 April 1769, Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham, p. 270. 12 �� Spallanzani, Saggio, p. 85; See Rostand, pp. 36, 47–8; Roger, p. 697; Roe, p. 178. 13 �� Needham, ‘Notes’, pp. 216–7. 14 �� Ibid., p. 172. 15 �� Bonnet to Needham, 17 February 1770, Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham, p. 286.

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balanced by further development, revealing a cyclic vital process? The difference was crucial, for Needham envisioned a process of diminution and splitting up of organic life without taking into account compensation by the development, and thus enlargement, of organisms.16 This matched his claim that, even if he could believe in pre-existence (the necessity of a parent: an egg, an animalcule which buds or divides, and so on), he would never give credence to preformation (the developmental growth of a beings without organizational changes).17 The ball was now in the other court. Bonnet, who had obtained a copy of Needham’s Recherches métaphysiques (1769), was extremely irritated to see its treatment of Saussure’s research, and requested a letter from him, which he added to the 1770 reprint of his own book Palingénésie philosophique. The letter from Saussure described division and reported on an experiment using isolation,18 such that the pre-existentialist approach served to interpret division within the framework of a cyclical theory of organic life. This cyclical theory stemmed from an observation by Saussure, who noted that the divided animalcules ‘acquire in a short time the size of the whole which they once belonged to’.19 Being able to criticize Needham’s errors, the Geneva team had turned division into one of the keys to unlocking the pre-existence of microscopical beings. Thanks to Bonnet’s Palingénésie and Spallanzani’s Opuscoli, some limited knowledge of division was accessible. Later, Müller, Adanson and Corti also observed division in infusoria and Müller, Goeze and Virey established the phenomenon for certain worms. Some scholars hesitated on whether or not to label it a regular process,20 while microscopical botanists treated it as a standard process after the 1780s. Other works rejecting Needham’s ideas appeared in England, Italy and the German lands. In 1769, Ellis carried out antispontaneist experiments with boiled potatoes left in a covered glass vessel. In another vessel he put a fresh cut potato with cold river water, and covered it. Twenty-four hours later he found both vessels full of animalcules, and, like Wright and Spallanzani, he said that animalcules thrive ‘in proportion to the heat of the circumambient air’.21 On the Italian side, Needham’s attack on Spallanzani demanded new experiments, which the latter brought to an end by 1771.22 Yet, although Bonnet urged him to publish, Opuscoli di fisica animale e vegetabile did not appear until 1776, and dealing mainly with the physiology of microscopical organisms. In reply to Needham, Spallanzani performed series of experiments, including some on heated and roasted seeds, 16

�� Needham, ‘Notes’, pp. 198–200, 218. �� Needham to Bonnet, 3 August 1765, Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham, pp. 221–2. 18 �� Saussure, [Letter], in Bonnet, Palingénésie philosophique, in Oeuvres, vol. 15, pp. 475–80, p. 477. 19 �� Ibid., p. 476. 20 �� Gleichen, Abhandlung, pp. 84–6. 21 �� Ellis, ‘A particular Manner of Increase’, p. 141. 22 �� Needham, ‘Notes’, pp. 216–18. 17

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which always produced animalcules once infused.23 Even the fire could not kill their vegetative force, because the latter was an illusion.24 Briefed by Bonnet to comply only with nature and experimental methodology, Spallanzani admitted that no outcome definitely explained the animalcules’ generation. The book nevertheless signalled the defeat of Needham, who, in a 1779 letter to Bonnet, wrote that ‘Spallanzani emerged the master of the game’.25 After 1770, a minority of scholars defended new forms of spontaneism, this being associated with a particular geographical distribution. In Italy, almost no one supported spontaneism, and the physiological research on microscopic animalcules continued. Directed by the Redian framework, scholars identified the methods of reproduction of microscopical species, their life cycles and other physiological features. Research was carried out by Beccaria, Spallanzani, Corti and Fontana on infusoria, Roffredi and Fontana on eels, Cavolini and Colombo on polyps, Spallanzani, Corti, Colombo, Guanzati and Michelotti on rotifers and tardigrades, Guanzati on Proteus and Bacounin on Gordius. Defending spontaneism was considered aberrant in Italy, while this was probably not the case in other countries. The German lands and France showed tensions between partisans of and opponents to spontaneous generation, both sides being fascinated by the capacity of matter to give birth to microscopic life. In France, Buffon’s speculative and authoritative stance had negatively affected microscopical research: Valmont de Bomare’s Dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle defined animalcules according to Buffon’s theory of organic molecules,26 investigation on spermatic animalcules suffered from censorship,27 studies remained unpublished. In 1775, attempts at publishing Adanson’s enormous work failed, despite a recommendation from a committee appointed to appraise his collection of 40,000 original drawings, including microscopical illustrations. Adanson developed a position close to Needham’s, although he admitted multiplication through eggs and division. During the 1780s, in small French-speaking academies, such as Dijon, Lausanne and Brussels, scholars such as van Bochaute, the Nancy botanist Willemet, Father Vernisy and Louis Reynier had performed microscopical experiments and declared themselves spontaneist or transmutationist. In 1793, the editor of Journal de Physique, La Métherie, advocated a creationist form of spontaneism

23

�� Spallanzani, Opuscoli, vol. 1, p. 13. �� Ibid., vol. 1, p. 24. 25 �� Needham to Bonnet, 28 October 1779, Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham, p. 308. According to historians, neither of them won the battle: William Bulloch, The History of Bacteriology (Oxford, 1938), p. 78; Bernardi, ‘Spallanzani e la controversia …’, pp. 59–60. 26 �� Jacques-Christophe Valmont de Bomare, Dictionnaire raisonné universel d’histoire naturelle, 2nd edn (9 vols, Paris, 1775), vol. 1, pp. 246–7. 27 �� Ray to Spallanzani, 20 June 1785, Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 7, pp. 46–8. 24

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‘to explain the first origin of organized beings’.28 The theory was adopted by minor scholars such as Abbé Colomb, but also by Lamarck fifteen years later. However, antispontaneists continued to argue their case through important works such as Pierre Bulliard’s Histoire des champignons de France (1791) and other papers.29 The network of antispontaneists included the English, Italian and Geneva scholars, parts of the French and German communities and many academies. In addition, many of the Linnaeans declared themselves opposed to spontaneous generation. The German lands had several well-known authors who manipulated notions of vital forces to explain the generation of microscopic beings: for example, Wrisberg, Gleichen, Müller, Ingenhousz, Bloch, Blumenbach and Treviranus.30 For Gleichen, whose 1768 book on infusoria went through a second German edition (1778) and a French translation (1799), the animalcules came from water particles.31 Müller argued for a Needhamian sort of decomposition of certain infusoria.32 Still, many scholars from northern countries who performed research on animalcules advocated the pre-existentialist thesis on the grounds of their experiments. They included Goeze (Fig. 9.1), Köhler, Gaertner, Terechowsky, Schrank, Hedwig, Johann Hermann and several anonymous researchers. From the Generation Quarrel to Establishing Rules for Communication Since Needham’s 1749 Observations on eels coming from blighted wheat, many authors had written on this graminacea disease, although few identified the wheat species other than Tillet, who spoke of rachitic wheat. In Journal de Physique, in 1775, Roffredi demonstrated the oviparity of the eels (Fig. 9.2), their life cycle and sexual dimorphism, and proposed them as the true cause of the disease, thus overcoming the transmutationist thesis which Needham still defended in 1769.33 The editor Rozier, commented ‘one must say that he has caught nature in the act’,34 while Needham recognized his ‘previous errors’.35

�� Jean-Claude de La Métherie, ‘Discours préliminaire’, Journ. Phys., 38 (1791): 3–51, p. 7. 29 �� Antoine Richard, ‘Réfutation De l’Opinion de la transmutation des Animaux en Végétaux’, Journ. Phys., 15 (1780): 400–402, pp. 401–2. 30 �� Lenoir, pp. 17–22. 31 �� Gleichen, Abhandlung, pp. 74–5. 32 �� Müller, Vermium, vol. 1, pp. 19–21. 33 �� Needham, ‘Notes’, pp. 162–3. 34 �� Rozier, [Comment to] Roffredi, ‘Mémoire sur l’origine des petits vers’, p. 19. 35 �� Needham, ‘Lettre écrite à l’Auteur de ce Recueil’, Journ. Phys., 5 (1775): 226–8, p. 226. 28

Fig. 9.1

The animalcules observed by Goeze

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Fig. 9.2 A worm that caused rusted wheat according to Roffredi

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A reader of Journal de Physique, Bonnet welcomed Roffredi’s work and noted it in the footnotes to the Contemplation.36 Having read Roffredi’s Mémoire sur la trompe du cousin, Bonnet was delighted to see scholars improving on Réaumur’s and Swammerdam’s research. Thanks to bright magnifications of 120, 200 and even 380×, Roffredi elucidated the mechanism of the proboscis in mosquitoes (Fig. 9.3). Moreover, in 1770, he had provided wise advice on microscopical observations, and Bonnet was quite satisfied by this concise theory of the shared experimental report:37 three quarters of the authors who appeared in the controversy would not have had the courage to bother the public with their so-called discoveries if a sacred law could have prevented them from publishing their texts in a way other than by reporting facts exactly detailed in all their circumstances. One must not be afraid of being careful, I think, when one says only what is precisely necessary to inform the reader so as to allow him to verify the observation and to repeat it in all its circumstances.38

Fig. 9.3 Roffredi’s 1770 plate showing the mechanism of the proboscis in mosquitoes New events were to cast clouds over this harmonious atmosphere. Felice Fontana opened fire in 1776 with a long letter reporting previous observations dating from May 1771. There, eels were true animals, oviparous, with sexual dimorphism and reviviscence, characterizing the vegetable illness called ergot39 – all of which amounted to an implicit accusation of plagiarism against Roffredi. To cap it all, Rozier published a letter from a ‘supporter of Abbott Fontana’, who 36

�� Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, in Oeuvres, vol. 8, p. 257. �� Bonnet to Spallanzani, 25 March 1775, in Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 2, p. 256. 38 �� Roffredi, ‘Mémoire sur la trompe du cousin’, p. 5. 39 �� Fontana, ‘Sur l’ergot & le tremella’, Journ. Phys., 7 (1776): 42–52, p. 42. 37

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corrected Fontana’s cereal species, which did not actually produce eels.40 Clearly there were strange errors in Fontana’s letter and an anonymous Deus ex machina had appeared in time to correct them. Roffredi reacted with a Mémoire that stopped the controversy, showing how the quarrel shifted from the scientific field to that of communication, while Roffredi accused Fontana: Mr. Fontana is in the habit of communicating his discoveries to the public only through the channel of a few friends, and he reserves always the right, as he says himself, to allow his observations to appear publicly once organized into good formats. While expecting this permission, he does not fail to announce that books in which observations will be detailed, are actually in press, and that they are about to be published. However these books obstinately refuse to appear, and if he prints a new sample, it contradicts, on key points, what the friends had already published. I make this remark because it is crucial to the understanding of what follows.41

In a footnote, he added Fontana’s remarks on the animalcules of the infusions, published in the latter’s book on blood globules: there is a long note from a friend who certifies that soon a book will be published in which the author shall demonstrate it [antispontaneism for animalcules]. This book was never published, and its announcement made other observers stop their investigation on the same object.42

Such a remark captures the feeling of other scholars. Indeed, in 1775, Adanson complained to Corti about Fontana not returning to him a Mémoire on the use of the microscope and lamented that ‘the hurried ease of Italian observers ... prevented me from giving my converse observations on these objects’.43 Roffredi denounced another of Fontana’s strategies of communication, namely, publishing papers in unknown journals. People reading such a paper ‘considered it to be an article from The Gazette, unrelated to a printed book, and containing content guaranteed by no one’.44 Roffredi then attacked the scientific priority of Fontana, because, as �� Anon., ‘Lettre à l’auteur de ce recueil’, Journ. Phys., 7 (1776): 328–33, pp. 328–30. �� Maurizio Roffredi, ‘Supplément & éclaircissement aux deux mémoires sur les anguilles du bled avorté’, Journ. Phys., 7 (1776): 369–85, pp. 375–6. In the footnote, Roffredi wrote that the italic passage was the ‘Avant-propos p. 9 to Fontana’s Osservazioni sopra la ruggine del grano, Lucca, 1767’. 42 �� Ibid., pp. 375–6. 43 �� Adanson to Corti, 24 July 1776, in Intorno alle opere scientifiche dell’abate Bonaventura Corti, ed. Paolo Bonizzi (Modena, 1883), p. 39. 44 �� Roffredi, ‘Supplément et éclaircissement’, p. 378. Jean Senebier, Recherches sur l’influence de la lumière solaire (Genève, 1783), p. 261, ironically quoted Fontana 40 41

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pointed out by the anonymous supporter, Fontana’s plate showed a cereal in which eels never appeared. Thus either he had perpetrated a scientific fraud or he could not claim priority, for the identification of the cereal was wrong. One is thus left to choose between Roffredi, whom Fontana had accused of plagiarism, and Fontana, himself accused of scientific fraud. To find allies, Fontana begged Bonnet to bear witness against Roffredi. But, looking for more information, Bonnet consulted Spallanzani, who replied that the first true discoverer was in fact another Italian scholar from central Italy, Francesco Ginanni, who had achieved it in Ravenna twenty years earlier, in 1759.45 Fontana was thus doubly at fault; nonetheless, Bonnet credited both observers, Roffredi and Fontana, with the discovery.46 Increasingly, communication and strategies were a locus for the discussion. In the middle of the century, the Royal Society had established scientific censorship by means of peer-review for Philosophical Transactions. Roffredi was aware of the impact of journals, and also pointed out the negative effect of a book announced but not published. Fontana echoed Buffon who had used a similar strategy – in 1749 he announced a phantasmal Natural history of microscopic animals47 – that could have also discouraged French scholars from working on this topic. And against such abuses, scholars aimed at establishing ‘sacred laws’ of communication within the scientific framework. It has also been repeated that adherence to theory influenced Spallanzani and Bonnet’s opposition to spontaneous generation.48 However, it seems to me that there is a pre-eminence of the methodological over the theoretical orientation for Bonnet, Spallanzani and other experimentalists of the time. Although they could not conceive a world out of pre-existence, they subordinated their interpretation of antispontaneist results to experimental control while looking for a coherent rationale. Bonnet’s first impulse was to defend his belief in pre-existence – based on hundreds of observations – but the second impulse was to place it in the capable hands of experimental systems. For instance, in a letter to Spallanzani, after defending his dogmatic belief he asked for experiments and added: ‘You will not hear the language of friendship, when Nature speaks against me. And I will be the first to submit to Her decisions.’49 Bonnet made similar recommendations to Needham: ‘In fact, the question is not to know which is the hypothesis that makes

who ‘continued to give the public clues to his numerous, important and extraordinary discoveries’. 45 �� Spallanzani to Bonnet, 29 July 1775, in Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 2, pp. 265. 46 �� Bonnet to Spallanzani, 27 January 1776, in Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 2, p. 275. Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, in Oeuvres, vol. 8, p. 259. Bonnet, ibid., pp. 259–61, developed Roffredi’s memoir. 47 �� Buffon, Histoire naturelle, vol. 2, pp. 283, 305. 48 �� Farley, pp. 26–7; Castellani, pp. 83–4; Stefani, p. 181. 49 �� Bonnet to Spallanzani, 17 January 1771, in Carteggi di Spallanzani, vol. 2, p. 166.

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us either comfortable or finding a suitable match. We only need to know which is the hypothesis Nature seems to admit.’50 By contrast, certain scholars thought of experimentation as a guaranteed recipe for reaching a successful outcome.51 For them, the attractiveness of the results took precedence over careful precautions and coherent theory, leading to a lack of discipline in the experimental procedure. Moreover, in the 1770s, shared visual control was more difficult than ever, for microscopes had stronger magnifications. Adanson cited 400×, Gleichen 500×, Roffredi 380×, Colombo 700×, Fontana 700×, Beseke 559×, Béraud 400×, Saussure 200×, Cavolini 180×, Sprengel 200×, Ledermüller 400×, Bloch 369×, Müller 300×, Hedwig 320×, and Placard Ray 180×. These magnifications multiplied between two to ten times the average power used in 1740, and raised anew the question of how to balance size with shared vision. Stronger magnifications actually made further demands on keeping up and repetition, which is probably among the reasons why the citation of makers increased over the course of the century, as shown by Table 9.1. Table 9.1

Ratio of citations of microscope makers according to period

Period

% Comp. Ratio*

%

1700–1739

4

3.4

1740–1759

18

31

1760–1799

78

65.6

100

100.0

Total

* The compensated ratio was calculated by converting the 19-year period into a 39-year period.

The increase in citing makers over the course of the century correlates with both the increase in magnification and the changes in iconographical techniques, from natural to serial comparison. Indeed, in the first four decades of the century, scholars seldom quoted makers, and, for all of Europe, on around 420 printed sources, less than 10 authors referred to makers. Moreover, many among them were dealing with invisible, and not minute, bodies.52 This would suggest that the 50 �� Bonnet to Needham, 8 November 1779, Correspondence of Bonnet and Needham, p. 314. 51 �� Ellis, ‘A particular Manner of Increase’, p. 141; Gleichen, Abhandlung, pp. 125–6. 52 �� Except for leaflets, the following scholars referred to instrument makers: Zahn, pp. 530–38, 554, 749–50; Cowper, p. 1181; C.H., p. 1357; Puget, ‘Lettre au R.P. Lamy’,

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citation of makers by scholars was among the rhetorical strategies scholars used when dealing with invisible bodies such as infusoria, and, consequently, this table yields another indication as to how the scientific microscopic object transformed, from minute to invisible bodies. Dozens of scholars had demonstrated procedures useful to the microscopical observer. Roffredi had showed how to join two slides, Ingenhousz used the cover slip, Goeze wrote on avoiding tiredness when observing for long periods, Hill had invented a primitive microtome.53 Adanson, who had given Fontana a Mémoire instructif sur la manière d’observer les êtres microscopiques, et de ne pas se laisser tromper par les apparences,54 planned a larger work ‘to serve as a model for the method of observing the smaller beings with the microscope, and to help the other observers to decide if they are precisely the same beings one has observed’.55 Gathering together these procedures and improving communication were important components of Bonnet’s attempt at reforming ‘epistemology’. He was well informed on these works and corresponded with many of the European users of the microscope. Bonnet sought to compile an Art of observation for the naturalist, a set of epistemological guidelines for research, microscopical or otherwise.56 It contained hints for experimental repetition, use of probabilities, safeguards against illusion, and the rational use of analogy. Adanson, Roffredi, Müller, Goeze and others had similar epistemological interests, and many regarded the relationships between theory, procedures and results as serious issues.57 Coordinating them into experimental systems helped the notion of control to emerge around 1770 in the semantics of the experimental report.58 They discussed the relationship between experiments and narration, with a new outlook on scientific communication. To the pre-existentialist community, the regularity of the species through stable descent – germs and methods of generation – remained the major issue. Senebier, a disciple of Bonnet who translated Spallanzani’s Opuscoli, argued for it:

p. 66; Bradley, A Philosophical Account, p. 156; Derham, p. 415; Joblot, part 1, p. 6; Mazzucchelli, pp. 10–11; Vallisneri, Opere, vol. 2, pp. 104–5. 53 �� Roffredi, ‘Mémoire sur la trompe du cousin’, pp. 9–11; Goeze, Versuch einer Naturgeschichte, pp. 444–53; Goeze, ‘Vortheile bey dem Gebrauch der Vergrößerungsgläser, ohne den Augen zu schaden’, Neue Mannigfaltigkeiten, 2 (1775): 337–45; John Hill, The Construction of Timber, from its Early Growth, Explained by the Microscope (London, 1770). On Ingenhousz, see Hebbel Hoff, ‘A Classic of Microscopy. An Early, if not the First, Observation on the Fluidity of the Axoplasm, Micromanipulation and the Use of the Cover-Slip’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 33 (1959): 375–9. 54 �� Adanson to Corti, 24 July 1776, Intorno alle opere di Corti, p. 39. 55 �� Ibid., p. 40. 56 �� See Ratcliff, ‘Wonders, Logic and Microscopy’, pp. 104–7. 57 �� Müller, ‘Von unsichtbaren Wassermosen’, p. 43. 58 �� Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science (Madison and London, 1988), pp. 70–72.

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‘The same germs usually produce the same developed beings’.59 The pre-existence of a species guaranteed its stability and constancy. Through his enhanced control of experiments, Spallanzani had twice illustrated the impossibility of spontaneous generation, but uncertainties remained on this question after the 1780s. Saussure’s division won widespread agreement that the isolation of animalcules definitively showed the continuity between a parent and its offspring. Bonnet and Saussure had turned division into a new means of demonstrating pre-existence and adapted their theory to it, and the manifold microscopical research projects arising since the 1760s vouched for the continuance of a remarkable experimental programme on the invisible. At the core of pre-existence, was the feeling or belief that without a universal regularity in nature – natura non facit saltum – no naturalistic project was realizable. Systematists found this regularity in the stability of their groups while they turned towards the natural method. But, if the systematics had established a social community around infusoria, such an agreement was far from being present in the natural experimental world, despite the call for major tools to facilitate communication on experiments. Lack of agreement on pre-existence, differences in conception of the experiment itself, made scholars turn from spontaneous generation. The naturalist’s sight was oriented towards new microscopical objects, and reframing old questions related to the issue of limits. Limits, Criteria and Borders for Microscopical Life and Species The limits of animality had often been discussed up until the 1750s. Oak galls, cochineal, polyps, coral, zoophytes, all straddled the border between animal and vegetable. In the 1760s new objects would grab the attention of many microscope users, as did the ambiguity of the organisms and their ‘resurrection’. Animalcules, as well as ambiguous organisms, raised new problems that appealed for a new synthesis, and during three decades scholars investigated criteria for microscopic animality (fungi, algae, green matter) and for life (resurrecting beings). Eventually the discovery of the method of generation of algae in 1803 brought about the return of the notion of pre-existence and generation into the field of microscopical research. Fungi and Animalcules At the time of the French revolution, the naturalist Reynier noted ‘several scholars think that Fungi had an animal origin’.60 Needham’s works had had an early influence on German authors, his Mémoire had been translated in Hamburgisches Magazin in 59

�� Jean Senebier, ‘Introduction du traducteur, Dans laquelle on fait connoître la plûpart des Découvertes microscopiques …’, in Spallanzani, Opuscules de physique, animale et végétale (Genève, 1777), p. xcvii. 60 �� Jean Louis Antoine Reynier, ‘[Account of] Traité sur l’origine et la formation des champignons de Medicus’, Journ. Phys., 34 (1789): 241–7, p. 243.

