Lecture6April15.pptxJohann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749.docx

Lecture6April15.pptx
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832
1
Living nature exhibits fundamental organic types: archetypes,
Urtypen, Haupttypen,…
Organisms as if produced by the ideal they embodied
Metamorphosis of organisms: development out of a basic kind
of structure (parts of plants from leaves, skulls from vertebrae)
Organic conception of Nature opposed to the mechanical ideal:
Naturphilosophie against Newtonianism
Art and Science: “All art should become science, and all science
should become art”
Nature as Resource for the creation of the self
2
Alexander von Humboldt und Aimé Bonpland in der
Urwaldhütte, 1850

3
Cosmos, A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe
(1845-62)
Overview of all past and present knowledge of the earth and the
heavens
Universe as law-bound, unified whole while respecting the
freedom of each individual part
Chronometers, telescopes, quadrants, magnetic compasses,
thermometers, barometers, electrometers…
Data from his voyages and from international networks
Widest audience possible (Language and images)
Aesthetics and Precision
Humboldt and Bonpland share a theodolite with an Ecuadoran,
1806
4
Humboldt (1850):
All formations are, therefore, common to every quarter of the
globe and assume the like forms. Everywhere basalt rises in
twin mountains and truncated cones… Thus, too, similar
vegetable forms, as pines and oaks, alike crown the mountain
declivities of Sweden and those of the most southern portion of
Mexico”
“The azure of the sky, the effects of light and shade, the haze
floating on the distant horizon, the forms of animals, the
succulence of plants, the bright glossy surface of the leaves, the
outlines of mountains, all combine to produce the elements on
which depends the impression of any one region.” “Swiss

scenery… Italian sky”
“”Observation of individual parts of trees or grass is by no
means to be considered plant geography… rather, plant
geography traces the connections and relations by which all
plants are bound together.“
“Everywhere the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the
grandeur and the vast expense of nature, revealing to the soul,
by a mysterious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate
the forces of the universe.”
5
6
The Heart of the Andes, 1859
Frederic Edwin Church
8
"women felt faint. Both men and women succumb[ed] to the
dizzying combination of terror and vertigo that they
recognize[d] as the sublime. Many of them will later describe a

sensation of becoming immersed in, or absorbed by, this
painting, whose dimensions, presentation, and subject matter
speak of the divine power of nature."
9
Mark Twain:
“You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your
reflections—your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something—
you hardly know what—will grow so painful that you will have
to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may
find relief, but you cannot banish the picture—it remains with
you still. It is in my mind now—and the smallest feature could
not be removed without my detecting it."
10
11
“Balancing of the severer forms of science and the more
delicate emanations of the fancy”
12

Niagara Falls, from the American Side, 1867
Thomas Cole (1801–1848), The Oxbow, View from Mount
Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,
1836
Lecture8_April22.pptx
Alexandre Yersin (1863 -1943)
Behring together with his colleagues Wernicke (left) and Frosch
(center) in Robert Koch's laboratory in Berlin.
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), by Albert Edelfelt
Robert Koch, 1843-1910
1873 Relapsing fever
1876 Anthrax
1878 Staphylococcal wound infection
1879 Gonorrhea, leprosy
1880 Typhoid fever
1881 Pneumonia; streptococcal wound infection
1882 Tuberculosis
1883 Cholera
1884 Diphtheria, tetanus
1885 E Coli
1887 Bacterial meningitis, Malta fever

1888 Salmonella
1
Koch’s postulates
A Micro-organism must be shown to be constantly present in
diseased tissue
The organism must be grown and isolated in pure culture
The pure culture must produce the disease when inoculated into
a healthy animal
Koch’s photograph of B. anthracis,
Lisbon Bacteriological Institute (founded in 1892)
Diphtheria building
Rabies building
Laboratory
Doghouse
Horse stable

