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Following insects around: tools and techniques of eighteenth-century natural history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2010

MARY TERRALL
MARY TERRALL
Affiliation:
Department of History, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Email: terrall@history.ucla.edu.
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Abstract

This paper examines the movement of the materials, ideas and practices that went into the construction of natural-historical observations in Paris and the French provinces – in particular, observations of insects. The paired notions of circulation and locality expose the complex dynamic at play in the production of knowledge about these mundane creatures. I show how the movement of things and people problematizes the notion of a single ‘centre of calculation’, even where a dominant figure like Réaumur was managing collections and producing authoritative texts. Réaumur was indeed managing the flow of observations, letters and specimens from his privileged vantage point in Paris, but he was not the only one doing the processing, and the objects and knowledge flowed in all directions. The paper uses correspondence among eighteenth-century naturalists of various sorts to get at the dynamics of circulation, tracing the movements of insects, bits of text or narrative, drawings, letters, questions, apparatus, books and people. My title refers to the activities of naturalists, who had to follow insects around in order to observe them, and to my own activity in following the insects in their movement through letters, conversations, specimen jars, drawings and texts. My research depends on the accumulation of details about experimental and observational practice, culled from the masses of letters that moved continually around Europe, much as the science of insects depended on the accumulation of details about insects – their physiology, habits, metamorphosis and place in the human economy and the economy of nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 43 , Issue 4: Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science , December 2010 , pp. 573 - 588
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2010

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References

1 de Réaumur, R.-A.F., Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insectes, 6 vols., Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1734–42, vol. 1, pp. 51–52Google Scholar.

2 On Trembley's distribution of live specimens of hydra see Ratcliff, Marc, ‘Trembley's strategy of generosity and the scope of celebrity in the mid-18th Century’, Isis (2004) 95, pp. 555–574CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 A young doctor, M Baron, lived with Réaumur in the early 1730s, and took charge of ‘mes menageries d'insectes’. Réaumur, op. cit. (1), vol. 1, p. 51.

4 John Law, ‘Technology and heterogeneous engineering: the case of Portuguese expansion’, in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor J. Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

5 Fonds Trembley 5, Bibliothèque de Genève (hereafter BG), Réaumur to Caumont, 1 September 1735. Many letters are missing from the correspondence; Réaumur's first letter refers to ongoing investigations by Caumont, who has asked for advice.

6 Fonds Réaumur, Archives de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris (hereafter AS), Caumont to Réaumur, 2 February 1739. The letters do not specify the patronage ties that very likely linked Caumont and Alphons.

7 Fonds Trembley 5, BG, Réaumur to Caumont, 17 November 1736.

8 Fonds Réaumur, AS, Alphons to Caumont, 20 October 1736 (enclosed with Caumont to Réaumur, 2 November 1736).

9 Fonds Trembley 5, BG, Réaumur to Caumont, 17 November 1736.

10 Fonds Réaumur, AS, Alphons to Caumont, 11 July 1737 (enclosed in Caumont to Réaumur, 14 July 1737).

11 Alphons to Caumont, op. cit. (10).

12 Fonds Trembley 5, BG, Réaumur to Caumont, 22 November 1737.

13 Fonds Trembley 5, BG, Réaumur to Caumont, 13 May 1739.

14 Fonds Réaumur, AS, Alphons to Caumont, 20 September 1739.

15 Fonds Réaumur, AS, Alphons to Caumont, 20 September 1739.

16 Fonds Trembley 5, BG, Réaumur to Caumont, 22 November 1737.

17 Caumont discusses the local grasshopper infestation in Fonds Réaumur, AS, Caumont to Réaumur, 15 June 1740; later in the season he sent specimens.

18 Réaumur, op. cit. (1), vol. 5, p. 183.

19 Réaumur, op. cit. (1), vol 5, pp. 164–165.

20 Biographical information on Bazin is lacking; there is no evidence to support the claim in several biographical dictionaries that he was a doctor. He did follow a course of lectures in anatomy in Strasbourg, relatively late in life. Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 28 August and 9 December 1737. Réaumur mentions his position at the salt depot: Réaumur, op. cit. (1), vol. 1, p. 50.

21 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 8 June 1733.

22 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 9 May 1734.

23 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 8 June 1733.

24 For example, while observing a certain caterpillar during the cutting of logs, he immediately looked for the empty skin, found it, and sent it off. ‘That's what you will find enclosed, in the little piece of paper, that seemed to me to be the shed skin of the ver cordé, which you will recognise easily by the head. I added a little piece of the cap [calotte] so that you could decide what material it is made of’. Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 28 December 1733.

25 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 11 March 1734.

26 Jean Vivant (also known as the bishop of Pharos), served as auxiliary bishop in Strasbourg; he was an uncle of Bazin's wife. After the bishop's death in 1739, Bazin became librarian to Cardinal de Rohan, the archbishop of Strasbourg, a position he held until the archbishop's death in 1749.

27 For example, when Bazin learned that the Parisian astronomers Cassini and Maraldi were passing through Strasbourg, he suggested that they might carry several bottles of preparations back to Paris, because the coach would be better than the post for transporting the fragile containers. Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 10 June 1739.

28 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 26 May 1735.

29 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 9 December 1737.

30 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 22 March 1738, where Bazin promises to keep the secret whether or not he could use the formula successfully in his caterpillars and snails.

31 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 15 July 1738.

32 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 10 August 1740.

33 Dossier Bazin, AS, Bazin to Réaumur, 22 May 1739. Réaumur had expressed scepticism about Godaert's observations of the mole cricket in op. cit. (1), vol. 1, pp. 26–27.

34 There was also a octavo edition: Réaumur, , Mémoires pour servir de l'histoire des insectes, 6 vols. in 12, Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1737–1748Google Scholar.