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1757. But, as early as 1751, some scholars defended a theory of the transmutation of fungi. In that year, the physician Buttner experimented on the Cyathus striatus and gathered evidence for the animal origin of fungi. Historians acknowledged this ‘progressive migration of the fungi towards the orbit of the infusoria’.61 New transmutationism appeared in 1765, when Baron von Münchhausen observed the ‘blackish dust’ of a Lycoperdon that he soaked. It showed microscopical spheres that changed into ovoid and animal-like balls, which the next day formed ‘clumps of hard weft and from these arise moulds or fungi’.62 Münchhausen thought that they formed tubes ‘in which polyps move back and forth’.63 The seeds of fungi were thus animated, as were those of blighted wheat. Through correspondence, Münchhausen presented his ideas to Linnaeus, at the time when the latter’s pupil Roos was writing a thesis on invisible organisms. In Mundus invisibilis (1767), Roos praised the microscope as the key that would unlock a new room in nature, in the same way that Trembley had ‘opened the door of the polyp room’.64 Inspected through the microscope, Münchhausen’s dust showed transparent globules with a black point, which he regarded as eggs of insects or worms.65 With Linnaeus’s Cuff microscope, Roos repeated Münchhausen’s experiment, made an infusion with the dust and, after few days, saw a myriad animalcules.66 But, besides using cold water and unsealed infusions, Münchhausen and Roos did not show great skill in reporting the many experimental variables of temperature, time, motion and morphology. By 1767, after Wrisberg’s and Spallanzani’s works, these experiments required disciplined completion of laboratory procedures, in order to be up to the standards of the time. Here too, repetition without variation of a single experiment showed that the control of experiments was not truly understood.67 Although he was inclined to the theory of transmutation of microscopical bodies, in January 1767 Linnaeus nevertheless asked John Ellis to verify Münchhausen’s observation – part of a dispute concerning spores of fungi taken for animalcules, according to Geoffrey Ainsworth.68 But, after repeating the observation, Ellis concluded that animalcula were distinct from the seeds. In October 1767, Linnaeus requested more experiments and even after Ellis’s reiteration of his results, stood

61 �� Alessandro Ottaviani, La periferia inquieta del vivente, PHD Diss. Università di Catania (Catania, 2001), p. 226. 62 �� Ainsworth, p. 23. See Otto von Münchhausen, Der Hausvater (6 vols, Hannover, 1765–73), vol. 1, p. 149. 63 �� Ainsworth, p. 23. 64 �� Linnaeus and Roos, ‘Mundus invisibilis’, p. 388. 65 �� Ibid., p. 396. 66 �� Ibid., p. 399. 67 �� On Mundus invisibilis, see Ruestow, pp. 261, 269–70. 68 �� Ainsworth, pp. 23–4.

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firm on his opinion.69 Ellis took the opportunity, to bring the controversy before the scholarly public in 1769: the seeds were put into motion by very minute animalcula which proceeded from the putrefaction of the mushroom; for by pecking at these seeds, which are reddish, light, round bodies, they moved them about with great agility in a variety of directions, while the little animals themselves were scarcely visible, till the food they had eaten had discovered them.70

This paper was translated into French and a Latin abstract and published in 1772 in Göttingen. The controversy expanded later, with some authors defending the same position as Münchhausen – in Pavia the botanist Scopoli followed him, and Müller, in a paper on Clavaria, joined him. Later, Gleichen criticized Münchhausen whose Culpeper microscope was a ‘source of errors’.71 In Holland, Rainville and other authors in the Journal de Physique reported observations contradicting Münchhausen’s, or acknowledged his defeat. Palisot de Beauvois criticized both Münchhausen’s and the crystal theory of the origin of fungi put forward by the German physician Medicus, Reynier and La Métherie.72 In 1783, Palisot adopted the same stance with stronger arguments in his article ‘Fungi’ in Encyclopédie Méthodique. Although the authors in this quarrel explored many aspects of the transmutation of microscopic species, they did not tackle head-on the question of animality. They did not draft criteria to determine where the border between the animal and vegetable kingdoms was, at the microscopical level. Münchhausen was not a naturalist, Ellis rejected the transmutation, and Linnaeus faced a great deal of difficulty with microscopical species. Animality and limits signalled an emerging trend in which other authors would distinguish themselves. Criteria of Life and Animality The story of the tremella is emblematic of the switch that occurred during the 1770s from spontaneous generation to the ambiguity of organisms. In 1772, Corti, a priest friend of Spallanzani in Reggio, was experimenting on animalcules, and discovered their division without knowing of Saussure’s work.73 In July 1773, Spallanzani encouraged him to examine another strange being, the tremella.74 Latin 69

�� Ibid., p. 24. �� Ellis, ‘A particular Manner of Increase’, p. 138. 71 �� Gleichen, Abhandlung, p. 102. 72 �� Ambroise Marie Palisot de Beauvois, ‘Lettre à M. de la Métherie au sujet du Traité sur l’origine & la formation des champignons’, Journ. Phys., 36 (1790): 81–93, pp. 82– 5. Reynier, ‘Sur la cristallisation des êtres organisés’, Journ. Phys., 33 (1788): 215–17, p. 217. 73 �� Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, p. 72; Monti, ‘Gli “animaluzzi”…’, pp. 290–92. 74 �� Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, p. 7. 70

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botanists such as Micheli in 1729 and Dillen in 1741 had described this shaking organism and classified it as a vegetable. In Paris in 1766, Needham asked Adanson to publish a Mémoire on Tremella ‘in order to procure for Mr. Spallanzani … the occasion to follow this object in a more complete way’.75 Needham’s strategy in replying to Spallanzani was to issue a public challenge expressed by Adanson as an academic question: ‘find a plant recognized as such, which reappears through a new creation, i.e. which reproduces naturally without any seeds’.76 Busy with experiments on animalcules and blood circulation, Spallanzani forwarded everything to Corti. The latter crushed a tremella into many filaments placed in separate glasses filled with water. A day later, each tremella had produced a green filament that the microscope discerned as many filaments, by means of division. In his memoir, Adanson had observed spontaneous motion in tremella, and distinguished oscillation from increase, thus broaching the subject of animality: ‘the chance made me discover this spontaneous motion, so to speak, animal, in a true plant’.77 Yet, later Adanson rejected any animal motion.78 Then, Corti experimented on algae, Tremella and Conferva described by Dillen, and defined six motions: vibrating, folding, pendular, straightening up, springing and extension.79 If spontaneous motion was the character of animality, then the Tremella and other plants should be classified as animals.80 Bonnet was also looking for criteria of animality and of life, a strong ground for a natural classification. To him, locomotion was not a valid criterion to distinguish animals from vegetables.81 After Bonnet, Corti concluded also that the ‘motion is not a character that brings a distinction between animals and plants’.82 Both believed that Tremella was an animal, and the controversy lasted for more than half a century.83 Aside from limits of animality, other organisms raised the question of the limits of life. Leeuwenhoek and Baker had touched on ‘resurrecting’ microscopical bodies, and Needham and Fontana had considered certain eels to be reviviscent.84 Scholars had noticed that the tremella vanished during the summer and reappeared 75

�� Adanson, pp. 565–6. �� Ibid., p. 570. 77 �� Ibid., p. 565. 78 �� Adanson to Corti, 24 July 1776, Intorno alle opere di Corti, p. 40. 79 �� Johann Jakob Dillen, Historia muscorum (Oxonia, 1741), p. 15; Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, p. 18. 80 �� Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, pp. 65–6. 81 �� Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, in Oeuvres, vol. 8, p. 464. 82 �� Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, p. 77. 83 �� It included authors such as Olivi, Spallanzani, Saussure, Senebier, Scherer, Brisseau de Mirbel, Hedwig, Persoon, Vaucher and Nitzsch. Bory de St-Vincent, Essai monographique sur les oscillaires (Paris, 1827), p. 9, lamented that after Adanson ‘nobody wrote anything in which the word tremella was employed without mentioning its animality’. 84 �� Fontana, Nuove osservazioni, p. 151; Fontana, ‘Sur l’ergot et le tremella’, p. 42. See Barsanti, ‘Spallanzani e le “Resurrezioni”’, p. 175. 76

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in autumn.85 In a short paper of the early 1760s, known to Adanson,86 the French physician J.T. Desmars mentioned that ‘the conferva does not die’.87 Yet Adanson never managed to see the phenomenon and passed the matter on to the Italians, who experimented on the ambient conditions under which ‘resurrection’ could occur. After desiccation, a drop of water made bodies recover motion, and Spallanzani developed the subject with an essay on the limits of life in rotifers and tardigrades.88 Corti also investigated the physiological phenomenon in various organisms – tremella, nostoc, eels, rotifer and monoculus.89 The threshold of life was defined in relation to the particular conditions necessary for the organisms to come back to life. In pure water many could not resurrect, and a little sand in the water greatly aided the resurrection. All of this represented major issues for these Catholic priests, for whom it was not easy to remain calm when it came to disentangling theological and scientific arguments. For, could one speak of a true resurrection? Was a mechanical conception able to account for it? Fontana and Spallanzani concluded that it was true resurrection, while Corti and Bonnet decided against it and believed the bodies to be sleeping. Everything pointed to a synthetic concept that would account both for the sleep of the organism and the threshold of life. This was the concept of organization, competing with the mechanical model, but unifying animal and vegetable structures.90 When the organization was altered, life ended.91 Everywhere the question of limits surfaced: limits of the species and of the natural groups, limits of life through organization. During the 1790s, Italian observers such as Guanzati, Colombo and Michelotti resorted to organization in order to understand animalcules.92 Other scholars, such as Goeze, and Prochaska reported on the phenomenon. Bonnet and the Italians were well enough travelled in the microscopic world to feel the need for a theoretical synthesis by the 1770s. English, French and German scholars followed Bonnet’s route in the 1790s, through interpretations of nature that developed similar subjects.93 85 �� Dillen, pp. 17–8; J.T. Desmars, ‘Observations sur le Conferva’, Journal œconomique (April 1761): 174–5, p. 175; Adanson, p. 569. 86 �� Adanson to Corti, 26 February 1775, Intorno alle opere di Corti, pp. 36–7. 87 �� Desmars, p. 174. 88 �� Spallanzani, Opuscoli, vol. 2, pp. 181–253. 89 �� Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, pp. 27, 32, 97–9; Monti, ‘Gli “animaluzzi”…’, pp. 295–302. Corti and Spallanzani came from the same town, Scandiano, and worked on similar species. 90 �� Joseph Schiller, La notion d’organisation dans l’histoire de la biologie (Paris, 1978), pp. 33–9, 92–6; Ratcliff, ‘Wonders, Logic and Microscopy’, pp. 113–15. 91 �� Corti, Osservazioni microscopiche, pp. 99–100. 92 �� Colombo, p. 81; Guanzati, pp. 13–14; Victor Michelotti, ‘Observations et expériences sur la vitalité et la vie des germes’, Journ. Phys., 54 (1802): 140–59. 93 �� See Lenoir, pp. 17–53; Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists. Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology (Madison, 1983), pp. 15–30; Schiller, pp. 72–6,

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Algae from Spontaneous Generation to Fecundation Other scholars were to deal with transmutation and animality in the context of vegetable physiology related to chemistry. In 1749, Springsfelds, a physician and a member of the Berlin Academy, examined the tremella for its thermal properties.94 Leaving water in a closed glass, he observed a green substance, while in France other scholars such as Secondat and Morand observed similar phenomena.95 Desmars also remarked on the green substance present in water, and wrote that the ‘action of air … turned the filaments green’.96 Precisely at this time, air was beginning to be investigated, and academics asked whether or not it has an influence on vegetation.97 Scholars would transform air into a scientific object, thanks to chemical analysis, in the 1770s. It was Joseph Priestley who brought the relationship between air and the green substance into focus, by showing that plants produced a particular ‘dephlogisticated air’, which Lavoisier later called ‘oxygen’, that improved the quality of the air. Yet this was not true for all plants.98 Priestley observed the green matter with the microscope, and at first glance, defined it as a substance sui generis, neither a vegetable nor an animal, but generated by the water, which produced pure air when exposed to the sun.99 Priestley and the botanist Bewly observed green matter with a microscope before concluding, after further investigation, that it was produced by invisible seeds deposited on a substance that provided suitable nourishment.100 To test the origin of green matter, Priestley had improved on the experimental protocol for spontaneous generation. He boiled and distilled water to fill a jar that he turned upside down on a base made of quicksilver that served as an impermeable cork.101 No green substance materialized, while open vessels exposed to the sun let it appear – an outcome that Priestley interpreted in accordance with pre-existence. The green particles were thus seeds of vegetables, a result Priestley published in 1781. Green matter was configured as a new subject of experimentation, and during the 1780s many observers attempted to determine it with the microscope. In 1781, 97–102, S�� téphane Schmitt��, Les forces vitales et leur distribution dans la nature: un essai de systématique physiologique (Turnhout, 2006). 94 �� Gottlob Karl Springsfeld, ‘Observation physique sur une plante assez particuliere’, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des sciences de Berlin (1752; pub. 1754): 102–8. 95 �� Jean-Baptiste Secondat, Observations de physique et d’histoire naturelle sur les eaux minérales de Dax (Paris, 1750), p. 12. 96 �� Desmars, p. 174. 97 Journal des sçavans, 1753, p. 699, for 1755. 98 �� Joseph Priestley, Experiments and observations on different kinds of air (3 vols, Birmingham, 1790), vol. 3, p. 284. 99 �� Ibid., pp. 285–8. 100 �� Ibid., pp. 293–4, 306, 322–3. 101 �� Ibid., p. 294.

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Fontana, who announced a book dealing with experiments on vegetables, noted that animalcules exposed to light produce the dephlogisticated air, and Senebier had already supposed green matter to be the alga Conferva.102 Meanwhile, the Vienna physician Ingenhousz, who had discovered the diurnal property that vegetables yield dephlogisticated air,103 changed his mind on the green matter that he had previously considered a vegetable.104 In Vermischte Schriften physichmedizinischen Inhalts (1784), he repeated experiments performed previously by Priestley, with whom he disagreed. To Ingenhousz, green matter was not a vegetable, but ‘true animalcules of the infusions, turned green because of the sunlight’.105 Ingenhousz quoted Fontana’s ‘discovery’ that animals ‘spread dephlogisticated air, exactly like the vegetables’. As Roffredi has shown, Fontana’s system of communication worked well and friends championed his ‘discoveries’. With such cards in his hand, Ingenhousz promoted a new version of spontaneous generation. How, he asked, did the ‘insects or germs’ arrive in a jar when a piece of meat was put into it. In fact, introducing organic matter into a closed jar of boiled water changed everything, and mainly shows the lack of a shared experimental culture. Ingenhousz launched several attacks against Bonnet and praised the plastic virtue and forces ‘among the shining marks of a supreme Wisdom’ albeit ‘limited to very few live beings’.106 Needham’s rhetoric of invocation of the omnipotentia Dei was heard once more. There are further analogies between Needham and Ingenhousz as the latter also appealed to transmutation, although not citing Needham.107 Indeed, in the space of one year, his green matter turned into a tremella, putrefied, and changed kingdom: ‘this substance having been a plant …, ceased to be such and turned into insects’.108 Physicists who visited him in Vienna were astonished to see green corpuscles in C. rivularis acquiring a ‘vital motion’ moving to the animal state. Their surprise must have been even greater when it became again a vegetable, ‘a new conferva’, precisely according to Needham’s schema.109 Against it, new experiments carried out by Priestley with Bewly in 1789 set inverted corked phials into quicksilver and showed that no green matter appeared. (Priestley admitted that a normal cork could allow passage to the invisible seeds of the plant.) More experiments showed that it was the green matter and not the light that yielded pure air, which

�� Senebier, Recherches sur l’influence de la lumière solaire, pp. 267–8. �� Jan Ingenhousz, Experiments upon Vegetables (London, 1779), pp. 41–4. 104 �� Ibid., pp. 89–90. 105 �� Ingenhousz, Nouvelles expériences et observations sur divers objets de physique (2 vols, Paris, 1785–89), vol. 2, p. 40. 106 �� Ibid., pp. 60–61. 107 �� Ingenhousz, Nouvelles expériences, pp. 21, 56–62; Ingenhousz, ‘Remarques sur l’origine & la nature de la matière verte de M. Priestley’, Journ. Phys., 25 (1784): 3–12. 108 �� Ingenhousz, Nouvelles expériences, p. 92. 109 �� Ibid., p. 128. 102 103

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was thought to depend on chemical purification.110 They determined the plant as Conferva fontinalis, which Priestley published in 1790 in to close the debate.111

Fig. 9.4 Vaucher’s 1803 drawing showing the development of algae After the French Revolution, another major supporter of the animality of algae was Girod-Chantrans, a Besançon politician and amateur of the microscope, who since 1791 had sent to the Société philomatique in Paris his mémoires on ambiguous vegetables. He described vegetable filaments that converted into animalcules, for 110

�� Priestley, On different kinds of air, vol. 3, pp. 294, 297–8, 303. �� Ibid., p. 317.

111

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instance the Byssus flos aquae was an alga turned into animalcules.112 Following the lead of several previous authors, he determined a progressive motion of green globules in the tube of certain conferva, taking them for animalcules that produced the algae, just as polyps produced coral.113 At the same time Vaucher, a Geneva minister, had started to work on algae, taking on the old programme of determination of the seeds of cryptogams. The division of algae, advocated by Adanson, Corti, and Vaucher’s professor Saussure in 1790, had hindered scholars from investigating other methods of reproduction.114 When isolating microscopical seeds of conferva ‘sown’ in pure water, Vaucher observed filaments growing from these corpuscles, a process similar to germination, which he illustrated step-bystep (Fig. 9.4). On 27 Germinal An 8 (27 March 1800), he read before the Geneva scientific society a memoir on the seeds of Conferva, subsequently sent to Paris. The Société Philomatique asked the leading botanist Candolle, who carefully followed the European advances in botany, for a review. Société Philomatique was satisfied by Candolle examining both Girod and Vaucher’s works in order to ‘enable botanists to compare the facts and decide on the vegetability or the animality of the conferva’.115 Indeed, Girod placed certain algae into the animal kingdom, and distributed the Conferva in polyps, polyparies and animalcules. In his report, Candolle praised Vaucher’s research and included its findings in the series of discoveries by Malpighi, Cestoni, Vallisneri, Micheli, Spallanzani and, more recently, by Ludwig, Roth, Gaertner and Hedwig.116 But he refuted all of Girod’s calls for removing the Conferva from the vegetable kingdom, for four reasons: 1. No one observed pores allowing animalcules to pass through the conferva. 2. Certain so-called polyparies animalcules were found in waters without conferva. 3. Several animalcules were found in a species of Conferva; Senebier indeed identified 22 species of animalcules in the green matter. 4. Some conferva showed no animalcules.117 Candolle easily disproved Girod’s thesis, and concluded that Vaucher’s observations yielded new insights into the vegetable nature of Conferva, which belonged to the family of the algae. The strength of Candolle’s refutation took advantage of his adversary’s own contradictions, for Girod had shown certain confervae to have no 112

�� Girod-Chantrans, pp. 38–41. �� Ibid., pp. 149–51; Ingenhousz, Nouvelles expériences et observations, p. 115. 114 �� Saussure, ‘Description de deux nouvelles espèces de trémelles’. 115 �� Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, ‘Mémoire sur les graines des conferves, par P. Vaucher’, Bulletin des sciences, 2/48 (An 9, 1801): 185–7, p. 186, note 1. 116 �� Hedwig called spores the seeds of Fungi; see Ainsworth, p. 62. 117 �� All this discussion, de Candolle, ‘Extrait d’un rapport sur les Conferves’, Bulletin des sciences, 3/51 (An 9, 1801): 17–21, pp. 17–19. 113

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animalcules. Candolle ended magnanimously by naming two genera of Conferva after the two rivals Girod and Vaucher. Candolle’s review would have probably remained a five-page text in the Bulletin des sciences had Girod not attacked him in a note added to his Recherches chimiques et microscopiques sur les conferves (1802). Girod impugned Candolle ‘who probably lacked the spare time to repeat my experiments, and who nevertheless felt obliged to decide between these and those of his compatriot, the Citizen Vaucher’.118 Clearly, Girod slandered Candolle with the allegation of his having favoured Vaucher because of common citizenship, as Candolle felt compelled to reply with a full version of the report in Journal de Physique.119 There he categorically demolished Girod’s wish to animalize the Conferva, refuting their animality with convincing arguments drawn from experiments, dissections and a vast knowledge of the botanical subject, and established that the Conferva were true vegetables similar to the Tremella, Fucus and Lichen.120 Taken together, Candolle’s paper and Vaucher’s book ended the controversy and Girod abandoned the game. Far from being wide-ranging, the course of these quarrels over spontaneism was centred on two main issues, the limits between species and the development of Needham’s ideas. Buttner, Münchhausen, Linnaeus and Roos, Scopoli, Müller, Ingenhousz, Girod-Chantrans, all those savants who were dealing with fungi, green matter, tremella, conferva claimed in one way or another that certain microscopical species were not stable and changed kingdom, falling thus into Needham’s schema of the transmutation of the species. But, they all encountered contradictors – in England, Italy, France, the German lands and Geneva – who performed new experiments in which the microscope was a routine research tool. During the last four decades of the century, this scattered pre-existentialist ‘community’ responded in various ways, they improved both experimental methods and communication skills, drew up epistemological guidelines, explored the new microscopical objects to reach successful outcomes, and also tried to unravel communication. Yet, if some were aware that the conditions for advances in microscopical research would come from giving more thought to both cognition and communication, many also failed to understand that Müller’s systematic of infusoria was a tool not only suitable for stabilizing species but also for communication. And this feature of the crisis of microscopical research was dealt with differently in the several parts of Europe.