Director’s house
Bacteriological Institute Câmara Pestana BICP (ground floor)
5
Clean all the lenses, screw them in completely, and place the
illuminating mirror on the sunny side of the microscope. With a
dark cloth over your head, look through the ground glass and
adjust the light and focus the specimen… Once the image is in
focus… go inside to prepare the photographic plates. In the
darkroom…remove a clean glass plate with forceps and pour
over its surface the iodized collodion solution, making sure the
film spreads evenly and completely. Once the collodion film is
ready, close the darkroom door and carefully lower the plate
into the silver bath… Allow it to drain and put it in the
cassette… Go back outdoors to the photomicrographic
apparatus. Remove the black cloth…and check to be certain that
the proper image is still in focus… Then carefully place the
cassette, being careful not to move anything. After the
exposure… push the slide back in the cassette, remove the

cassette from the microscope, and cover the microscope again
with the black cloth. This whole procedure must be done
quickly! Run back to the darkroom with the closed cassette,
develop the plate, and fix the negative. If the photographic
image is not completely sharp, or if there are imperfections in
the emulsion… it is necessary to repeat the whole process, since
nothing is more disheartening in the photographic technique
than to try to make prints from unsatisfactory negatives
Robert Koch, Verfahren zur Untersuchung, zum Conservieren
und Photographiren der Bakterien
12
14

Physiology, “Queen of the Life Sciences”
Laboratory revolution and Physiology: Physiologists observed,
dissected, measured, stimulated, registered, graphically
recorded
Laboratories not in “sunny gardens” but in “The German
Chicago” full of pipes, cables, tracks, traffic, factories…
Technological modernization of the workshop: small power
engines (gas motors by Otto and Langen)
Berlin Institute Physiology, 1877
“"Shafts, driven by a 4-horsepower gas engine from Otto in
Deutz, placed in the cellar, ran under the ceiling of the hall.
Above the window workstations, the same are equipped with
belt pulleys, in order to hang a bellows, rotating engines and
apparatuses, if necessary."
17
Caesar Heimann (1884):
“With the aim of studying the causes of dizziness under the
simplest conditions ..., I studied the disturbances that take place
in animals as a result of spinning.... I tied the animals flat in the
stomach area in the periphery of a circular disk with a high rim,
with the legs stretched in front of and behind the animal. The
head was placed with the chin on the disk, so that one half of
the skull was peripheral, the other central. The disk, which had
a diameter of 550 mm, is regularly rotated by a gas motor2 -300
times a minute, each time 3 to 4 minutes long; this rotation is

repeated 3 -4 times at 1-minute intervals. The animals used
were dogs and frogs.”
Wilhelm Wundt 1862:
“The ultimate goal of all investigations in the natural sciences
is the artificial, experimental production of processes observed
in nature. The ultimate goal of physiology is the Homunculus.
Even though it is highly improbable, and will always remain a
vain wish to put the Homunculus together, scientists have
already taken some important steps in that direction.
Physiologists will be satisfied without the whole if they only
have all the parts in their hands”.
Ludwig-Baltzar "Kymograph with endless paper" (From Oscar
Langendorff, Physiologische Graphik: Ein Leitfaden der in der
Physiologie gebriuchlichen Registrier-methoden [Leipzig:
Deuticke, 1891],
18
19
20

Empires and Revolutions/FrenchRevolution.pdf

Empires and Revolutions/LinnaeusCabinet.pdf
Linnaeus’ herbarium cabinet: a piece
of furniture and its function
Staffan Müller-Wille
ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, University of Exeter,
Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, Devon, UK EX4 4RJ
The Swedish 18th-century naturalist Carolus (Carl)
Linnaeus is habitually credited with laying the foun-
dations of modern taxonomy through the invention of
binominal nomenclature. However, another innovation
of Linnaeus’ has largely gone unnoticed. He seems to
have been one of the first botanists to leave his
herbarium unbound, keeping the sheets of dried plants