118

�� Girod-Chantrans, p. 240. �� de Candolle, ‘Rapport sur les conferves, fait à la Société Philomatique’, Journ. Phys., 54 (1802): 421–41. 120 �� Ibid., p. 429. 119

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The Crisis of Microscopical Experimental Research at the End of the Enlightenment A Geography of Research From the mid-1760s onwards, a new mood was undoubtedly taking hold in Europe as to what was a proper subject for microscopical experimental research. In England, after the second decline, it is in fields other than infusoria that the microscope was instrumental. John Hill invented a primitive microtome that helped the early nineteenth-century renewal of microscopic vegetable anatomy to establish itself; new instruments such as Withering’s microscope also contributed. In the early 1770s, in London Hewson created a landmark by demonstrating the variety of shapes of blood cells. In France, experimental research did not really start before 1800. The reception of Spallanzani’s Saggio was distinctly tepid.121 Adanson, a major expert on the microscope, never published his complete works, and Buffon’s distrust of the microscope remained prevalent. Vaucher and Candolle destroyed Girod’s work, but spontaneism still had many defenders, from La Métherie to Lamarck.122 It is only after the Revolution that dictionaries followed Müller and Spallanzani and viewed infusoria as true ‘microscopic animals’, and from then on French scholars, among them Bruguière, Lamouroux, Lamarck and Bory, turned towards improving the systematics of infusoria.123 The ambiguity of organisms was a central topic and several journals were sometimes filled with papers on tremella, conferva, green matter and ambiguity.124 Other fields such as cryptogams, fungi and vegetable anatomy developed, with Candolle, Bulliard and Brisseau de Mirbel. But, at the same time, physicians such as Bichat and Richerand claimed the microscope was useless to physiology. Considerable tensions remained between spontaneists and antispontaneists, advocates and opponents of the microscope, physicians and naturalists, not to speak of the political troubles of the time. The German lands, the Northern countries, Italy and Geneva were the main places where research on microscopic animalcules took place between the 1760s and the 1800s. Italy developed most of the European experimental heritage, and Spallanzani was perceived as the master of natural experimentalism, at the heart of a large network. He and his rival Fontana achieved the greatest visibility in 121

�� Castellani, pp. 67–8, 74–5. �� La Métherie, p. 7. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique (Paris, 1809), pp. 210–11. 123 �� Valmont de Bomare (ed.), Dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle, 4th edn (15 vols, Lyon, 1791) vol. 1, pp. 349–50; Bruguière, vol. 1, pp. ii–v; Lamarck, Histoire naturelle, vol. 1, p. 450; Hippolyte Cloquet, ‘Infusoires’, in Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (60 vols, Paris, 1812–22), vol. 25, pp. 34–5, 38; Dictionnaire Classique d’histoire naturelle (17 vols, Paris, 1822–31), vol. 10, pp. 533–46. 124 �� Half of the papers in the 1799 Observations sur la physique related to green matter and many are signed by Senebier. 122

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the community, however, they are but big trees within the Italian seedbed of microscopical experimental research that also included Scarpa, Roffredi, Corti, Della Torre, Targioni, Rovatti, Cirillo, Carminati, Griselini, Magni, Colombo, Cavolini, Guanzati, Moscati, Amici and Rusconi among others. In this field, Italy actually matched the German countries where a huge amount of research was carried out on systematics and less so on experiments. Tensions between spontaneists and antispontaneists also existed in the German lands, where the microscope was considered a research tool. There, Gleichen, Goeze, Ledermüller and Müller achieved the greatest visibility. In contrast to Italy, where Spallanzani and Fontana’s works overshadowed many others’, Müller unified northern research. The work of one man appealed to the intellectual elite of half a continent, which explains why his book impacted so strongly on further developments in microscopical research. Bonnet and the Geneva scholars were located geographically as well as intellectually between the two countries and they benefited from permanent contact with France, and Holland and England through the internationale huguenote. Among the major promoters of experimentalism, Bonnet could not resist the stream of Linnaean research. His local heirs – Saussure, Jurine, Vaucher, Candolle – benefited from a strong experimental and theoretical tradition, while changing their position toward Linnaeism. Defining the Crisis of Microscopical Research Looking strictly at the use of the microscope up to the 1800s, there were advances in research, results and practices, without speaking of other microscopical fields – Targioni-Tozzetti on microfungi of rusted wheat, Hewson on blood cells, Fontana on the ‘axon’, Hedwig on spores, Vaucher on algae fecundation, Prevost on blighted wheat, and so forth. The power of seeing had been refined; the magnifications susceptible to shared vision reached 100×, perhaps 150×.125 Methods and procedures were sufficiently standardized to be reproduced and improved by early nineteenth-century scholars who constituted a new critical mass of researchers.126 In 1804, Villars argued that the difference between ‘Réaumur, Swammerdam, Bonnet, Lyonet, Leeuwenhoek’ and ‘the moderns, Spallanzani, Cuvier, Müller’ was that the latter had ‘looked for a method’ and found one, thus the systematics had been instrumental in crystallizing and accelerating research programmes and creativity.127 The microscope was now in current use from Edinburgh to Vienna, from Naples to Uppsala, and from Lisbon to St Petersburg. Nonetheless, many obstacles hindered this stream of creativity, as the distribution of competencies and the geographical availability of knowledge and 125 �� In 1804, Villars (Observations microscopiques, p. 119), wrote: ‘Mon grossissement moyen est une lentille de six lignes de foyer, qui grossit cent fois … et une de quatre lignes de foyer, qui grossit cent quarante fois’. 126 �� See among others on this, Henry Harris, pp. 23–46. 127 �� Villars, Mémoires sur la topographie, p. 47.

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practices was not uniform throughout Europe. For example, journals offering a comprehensive and cumulative panorama of naturalistic European research, and therefore likely to create an audience, were widely available in German countries, but this was far from being the case in Italy. Many indications point to a gap between communication of scientific information and microscopical creativity. The acceleration in creativity was only partly absorbed by the sparse and patchy follow-up of communication and circulation. Important studies, in particular those from Italy, were simply ignored by the scientific world. For example, TargioniTozzetti did not make widely known his discovery of the microfungi that caused rusted wheat in 1767 – but his work was also the target of several attacks by Fontana. Moreover, although the microscope was used everywhere, its heuristic use was centred in only a few places, largely depending on the existence of previous traditions. It is not by chance that Spallanzani’s work generated new research in Geneva, a place where an experimental tradition already existed. With Trembley, experimental standards had improved in procedures, reports and interpretations. Yet didactic means of spreading both knowledge and know-how did not have a widespread diffusion, and the last decades of the century lacked a large audience able to reproduce microscopical experiments to a sufficient standard. Improving the methods of both experimental and systematical traditions brought radical change to the social conditions of observation, turning the use of the microscope into a skilled operation. Particular skills in the management of both experiment and classification were required to use the instrument, but many people without a grounding in the traditions employed the microscope as amateurs to investigate these issues. Paradoxically, microscopical observation now offered fewer openings to the amateur, at a period in which naturalist knowledge was among the expected accomplishments of the honnête homme or gentleman. The term ‘amateur’ represents a new figure at the end of the century. Previously, it referred to wealthy people who collected expensive books and rare objects, but now the amateur belonged to a learned society, although he was not always connected with the demanding centres of experimental practice. Systematics, and particularly Linnaeism, also built a culture of scientific consumers that swelled the ranks of the many Linnaean societies, among others.128 Many among these amateurs were not sufficiently knowledgeable to assess experimental practices, for many among them were familiar only with the basic scientific knowledge displayed in catalogues of naturalia, and were ignorant of the experimental tradition. The systematic spirit also extended to scientific topics. Indeed, the new focus on the limits – animality, life – was anchored in a larger trend, which crystallized in the 1770s. From that time onwards, the standards of classification spread everywhere. Lavoisier and Guyton de Morveau’s chemical revolution included a reform of the classification. The Encyclopédie became Encyclopédie Méthodique in the 1780s, that is it became classified. The progressive extension of Linnaeism to every natural object including infusoria was a major trend at the end of the century. 128

�� Duris, pp. 69–99.

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With this focus on classification, many border disputes took place – borders of disciplines; borders of tools, say, what use is the microscope to the chemist? Scholars were also looking for nomenclature and the right terminology: for instance, converting water into gases was first called ‘transmutation’, then Fontana experimented on the transmutation of water into earth, while zoophytes were also said to transmute. Further, fungi had a mineral origin, algae were zoophytes or animals, the resurrecting organisms pointed to the limits of life and death. And the leading trend of Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu’s and Cuvier’s natural method corresponded to a major reorganization of the system of classification and to a reform of the borders between the existing botanical and zoological groups. This period demonstrated a major crisis concerning borders, limits and boundaries, and the microscopical object did not escape it. Moreover, there are many indications that the systematics absorbed the scholarly forces of the experimental tradition. Despite some resistance, at the turn of the century experimentalism was set aside, while, in a significant development of the crisis, systematics became dominant in many European locales.

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Conclusion

This work has attempted to reconstruct the circulation of microscopes and microscopical technologies, practices and discourses in scholarly sites and networks of the Enlightenment, showing scientific patterns and research programmes to fit the progressive construction of an invisible object. Nevertheless, one must ask why all previous histories of microscopy until recently systematically negated such a pattern, ignored sources, and repeated negative stereotypes such as ‘the programme of microscopy does not survive into the eighteenth-century’. To answer that question, there is need for a historical deconstruction, which I shall now attempt, before concluding examination of the eighteenth-century quest for the invisible.

Deconstructing the History of Microscopical Research Until recently, the history of microscopy has not been the object of a historical deconstruction. Such absence of deconstruction drove historians of microscopy to use, mainly for the Enlightenment, nationalistic and hagiographic historiography, technical and realist judgement, anachronism and stereotypes, all leading to a major consequence – the neglect of sources. Although historians of science agree that anachronism must be eliminated, the history of microscopy has been written largely under the influence of a presentist instrumental scheme. ‘Microscopist’ and ‘microscopy’ are anachronic words, and retrospective determination of microorganisms has been applied to observations, despite the fact that Latin names were not standard before 1773. A consistent mythology has nurtured the history of microscopy, yet this attitude was forged in the nineteenth century, when scholars started to judge the previous centuries from moral and presentist vantage points. Balancing size with shared visibility enables us to grasp the shaping of these nineteenth-century categories. It was the achromatic microscope, which appeared around 1820–30, that brought a second solution – a technical one – to the issue of how scholars could link cognition and communication. And, it drove scholars to change their representations of the instrument, of the scholars themselves and of the emerging discipline, all the while projecting moral categories on the history.

�� Holmes, p. xvii. See Stephen G. Brush, ‘Scientists as Historians’, in Arnold Thackray (ed.), Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science, Osiris, 10 (1995): 215–31, pp. 217–24; and Nick Jardine, ‘Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in the History of the Sciences’, History of Science, 38 (2000): 251–70, pp. 265–6. �� See for instance Ford, Single Lens.

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The Invention of the ‘Technological Thesis’ Thanks to the wide availability of the standardized achromatic microscope from the 1830s onwards, a new trend of microscopical research re-emerged in Europe and America, which spread to many domains of biological research, leading to the creation of microscopical societies from the 1840s onwards. Yet, until the 1820s, observers continued to exploit experimental and systematical models invented during the Enlightenment. Dutrochet’s 1812 work on rotifers was influenced by Spallanzani’s 1776 Opuscoli. When Prévost and Dumas explained the fecundating role of spermatic animalcules in the 1820s, they discussed Spallanzani’s experimental set-ups. Amici experimented on the microscopical motion of Chara, a cryptogam, after Corti. The eighteenth-century experimental tradition was exploited, and many studies referred to Needham and Spallanzani. Similarly, up until the 1830s, systematicians continued to develop eighteenthcentury research, and the major users of the microscope acknowledged Müller’s influence. Indeed, scholars acknowledged that he had unified the field, and his synonymy transformed his 1786 Animalcula infusoria into the standard to be cited, superseding all previous works on animalcules. Thus Gmelin, Bruguière, Bosc, Nitzsch, Lamarck, Cuvier, Bory, Dujardin and Ehrenberg seldom referred to previous scholars other than Müller. But, after 1840, microscopists neglected Müller and replaced him with Ehrenberg, the new ‘Linnaeus of infusoria’. Systematists also classified previous micrographes – not microscopists. In the entry ‘Microscopic animals’ in the 1824 Encyclopédie Méthodique, Bory and Lamouroux sketched out a short history of infusoria that accused the seventeenth-century scholars of dilettantism: ‘the first observers who employed it [the microscope] seem to have been only looking for a way to amuse themselves’.

�� Daumas, pp. 328, 377. �� Henri Dutrochet, ‘Recherches sur les rotifères’, Annales du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris, 19 (1812): 355–87, pp. 355, 381; Spallanzani, Opuscoli, vol. 2, pp. 181–253. �� Jean-Louis Prévost and Jean-Baptiste Dumas, ‘Essai sur les Animalcules spermatiques de divers Animaux’, Mémoires de la Société de physique et d’histoire naturelle de Genève, 1/1 (1821): 180–207, pp. 183–4, 195–6. �� Giovanni Battista Amici, ‘Osservazioni sulla circolazione del succhio nella Chara’, in Amici, Collezione di alcune memorie e lettere (Modena, 1825; 1st edn 1818), pp. 3, 8. �� Gmelin adopted Müller’s classification in the 13th edition of the Systema Naturae, and Bruguière used Müller’s plates in the Encyclopédie Méthodique. While hundreds simply used Müller’s nomenclature, the following authors improved on his classification system: Bosc, Oken, Lamarck, Cuvier, Nitzsch, Lamouroux, Bory, Ehrenberg, Dujardin. �� Edouard Claparède and Carl Friedrich Lachmann, Etudes sur les infusoires et les rhizopodes (Genève, 1858–59), p. 9. �� Jean Vincent-Félix Lamouroux, Jean-Baptiste Bory de St-Vincent, and Eudes Deslongchamps, Histoire naturelle des vers zoophytes, in Encyclopédie Méthodique (Paris,

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Their ‘imperfect instruments’ were later improved, in the eighteenth century.10 Bory particularly focused on Müller: ‘The facts … appeared ridiculous up until his time and they were presented in a contradictory manner’.11 Müller, who ‘added a new class to the animal kingdom’,12 was regarded as the most influential scholar on infusoria up to Lamarck, whose latest book on invertebrates was published in 1815, and Lamarck himself considered Müller’s work to be foundational.13 In 1826, Bory’s long article was turned into a book entitled Essai d’une classification des animaux microscopiques that divided micrographers into pre-Müllerian and post-Müllerian periods. Bory’s classification crossed many frontiers. The Prussian microscopist Ehrenberg, who further reorganized the classification of infusoria,14 also developed the classification of micrographs, henceforth named microscopists. In a 1830 memoir he adopted Bory’s eras, which he legitimated with the Linnaean classification. The first period was marked by unsystematic and irresolute classifications. A second phase began with Müller’s 1773 Vermium, that is with a serious and systematic method of research and classification.15 Opposing serious to irresolute knowledge was already a step toward structuring the emerging memory of the microscopical ‘discipline’, itself an invention. And a historical linear model displayed steps in a disciplinary development in line with the representation of knowledge in progress, commonly thought at that time to be impelled by science. This was now shared knowledge. In 1841, the French protozoologist Dujardin opened Histoire naturelle des zoophytes – Infusoires with a history of infusoria split into ‘three eras’,16 a triadic scheme perhaps influenced by the French philosopher Auguste Comte’s ‘law of the three states’. Thanks to the achromatic microscope, he added to the previous scheme a phase that included recent transformations. Dujardin also provided a new technical rationale, and the instrument, so the kind of microscope was now the major factor distinguishing the boundaries between the three periods. From 1672, micrographers used simple microscopes, like Leeuwenhoek, and observed without classifying. A century later, Müller heralded a second period of morphological classification, the scholarly use of the compound microscope. The final period was Dujardin’s own period, which began with the achromatic microscope in the 1830s when Ehrenberg classified infusoria according to their organization. One name was symbolic for each period, represented by one type of microscope, and the invented unified identity of ‘micrographer’ capped 1824) [wrongly vol. 2], p. 516; Bory de St-Vincent, Essai d’une classification, p. 5. 10 �� Bory de St-Vincent, Essai d’une classification, pp. 5–6. 11 �� Ibid., p. 6. 12 �� Lamouroux et al., ‘Histoire naturelle des zoophytes’, p. 517. 13 �� Lamarck, Histoire naturelle, vol. 1, p. 406. 14 �� Ilse Jahn, ‘Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg’, in DSB, vol. 4, pp. 288–92, p. 290. Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, ‘Recherches sur l’organisation et la distribution des infusoires’, Annales des Sciences Naturelles 2ème série (Zoologie), 1 (1834): 129–44. 15 �� Ehrenberg, pp. 129–30. 16 �� Félix Dujardin, Histoire naturelle des zoophytes – Infusoires (Paris, 1841), p. 4.

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it all. Each period was characterized by new discoveries depending on different types of microscope, ergo the discovery was determined by the type of microscope at the user’s disposal, and by its technical properties. This last sentence shall be referred to as the technological thesis. Yet, while Enlightenment scholars were observers using several microscopes,17 the technological thesis transformed them into micrographers, then microscopists using a single microscope. It projected on to the historical core the image cultivated during the 1840s by the emergent professional body of newly fledged microscopists. Like his contemporaries familiar with the first achromatic microscopes of the 1820s, namely those by Fraunhofer, Amici and Jacques Louis Vincent Chevalier and Lerebours, Dujardin was well acquainted with the microscopical works of the Enlightenment. He sketched out a quick genealogy of twenty authors for the first period, all credited with the idealized identity of ‘micrographer’.18 Despite Dujardin’s omission of many scholars (especially Italians) – probably thanks to the influence of Müller’s books – he nevertheless identified many works on infusoria and related topics. He characterized the second period (1773–1820s) with Müller’s classification of infusoria, which ‘served as the material for the nomenclators who came after him’.19 And there, thanks to a national bias, he quoted mostly French authors. Dujardin’s classification was later used in certain dictionaries, such as the 1880 Larousse. With Dujardin’s classification, the technological thesis was systematically linked to a chronological reconstruction, schematizing and judging the historical subject through the equation: ‘good microscope’ = discovery / ‘bad microscope’ = amusement. Certainly, one could find evidence for this: that is, a convincing explanation for understanding the changes that took place during the 1820s and 1830s. But, it was also between 1820 and 1840 that scholars started to use only one microscope for their research, because achievement of technological standardization was fast becoming a reality. Indeed, in 1802 the botanist Brisseau de Mirbel was still using five microscopes.20 The invention of the achromatic microscope not only advanced further the dissociation between the instrumentmaker (producer) and the scholar (consumer), but also removed from the market that characteristic figure of the Ancien Régime world of microscopical research the amateur microscope maker. Standardization was a more important goal for research than achromatism, but less visible.21 As a tacit category, the technological thesis 17

�� On this see Ratcliff, ‘Testing microscopes’, pp. 143–5. �� Dujardin, pp. 4–8. 19 �� Ibid., p. 11. 20 �� Charles-François Brisseau de Mirbel, ‘Mémoire d’anatomie végétale’, Journ. Phys., 54 (1802): 279–98, p. 279. 21 �� In the works of J.L.V. Chevalier, Brewster, Mandl, N.J. and N.M.P. Lerebours. See M.E. Rudd and D.H. Jaecks, ‘The Rapid Development of the Achromatic Microscope: An Early Example by Andrew Ross’, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 49 (1996): 17–21; R.H. Nuttall, ‘The Achromatic Microscope in the History of Nineteenth Century Science’, The Philosophical Journal, 11 (1974): 71–88, pp. 80–86. 18

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was helpful for explaining contemporaneous developments. A new generation of scientists extended it to the history of microscopy, where it would contribute to the negative representation of the microscopical works of the previous century. Since the 1830s, the technological thesis was among the major categories with which microscopists, from Ehrenberg and Dujardin, read the history of their ‘discipline’, although the discipline, strictly speaking, did not exist in the eighteenth century. For instance, in 1806 Wildenow criticized Linnaeus’s errors on cryptogams, blaming them on his neglect of the microscope.22 But, in 1832 Ehrenberg lauded Linnaeus for being a wise scholar because he refused to use the ‘bad’ microscopes of his time.23 If Ehrenberg invented a moral motivation to Wildenow’s argument, still an obvious ‘fact’ remained: there were bad microscopes in the Enlightenment – or, Enlightenment = bad microscopes. This judgment was later popularized, Trembley and Müller’s works being judged ‘insufficient, due to the insufficiency of their optical instruments’.24 Linked to it, another belief emerged at the same time, the myth of the eighteenth-century scholar dabbling with the microscope. Ehrenberg had carried out observations using stains so as to envision the nutritive system in infusoria.25 He recalled previous types of staining technique practised by Trembley and Gleichen, and added scornfully: ‘but their experiences were amusement rather than work’.26 More generally, post-1830s scholars screened out the previous century’s results, judging them very poor, especially when compared with advances in cellular theory and systematics. With the establishment of the major European universities, the new generation of microscopists was educated with a common background in science, skills, aptitudes and prejudices, so sharing this negative perception of the history of microscopy. It matched ideas that, especially in the French medical milieu, presented the microscope as a useless instrument.27 The new generation of scientists educated in the expanding network of European universities was not trained as historians, a situation fostered by the irreversible dissociation between historical and scientific disciplines. Thus, the previous knowledge and practices of the microscope were lost sight of, framing the future of the history of microscopy as a mythological system of values. Not that schematizing the main history of a field was characteristic of the new microscopical trend, writing reductionist linear histories of one’s own discipline was a hobby of many scientists, Cuvier being the most prestigious among them. While Cuvier was creating a framework for natural 22

�� Carl Ludwig Wildenow, ‘Über die Gattung Chara’, Sammlung der deutschen Abhandlungen … der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (1803; pub. 1806): 54–62, p. 55. 23 �� Ehrenberg, p. 129. 24 �� Claparède and Lachmann, p. 6. 25 �� See Jahn, ‘Ehrenberg’, p. 290. 26 �� Ehrenberg, p. 134. 27 �� In 1801, Bichat rejected the microscope for tissue anatomy. Scholars such as Villars, Mémoires sur la topographie, p. 91, were outraged by Bichat’s assertion.

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sciences with his Histoire des sciences naturelles (1841–45), Bory, Dujardin, Pritchard, Ehrenberg, Harting and others began to utter harsh judgements against the microscopical works of the previous century. This latter stance has become a sort of standard for the history of eighteenth-century ‘microscopy’: judged, but poorly studied, a good example of the moral economy of a certain history of science. In other words, much of the standard ‘history of microscopy’ demonstrates that scientists are not spontaneously relevant historians of their discipline, for want of deconstruction. New Instrument, New Representations Epistemologists discussed the tendency of scientists to spontaneously become historians of their own disciplines.28 It appears indeed that the new microscopists were the first ‘historians’ of their science. But although all the scientific arguments they wrote were checked and debated, their historical fictions were not similarly subjected to criticisms. For scientific purposes, new microscopists such as Dujardin, Dutrochet and Donné frequently emulated past scholars, and contrasted Leeuwenhoek’s experiments to Spallanzani’s. Many others, particularly zoologists, still knew famous scholars of days gone by.29 But in the course of discussion of their scientific achievements, by the late 1830s these famous scholars re-emerged as historical figures.30 Microscopists were indeed also looking for genuine ancestors of their recent professional identity, for heroes and fathers, fashionable icons for these positivistic days. The Dutch histologist Harting, the first serious historian of the microscope, recalled ‘our compatriot’ Leeuwenhoek’s observations in a 1839 scientific paper.31 Then, in a Latin dissertation dated 1843, a Franciscus Fleck paid homage to Leeuwenhoek’s work. Ehrenberg adopted the latter’s theory of the internal organization of infusoria and established Leeuwenhoek as a symbol of his reform of the classification of infusoria. These different uses of Leeuwenhoek fed a mythology that was at times patriotic and served the interests of the young and newly established societies of microscopy, as well as those of individual scholars. The time was ripe for such a historical invention, the young societies of microscopists were in need of social acknowledgment. To incorporate microscopy in the general programme of the Western science, of Galileo, Harvey and Newton was helpful to institutionalizing their discipline. Microscopy could now claim to

28

�� Brush, pp. 215, 229–30. �� Between 1845 and 1865 the protozoologists Schmarda, Lachmann, Carpenter and Pennetier discussed the microscopical observations of Leeuwenhoek, Müller, Schrank, Rösel, Gleichen, Trembley and Spallanzani. 30 �� Dobell, p. 381; Dujardin, p. 4: ‘Leeuwenhoek, le père de la micrographie’. 31 �� Pieter Harting, ‘Bijdragen tot de mikroskopische kennis der zachte dierlijke weefsels’, Germ. trans. in Opuscula selecta Neerlandicorum de Arte Medica, vol. 16 (Amsterdam, 1942; 1st edn 1839): 14–57, pp. 35, 37, 39, 41. 29

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be on the same scientific stage as astronomy or physics, displaying the instrument, the forerunners and the complete pedigree of their 150-year lineage. However, Leeuwenhoek’s emerging heroization was coupled with the elimination of Müller. Ehrenberg’s advanced classification had overthrown that of Müller, whose memory was discarded in what may be regarded as a sort of patricide, given that for over sixty years he was considered the founder of a new field. Thanks to the achromatic standardized microscope, shared vision continued to improve, using the same scheme as Müller, which tackled visual communication on microscopical bodies as a scientific issue. But Müller made scholars share a visual and Latin language about infusoria, while the new microscope added to that framework a technical solution that improved shared envisioning. The new standardized technique of envisioning became so universal that, in the 1850s, the protozoologists Claparède and Lachmann acknowledged that ‘one can not recognize the species of Müller with certainty ... it is impossible to look back with certitude before Ehrenberg’.32 This should sound odd to those historians of microscopy whose hobby was to identify the bacteria Leeuwenhoek observed. Outdated in the 1840s, Müller’s work was dropped from the scientific field, but was also removed from historical thought, although his work had been extremely influential, as everyone acknowledged before the 1840s. The scientists after 1840 actually rewrote the memory of the microscope and invented a new reputation for seventeenth-century scholars, belatedly hailed as the fathers of microscopy. Yet, the new favour reserved for Leeuwenhoek and other seventeenth-century ‘scientists’, as they now became, conflicted with the previous linear historical model. Elaborated during the 1820s, this model drew a three-stage linear historical progression that was abandoned when scholars took for granted that there was a golden age of microscopy. The invention of a father figure suits the use of the microscope for amusement, for a father does not play, he works with tools, as do good scientists, while children play and use toys, which is apparently what microscopes were before achromatism: ‘The ingenious design of lens system by Joseph Jackson Lister published in 1830, ... lifted the microscope from little more than a toy to a scientific instrument.’33 It is obvious to what extent such a judgment, taken for granted by historians and epistemologists, would distort the reading of Enlightenment sources.34 Before the appearance of the achromatic standardized microscope, the historical dimension was not viewed dismissively. The eighteenth century was regarded as the hotbed of microscopical research, and many early nineteenth-century authors praised masters whom they considered to be in their own intellectual lineages, �� Claparède and Lachmann, p. 6. �� Turner, ‘A Very Scientific Century’, p. 19. 34 �� Contemporary epistemologists still make unquestioning reuse of the same preconceptions. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 192–4, followed the ‘evidence’ provided by English historians on the ‘bad preachromatic microscopes’. 32 33

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in Pavia, Geneva, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris and elsewhere. Making use of the new instrument produced a profound break with the previous notion of history, and a new perception of historical matter linearized the memory of that field, albeit with a strange hole in the middle. Far from being limited to scientific advances, the new microscope impacted on the representation of the scientist’s own activity and placement within a tradition. Sharing visual knowledge was now more easily obtained as standardization of the microscope brought assurance to each scholar that his colleagues could see the same things. One hundred and twenty years of construction of a shared microscopical object that was tied to balancing size with shared vision were blown away when the new instrument took over. By the time the microscopists of the generation of Pasteur and Koch started their work, the historical myths of foundation and the technological thesis had become normalized representations feeding positivistic historical research. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a series of ‘precursors’ springing up in papers on figures such as Joblot, Leeuwenhoek, Hooke and Malpighi, each of them being rediscovered by his compatriots. The death of Leeuwenhoek in 1723 was taken as the starting point of a century of ‘absence of research’. On the other hand, the technological thesis found great success, for it is mainly upon that notion that the history of the microscope has been written. Everything demonstrated that microscopy was a purely technical affair that had nothing to do with communication, and this applied equally to the history of microscopy. Indeed, communication on invisible bodies through the Müllerian language, was now a universal and standardized set of norms used daily by microscopists, along as was a standardized instrument. Both had become so normalized as to be beyond questioning or evaluation, thus leaving no room for historical research.

The Quest for the Invisible The primary claim with which this book began could seem out of place at a time when relativism in the history of sciences sometimes seems to be set up as a new dogmatism. Yet, I restate positively that, before science became established as a major institution in Western society, there were not many ways through which a community could build a shared stable scientific object such as the invisible. Looking at the European eighteenth-century quest for the invisible, it seems obvious that both dimensions – cognition and communication – had to be discussed together. In fact, ‘doing science’ implied, in the eighteenth century, that scholars dealt with both communication and cognition. A heuristic way to build a stable research domain was to tackle communication as a scientific problem. Historical Avenues for Microscopical Research The sources discussed in this work converged in showing that the consensus among academic elites, between 1680 and 1740, was to study small-scale though

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not invisible organisms. Such a programme influenced the selection of objects and phenomena to investigate, and also fixed the limits of shared visible things. In contrast with the seventeenth century, in which scholars did not reach a social consensus on the limits of vision, at the beginning of the eighteenth century this limit was insects, seeds and small eggs, so that it was possible to balance the size of objects with shared vision. For, to establish the microscope as a routine instrument, scholars had to address the problem of how everyone could see the same image. A levelling of standardized visual practice followed the adoption of this pragmatic rule throughout most of Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century, which corresponded, for the first time, to a social calibration of the microscopical gaze. The seventeenth-century philosophical tool, its origin traceable to the metaphysician’s cabinet, was turned into a routine tool for scholarly use. The microscope was used as an instrument for the magnification of small-scale and just visible objects, and permitted everyone easy access to this new regime of observation. For the first time, the members of several communities agreed on the interpretation of their observations of microscopic bodies. Opting to avoid entities too invisible – such as spermatic worms and animalcules – the new social gaze diverged from the previous regime of vision, which certain seventeenthcentury microscope users represented. The first wave of studies on undetermined animalcules, of which Joblot was the last representative, lacked both the balance of size with shared vision and the blending of experimentalism with systematics. Joblot’s studies of invisible organisms did not meet unanimous academic approval, for invisibility precluded shared vision. Moreover, actual understanding of the animalcules had not benefited from the classificatory spirit of the systematical tradition, which prevented them from being incorporated within a larger research programme. The programme of identification of bodies and mechanisms for the transmission of species that was achieved by the Italians – and also the Dutch – pointed the way to the principal route next taken by European scholars. It is in the Paris Académie royale des sciences that a critical mass of scholars was able, under Fontenelle, to share microscopical observations. This expansion of studies to less visible bodies initiated a heuristic method of investigating naturalia, which proved efficient for various discoveries. With Réaumur as frontrunner, followed by a network of European scholars, microscopical research now combined experimental and systematical traditions on insects and seeds. Their convenient size, which allowed investigation on both physiological and classificatory levels, turned them into the first microscopical scientific objects. Animalcules, too small and neglected by systematists, were set aside. Once the rule of balancing size with social vision was established, the major condition for standardized sight was met, which primed scholars for a shared quest for the invisible. Magnification could now increase, provided that the whole community controlled it, and indeed, major changes happened to the microscopical object during the 1740s. The public announcement of the polyp by Réaumur was

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received with scepticism by the scholarly world. Trembley’s solutions to the problems inherent in dispatching polyps contributed to improving the standards for scientific communication, and to designating the laboratory as a new space for research. His method of tackling communication issues as a scientific problem allowed the microscope to be considered a research tool both for scholars and for an enlightened public. As a textual form of communication, the design of the microscopical report changed and took the form of experiments in series. All this boosted the take-off in research on and production of microscopes that arose – thanks to the previous microscopical object, insects and seeds – from the late 1730s onwards. With a characteristically high profile, English instrument manufacturers produced more types of microscopes, while continental makers followed suit around the middle of the century. Along with new prototypes for microscopical research – greenfly and polyps – and new scientific phenomena such as parthenogenesis and regeneration, Trembley’s effect made scholars direct their gaze to microscopical life in aquatic environments. Up until the late 1740s, the need for a social sharing of microscopical sight remained independent of other academic norms, such as the avoidance of metaphysical and religious issues in texts. It is the entanglement of these issues with the facts of microscopical observations in the French milieu of the late 1740s by Needham and Buffon that forced scholars to leave their writings unpublished, or to write anonymous texts, on a core topic of microscopical investigation – spontaneous generation. In championing a literary style of report, to the detriment of experimental accuracy, and defending a speculative theory of life, Buffon and Needham revitalized the debate on invisible entities; but this strategy also endangered the microscopical report as a form of shared knowledge. As a consequence, the Académie des sciences kept its distance from the study of animalcules. This situation was not due to a declared attitude against spontaneism – scholars were actually divided on the issue – but because the subject had not been treated according to the academic practice that excluded metaphysics from academic texts. The approved rules of communication had not been respected. Needham and Buffon attacked the standard forms of communication and reintroduced metaphysical issues into the microscopical report. As a consequence, the generation topic, although discussed anonymously in France, was delocalized from there and shifted to England, the German lands, Geneva and Italy. The period that follows, between 1750 and the 1760s, was characterized by attempts at establishing microscopical research in England and the German lands as a science mainly based on the instrument. John Hill’s inclusion of the microscope among the criteria for his new ‘kingdom’, and Baker’s connections with instrument makers, at the heart of a network of ‘gentlemen users of the microscope’, show the English attempts to create a science focusing on the instrument rather than on the scientific object. In England, the microscope was a goal in itself, fetishized merchandise, and the quest for the invisible trailed in second place, doomed to failure by factors such as rivalries at the Royal Society, and a lack of experimental creativity and of systematical reporting. Similar attempts were embodied in the

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more erudite but less well-advertised scientific tradition of Nuremberg, thanks to Ledermüller. Yet a major obstacle to establishing an invisible object was the gulf between systematics and experimentalism while both English and German scholars specifically did not treat communication as a scientific issue. Another difficulty lay in the discrepancies between the systematical report and the Leeuwenhoek-Joblot narrative model. From the 1760s onwards, new avenues for sharing images of the invisible appeared with the trends toward quantification and standardization connected to the industrial revolution. Scholars more frequently noted the magnification used for an observation, an emerging standard aided by increased accuracy in the making of microscopes. Makers set up the first ‘standardization’ of functions for the material used – brass, wood and glass – and developed other advances in instrument making. And, as shown by the use of series comparison in addition to natural comparison in the microscopical iconography, the level of magnification shared increased in the second half of the century. In a parallel way, the systematic study of animalcules was defined as a programme in the works of Hill, Linnaeus and Pallas, and reached maturity with Müller. His main concern was to establish unambiguous communication on invisible animalcules using Linnaean categories, in order to supply the scholarly community with a solution for precisely determining microscopic animalcules. Müller’s solution remained the basis for the modern means of communication on invisible bodies: describing, naming and classifying them according to conventional and economic rules. The study of pre-existence and the search for hereditary material for the transmission of species, eggs and spermatic animalcules, was also an important programme for Enlightenment natural sciences. From the 1760s onwards, fresh interest in invisible animalcules arose and certain savants accustomed themselves to balancing magnification with shared vision. The years from 1765 into the 1770s saw the rejection of spontaneism through the work of Spallanzani, and the discovery of fission in animalcules by Saussure. However, while several scholars still claimed to be spontaneist or transmutationist, new research subjects emerged in the 1770s, such as the ambiguity of certain microscopical algae, Priestley’s investigation of green matter, and advances in the physiology of certain ‘marvellous’ animalcules (rotifers, tardigrades). The manifold questions which arose in the course of work on invisible bodies led a number of researchers to establish methodological and epistemological rules for the use of the microscope and methods of carrying out microscopical observations. But, if the search had turned towards criteria for distinguishing animals from vegetables on a microscopic scale, many scholars still paid little attention to systematics. All these issues enlarged the research field of naturalists using the microscope and, despite a crisis attributable to the increasing number of amateurs who followed the fashion for classification and systematics without real understanding, they nevertheless provided the basis for early nineteenth-century experimental work by Vaucher, Dutrochet, Prévost and Dumas, and Ehrenberg.

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Eventually, through advances in standardization, the arrival of the achromatic microscope brought a technical answer to the problem that had already been solved by Müller with visual and morphological Latin language and classification – that is, communicating unambiguously through morphological representations of the invisible. If Bloor’s principle demanded a unified explanation for both successes and failures of a discipline, it seems that the scheme of balancing size with shared visibility applied to the understanding not only of the shaping of microscopical research in the Enlightenment – with its successes and failures – but also of the categories of its historiography. In particular, the achromatic microscope brought a new technical solution to the enduring problem of articulating communication to cognition. Just as Réaumur’s insects, Trembley’s polyp or Müller’s infusoria had done earlier, the new microscope permitted better-standardized and shared communication on microscopical objects. This collective perception founded a new historical representation of microscopical research and its history during the first half of the nineteenth century. It gave birth to an anachronistic attitude in microscopists, who projected the technological thesis and its positivistic value on the past, looking for heroes and cancelling piece by piece the Enlightenment research that had supplied the cognitive and social tools – and some technical ones – to the Western quest for the invisible. From Current Anachronistic to Restitutive History The methodologies used in this work seek both to deconstruct anachronism and to find answers to the problem of how knowledge comes to acquire stability. First, it provides a reinterpretation of the so-called decline of microscopy. Evidence shows that the ‘decline of microscopy’ was a superficial interpretation of a deeper transformation in the status of the microscopical object. At the turn of the eighteenth century, far from neglecting microscopical observation, scholars reshaped it by counterbalancing the current practice of increasing magnitude with the requirement of shared vision. The model for this modern practice of microscopical research was provided mainly by Italian and some Dutch scholars, followed by the French. On the whole, the microscopical bodies needed reconstruction and their size declined from invisible to less visible organisms, turning them into a shared scientific object. This transformation accorded with the shared conditions of vision, but was taken at face value by positivistic historians who, believing that scientific progress implied endless advances, interpreted the withdrawal as a decline and a regression in knowledge. However, these historians forgot that there can be no stable knowledge unless there is the possibility of reproducing each other’s work. A second dimension – the social sharing of sight – offset the first dimension of increasing magnitude. Thus the passage from the seventeenthto the eighteenth-century style of microscopical research is an example of the restructuring, not regression, of a whole research field. The purpose of it was to articulate a cognitive dimension – increasing magnitude – with a communicative dimension – social sight. I refer to the first dimension as cognitive because to confer

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existence on an invisible thing requires at the very least, a cognitive operation. My interpretation fits the fact that there is not one single eighteenth-century source that speaks either of ‘microscopy’ or ‘decline’. ‘Microscopy’, like ‘biology’ and ‘vitalism’, is a word coined in the first half of the nineteenth century, one that still licenses anachronistic categories to pervade historical inquiry.35 A creation related to the emergence of the achromatic microscope, ‘microscopy’ complemented the identity of the new microscopists. But there was no such thing in the eighteenth century, no microscopy as such before the 1830s. Second, in contrast with the minor importance ascribed to Müller by classical historiography, it is now clear that without Müller’s solution, which baptized animalcules into the Latin tradition and transformed them into stable species, the fields of protozoology and bacteriology would probably never have come into existence. How could any community identify invisible things without stable names and stable rules for their identification, recognition and classification? This is why a world with the achromatic microscope but without Müller’s solution could never have opened the door to nineteenth-century advances in protozoological research. Müller’s works, as well as the works of Linnaeus, do not have any connection to positivistic results, but they touch on the social and cognitive conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge and its circulation. Once these rules, which allowed unambiguous communication about microscopical bodies, were institutionalized for the reproduction of knowledge, they actually established conditions of possibility. To modern historians, the appeal to nomenclature and classification for achieving a microscopical report is such a necessity that it has become a hobby for historians of microscopy who, three hundred years later, make determinations of the ‘species’ observed by Leeuwenhoek. Still, they are not doing history, though they fill a ‘hole’ opened up by the microscopical report, for the systematical report appears to be lacking in their eyes. To fill this supposed hole, they use a literary and communicative technology invented in neither the seventeenth nor the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth century. The standardization of communication on microscopical bodies changed the relationship of the scholars with their own origins. Indeed, focusing on less-visible organisms allowed for a rejection of the seventeenth-century wave of studies on animalcules, perceived as a dead end for microscopical research. Trembley’s discovery of the aquatic world supplanted insects and brought the laboratory to the centre of natural experimentalism. Müller implemented a new attitude towards historical origins, and his invention of microscopical species influenced the reinterpretation of previously observed specimens. All the animalcules observed by Leeuwenhoek, Joblot and others were considered to be species retrospectively from the 1770s onwards. Similarly, the standardization of the achromatic microscope led scholars to change their relationship with history, inventing roots for their discipline within a major anachronistic scheme. At this propitious time, the establishment of a presentist history, notably by Cuvier in the 1830s, 35

�� For criticisms of the term ‘biology’, see Jardine, pp. 261–2.

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institutionalized an interpretation of historical knowledge of science as a direct function of the positive result obtained. By encouraging a positivistic history, this trend harmed the image of the Enlightenment system of microscopical practices, and eliminated from the narrative almost everything except the outcome. We have already seen above how the historians of microscopy followed a similar course, whereas during the eighteenth century language and practices, not outcomes alone, were essential elements of the scholarly world. Just as the history of ideas could not understand the role of communication, we must now assess the role of social history in understanding the construction of a scientific object. The history of ideas could not survive after a century of anachronistic and idealistic perception of historical material. Yet if intellectual history discussed conceptual categories not deconstructed, much of the concern of social history escaped the construction of scientific objects, to concentrate on scientific manners. In this work, my challenge has been to deal with both aspects, not intellectual or social, but cognitive and communicative. In comparison with intellectual or social histories of science, this work is an attempt to escape from the presentist approach still active in these trends. The problem is not to deny the specificity of a system of practices or a scientific field, but to understand how these categories were constructed, how it was possible to detach them from other human activities and demarcate science as an autonomous activity. Several examples discussed in this work show that sociological models using concepts such as social play of forces, or winner and loser, do not work for the history of microscopical research in a preinstitutionalized context. Indeed, these models deal with short-term impact and not conditions of possibility, a conception that does not allow for addressing the question of the long-term construction of a scientific object. ‘He who has the most, and the most powerful, allies wins’36 cannot serve as an explanation. Winners and losers are anachronistic categories that conceal a moral judgment under the semblance of an explanation, and it is their appropriateness for making the play of actual social and institutionalized forces understandable that explains their persistence in the history of sciences. In particular, they do not explain the preinstitutionalized dynamics of science. Baker was undoubtedly a leader in microscopy in the context of the Royal Society, yet little of his scientific legacy remains, and both his reputation and work were easily dismissed by later historians. On the other hand, it would be giving a misleading impression of Trembley’s conduct to characterize him as a ‘winner’, for he showed no signs of superiority and never used his tremendous status to pull rank on others, not even Baker who plagiarized him. Buffon destroyed Réaumur’s reputation, although the latter had done a great deal of work toward establishing the beginning of European microscopical research. Buffon triumphed in France and was acclaimed by a certain historiographic tradition, yet he attempted, albeit clearly unsuccessfully, to destroy microscopical research. Müller was branded a loser during the nineteenth century and ignored by the whole history 36

�� Shapin and Schaffer, p. 342.

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of microscopy; nevertheless his work was probably the most influential on almost all future microscopical investigations. These men who influenced microscopical research considered the whole before their own personal interests, which enabled them to create and maintain a network and a system of practices, so insulating themselves from the play of social forces. That Linnaeus, and formalized Linnaeism, overran natural sciences, was due less to the number of his allies than to his highlighting the problem of unambiguous communication among scholars and providing a solution that is still considered valid. Winners and losers do not deal with conditions of possibility and heuristic solutions, and do not articulate communication and cognition. But he who addresses communication, considering the whole as a scientific problem, will have a greater impact on allowing the stabilization of further scientific fields. Much of the social history of science has answered issues that emerged from contemporary tensions, and mirror our time, just as intellectual history reflected the time when the positivist credo was viewed as undeniable truth. The approach I have adopted consists mainly of restitutive history, functioning like a translation that tries to catch all the nuances and lines of force of the original story. This ought to be a multidimensional history that diligently seeks out the various intentionalities of actors and their respective weights in order to build an enduring object. The task of restitutive history is to identify and to restore the intentionality of the projects in which the actors of a particular period participated. For restitutive history, the study of social systems, forms of communication, instrumental and institutional practices, laboratory procedures, forms of writing, economic, political, ethical, market and legal practices in science, and conceptual and theoretical constructions, as well as the deconstruction of historiographical categories, are all categories which have the same a priori value, and never exclude each other. They are objects, in fact, for many historical methods and are not a credo to be opposed to another historical school. In the history of science, it is the use of a single and isolated method which turns a scientific enquiry into the defence of an ideology. Frequently, the use of one particular method allows for self-verification of the tacit hypotheses on which it is based. Tacit hypotheses are category-blinders which a researcher wears without being aware of them, and which facilitate the elimination of objects and issues that would not help to verify the tacit hypotheses introduced by the use of the method itself. The goal of restitutive history is the criticism and self-criticism of these epistemological filters, their transformation into explicit hypotheses, their incorporation in a particular method, and their balance with other methods. This is a challenge to be taken up by historians of science. Using such methods allows one to focus progressively on factors relevant to the construction of a scientific object and to provide explanations of the nature of the relationship between communication and cognition. It is equally true that historians of science cannot content themselves with the study of sources. As this work shows, sources are organized into networks of sources, which must be identified and reconstructed. Moreover, the deconstruction of the categories inherited from the previous two centuries is a fundamental step

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that cannot be avoided. Eventually, the main geographical territory where the conditions of possibility for Enlightenment sciences were established was Europe, if not the globe. Historians of science addressing the question of the construction of a scientific object during the Ancien Régime should work on the European context and dismiss nationalist mentalities as one of the abiding and anachronistic ghosts we have inherited from an authoritarian past. Articulating Communication and Cognition Towards the Construction of a Scientific Object Two main factors explain the recognition or neglect by their contemporaries of eighteenth-century authors, and their impact on establishing the invisible as a scientific object: tackling communication as a scientific issue and joining systematics to experimentalism. Identifying only scientific and technical skills does not explain the very diverse impressions these authors achieved. Leeuwenhoek was perhaps more skilled than Müller in microscopical observation, yet he had little impact on the construction of the microscopical object, while new scientific objects such as insects and polyps influenced greatly the market of the microscope. Joblot invented the modern protocol for testing spontaneous generation, but his influence was indirect. Senebier was as skilled in microscopical investigation as he was ignored by his successors. That scholars took communication seriously, and tackled its challenge as a scientific problem, explains much of their impact on the scientific quest for the invisible. Indeed, authors of the first wave of studies on animalcules were overlooked due to their deficiencies in communication; the success of the polyp was largely due to Trembley’s strategy of generosity; whereas Buffon’s authoritarianism forced many French authors to hide themselves behind anonymity. Linnaeus had to change the rules of his written code in order to allow for microscopical animalcules; Müller enabled a community to comprehend a shared object described in the same way. Communication is not an epiphenomenon. The union of the two major traditions of natural sciences – experimentalism and systematics – also revealed itself as a primary factor. The difference between the full significance of the experimental and the microscopical report is obvious when one considers the ‘necessity’ that the microscopical report be complemented by the ‘systematical report’, a literary technology of Latin natural history. When insects supplied the first shared microscopical objects, they were also named and classified. Similarly, Trembley needed the help of the major entomologist of the day, Réaumur, to endow the polyp with a name and a suitable place in nature. Goeze and Müller also used the microscopical report, but with species – not specimens any more – determined systematically. At the core of the crisis of microscopical research was the neglect of the systematical report. Rethinking the history of microscopical research obliges us to shift categories and, notably, to include the role of communication. Many examples analysed above showed how closely microscopical investigation was bound up with the avenues of communication. Indeed, one particular solution that proved itself valuable for

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communication closed the doors to other solutions, and opened the field to progress – to a time when all scholars had access to the same language. The conjunction of the microscopical and systematical reports provided a necessary condition for the emergence of a heuristic discipline using the microscope in natural sciences. We saw Réaumur unifying the microscopical and systematical reports before the 1740s for entomology. Trembley did the same, but shortly afterwards a new dispute promoted the conflicting viewpoint. In the natural sciences, the two traditions of experimental philosophy and Latin natural history each brought particular forms of communication. Their research objects, methods of working and writing, and styles of social sharing of knowledge were different. They represented two types of rationality. Experimentalists used almost no logic for classification and denomination, while a great deal of natural history was defined by this kind of logic. Phenomena are not organisms. Indeed, literary, social and instrumental technologies are dealt with not only in the realm of the laboratory, as appears from the discussion among social historians of science, but are also operated by systematicians, especially in the Latin tradition. The matter of fact, or phenomenon, sought by experimental science and the experimental report discussed by historians are analogous to organism and systematical report in the Latin tradition. Both traditions shared a similar scheme, which enabled others to reproduce an object. Physics, experimental natural sciences and the experimental report primarily repeated procedures and phenomena, while natural history, especially Latin, replicated organisms through the systematical report. As a solution to a communication problem, the convergence of the microscopical and the systematical report in 1773 opened up a space in which heuristic processes could get off the ground. Lack of just one of these factors would weaken their long-term impact. In the eighteenth century, savants used a system of practices involving the microscope that touched many disciplines. This transversal system was not a discipline with a name such as chemistry or botany, nor did it exist during the seventeenth century. How was this system stabilized? Building on the Redian school, Réaumur thrust it forward with his research on minute-scale organisms, and later Trembley established the experimental laboratory as a locus for such a system of practices using the microscope. Trembley’s effect oriented research towards minute aquatic organisms, a direction confirmed by Müller and Spallanzani who definitively linked the microscope to these invisible organisms. It is my contention that it was the articulation of cognitive and communicative dimensions that created the conditions which made possible the transformation of such systems of practices into a scientific field. And then, and only then, political decisions occurred, when a discipline such as systematics was regarded as an object for institutionalization. These conditions existed by 1773 in the northern countries, and indeed, in one of the places where Müller’s ideas were received the society Berlinischen Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde was promptly founded in 1773, and became an international forum for microscopical research. In Nuremberg, Gleichen also tried to forge a society devoted to infusoria research.

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Neglect of the systematics by the major Italian experimentalists hindered them when seeking to institutionalize the field. The whole story of microscopical research in the preinstitutionnalized context contrasts with the story of the institutionalizing of microscopy that started during the 1830s. Badly entangled with politics, scholars of this preinstitutionalized context always dealt with concrete communication. It thus appears that transforming communication into a cognitive issue facilitates long-term goals – indeed the Müllerian solution is still in use – while the political interplay of forces and alliances operates on the short-term level, and dies with the men. There are thus systems of practices interacting with scientific fields already established – for instance, using the microscope for anatomy, agriculture, ‘animal physics’, or botany – and forms of communication rooted in scientific fields, which strongly differ from each other. Addressing communication as a cognitive problem could lead scholars to import solutions already existing in other fields – Müller utilized the Linnaean systematics – or invent new solutions – such as Trembley’s dispatch of living systems, or the Italians with their pragmatic rule. The historical quest for the invisible supposed that a system of practices was set up obeying a social dimension in addition to the cognitive magnification of images. Yet this social dimension was not an epiphenomenon, although it was neglected by historiography. It came to be a constitutive dimension of the scientific activity only when scholars took it into account as a problem within their scientific field. In the course of his activities, when the scholar met a problem that concerned his social and communicative relations with colleagues when dealing with nature rather than nature itself, he regarded it as a problem outside the scientific field. Assimilating these external problems within the scientific field forced these scholars to turn an external issue into an internal problem. It was only after such a transformation, never before, that a scientific field could take off, aiming at a longue durée scheme. That explains why the first wave of research on animalcules was doomed to failure. Very few authors, if any, tackled the question of communication on microscopic beings inside the field of Latin natural history. It was first necessary to recognize that there was a need for the social sharing of knowledge. Wary of any excessive magnification because it could not be exactly reproduced by other scholars, the Italian scholars connected both dimensions and invented the modern criteria for the scientific use of the microscope, allowing for a heuristic development of research. But managing this transformation of a social into a cognitive issue did not predetermine its geographical extent, which depended on its being put into practice by networks working with the same agenda. Assimilating and institutionalizing are contingent activities, but what is not is joining social with cognitive levels as a means to ground a stable community working on a particular object. It has been questioned whether there are factors that distinguish heuristic and stable from social and evanescent knowledge. The answer this book provides is that tackling the communication issue as a social or a scientific problem made the difference, because only the latter answer to the social game could

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transform contingent social practices into controlled scientific communication. Communication was standardized, a normative move that no cognitive scientific skill alone was able to control. Yet heuristic power has two origins, one stemming from cognitive skills – gestures, practices of observation, experimental procedures, matching hypotheses with experiments, research strategies, and so on – and the other emanating from tackling communication as a scientific problem. But neither the cognitive heuristic solution, nor the social contingent solution alone could survive in the long term, as the cases of Leeuwenhoek, Joblot, Baker and Ledermüller demonstrated. Bridging the gap between cognition and communication thus brought stability to their heuristic potentialities. This is why, from the time this solution was adopted for this system of practices, but not institutionalized into a scientific field – between 1680 and 1840 – the true conflict for the quest of the invisible centred on the acceptance or the refusal of articulating communication with cognition. The reward was the stabilization of the system of microscopical practices into a scientific field dealing with the invisible. Réaumur’s studies on insects were designed in spite of the attitude towards investigation of certain seventeenth-century researchers. The greatest impact Buffon had on microscopical research was to impede the establishment of this system of practices through attacks on the Latin framework. Even Spallanzani’s experimental impact was greatly reduced because he had refused to make use of the opportunity that systematics offered to replicate determinations of organisms. Roffredi denounced Fontana’s strategies of communication, and showed how they hindered research. Other conflicts during the 1770s clearly demonstrated the need for unambiguous communication. Evidence showed that the articulation of cognition and communication determined the starting point of scientific microscopical research. It was the conservation or replication of such a framework that directed research to evolve towards a progressive quest for the invisible. Through this quest, the microscopical object, starting with insects and half-visible germs, diminished in size until it reached invisibility, and changed milieu from dry to aquatic, through Trembley’s effect, decreasing gradually to the point of becoming invisible at the level of infusoria. At each ‘step’, the articulation was maintained, and new solutions for communication were found within the same framework. The construction of a scientific microscopical object took place within a framework that blended communication with cognition.

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Prosopographical Index Abbreviations: ADS: fellow of the Académie des sciences; agron: agronomist; amm: noncommercial microscope maker; anat: anatomist; astr: astronomer; bot: botanist; chem: chemist; clerg: clergyman; clockm: clockmaker; di: designer of instruments; dm: designer of microscopes; engin: engineer; FRS: Fellow of the Royal Society; im: commercial instrument maker; imm commercial instrument and microscope maker; lm: lens maker; mech: mechanician; mm: commercial microscope maker; MP: Member of Parliament; nat: naturalist; nh: natural history; oim: maker of optical instruments; opt: optician; phil: philosopher; phys: physician; PRS: President of the Royal Society; trav: traveller; zool: zoologist; –: no information available A.B. [Baeck Abraham? (1713–1795) Swed phys Uppsala], 112n Adams, Archibald (fl 1706–1710) Eng phys, 27, 27n Adams, George Jr (1750–1795) Eng imm di dm London, 81, 99n, 102, 150n, 154n, 160n, 169, 212, 213, 213n Adams, George Sr (1709–1772) Eng imm di dm London, 22, 30, 30n, 31, 77n, 81, 99n, 102, 125n, 129, 129n, 150n, 160n, 169, 192 Adanson, Michel (1727–1806) Fr nat ADS FRS, 115n, 122n, 157n, 161n, 220, 221, 226, 226n, 228, 229, 229n, 233, 233n, 234, 234n, 238, 240 Aepinus, Franz Ulrich (1724–1802) Germ physicist dm di St Petersburg, 199n Albin, Eleazar (fl 1707–1759) Germ painter London, 125n Albinus, Bernhard Siegfried (1697–1770) Germ anat prof Leiden FRS, 16, 108 Alcázar, Father Bartolomé de (1648–1721) Span Jesuit Madrid, 61, 61n Aldrovandi, Ulisse (1522–1605) It phys nat prof Bologna, 55, 57 Allamand, Jean Nicolas Sébastien (1713–1787) Swiss physicist di prof Leiden FRS, 108, 121, 121n, 122n, 131, 131n, 133, 133n, 135, 145 Amici, Giovanni Battista (1786–1863) It imm dm engin bot physicist prof Modena, 212n, 241, 246, 246n, 248

Amontons, Guillaume (1663–1705) Fr physicist im ADS, 34, 52 Andry, Nicolas (1658–1742) Fr phys prof Paris, 54n, 125n, 169, 169n Arderon, William (1703–1767) Eng nat FRS, 161, 161n, 182 Artedi, Peter (1705–1735) Swed phys nat trav, 117, 120 Ayscough, James (fl 1719–c.1762) Eng opt imm London, 77n, 88, 99n, 150n Bacounin, Alexandre de (fl 1791) –, 221 Badcock, Richard (fl 1746) –, 115n, 161n Badier (fl 1775–1790) Fr road surveyor Guadeloupe, 120n, 122n Baglivi, Giorgio (1668–1707) It phys prof Rome FRS, 25, 25n, 46, 47, 48, 48n, 49n Baillou, François de (d 1774) It opt oim mm Milan, 26, 89, 94n Baker, Henry (1698–1774) Eng writer nat dm London FRS, 9, 34, 77, 77n, 78, 78n, 80, 80n, 81, 108, 109, 110, 110n, 121, 121n, 129, 129n, 130, 130n, 133, 141, 141n, 142, 143, 143n, 154n, 158n, 160, 160n, 161, 161n, 162, 162n, 166, 167, 167n, 168, 177, 179, 180, 180n, 181, 181n, 182, 182n, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192n, 194, 209, 219, 233, 254, 258, 263

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Balthasar, Theodor (fl 1701–1740) Germ imm dm prof Erlangen, 24, 168, 168n Banks, Joseph (1743–1820) Eng patron nat di trav London PRS, 4, 199n Barba, Antonio (1751–1827) It physicist amm prof Naples, 96, 96n, 160n, 166, 166n Barker, Robert (d 1745) Eng dm London FRS, 28, 29, 29n, 30, 30n Bassi, Laura (1711–1778) It physicist prof Bologna, 95 Baster, Job (1711–1775) Dutch phys nat FRS, 117n, 120, 120n, 121, 153n, 191, 194 Bauhin, Caspar (1569–1624) Swiss phys bot prof Basel, 55, 180, 180n Baumann, Johann Christian (1711–1782) Germ opt imm Stuttgart Göttingen, 89n, 99n Bazin, Gilles Augustin (1681–1754) Fr nat ADS Strasbourg, 139, 149n Bazzanti, Isidoro Gasparo (fl 1760) It mm Arezzo?, 94n Beccaria, Giambattista (1716–1781) It physicist prof Turin FRS, 95, 95n, 139, 141, 141n, 146, 221 Beckmann, Johan (1739–1811) Germ physicist prof Göttingen, 199n Belletti, Paolo (fl 1680s) It opt oim Bologna, 25n Bellini, Lorenzo (1643–1704) It phys prof anat Pisa, 18n, 46, 48, 49, 49n Benincasa, Angelico [Bartolomeo] (fl 1766–post 1804) It clerg physicist mech amm Modena, 94n, 95n Bentinck, Count Charles John (1708–1799) Eng patron politician Low Countries, 108 Bentinck, Count William (1704–1774) Eng patron politician Low Countries FRS, 108, 109, 146n Béraud, Jean-Jacques (1753–1794) Fr clerg prof math Marseille, 20n, 228 Bergman, Torbern Olof (1735–1784) Swed chem prof Uppsala, 166, 166n

Berkeley, George (1685–1753) Ir clerg phil Dublin FRS, 151 Beseke, Johann Melchior Gottlieb (1746–1802) Germ lawyer prof Mitau, 200, 228 Bewly (fl 1775) Eng bot, 235, 236 Bianchi, Giovanni Battista (1681–1761) It anat prof Turin ADS, 26n Bianchini, Francesco (1662–1729) It clerg astr im di ADS, 95 Bichat, Xavier (1771–1802) Fr phys anat Paris, 240, 249n Bidloo, Govard (1649–1713) Dutch anat prof Leiden ADS FRS, 46 Bignon, Jean-Paul (1662–1743) Fr clerg ADS FRS, 106 Bion, Nicolas (1652–1733) Fr imm di Paris, 19, 19n, 20, 20n, 21, 22, 24 Birch, Thomas (1706–1761) Eng theologian historian FRS, 14n Bird, John (1709–1776) Eng imm di London, 171 Bischoff, Johann Georg (1735–?) Germ mech imm dm di Nuremberg, 99n Bjerkander, Clas (1735–1795) Swed clerg entomologist, 153n Blavet (fl 1770) Fr opt Paris, 92n Bloch, Marcus Elieser (1723–1799) Germ phys zool Berlin, 167n, 199, 217, 222, 228 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich (1752–1840) Germ phys prof Göttingen ADS FRS, 83n, 112, 113n, 119, 212, 222 Boccone, Paolo (1633–1704) It Cistercian nat trav Florence, 106, 120 Bochaute, Karel van (1732–1793) Belg chem prof Louvain, 221 Boerhaave, Herman (1668–1738) Dutch phys prof Leiden FRS ADS, 16, 46, 46n, 105, 105n Bohadsch, Johann Baptist (1724–1772) Czech phys zool prof Prague FRS, 120n, 122, 122n, 123 Bolten, Joachim Friedrich (1718–1796) Germ phys Hamburg, 120n, 199n, Bomme, Leendert (1727–1788) Dutch painter, 200

Prosopographical Index Bon, Francois Xavier (1678–1771) Fr administrator nat Montpellier FRS, 120 Bonnet, Charles (1720–1793) Geneva lawyer nat FRS ADS, 16n, 28, 28n, 60, 60n, 69, 69n, 70, 72, 72n, 87, 88, 88n, 106, 108, 109n, 113, 114, 114n, 118, 118n, 119n, 121, 122n, 123, 123n, 130, 130n, 132, 132n, 133, 134, 134n, 135, 136, 139, 160n, 196, 196n, 199, 199n, 200, 218, 218n, 219, 219n, 220, 220n, 221, 221n, 225, 225n, 227, 227n, 228n, 229, 230, 233, 233n, 234, 236, 241 Bono, Bernardino (fl 1686–1713) It phys amm Brescia, 26n, 99n Bonomo, Giovanni Cosimo (1663–1696) It phys trav, 25, 25n, 47, 69, 69n, 129 Borel, Pierre (c.1620–1689) Fr phys imm Paris, 81, 209 Bory de Saint-Vincent, Jean-Baptiste (1778–1846) Fr milit nat ADS, 188, 188n, 211n, 215, 233n, 246, 246n, 247, 247n Bosc d’Antic, Louis Augustin (1759–1828) Fr nat ADS, 212n, 246, 246n Boscovich, Ruggero (1711–1787) Croat Jesuit math prof Rome Pavia FRS ADS, 94, 94n, 169 Bougeant, Guillaume-Hyacinthe (1690–1743) Fr Jesuit writer, 63 Boulogne le jeune (fl 1770) Fr opt oim mm Paris, 92, 92n Bourguet, Louis (1678–1742) Fr math prof Neuchâtel, 26n, 50, 50n, 55n, 62, 62n, 72, 72n, 118, 118n, 125, 125n Boyle, Robert (1627–1691) Irish physicist di FRS, 13, 14n, 46 Bradley, Richard (1688–1732) Eng bot prof Cambridge FRS, 14, 14n, 28, 30n, 53, 125, 229n Brady, Thomas (fl 1756) phys Brussel, 194 Brander, Georg Friedrich (1713–1783) Germ mech imm di Augsburg, 24, 88, 89, 89n, 99n, 100n, 150n, 172, 172n, 175

295

Breithaupt, Johann Christian (1738–1800) Germ mech imm di Kassel, 89n Brewster, Sir David (1781–1868) Scott math imm di FRS ADS, 248n Breyn, Johann Philipp (1680–1764) Dutch phys nat Danzig FRS, 9, 53, 65, 67, 67n, 68, 69, 69n, 70, 72 Brinkman, J.G. (18th cent.) Germ �� imm Bremen, 89n Brisseau de Mirbel, Charles-François (1776–1854) Fr bot Paris ADS, 233n, 240, 248, 248n Brisson, Mathurin-Jacques (1723–1806) Fr physicist prof Paris FRS ADS, 139, 150, 160n Broussonet, Pierre Marie (1761–1807) Fr phys zool FRS ADS, 120n, 122n Bruguière, Jean-Guillaume (1750–1798) Fr zool trav, 211, 212, 212n, 240, 240n, 246, 246n Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc Count de (1707–1788) Fr writer nat Paris FRS ADS, 9, 10, 81, 83, 107, 108n, 123, 129, 130, 130n, 131, 132, 132n, 133, 133n, 134, 136, 136n, 137, 137n, 138, 139, 139n, 140, 140n, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 156, 160, 162, 162n, 163, 163n, 185, 185n, 190n, 197, 198, 207, 221, 227, 227n, 240, 254, 258, 260, 263 Bulliard, Pierre (1742–1793) Fr bot Paris, 222, 240 Buonanni, Filippo (1638–1725) It Jesuit physicist amm dm Rome, 25, 45, 48, 48n, 49, 49n, 57, 78, 81, 94, 126, 138, 145, 151n, 192n, 209 Burlini, Biagio (1709–1771) It opt oim mm Venice, 94n, 150n Burman, Nikolaas Laurens (1737–1793) Dutch phys bot prof Amsterdam, 120 Burucker, Wilhelm (1728–1801) Germ mech opt imm Nuremberg, 88n, 89n, 100n, 150n Butterfield, Michael (c.1635–1724) Eng imm Paris, 19, 19n, 47

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Buttner, Christoph Gottlieb (1708–1776) Germ phys prof Königsberg, 231, 239 C. (fl 1703) –, 52, 52n C.H. (fl 1703) –, 30n, 52, 52n, 125, 125n, 158, 158n, 160n, 228n Cahuet (fl 1770) Fr opt Paris, 92n Caldani, Marco Antonio Leopoldo (1725–1813) It anat prof Padua FRS, 199 Campani, Giuseppe (1635–1715) It optician oim mm dm di Rome, 14, 25, 46, 95, 99n Campani, Matteo (fl 1656–1678) It clerg clockm imm di Rome, 94 Campe [Kampe], Franz Leberecht (1712–1785) Germ mech oim mm Göttingen, 89n, 99n Campi, Carlo Giuseppe (1732–1799) It clerg physicist Milan, 95n Candolle, Augustin Pyramus de (1778–1841) Geneva phys bot prof FRS ADS, 212n, 238, 238n, 239, 239n, 240, 241 Carminati, Bassiano (1750–1830) It clerg phys prof Pavia, 241 Carochez, Nöel Simon (c.1745–1813) Fr opt oim im di Paris, 93 Caron, Veuve (fl 1770) Fr opt Paris, 92n Carpenter, William Benjamin (1813–1885) Eng phys microscopist prof London FRS, 250n Carré, Louis (1663–1711) Fr math di ADS, 42, 44, 45, 45n, 46, 47, 53 Cassini, Gian Domenico (1625–1712) It astr di prof Bologna Paris FRS ADS, 46 Catesby, Mark (1683–1749) Eng painter nat trav FRS, 150 Cauchoix, Robert Aglae (1776–1845) Fr imm di Paris, 93 Cavolini, Filippo (1756–1810) It zool amm prof nh Naples, 96, 115n, 120, 120n, 122n, 166, 166n, 221, 228, 241 Cellio, Marc’Antonio (fl 1679–1687) It imm Rome, 25, 95 Cestoni, Diacinto (1637–1718) It apothecary nat Livorno, 25, 25n,

26n, 40n, 44, 47, 48, 48n, 49, 57, 57n, 59, 60, 60n, 62, 62n, 67, 69, 69n, 238 Chapotot, Jean (fl 1700–1721) Fr imm Paris, 19, 19n Chapotot, Louis (fl 1670–1686) Fr imm Paris, 19, 19n Charles, Jacques Alexandre César (1746–1823) Fr physicist imm di prof Paris ADS, 93 Chaulnes, Michel Ferdinand d’Albert d’Ailly, Duc de (1714–1769) Fr physicist engin di ADS, 92, 169, 171, 171n, 174, 174n Chemnitz, Johann Hieronymus (1730–1800) Dane clerg conchologist Copenhagen, 199n Chérubin d’Orléans [François Lasséré] (1613–1697) Fr Capuchin physicist imm dm, 15 Chevalier, Jacques Louis Vincent (1771–1841) Fr opt imm dm Paris, 248, 248n Chevalier, Louis Vincent (c.1740–c.1800) Fr opt imm Paris, 92 Chiarello, Andrea (fl 1696–1713) It clerg opt oim Rome, 94 Chiquet, Jean-Baptiste (1722– c.1794) Fr opt imm Paris, 89 Choppin (fl 1749) Fr mm ?, 92n Choquart (fl 1770) Fr opt Paris, 92n Ciampini, Giovanni Giustino (Carlo di Napoli) (1633–1698) It lawyer clerg lm dm historian Rome, 14, 25, 94 Cirillo, Domenico (1739–1799) It phys bot prof Naples FRS, 96, 241 Claparède, Edouard (1832–1871) Geneva phys protozoologist prof FRS, 246n, 249n, 251, 251n Clark, John (fl 1749–1796) Scott goldsmith mm dm Edinburgh, 92, 99n, 143 Clemens, Johann Friedrich Rudolph (1749–1831) Pol engraver ?, 83n Clemens XIV, Pope (Giovanni Ganganelli) (1705–1774) It clerg Rome, 146 Cloquet, Hippolyte (1787–1840) Fr phys Paris, 240n

Prosopographical Index Cocchi, Antonio (1695–1758) It phys prof Florence FRS, 26n Cole, Benjamin Sr (1695–1766) Eng imm di London, 19 Collombat, Jacques (c.1668–1744) Fr printer Paris, 45n Colomb (fl 1791) Fr clerg Lyon, 222 Colombo, Michele (1747–1838) It clerg nat writer Treviso Parma, 95n, 157n, 166, 166n, 172, 172n, 212n, 213n, 221, 228, 234, 234n, 241 Conradi, Johann Michael (fl 1710–post 1742) Germ physicist mm dm prof Coburg, 24 Conti, Antonio (1677–1749) It clerg math Padova FRS, 46 Conti, Giovan Stefano (1720–1791) It opt oim Lucca, 94 Corti, Bonaventura (1729–1813) It clerg physicist Reggio, 95n, 115n, 157n, 197, 197n, 200, 207, 207n, 220, 221, 226, 226n, 229n, 232, 232n, 233, 233n, 234, 234n, 238, 241, 246 Cotte, Louis (1740–1815) Fr Oratorian physicist Paris, 212 Coveri, Stefano (fl 1684) It opt oim Livorno, 25n Cowper, William (1666–1709) Eng surgeon anat London ADS FRS, 30n, 53, 228n Cramer, Gabriel (1704–1752) Geneva math prof, 88n Cuff, John (1708–1772) Eng opt oim mm dm London, 31, 77, 77n, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 88, 88n, 99n, 108, 115, 122, 122n, 129, 129n, 150n, 161n, 162, 168, 169, 187, 231 Culpeper, Edmund (1666–1738) Eng imm dm London, 18, 19, 19n, 28, 99n, 232 Cuno, Cosmus Conrad (1652–1745) Germ goldsmith oim mm Augsburg, 24, 70, 70n, 192n Cuvier, Georges (1769–1832) Fr zool prof anat Paris ADS FRS, 188n, 190, 211, 211n, 212n, 241, 243, 246, 246n, 249, 257

297

d’Alembert, Jean le Rond (1717–1783) Fr math writer ADS FRS Paris, 58n, 93, 133, 154n, 186, 186n Dana, Giovanni Pietro Maria (1736–1801) It phys zool Turin, 120n Dathée, Alexandre (fl 1770) Fr opt Paris, 92n Dathée, Jean (fl 1770) Fr opt Paris, 92n Daubenton, Louis Jean-Marie (1716–1800) Fr phys anat Paris ADS FRS, 60n Degola, Antonio (fl 1680–1710) It im Rome Genova, 25n Deijl, Harmanus van (1738–1809) Dutch oim mm dm Amsterdam, 15 Deijl, Jan van (1715–1801) Dutch oim mm dm Amsterdam, 15 Delius, Heinrich Friedrich (1720–1791) Germ phys bot prof Erlangen, 83n, 99n, 185, 185n, 199 Della Torre, Giovanni Maria (1712–1782) It Somascan physicist amm dm Naples, 27, 27n, 83n, 94n, 95, 96, 96n, 99n, 115n, 133, 133n, 138, 138n, 150n, 154n, 160n, 161n, 166, 166n, 167, 241 Delle Chiaje, Stefano (1794–1860) It phys zool Naples, 212n Dellebarre, Louis-François (1726–1805) Fr mm dm Leide Paris, 92, 92n, 93, 99n, 167n, 169, 172 Depiere, Daniel (d 1682) Danzig opt oim mm Augsburg, 24 Derham, William (1657–1735) Eng clerg nat FRS, 30n, 53, 125, 125n, 140n, 229n Deslandes, André-François Boureau (1690–1757) Fr physicist navy commissioner ADS, 52, 53 Deslongchamps, Jacques Amand Eudes(1794–1867) Fr surgeon nat prof Caen, 246n Desmars, J.T. (d 1767) Fr phys Boulogne, 234, 234n, 235, 235n Dicquemare, Jacques-François (1733–1789) Fr clerg nat prof le Havre, 119, 120n, 122n, 123, 123n Diderot, Denis (1713–1784) Fr writer phil Paris, 58n, 108, 108n, 135, 140

298

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Dillen, Johann Jakob (1684–1747) Germ bot prof Oxford, 233, 233n, 234n Dillwyn, Lewis Weston (1778–1855) Eng nat London MP FRS, 212n Divini, Eustachio (1610–1685) It imm dm Rome, 13, 14, 25, 25n, 79, 95 Dollond, John (1706–1761) Eng opt imm di London FRS, 77n, 88, 98, 99n, 150n, 167n, 169 Donati, Vitaliano (1717–1762) It phys zool prof Turin FRS, 118, 120, 120n, 122, 122n Donné, Alfred (1801–1878) Fr phys bacteriologist prof Paris, 250 Doppelmayr, Johann Gabriel (1677–1750) Germ math prof Nuremberg FRS, 24 Dortous de Mairan, Jean-Jacques (1678–1771) Fr math physicist ADS Paris, 107n, 118n du Moutier, Mlle (d 1749) Fr drawer Paris, 150 Duchesne, Henri-Gabriel (1739–1822) Fr polygraph Paris, 93n, 171n, 172n, 174n Duhamel du Monceau, Henri-Louis (1700–1782) Fr agron bot Paris ADS FRS, 20n, 30, 30n, 50n, 51, 51n, 52, 114n, 131, 173n Dujardin, Félix (1801–1860) Fr protozoologist prof Rennes, 246, 246n, 247, 247n, 248, 248n, 249, 250, 250n Dumas, Jean-Baptiste (1800–1884) Fr chem deputy prof Paris ADS FRS, 246, 246n, 255 Dumotiez, Louis-Joseph (1757–c.1820) Fr engin imm Paris, 93 Dumotiez, Pierre-François (fl 1780–1787) Fr engin imm Paris, 93 Duncker, Johann Heinrich (1767–1843) Germ clerg oim mm Rathenow, 89n Dutrochet, Henri (1776–1847) Fr phys biologist ADS, 246, 246n, 250, 255 Duverney, Joseph-Guichard (1648–1730) Fr phys prof anat Paris ADS, 46, 48n, 49, 49n

Edwards, George (1694–1773) Eng painter nat trav London FRS, 150, 194 Ehrenberg, Christian Gottfried (1795–1876) Germ phys protozoologist prof Berlin ADS FRS, 215, 246, 246n, 247, 247n, 249, 249n, 250, 251, 255 Ehrenberger, Boniface Henri (1681–1759) Germ math prof Coburg, 161, 161n Eichhorn, Johann Conrad (1718–1790) Danzig clerg nat, 34, 200, 200n, 201, 202, 202n, 207 Ellis, John (1714–1776) Irish merchant zool dm London FRS, 60n, 82, 83, 83n, 88, 88n, 99n, 111, 111n, 115n, 119, 120, 120n, 121, 121n, 122, 122n, 123, 133, 180, 183, 183n, 194, 197, 197n, 218, 219, 219n, 220, 220n, 228n, 231, 232, 232n Erxleben, Johann Christian Polykarp (1744–1777) Germ phys nat prof Göttingen, 199n, 212 Esper, Eugen Johann Christoph (1742–1810) Germ painter prof nh Erlangen, 150, 166n Etang, Charles François de L’ (c.1722–post 1793) Fr opt oim Paris, 92n Euler, Leonhard (1707–1783) Swiss math di dm prof St Petersburg ADS FRS, 102 Fabri, Honoré (1607–1688) Fr Jesuit math di Rome, 14 Falchi, Pietro Antonio (fl 1719) It amm Turin, 26n, 99n Fatio de Duillier, Nicolas (1664–1753) Geneva astr im di London FRS, 173 Fedele, Frà (d 1790) It Capuchin imm Modena, 95 Ferguson, James (1710–1776) Eng astr London FRS, 160n Ferrein, Antoine (1693–1769) Fr anat Montpellier Paris ADS, 136, 136n Fichtel, Leopold von (1770–1810) Romanian nat conchologist trav Vienna, 120n, 153n

Prosopographical Index Firmian, Count Carlo (1718–1782) Austr patron state minister Lombardy, 95, 95n Fleck, Franciscus (fl 1843) Dutch protozoologist ?, 250 Folkes, Martin (1690–1754) Eng math di London PRS, 27, 27n, 28, 28n, 65, 77, 77n, 103, 107, 108, 108n, 109, 109n, 110, 110n, 115, 116, 116n, 120, 120n, 121, 121n, 129, 130, 130n, 133, 168, 181 Fontana, Felice (1730–1805) It physicist Florence, 95n, 113, 113n, 115n, 139, 141, 141n, 157n, 166n, 171, 200, 221, 225, 225n, 226, 226n, 227, 228, 229, 233, 233n, 234, 236, 240, 241, 242, 243, 263 Fontana, Francesco (c.1585–1656) It lawyer astr oim dm Naples, 14, 25n, 95 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de (1657–1757) Fr math writer ADS Paris, 42, 43n, 46, 46n, 47, 48, 49, 50, 50n, 51, 51n, 52, 53, 54, 54n, 55, 59n, 61n, 132, 157n 160n, 253 Fonzonole, Roux? Fr mm ?, 92n Fortin, Nicolas (1750–1831) Fr mech im di Paris, 92, 171 Fortis, Alberto (1741–1803) It clerg nat trav FRS, 95n, 120n Fougt, Henric (1720–1782) Swed nat, 120 Francesco da Fiorano, Frà (fl 1728–1743) It monk amm Emilia, 94n François, Gilbert (fl 1710s) Fr mm Paris, 19 Fraunhofer, Joseph von (1787–1846) Germ engin imm di Benediktbeurn, 100n, 173n, 248 Frisch, Johann Leonhard (1666–1743) Germ nat Berlin, 55n, 57, 70 Fromond, Giovanni Francesco (d 1785) It clerg a?mm Cremona, 94n Fuss, Nicolaus (1755–1826) Swiss math mm dm St Petersburg, 160n Gaertner, Joseph (1732–1791) Germ phys prof bot Tübingen FRS, 120n, 222, 238

299

Galilei, Galileo (1564–1642) It physicist astr di prof Pisa Padua, 250 Galland, Petrus (fl 1691) imm Rome Venice, 25 Gallon (fl 1680) Fr opt Paris, 15, 15n Gallon, Jean-Gaffin (1706–1775) Fr engin Paris, 19 Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655) Fr clerg math prof phil Paris, 40n, 42 Gatellier, Nicolas (fl 1690–1708) Fr imm Paris, 19 Gaub, Hieronymus David (1705–1780) Germ phys prof Leiden, 16, 108 Geer, Baron Carl de (1720–1778) Swed entomologist Stockholm, 59n, 112, 132, 132n, 139, 140, 140n, 149n, 150, 155, 155n, 189, 194 Geißler, Johann Gottlieb (1753–post 1803) Germ engin writer imm Zittau, 89n, 171 Geoffroy, Claude Joseph (1685–1752) Fr apothecary ADS, 50, 50n, 51, 51n, 52, 53, 61n, 62, 62n, 63, 67, 70, 70n, 72, 173n Geoffroy, Etienne-François (1672–1731) Fr phys prof Paris ADS, 46, 46n, 50n, 53, 62n Geoffroy, Mathieu François (1644–1708) Fr apothecary Paris, 46 Georges [George], Etienne François (d 1774) Fr opt imm Paris, 83, 89, 92, 92n, 99n, 161, 161n Germon, Barthélemy (1663–1718) Fr Jesuit publicist Orléans, 45 Gesner, Conrad (1516–1565) Swiss phys prof bot Zurich, 55 Gesner, Johann (1728–1777) Swiss phys prof Zurich, 163, 163n Gilardi, Giuseppe (c.1755) It mm? Milan, 94n Ginanni, Count Francesco (1716–1766) It nat Ravenna, 26, 26n, 112n, 113, 113n, 115n, 122n, 227 Girod-Chantrans, Justin (1750–1841) Fr milit nat deputy Besançon, 167, 167n, 212n, 237, 238, 238n, 239, 239n, 240 Gleditsch, Johann, Gottlieb (1714–1786) Germ phys bot prof Berlin, 199

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Gleichen-Russworm, Wilhelm Friedrich von (1717–1783) Germ nat dm Nuremberg, 85, 88, 99n, 114, 114n, 115n, 134n, 150, 150n, 163, 163n, 165, 185, 185n, 198n, 200, 200n, 209, 220n, 222, 222n, 228, 228n, 232, 232n, 241, 249, 250n, 261 Gmelin, Johann Friedrich (1748–1804) Germ phys prof Göttingen, 212, 246, 246n Goedart, Jan (1620–1668) Dutch painter nat Middelburg, 16, 125 Goeze, Johann August Ephraim (1731–1793) Germ zool Quedlinburg, 100n, 102n, 155n, 166n, 167, 167n, 199, 199n, 200, 202, 207, 220, 222, 229, 229n, 234, 241, 260 Gonichon, Jean-Baptiste-Charles (fl 1733–1791) Fr opt oim di Paris, 92n Gori, Anton Francesco (1691–1757) It clerg historian prof Florence FRS, 119n Gozzi, Angelo (fl 1770) It a?mm Parma, 94n Graaf, Reinier de (1641–1673) Dutch phys anat Delft, 46 Grandjean de Fouchy, Jean-Paul (1707–1788) Fr astr di ADS FRS, 137, 168 Greenlease (fl 1753) –, 182 Griendel von Ach, Johann Franz (1631–1687) Germ optician imm dm engin Nuremberg Vienna, 24, 81, 156, 192n Griselini, Francesco (1717–1783) It publicist nat Venice, 95n, 120n, 123, 241 Gronovius, Jan Frederik (1686–1762) Dutch bot Leiden, 107n, 108n, 109, 109n, 132, 194 Guanzati, Father Luigi (1757–1836) It Barnabite nat Lodi, 200, 212n, 213n, 221, 234, 234n, 241 Guericke, Otto von (1602–1682) Germ engin physicist mayor Magdeburg, 46

Guettard, Jean-Etienne (1715–1786) Fr phys bot geologist ADS, 112n, 113, 113n, 118, 120, 120n, 121, 150, 173 Guevara, Frà Giovanni Maria (fl 1740–1776) It Somascan amm dm Naples, 94n, 95, 96, 99n Guidi, Leto (1711–1777) It monk oim mm Valleombrosa, 94n Guisnée, N (d 1718) Fr engin prof math Paris ADS, 53, 159 Guyton de Morveau, Louis-Bernard (1737–1816) Fr lawyer chem di Paris ADS, 242 Hacquet, Balthasar (fl 1776) Fr phys nat trav Austria, 166n Haller, Albrecht von (1708–1777) Swiss phys prof Göttingen Bern ADS FRS, 28, 28n, 115n, 142, 142n, 183n, 218, 218n Hamberger, Georg Erhard (1697–1755) Germ math prof physics Jena, 160n Hanow, Michael Christoph (1695–1773) prof physics Danzig, 158, 158n, 159, 159n, 171, 171n Hardy (fl 1795) mm Köln, 89n Harmer (fl 1753) –, 182 Harris, John (c.1666–1719) Eng clerg math writer London, 192n Harris, Joseph (1702–1764) Eng imm London, 81, 81n Harting, Pieter (1812–1885) Dutch protozoologist prof Utrecht, 24n, 88n, 96n, 250, 250n Hartsoeker, Nicolaas (1656–1725) Dutch physicist imm dm Amsterdam prof Düsseldorf ADS, 14, 30, 30n, 34, 42, 54n Harvey, William (1578–1657) Eng phys prof anat London Oxford, 250 Häseler, Johann Friedrich (1732–1797) Germ clerg math imm Hamelungsborn, 150n Haupois, Jean (fl 1785–1795) Fr engin im Paris, 169 Haussard, Jean-Baptiste (1680?–1749) Fr engraver Paris, 150

Prosopographical Index Hautefeuille, Jean de (1647–1724) Fr engin imm di Rouen FRS, 15, 157n, 168, 169, 169n, 171, 172n, 173, 173n, 175, 175n Hedwig, Johann (1730–1799) Germ phys dm prof bot Leipzig FRS, 167, 167n, 199n, 222, 228, 233n, 238, 238n, 241 Heister, Lorenz (1683–1758) Germ phys bot prof Altdorf, 61, 61n Herbst, Johann F Wilhelm (1743–1807) Germ theologian zool Berlin, 120n, 199, 212 Hérissant, François David (1714–1773) Fr phys Paris ADS, 119, 120n Hermann, Jean? (1738–1800) Fr phys nat prof Strasbourg, 207, 222 Hertel, Christian Gottlieb (1683–1743) Germ math imm dm prof Liegnitz, 14, 24, 168 Hewson, William (1739–1774) Eng phys nat prof London, 115n, 199, 240, 241 Hill, John (1714–1775) Eng apothecary nat di London, 39n, 58n, 115n, 120n, 121, 121n, 133, 139, 141, 141n, 142, 142n, 144, 145, 146, 156, 177, 177n, 178, 179, 179n, 180, 180n, 181, 181n, 182, 182n, 183, 183n, 188n, 189, 191, 192n, 196, 198, 198n, 202, 209, 229, 229n, 240, 254, 255 Hofman, Samuel Gottlieb (c.1726–1801) Germ mech oim mm dm Leipzig, 89n, 92, 92n, 99n, 100n, 167n Hollmann, Samuel Christian (1696–1787) Germ physicist prof Göttingen FRS, 162, 169, 169n Homberg, Guillaume (1652–1715) Germ phys chem lm dm Paris ADS, 13n, 14, 46, 49 Home, Sir Everard (1756–1832) Eng phys di London FRS ADS, 212n Hooke, Robert (1635–1703) Eng physicist di prof London FRS, 48, 79, 81, 81n, 149n, 156, 192n, 209, 252 Horch, Friedrich Wilhelm (fl 1740) –, 161, 161n

301

Höschel, Christoph Caspar (1744–1820) Germ mech imm di Augsburg, 24, 89 Hubin (fl 1673–1703) Eng enameller imm Paris, 14, 14n, 19 Huette [Huet], Louis (1756–1805) Fr imm Nantes, 93 Hume, David (1711–1776) Scott phil Edinburgh, 135 Hunter, John (1728–1793) Scott surgeon prof anat London FRS, 115n, 199 Huygens, Christiaan (1629–1695) Dutch lawyer math engin oim di dm FRS ADS Paris, 13n, 14, 14n, 15n, 19, 19n, 30, 34, 34n, 40, 41, 42, 42n, 43, 44, 45, 79, 79n, 168n, 207 Huygens, Constantijn (1628–1697) Dutch oim lm astr state secr The Hague, 13n, 79, 79n Huysen, Jacob (fl 1739–1792) Dutch imm Utrecht, 88 Ingenhousz, Jan (1730–1799) Eng phys di London Vienna FRS, 222, 229, 229n, 236, 236n, 238n, 239 Jackson, Joseph (d 1770) Eng imm London, 30 Jacobi (fl 1765) mm, 83 Jallabert, Jean (1712–1768) Geneva prof physics di FRS, 20, 20n, 88, 133n Jaubert, Pierre (1715–1780) Fr clerg writer Bordeaux, 92n Jaucourt, Louis Chevalier de (1704–1779) Fr phys writer Paris FRS, 58n, 160n, 174, 175n Jecker, François-Antoine (1765–1834) Fr imm di Paris, 93, 171 Joblot, Louis (1645–1723) Fr amm dm prof geometry Paris, 6, 9, 14, 15, 19, 19n, 20n, 22, 30, 30n, 33, 33n, 34, 34n, 35, 36, 36n, 37, 37n, 38, 39, 39n, 40, 40n, 41, 41n, 42, 42n, 43, 44, 45, 45n, 46, 47, 54, 54n, 55, 56, 57, 67, 81, 83, 99n, 110, 129, 130, 141, 141n, 142, 154, 173, 173n, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184, 188, 190, 192n, 199, 200, 207, 209, 212, 229n, 252, 253, 255, 257, 260, 263

302

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John, Johann Wilhelm (fl 1778) –, 145, 145n Junker, Friedrich August (fl 1791) Germ clerg mm dm Magdeburg Rathenow, 89n, 100n, 150n Jurin, James (1684–1750) Eng phys London FRS, 28, 52, 53, 154n, 158 Jurine, Louis (1751–1819) Geneva surgeon nat prof, 212n, 241 Jussieu, Antoine-Laurent de (1748–1836) Fr phys prof bot ADS FRS Paris, 243 Jussieu, Bernard de (1699–1777) Fr phys prof bot ADS FRS Paris, 51, 53, 107, 118, 118n, 119, 120, 121, 122, 157n, 173n Kähler, Mårten (1727–1773) Swed phys Karlskrona, 112 Karl I, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (1654–1730), 79 Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf (1719–1800) Germ math prof Göttingen, 100n, 157, 157n King, Edmond (1629–1709) Eng phys FRS, 36 Kircher, Athanasius (1602–1680) Germ Jesuit polymath Rome, 45, 94, 126, 127 Klein, Jacob Theodor (1685–1759) Germ nat Danzig FRS, 117, 119, 120, 162, 162n, 186, 186n Kluegel, Georg Simon (1739–1812) Germ math prof Halle, 154n Koch, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm (1759–1831) Germ clerg nat Magdeburg, 212n Koch, Robert (1843–1910) Germ bacteriologist prof Berlin ADS FRS, 252 Köhler, Johann Gottfried (1745–1801) Germ math aim di astr Dresde, 199, 199n, 222 Kremer [Cremer, J.D.] �(c.1763–?) Germ imm Köln, 89n La Hire, Gabriel Philippe de (1677–1719) Fr math ADS Paris, 30, 30n, 53

La Hire, Philippe de (1640–1718) Fr math engin im di ADS Paris, 30, 30n, 46, 47, 52, 53, 59, 60, 61, 61n, 67, 125, 156, 169 La Métherie, Jean-Claude de (1743–1817) Fr phys prof nh Paris, 221, 222n, 232, 232n, 240, 240n La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709–1751) Fr phys phil Paris Berlin, 108, 108n, 129 Lachmann, Carl Friedrich Johann (1832–1860) Germ protozoologist Brunswick, 246n, 249n, 250n, 251, 251n Lalande, Joseph-Jérôme (1732–1807) Fr math astr ADS, 97 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste (1744–1829) Fr bot prof zool Paris ADS, 198, 198n, 211, 211n, 212, 212n, 213, 222, 240, 240n, 246, 246n, 247, 247n Lambert, Johann Heinrich (1728–1777) Swiss math phil Berlin, 172, 172n Lamouroux, Jean Vincent-Félix (1779–1825) Fr zool prof nh Caen, 240, 246, 246n, 247n, Lamy, François (1636–1711) Fr Benedictine theologian, 14n, 15, 15n, 30, 30n, 45n, 105n, 228n Lana Terzi, Francesco (1631–1687) It Jesuit oim dm di prof physics Terni Brescia, 94 Lancisi, Giovanni Maria (1654–1720) It phys prof Rome FRS, 26n, 47, 49, 49n, 127 Landi, Ubertino, Marquis (1687–1760) It milit publicist Piacenza, 49 Lange de la Maltière, François-Joseph (1730–post 1789) Fr milit physicist dm di Rouen, 92, 92n Langlois, Jean (fl 1700–1727) Fr imm Paris, 19, 19n Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent (1743–1794) Fr lawyer chem di ADS FRS Paris, 145, 235, 242 Le Canu, Michel (c.1721–1792) Fr opt mm Rouen, 89 Le Cat, Claude-Nicolas (1700–1768) Fr surgeon prof Rouen FRS, 164

Prosopographical Index Le Mariée (fl 18th cent.) mm Strasbourg, 15 Le Masson Le Golft, Marie (1749–1826) Fr teacher drawer nat Rouen, 122n Lebas, Philippe Claude (1637?–1677) Fr opt imm Paris, 14, 14n, 15, 99n, 169 Lebas, widow (fl 1679) Fr oim mm Paris, 14, 15, 15n, 19n, Ledermüller, Martin Frobenius (1719–1769) Germ lawyer nat dm Nuremberg, 60, 60n, 65, 65n, 66, 81, 83n, 85, 88n, 119, 150, 158n, 159n, 163, 163n, 175, 184, 185, 185n, 186, 186n, 187, 187n, 188, 188n, 191, 192, 192n, 194, 197n, 199, 209, 228, 241, 255, 263 Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van (1632–1723) Dutch clothier nat amm Delft FRS, 9, 17, 27, 27n, 28, 28n, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39n, 40, 42, 43, 48, 50, 52, 52n, 53, 54, 54n, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 59n, 60, 60n, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 77, 77n, 78, 78n, 79, 79n, 80, 80n, 81, 81n, 111, 125, 127, 128, 129, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162n, 169, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188, 190, 192n, 194, 197, 200, 207, 209, 212, 233, 241, 247, 250, 250n, 251, 252, 255, 257, 260, 263 Lefebure, Chevalier des Hayes (d 1785) Fr zool Saint Domingue, 122n Lefebvre [Le Fevre, LeFevre, Lefebure], Etienne-Jean (d 1753) Fr imm di Paris, 19n Lefebvre [Le Fevre, LeFevre, Lefebure], Jean (1652–1706) Fr imm Paris ADS, 19n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) Germ phil math Hannover ADS FRS, 28 Lennox, Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond (1701–1750) Eng politician FRS, 108 Lenoir, Etienne (1744–1832) Fr engin imm Paris, 92, 171 Léorier Delisle, Pierre-Alexandre (1744–1826) Fr entrepreneur Montargis, 173

303

Lerebours, Nicolas Marie Paymal (1807–1873) Fr opt oim imm Paris, 248n Lerebours, Noël Jean (c.1761–1840) Fr opt oim imm Paris, 93, 248, 248n Leske, Nathanael Gottfried (1751–1786) Germ prof nh Leipzig, 122n, 199n, 212 Lesser, Friedrich Christian (1692–1754) Germ clerg nat Nordhausen, 125, 125n, 128, 128n, 133, 140n, 188n Letellier (fl 1767–1777) Fr opt mm Paris, 92, 93 Leutmann, Johann Georg (1667–1736) Germ physicist imm di dm prof math Liegnitz, 24 Lieberkühn, Johann Nathanael (1711–1756) Germ phys amm dm trav Berlin FRS, 30, 31, 80, 88, 99n, 109, 109n, 112, 187 Lignac, Joseph Adrien Lelarge de (1710–1762) Fr Oratorian nat Mantes, 140, 145, 219 Linck, Johann Heinrich (1674–1734) Germ apothecary Leipzig FRS, 120 Lindsay, George (fl 1728–1776) Eng clockm imm dm London, 31, 77n, 99n Linnaeus, Carl (1707–1778) Swed phys bot prof nh Uppsala ADS FRS, 112, 117, 119, 120, 121, 139, 140, 156, 156n, 179n, 180, 183, 183n, 189, 189n, 190, 190n, 191, 191n, 192, 192n, 194, 196, 197, 197n, 198, 202, 204, 211, 231, 231n, 232, 239, 246, 249, 255, 257, 259, 260 Lister, Joseph Jackson (1786–1869) Eng merchant dm London FRS, 251 Lister, Martin (1639–1712) Eng phys nat FRS, 125 Locke, John (1632–1704) Brit phys phil London FRS, 151 Löfling, Pehr (1729–1756) Swed phys, 112, 120, 120n Loft, Matthew (1697–1748) Eng opt oim mm London, 19 Lommers, Jacobus (fl 1743–post 1767) Dutch oim mm Utrecht, 88, 99n

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Lorenzini, Stefano (c.1652–?) It phys Pisa, 47 Losana, Matteo (1738–1833) It clerg nat agron prof Turin, 212n Louvel (fl 1768–1787) Fr imm Paris, 92, 92n Louville, Jacques Eugène (1671–1732) Fr astr Paris ADS FRS, 168 Lucas (fl 1730) Fr engraver Paris, 150 Ludwig, Christian Friedrich (1751–1823) Germ phys prof Leipzig, 238 Lupieri, Giuseppe Maria (fl 1784) It phys Vicenza, 96, 96n, 160n, 166, 166n, 167, 172, 172n Lyonet, Pierre (1706–1789) Dutch lawyer zool dm The Hague FRS, 16, 81, 83, 88, 95, 99n, 121, 128, 128n, 133, 150, 158, 159, 164, 165, 165n, 167, 167n, 175, 241 Macrì, Saverio (1754–1848) It phys alm prof zool Naples, 96, 120n, 123 Magni, Giuseppe Antonio (fl 1776) It phys Milano, 83n, 241 Magny, Alexis (1712–1777) Fr imm Paris, 20n, 83, 88, 89, 92, 99n, 140n, 160n, 161, 161n, 163, 163n, 169 Mahling, F.C. (fl 1760) Germ nat Chemnitz, 185n Mainard see Menard, 14n Maingault (fl 1760) Fr opt Paris, 92n Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715) Fr Oratorian phil ADS Paris, 15, 15n, 45, 45n, 46 Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume Lamoignon de (1721–1794) Fr patron state minister ADS Paris, 133, 139 Malézieu, Nicolas de (1650–1727) Fr hellenist math ADS Paris, 46, 47, 159 Malpighi, Marcello (1628–1694) It phys prof anat Bologna FRS, 13, 14n, 18, 25, 33, 46, 48, 49, 49n, 62, 72, 81, 125, 127, 138, 156, 238, 252 Mandl, Louis (1812–1881) Hungarian phys microscopist Paris, 248n Manfredi, Eustachio (1674–1739) It astr imm Bologna ADS FRS, 25n

Mann, James Jr (c.1706–1756) Eng oim mm London, 77n, 150n Mann, James Sr (fl 1660–1719) Eng imm dm London, 18 Manzini, Carlo Antonio, count (c.1605–1678) It astr imm Bologna, 25n Maraldi, Jean Philippe (1665–1729) It astr ADS Paris, 46, 61n Maratti, Giovanni Francesco (1723–1777) It clerg bot Valleombrosa, 120n Marchant, Jean (c.1650–1738) Fr bot ADS Paris, 50n, 51, 51n, 53, 62n, 72n Marie, Jean Baptiste Nicolas (fl 1736–1747) Fr opt mm Paris, 83 Marivetz, Claude-Etienne Baron de (1729–1794) Fr physicist Langres, 172, 172n Marshall, John (1663–1725) Eng turner oim mm dm London, 18, 99n Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando count (1658–1730) It milit nat trav Bologna ADS FRS, 9, 25, 26n, 49, 49n, 62, 62n, 67, 105, 105n, 106, 106n, 110, 117, 120, 153n Martin, Benjamin (1704–1782) Eng imm dm London, 22, 31, 77n, 81, 81n, 99n, 150n, 154n, 168 Martini, Friedrich Heinrich Wilhelm (1729–1778) Germ phys nat Berlin, 199 Marzoli, Bernardino (c.1746–post 1834) It clerg imm Brescia, 89, 89n, 94n, 95, 96 Mascagni, Paolo (1755–1815) It phys prof anat Siena, 199 Massuet, Pierre (1698–1776) Dutch phys publicist Leiden, 55n, 117 Maty, Matthew (1718–1776) Brit phys librarian FRS, 142, 180, 180n, 181n, 182, 182n Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de (1698–1759) Fr math Paris ADS FRS, 61n, 108, 108n, 129, 133, 139, 168 Maurepas, Jean Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de (1701–1781) Fr state minister Paris, 130

Prosopographical Index Mayer, Johann Christof Andreas (1747–1801) Germ phys prof anat bot Berlin, 145 Mayer, Johann Tobias (1752–1830) Germ math im di prof Erlangen, 169 Mayer, Tobias (1723–1762) Germ im di prof physics Göttingen, 169 Mazzola, Vincenzo (fl 1770–1810) It Somascan opt mm dm Naples Vienna, 95, 96, 96n, 99 Mazzucchelli, Carlo (fl 1720–1736) It phys Milano, 26n, 229n McLaurin, Colin (1698–1746) Scott math prof Edinburgh FRS, 109 Medicus, Friedrich Kasimir (1736–1808) Germ phys prof bot Heidelberg, 199n, 230n, 232 Mégnié, Pierre (fl 1751–1807) Fr engin imm di Dijon Paris, 92 Meidinger, Karl von Freiherr (1750–1820) Austr state secretary nat Vienna, 199n, 200 Meinecke, Johann Christian (c.1722–1790) Germ clerg nat Oberwiederstadt, 199n Mellin, John (fl 1680–1703) Eng opt mm London, 13, 14n, 99n Menard, Guillaume (d 1668) Fr opt oim mm Paris, 14, 14n Menard, Siméon (fl 1750) Fr mm Paris, 83 Menard son (fl 1691) Fr opt oim mm Paris, 14 Ménon (d 1749) Fr clerg im? Paris, 150 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien (1740–1814) Fr writer publ Paris, 93n Mercklein, Albert Daniel (1694–1752) Germ clerg math, 24, 161, 161n Merian, Maria Sibylla (1647–1717) Germ painter nat trav Amsterdam, 16, 127, 150 Merlugo, Giovanni (fl 1780) It mech imm Vicenza, 94n, 99n Méry, Jean (1645–1722) Fr surgeon Paris ADS, 52 Metz, Coenraad Fibus (1703–?) Dutch imm Amsterdam, 15 Meyen [Mayen], Joachim Friedrich (fl 1747–1780) Germ opt imm dm Dresde, 88n, 89n, 99n

305

Micheli, Pier Antonio (1679–1737) It bot prof Florence, 26, 26n, 49, 49n, 183, 233, 238 Michelotti, Vittorio (c.1774–1842) It prof chem Turin, 221, 234, 234n Middleton-Massey, Richard (1678–1743) Eng phys FRS, 67n Milchmeyer, Johann Michael (fl 1760) Germ opt oim mm dm Frankfurt, 89n, 99n Miles, Henry (1698–1763) Brit clerg nat London FRS, 115n, 129, 161, 161n, 182 Mitsdörfer, Johann Georg (fl 1734–1763) Germ oim mm Berlin, 89n, 99n Modeer, Adolph (1738–1799) Swed nat Stockholm, 120n Modesto, Frà (d 1778) It Capuchin imm Modena, 95 Moffett, Thomas (1553–1604) Brit phys prof London MP, 55, 57 Moll, Johann Paul Carl von (1735–1812) Germ nat conchologist Vienna, 120n, 153n Monconys, Balthasar de (1611–1665) Fr phys aimm trav Lyon, 13n Monro, Alexander II (1733–1817) Scott phys prof anat Edinburgh, 199 Monti, Giuseppe (1682–1760) It bot prof Bologna, 26n Morand, Sauveur François (1697–1773) Fr phys ADS FRS, 53, 253 Morini (fl 1765) It clerg amm prof Modena, 94n Moscati, Pietro (1739–1824) It phys prof Milan Pavia, 95, 95n, 199, 241 Müller, Christian Friedrich (1744–1814) Dane engraver Copenhagen, 150 Müller, Johann Heinrich (1661–1731) Germ astr prof Nuremberg, 24 Müller, Otto-Friedrich (1730–1784) Dane tutor nat Copenhagen ADS FRS, 6, 9, 10, 111, 111n, 115n, 120n, 122n, 123, 145, 150, 152, 153n, 155n, 167n, 180, 180n, 184, 188n, 189, 191, 194, 194n, 195, 195n, 196, 196n, 197, 197n, 198, 198n, 199, 199n, 200, 201, 201n, 202, 202n,

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203, 204, 205, 205n, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 213n, 215, 220, 222, 222n, 228, 229, 229n, 232, 239, 240, 241, 246, 246n, 247, 248, 249, 250n, 251, 252, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262 Mumenthaler, Johann Jacob (1729–1813) Swiss mech opt imm dm Bern, 92, 92n Münchhausen, Baron Otto von (1716–1774) Germ bot Göttingen, 194, 231, 231n, 232, 239 Muralt, Johannes von (1645–1733) Swiss phys prof Zurich, 56 Musschenbroek, Pieter van (1692–1761) Dutch physicist prof Leiden FRS, 55n, 108, 125n, 127, 127n, 146 Musschenbroek, Samuel van (1649–1681) Dutch imm dm Leiden, 15, 83 Musschenbroek, Jan van (1687–1748) Dutch imm dm Leiden, 15, 99n, 150n Muys, Wyer Gulielmus (1682–1744) Dutch phys prof Franeker, 16, 161, 161n Mylius, Christlob (1722–1754) Germ publicist, 194 Nairne, Edward (1726–1806) Eng opt imm London, 77n, 88 Navarre (fl 1759–1778) Fr opt imm Paris, 92, 92n Necker, Noël-Joseph (1729–1793) Belg phys bot Mannheim, 112, 112n, 119, 119n, 122n, 212n Needham, John Turberville (1713–1781) Eng clerg nat FRS, 9, 10, 81, 88n, 93, 115n, 120, 121, 121n, 123, 129, 129n, 130, 131, 131n, 132, 133, 133n, 134, 134n, 135, 135n, 136, 136n, 137, 137n, 138, 138n, 139, 140, 141, 141n, 142, 143, 145, 146, 155n, 156, 161, 161n, 162, 162n, 180, 181, 182, 185, 191, 192n, 194, 197, 207, 217, 218, 218n, 219, 219n, 220, 220n, 221, 221n, 222, 222n, 227, 228n, 230, 233, 236, 239, 246, 254

Newton, Isaac (1643–1727) Eng math phil di London PRS ADS, 27, 28, 29, 115, 250 Nissole, Guillaume (1647–1735) Fr phys Montpellier, 58n, 61, 61n, 63, 63n, 67, 173n Nitzsch, Christian Ludwig (1782–1837) Germ phys prof zool Halle, 233n, 246, 246n Nobert, Friedrich Adolf (1806–1881) Germ clockm imm di Greifswald, 173, 173n Nodos [Nodas] (fl 1760) Fr mm? Paris, 92n Nöel, Dom Nicolas (c.1712–1783) Fr Benedictine oim im Paris, 92n Nollet, Jean-Antoine (1700–1770) Fr clerg imm di dm prof physics Paris ADS FRS, 19, 20, 20n, 22, 87, 88, 88n, 92, 123n, 133, 133n, 139, 150, 150n, 160n Oken, Lorenz (1779–1851) Germ phys prof nh Jena, 246n Olivi, Giuseppe (1769–1795) It clerg zool Padua, 119, 120n, 199n, 212, 212n, 233n Oppelt, Johann Balthasar (1743–c.1800) Germ imm dm Anspach, 88, 89n Paauw, Jan (c.1723–1803) Dutch imm Leiden, 88 Pahin de la Blancherie, Claude-Mammès (1751–1811) Fr entrepreneur publicist Paris, 93, 93n Palisot, Ambroise-Marie Baron de Beauvois (1752–1820) Fr attorney bot Paris ADS, 232, 232n Pallas, Peter Simon (1741–1811) Russ phys zool prof St Petersburg ADS FRS, 119, 119n, 120, 120n, 122, 122n, 123, 189, 189n, 191, 192, 194, 196, 199n, 202, 209, 255 Paris, Claude (1703–1763) Fr opt oim mm Paris, 88 Parsons, James (1705–1770) Eng phys London FRS, 108, 109, 115n, 130, 144, 144n, 161, 161n, 180, 181, 183

Prosopographical Index Passemant, Claude-Siméon (1702–1769) Fr engin imm di Paris, 22, 83, 88, 88n, 89, 92, 92n, 99n, 160n, 161, 161n, 163, 163n, 169, 169n Pasteur, Louis (1822–1895) Fr bacter prof Paris ADS FRS, 190, 252 Patroni, Pietro (1675/6–1744) It opt oim mm Milano, 25, 26, 89, 99n Pattier (fl 1772) Fr clockm im Paris, 171 Paula Schrank, Franz von (1747–1835) Germ Jesuit nat prof math Ingolstadt, 153n, 155n, 198, 198n, 199n, 200, 212n, 222, 250n Pelisson, Jakob Philip (1743–post 1793) Germ phys di Berlin, 199 Pennetier, Georges (1836–1923) Fr phys nat Rouen, 250n Perrault, Claude (1613–1688) Fr phys arch ADS Paris, 52 Persoon, Christian Hendrik (1761–1836) Dutch phys nat Paris, 233n Petit, Antoine (1722–1794) Fr phys anat prof ADS Paris, 27n, 53 Petiver, James (c.1665–1718) Eng apothecary bot London, 120 Peyssonel, Jean-André (1694–1759) Fr nat trav ADS FRS, 106, 106n, 117, 119, 120n, 121 Pézenas, Esprit (1728–1763) Fr Jesuit math astr prof Marseille, 24n, 150n Piazzi, Giuseppe (1746–1826) It clerg math astr prof Palermo ADS FRS, 169 Picard, Jean (1620–1682) Fr clerg astr di ADS Paris, 168 Pickering, Roger (c.1720–1755) Eng clerg nat di FRS, 115n, 183, 183n Pitcairne, Archibald (1652–1713) Scott phys Edinburgh ADS, 46 Plancus, Janus [Giovanni Paolo Bianchi] (1693–1775) It phys zool conchologist Rimini, 26n, 119, 120, 120n Pluche, Noël-Antoine (1688–1761) Fr clerg writer Reims, 115n, 140n Plumier, Father Charles (1646–1704) Fr Minim bot aimm, 51, 51n Pouilly, Jean de (fl 1680–1710) Fr imm Paris, 19, 19n

307

Poupart, François (1661–1708) Fr phys ADS, 30, 30n, 53, 61n Power, Henry (1623–1668) Eng phys FRS Halifax, 36, 81, 209 Prevost, Isaac-Bénédict (1755–1819) Geneva clerg agron prof Montauban, 241 Prévost, Jean-Louis (1790–1850) Geneva phys physiol, 246, 246n, 255 Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804) Eng clerg physicist FRS ADS Birmingham, 235, 235n, 236, 236n, 237, 237n, 255 Pringle, John (1707–1782) Scott phys London FRS, 144 Pritchard, Andrew (1804–1882) Eng opt microsc mm London, 250 Prochaska, Georg (1749–1820) Czech phys prof Prague Vienna, 200, 212n, 234 Puget, Louis (1629–1709) Fr physicist aim Lyon, 14n, 15, 15n, 30, 30n, 45, 45n, 105n, 149n, 228n Purrini, Bart (fl 1780) It mm Siena, 94n Putois, Etienne-Antoine (1763–1798?) Fr opt im Paris, 93 Rabiqueau, Charles (fl 1753–1783) Fr lawyer engin im di Paris, 92n Rainville, Frédéric (fl 1775) Dutch nat? Rotterdam, 232 Ramsden, Jesse (1735–1800) Eng imm di dm FRS London, 99n, 169, 171, 174, 174n Rangoni [Rangone], Gherardo Marquis (1744–1813) It patron state minister Modena, 95n Ray, John (1627–1705) Eng clerg bot Cambridge FRS, 55, 140, 140n, 190 Ray, Placard (fl 1785) Fr clerg nat Paris, 221n, 228 Réaumur, René-Antoine Ferchault de (1683–1757) Fr math engin di nat ADS FRS, 6, 9, 22, 30, 50, 50n, 51, 51n, 52, 53, 57, 60, 60n, 61n, 62n, 65, 65n, 70, 70n, 72, 72n, 73, 73n, 103, 106, 106n, 107, 107n, 108, 108n, 109, 109n, 111, 112, 112n,

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114, 115, 115n, 116, 118, 118n, 120, 121, 126, 126n, 127, 127n, 130, 131, 131n, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, 145, 149n, 150, 153n, 154, 157n, 161n, 163, 173, 173n, 225, 241, 253, 256, 258, 260, 261, 263 Redi, Francesco (1626–1697) Tuscan phys nat Florence, 13, 13n, 25, 25n, 39, 39n, 43, 43n, 46, 47, 48, 48n, 49, 49n, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 67, 69, 69n, 72, 125, 126, 127, 138, 144, 151n, 153n, 156, 221, 261 Reggio, Francesco (1743–1804) It clerg oim Genova, 94n Reghter, Johannes (1730–1801) Dutch imm Delft, 88 Regley (fl 1760s) Fr clerg writer Paris, 135n, 219 Reinthaler, Christian Friedrich Ernst (fl 1760–1783) Germ mech opt imm di dm Leipzig, 88n, 89n, 99n, 150n, 167 Revillas [Reviglias], Diego (1690–c.1745) It Hieronymit prof math Rome, 127, 27n, Reynier, Jean Louis Antoine (1762–1824) Vaud bot econ Paris Lausanne, 221, 230, 230n, 232, 232n Richard, Antoine (c.1735–1807) Fr gardener Trianon Paris, 222n Richer, Jean-François (1743–1823) Fr mech im Paris, 93, 169, 171, 172 Richerand, Anthelme Balthasar (1779–1840) Fr surgeon prof Paris, 240 Richter, Wilhelm Michael (1767–1822) Germ phys prof Moscow, 83n Ring, Johann Heinrich (fl 1750–1800) Germ mech imm Berlin Ac, 88, 88n, 89n, 99n Rochette, Gaspard (1754–1805) Fr opt oim mm Paris, 93, 167n Rochon, Alexis Marie (1741–1817) Fr astr oim di Paris ADS, 93, 169, 172 Rodella, Giovanni Battista (1749–1834) It mech imm Padua, 94n

Roffredi, Maurizio Domenico (1711–1805) It Cistercian nat di Turin, 27n, 83n, 95, 95n, 134n, 149n, 157n, 166n, 200, 221, 222, 222n, 224, 225, 225n, 226, 226n, 227, 227n, 228, 229, 229n, 236, 241, 263 Roos, Johann Carolus (1745–1828) Swed phys, 192, 192n, 194, 231, 231n, 239 Rösel von Rosenhof, August Johann (1705–1759) Germ painter nat Nuremberg, 70, 149n, 150, 184, 184n, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 192n, 194, 209, 250n Roth, Albrecht Wilhelm (1757–1834) Germ phys bot Vegesack, 238 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778) Geneva writer phil, 135 Rousset de Missy, Jean (1686–1762) Fr historian phil Low Countries, 117, 127 Rovatti, Giuseppe (1746–1812) It nat Modena, 94n, 95, 95n, 122n, 241 Rozier, Jean-Baptiste François (1734–1793) Fr clerg agron Paris Bezier, 174, 174n, 222, 222n, 225 Rudolph, J.G. (fl 1770) mm Dresde?, 99n Rusconi, Mauro (1776–1849) It phys zool Pavia, 212n, 241 Rutty, William (1687–1730) Eng phys FRS, 65, 65n Ruusscher, Melchior de (fl 1725–1753) Dutch Amsterdam, 63, 63n, 64, 65, 67, 72, 154, 155n Ruysch, Frederik (1638–1731) Dutch phys bot prof Amsterdam ADS FRS, 16, 46 Saint Hyacinthe, Paul Themiseul Chevalier de (1684–1746) Fr clerg free thinker trav FRS, 108 Salvetti, Pietro (fl 1660–1697) It musician opt oim mm Florence, 25n San Martino, Giovambatista da (1739–1800) It Capuchin nat dm di Vicenza, 95, 96, 97, 99n, 172 Sangallo, Pietro Paolo da (fl 1679) It nat Florence, 47, 127

Prosopographical Index Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de (1740–1799) Geneva physicist engin di prof ADS FRS, 115n, 133, 135, 135n, 157n, 171, 171n, 196, 196n, 199n, 212n, 218, 218n, 219, 220, 220n, 228, 230, 232, 233n, 238, 238n, 241, 255 Savoy, Carlo Emmanuele III, Duke of (1701–1773) King of Sardinia Turin, 141 Say (fl 1772) Fr opt Paris, 92n Sbaraglia, Giovanni Girolamo (1641–1710) It phys prof Bologna, 18 Scarlett, Edward Jr (d 1779) Eng opt oim imm London, 30, 99n Scarlett, Edward Sr (1677–1743) Eng opt oim mm London, 19, 99n Scarpa, Antonio (1747–1832) It phys prof anat Modena Pavia ADS FRS, 199, 241 Schadeloock, Gustav (1732–1819) Germ math prof Rostock, 212n Schaeffer, Jakob Christian (1718–1790) Germ clerg painter nat Regensburg FRS, 115n, 119, 122n, 153n, 173, 184, 184n, 191, 194, 199n, 209 Scherer, Johann Andreas (1755–1844) Germ phys, 233n Schleenstein [Sahleenstein], Camens V (1725–1810) Germ imm Köln, 88n, 89n Schmarda, Ludwig (1819–1908) Czech phys prof zool Prague Vienna, 250n Schmiedel (fl 1773) Germ? mm, 99n Schreber, Johann Christian Daniel (1739–1810) Germ phys prof nh Erlangen, 199n Scopoli, Giovanni Antonio (1723–1788) It phys nat prof Pavia, 232, 239 Sébastien, Father see Truchet, 46, 50, 157 Secondat, Jean-Baptiste, Baron de (1716–1796) Fr writer physicist FRS, 235, 235n Sedileau (d 1693) Fr physicist di Paris ADS, 59, 67 Segard (fl 1754) Fr opt Paris, 92n

309

Segner, Johann Andreas von (1704–1777) Germ physicist di prof Jena FRS, 169 Selva, Domenico (d 1758) It opt imm Venice, 94, 94n, 150n Selva, Lorenzo (1716–1800) It opt imm dm Venice, 85, 89, 90, 94, 94n, 150n Senebier, Jean (1742–1809) Geneva clerg physicist nat, 95, 122n, 172, 172n, 212n, 226n, 229, 230n, 233n, 236, 236n, 238, 240n, 260 Settala, Manfredo (1600–1680) It clerg imm di Milan, 94 Sherard, William (1659–1728) Eng bot prof Oxford FRS, 46n Sherwood, James (fl 1746) Eng surgeon London, 130, 130n, 133, 134, 182, 185 Short, James (1710–1768) Scott opt oim mm London FRS, 99n Sigaud de la Fond, Joseph-Aignan (1730–1810) Fr phys im prof physicist Paris ADS, 150n, 154n Simonneau, Philippe (1685–1753) Fr drawer engraver Paris ADS, 150 Slabber, Martinus (1740–1835) Dutch painter nat, 16, 120, 155n, 200 Sloane, Hans (1660–1753) Irish phys bot London ADS PRS, 28, 28n, 53, 67, 105n Smith, Robert (1689–1768) Eng clerg prof astr dm Cambridge FRS, 24, 24n, 28, 29n, 78n, 154n, 160, 160n, 168, 168n, 172, 172n Solander, Daniel (1733–1782) Swed bot London FRS, 194 Spallanzani, Lazzaro (1729–1799) It clerg nat prof nh Pavia FRS, 6, 9, 81, 94n, 95, 95n, 96, 97, 115n, 120, 120n, 122n, 134n, 135, 135n, 138, 141, 141n, 145, 172, 172n, 182n, 184, 188, 191, 197, 197n, 199, 199n, 200, 207, 209, 212, 213, 217, 218, 218n, 219, 219n, 220, 221, 221n, 225n, 227, 227n, 229, 230, 230n, 231, 232, 233, 233n, 234, 234n, 238, 240, 241, 242, 246, 246n, 250, 250n, 255, 261, 263

310

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Sparshall (fl 1753) –, 182 Sprengel, Kurt Polycarp (1766–1833) Germ phys bot prof Halle, 228 Springsfeld, Gottlob Karl (1714–1772) Germ phys nat Berlin Ac, 235, 235n Stancari, Vittorio (1678–1709) It astr oim di Bologna, 25n Stegmann, Johann Gottlieb (1725–1795) Germ imm di dm prof physics Kassel Marburg, 88n, 89n, 99n, 100n, 199n Steiner, Johann [Michael/Ludwig?] (1711–1799) Swiss clockm opt imm Zurich, 88n, 89n, 99n Sterrop, George (1715–1756) Eng opt imm London, 31, 77n, 99n Stiles, Sir Francis Haskins Eyles (d 1762) Eng consul Naples FRS, 157n Strange, John (1732–1799) Eng nat consul Venice FRS, 173 Streicher, C (fl 1750–1770) Germ clerg mm lm Kalkreuth, 99n Strobelberger, Johan Stephan (1593–1630) Germ phys Montpellier, 63 Sturm, Johann Christoph (1635–1703) Germ clerg di? prof math physics Altdorf, 150, 150n Sturte (fl 1775) mm Danzig, 89n, 99n Sully, Henry (1680–1729) Eng clockm im Paris, 19 Swammerdam, Jan (1637–1680) Dutch phys nat Amsterdam, 16, 46, 50, 56, 57, 72, 149n, 151n, 152, 153n, 156, 181, 209, 225, 241 Swartz, Olof (1760–1818) Swed bot trav, 120n, 166n Swaving, Abraham Coenraad (c.1753–1799) Dutch clerg di nat Harlem, 212n, 213n Targioni Tozzetti, Giovanni (1712–1783) It phys nat Florence, 95n, 115n, 119, 199n, 241, 242 Terechowsky, Martin Matveevitch (1740–1796) Russian phys St Petersburg, 212n, 222 Teuber, Johann Martin (fl 1727–1756) Germ turner imm Regensburg, 89n

Thiroux d’Arconville, GenevièveCatherine (1720–1805) Fr writer chem, 145n Thomin, Marc Mitouflet (1707–1752) Fr opt imm di Paris, 19, 20n, 22, 83, 85, 89, 92, 150n, 175 Tiedemann, Johann Heinrich (1742– c.1811) Germ mech oim mm dm Stuttgart, 88, 88n, 89n, 99n, 100n Tillet, Mathieu (1714–1791) Fr agron engin Paris ADS, 222 Titius, Johann Daniel (1729–1796) Germ astr prof Wittenberg, 199n Tode, Heinrich Julius (1733–1797) Germ theologian nat, 199n Toffoli, Bartolomeo (c.1755–1834) It clerg imm di Venice, 95 Tortoni, Carlo Antonio (1640–1700) It clerg oim mm Rome, 25, 94 Tournant, Gabriel (c.1728–1792) opt imm Berlin Paris, 89 Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de (1656–1708) Fr bot Paris ADS, 45, 48, 49, 50, 50n, 51, 51n, 52, 53, 54, 140, 157n, Trabaud (fl 1741–1753) Fr math Fréjus, 160n Trembley, Abraham (1710–1784) Geneva tutor nat dm trav Sorgvliet Geneva ADS FRS, 6, 9, 10, 16, 16n, 39n, 60, 60n, 81, 83, 88, 103, 104, 105, 105n, 106, 106n, 107, 107n, 108, 108n, 109, 109n, 110, 110n, 111, 112, 112n, 113, 114, 115, 115n, 116, 116n, 117, 118, 118n, 119, 119n, 120, 120n, 121, 122, 123, 127, 129, 130, 130n, 131, 132, 132n, 133, 135, 136, 138, 138n, 139, 145, 146, 146n, 157, 157n, 175, 182, 182n, 183, 184, 187, 189, 194, 196, 196n, 202, 219, 219n, 231, 242, 249, 250n, 254, 256, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263 Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold (1776–1837) Germ phys phil prof Bremen, 222 Trionfetti, Giovan Battista (1656–1708) It phys prof bot Rome ADS, 48

Prosopographical Index

311

Troughton, Edward (1753–1835) Eng im di London FRS, 171 Truchet, Sébastien (1657–1729) Fr Dominican engin im di ADS Paris, 46, 50, 157 Turgot, Anne-Robert Jacques (1727–1781) Fr econ state minister Paris, 91n, 93, 93n

Virey, Jules Joseph (1753–1846) Fr apothecary phys politician Paris, 220 Voigtländer, Johann Christoph (1732–1797) Austr engin imm di Vienna, 89n Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778) Fr writer FRS, 130, 138, 145

Vaillant, Sébastien (1669–1722) Fr bot ADS Paris, 50 Valentini, Michael Bernhard (1657–1729) Germ phys prof physics Gießen FRS, 24, 150n Vallisneri, Antonio (1661–1730) It phys prof Padua, 26, 26n, 43n, 48, 48n, 49, 49n, 57, 57n, 60n, 62, 62n, 69, 69n, 72, 127, 153n, 229n, 238 Vallisneri, Antonio Jr (1708–1777) It phys prof Padua, 95n Valmont de Bomare, Jacques-Christophe (1731–1807) Fr apothecary nat Paris, 221, 221n, 240n Van der Schley, Jacob (1715–1779) Dutch engraver St Petersburg Amsterdam, 15 Vaucher, Jean-Pierre (1763–1841) Geneva clerg bot prof, 157n, 167, 167n, 188n, 212n, 233n, 237, 238, 238n, 239, 240, 241, 255 Vennebruch (fl 1786) Germ mm Berlin, 88n, 89n Vernisy (fl 1784) Fr clerg nat Dijon, 221 Veryard, Ellis (1657–1714) Brit phys trav, 25, 25n Vianelli, Giuseppe Valentino (1720–1803) It phys zool Chioggia, 120n, 123, 123n Vidussi, Giuseppe Maria (fl 1717) It phys Venice, 126 Villars, Dominique (1745–1814) Fr phys bot dm prof Strasbourg, 157n, 167n, 212n, 241, 241n, 249n Villette, François (1621–1698) Fr opt oim Lyon, 15, 99n Villette son (d 1712) Fr mech mm Lyon, 15, 99n

Wandelaar, Jan (1690–1759) Dutch painter engraver Amsterdam, 15 Watkins, Francis (1723–1791) Eng opt imm dm London, 99n Watson, William (1715–1787) Eng phys FRS London FRS, 115n, 183, 183n Westberg, Carl Hindric (1720–1769) Swed mm Stockholm, 88n Wiedeburg, Johann Ernst Basil (1733–1789) Germ physicist mm prof math Jena, 150n Wiesel, Johann (1583–1662) Germ optician imm dm Augsburg, 13, 14, 24 Wilcke, Johann Karl (1732–1796) Swed physicist di prof Stockholm FRS, 83n, 166, 172, 172n, 194 Wildenow, Carl Ludwig (1765–1812) Germ phys bot Berlin, 249, 249n Willemet, Remi (1735–1807) Fr apothecary bot prof Nancy, 221 Wilson, James (c.1665–1730) Eng oim dm London, 18, 19, 19n, 22, 28, 30, 31, 52, 77, 78, 82, 83n, 99n, 158, 160, 162 Withering, William (1741–1799) Eng phys bot dm Birmingham, 240 Withof, Johann Philipp Lorenz (1725–1789) Dutch phys prof anat Duisburg, 158, 158n, 159 Wolff, Caspar Friedrich (1734–1794) Germ phys prof anat St Petersburg, 115n, 199 Wright, Edward (c.1666–1761) Eng phys FRS, 139, 142, 143, 143n, 144, 144n, 145, 146, 220 Wrisberg, Heinrich August (1739–1808) Germ phys prof Göttingen, 115n, 150, 188, 189, 191, 197, 200, 209, 222, 231

312

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Wulfen, Baron Franz Xavier von (1728–1805) Hung Jesuit math nh Austria, 119, 120n Zahn, Johannes (1641–1707) Germ clerg opt imm prof math Würzburg, 24, 24n, 78, 81, 150, 150n, 228n

Zetzell, Pehr (1724–1802) Swed phys Uppsala, 145 Zinanni [Ginanni], Giuseppe (1692–1753) It nat alm Ravenna, 26, 26n Zucchi, Niccolò (1586–1670) It Jesuit oim di prof astr Rome, 94

Author Index (Secondary Literature)

Adelmann, Howard, 46n Ainsworth, Geoffrey C., 48n, 49n, 191n, 231, 231n, 238n Alpers, Svetlana, 16n, 149n Baglioni, Silvestro, 48n, 69n Baker, John R., 72n, 103n, 106n, 108n, 111n Barsanti, Giulio, 105n, 121n, 182n, 233n Bazerman, Charles, 229n Beaudoin, Denis, 19n, 93n Bedini, Silvio A., 14n, 25, 25n, 46n, 78n, 95n Benguigui, Isaac, 20n Bennett, Arthur G., 25n, 95n Bennett, Jim, 2n, 14n, 81n, 100n Benoit, Serge, 140n, 175n Bernardi, Walter 8n, 25n, 39n, 40n, 43n, 45, 45n, 46n, 47, 47n, 55n, 221n Bertoloni Meli, Domenico, 2n Bevilacqua, Fabio, 94n Biagioli, Mario, 22n Bonizzi, Paolo, 226n Boschiero, Luciano, 47n Brenni, Paolo, 13n, 19n, 91, 91n, 93n Briggs, Robin, 37n Brignoli de Brunhoff, Giovanni de, 207n Brocard, H., 15n, 45n Brooks, John, 171n Brooks, Randall C., 168n Brush, Stephen G., 245n, 250n Bulloch, William, 221n Buscaglia, Marino, 103n Castellani, Carlo, 218n, 227n, 240n Cavazza, Marta, 18, 18n Cimino, Guido, 105n Clay, Reginald S., 2n, 14n, 19n, 24n, 31n, 77n, 80n, 83n, 88n, 122n, 168n Cobb, Matthew, 16n, 149n Court, Thomas H., 2n, 14n, 19n, 24n, 31n, 77n, 80n, 83n, 88n, 122n, 168n

Daudin, Henri, 190n Daumas, Maurice, 13n, 15n, 19n, 22n, 26, 26n, 30n, 77n, 83n, 88n, 91, 91n, 92, 92n, 93, 93n, 94n, 98n, 100n, 168n, 169n, 171, 171n, 172n, 173, 173n, 174n, 175, 175n, 246n Dawson, Virginia P., 16n, 57n, 70n, 72n, 103n, 106n, 107n, 111n de Clercq, Peter, 15n Dobell, Clifford, 33n, 39n, 188n, 209n, 250n Dörries, Matthias, 173n Duchesneau, François, 105n Duris, Pascal, 189n, 211n, 242n Farley, John, 138n, 217n, 227n Fazzari, Michela, 14n, 25n, 40n, 48n, 49n, 57n, 95n Findlen, Paula, 47n, 69n Ford, Brian J., 6n, 109n, 209n, 245n Foucault, Michel, 8n, 190n, 212n Fournier, Marian, 2n, 15n, 19n, 28n, 33, 33n, 36n, 39n, 40n, 41n, 42n, 52n, 54n, 57n, 58n, 83n, 88n, 89n, 93n, 100n, 122n Frängsmyr, Tore, 173n Galison, Peter, 7n Garber, Daniel, 79n Gayon, Jean, 131n Generali, Dario, 14n, 25n, 26n, 49n Geus, Armin, 24n, 70n Gillispie, Charles C., 33n Giordano, Raymond V., 19n Grob, Bart, 197n Guénot, Hervé, 93n Guerrini, Anita, 18n Guerrini, Luigi, 25n Guyénot, Emile, 60n Hacking, Jan, 251n

314

The Quest for the Invisible

Hahn, Roger, 19n, 46n, 63n, 93n Harris, Henry, 197n, 217n, 241n Harwood, John T., 149n Haycock, David, 121n, 180n Heilbron, John L., 173n, 174n Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane, 22n Hoff, Hebbel, 229n Holmes, Frederic L., 113n, 114, 114n, 137n, 182n, 245n Hooijmaijers, Hans, 197n Hoskin, Michael, 169n Hunter, Michael, 149n Jackson, Myles W., 100n Jacyna, L. Stephen, 217n Jaecks, D.H., 248n Jahn, Ilse, 247n, 249n Jardine, Nick, 189n, 245n, 257n Keil, Inge, 24, 24n, 70n, 89n, 119n Konarski, Wlodimir, 33, 33n, 45, 45n La Berge, Ann F., 2n, 217n Larson, James L., 189n, 212n Latour, Bruno, 137n, 190 Lechevalier, Hubert, 33, 33n, 39n, 44n Lenhoff, Howard M., 103n, 105n, 107n Lenhoff, Sylvia, 103n, 105n, 107n Lenoir, Timothy, 100n, 114, 222n, 234n Licoppe, Christian, 8, 37n, 174n, 184n Lindeboom, Gerrit A., 46n Lualdi, Alberto, 25, 25n, 26n, 83n, 89n, 94n Lüthy, Christof, 1n, 56 MacLeod, Christine, 22n Martin, Hubert de, 24n Mazzolini, Renato G., 54n, 100n, 129n, 131n, 134n, 136n, 151n McConnell, Anita, 62n, 106n Millburn, John R., 13n, 22n, 77n, 100n, 175n Miller, David P., 34n Monti, Maria Teresa, 122n, 207n, 232n, 234n Morus, Iwan Rhys, 150n Nicolson, Marjorie, 18, 18n

Nuttall, R.H., 13n, 248n Ottaviani, Alessandro, 231n Parnes, Ohad, 100n, 217n Pichon, Francis, 140n, 175n Pietro, Pericle di, 94n Pipping, Gunnar, 13n, 88n, 140n Proverbio, Eugenio, 94n Ratcliff, Marc J., 14n, 83n, 102n, 105n, 122n, 135n, 150n, 182n, 197n, 229n, 234n, 248n Rehbock, Philip F., 234n Reill, Peter H., 34n Rider, Robin E., 173n Robinet, André, 15n, 45, 45n Roche, Daniel, 189n, 211n Roe, Shirley, 129, 129n, 131n, 133n, 134, 134n, 135n, 136n, 138n, 139, 139n, 219n Roger, Jacques, 8n, 34n, 45n, 46n, 49n, 50n, 51n, 55n, 57n, 70n, 104, 104n, 126n, 131n, 138n, 140n, 145n, 219n Rooseboom, Maria, 2, 2n Rostand, Jean, 33, 188n, 219n Rousseau, George, 121n, 180n Rudd, E., 248n Ruestow, Edward G., 1n, 2n, 19n, 33n, 34n, 40, 40n, 43n, 56, 58, 58n, 59n, 78n, 138n, 149n, 151n, 217n, 231n Rusnock, Andrea, 182n Saine, Thomas P., 185n Salomon-Bayet, Claire, 46n, 49n, 51n, 145n Schaffer, Simon, 8, 8n, 79n, 114n, 149n, 258n Schickore, Jutta, 22n, 24n, 81n, 150n, 159n, 163n, 217n Schiller, Joseph, 234n Schmutz, Hans-Konrad, 54n Schullian, Dorothy M., 46n Secord, James A., 189n Shapin, Steven, 8, 8n, 79n, 114n, 182n, 258n Slaughter, Mary M., 8n, 189n, 190n

Author Index Sloan, Philip, 130n, 134, 134n, 162, 162n Snorrason, E., 194n Sonntag, Otto, 28n, 218n Spary, Emma C., 189n Stafford, Barbara M., 34n, 149, 149n Starobinski, Jean, 135n Stearn, William T., 8n Stefani, Marta, 40n, 131n, 135n, 137n, 141n, 218n, 227n Stevens, Peter F., 8n, 212n Taylor, Eva G.R., 13n Thackray, Arnold, 245n Torlais, Jean, 150n Trembley, Maurice, 60n

315

Turner, Anthony, 19n, 25n, 93n Turner, Gerard L’E., 2n, 13n, 19n, 77n, 80n, 88n, 89n, 91n, 100n, 110n, 121n, 180n, 251n Van der Pas, Peter W., 33, 34n, 39n Vartanian, Aram, 104, 104n, 108n Vermeir, Koen, 150n Viel, Claude, 131n Wilson, Catherine, 1n, 18n, 28n, 36n, 40n, 41n, 56, 105n, 132n, 138n, 151n, 211, 211n Wise, Norton, 149n Woolgar, Steve, 137n