separate and stacking them in a purpose built-cabinet.
Understanding the significance of this seemingly
mundane and simple invention opens a window onto
the profound changes that natural history underwent in
the 18th century.
Introduction
In December 1783, Sara Elisabeth Moræa, widow of the
famous Swedish naturalist Carolus (Carl) Linnaeus,
wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, then president of the Royal
Society, offering to sell him her husband’s natural history
collection for the price of 1000 guineas. Banks did not buy
it himself, but advised James Edward Smith – a member
of a well-to-do family of wool merchants from Norwich and
amateur botanist – to do so [1].
Linnaeus’ collection reached Smith in October 1784.
Among manuscripts, letters, index cards, books, minerals,
dried fishes and reptiles, and transfixed insects, the
collection included three cabinets stacked with sheets of
paper (Figure 1). Each sheet displayed a dried plant – this
was Linnaeus’ herbarium, and it contained a total of about
14 000 specimens. Two of the three cabinets that Smith
purchased were returned to Sweden in 1938, although the
Linnean Society retained their original contents [2].
Emptied of the herbarium sheets that once occupied
their shelves, they are now mere showpieces in a little
museum adjacent to the old botanical garden of Uppsala
that illustrates the atmosphere in which Linnaeus once
lived and worked. Today, the collection of specimens is

preserved in a temperature- and humidity-controlled
store beneath Burlington house in London – the seat of
the Linnean Society founded by Smith in 1788. There they
form the material starting point for the work of
taxonomists, serving as ‘type’ specimens for the 5900
plant and 4378 animal species that Linnaeus identified
and named in his Species Plantarum and Systema
Naturae, respectively.
The separation of the cabinets from the herbarium
sheets they originally contained has destroyed the unity of
Corresponding author: Müller-Wille, S. ([email protected]).
Available online 5 April 2006
www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter Q 2006
Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
what for Linnaeus was a single tool for scrutinizing the
‘natural order’ of the plant world. Today, plant taxono-
mists advance their classifications on the basis of the type
method. Each species is defined by reference to a single
specimen, the so-called ‘holotype’, which is then preserved
in a natural history museum to be accessible for
later revisions.
However, historians have established that this was not
the method Linnaeus himself employed. The type method
was the result of a protracted and often bitter fight over
authority in natural history, which took place in the first
half of the 19th century and was only resolved by the
adoption of international codes of nomenclature in 1842
(for zoology) and 1867 (for botany) [3]. The result of these
developments was that authority for the definition of
species shifted, in a sense, from people and their ideas
about species to specimens and the rules that taxonomists
use to handle them – a ‘metaphysics in action’, as historian
of science Lorraine Daston recently put it [4].

But if the type method was not how Linnaeus
determined species, how did he do it? This is an
interesting question for three reasons. First, modern-day
botanists need some understanding of the methods
Linnaeus employed when naming and defining species
because they are obliged to decide, artificially and in
retrospect, which of Linnaeus’ many specimens might
have been the type specimen described in Species
Plantarum [5]. Second, Linnaeus played a key role in
the history of biological ideas by defining the quest for a
‘natural system’ as the main task of naturalists [6]. Third,
Linnaeus was at the heart of a large-scale social
transformation in which the activity of naturalists
reached a truly global scale [7]. A look into his herbarium
cabinet, restored to life by imagining it at work, can open a
window onto the profound changes that natural history
underwent in the 18th century.
Making a herbarium
The Philosophia Botanica, a botany textbook that
Linnaeus based on the lectures he gave at the University
of Uppsala, contains careful instructions on how to create
a herbarium [8]. Linnaeus described how plants should be
collected, dried, pressed and glued onto paper, including
such details as what materials and glue to use. These
instructions were an attempt to standardize botanical
procedures and erase the habits and whims of
individual collectors.
Review Endeavour Vol. 30 No. 2 June 2006
. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2006.03.001
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.sciencedirect.com
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Figure 1. Linnaeus’ herbarium cabinets. This image shows the
cabinets as they
were set up inside a large mahogany unit in the meeting room at
the Linnean
Society, circa 1907. To the extreme right are the publications of
Linnaeus. Image
reproduced courtesy of the Linnaean Society of London.
Figure 2. A sheet from Paul Hermann’s herbarium. q Natural
History Museum,
London.
Figure 3. (a) Construction plan by Linnaeus for a herbarium
cabinet, reproduced
from Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica (1751) (b) Linnaeus’
herbarium cabinets circa

1938 – image reproduced courtesy of the Linnaean Society of
London.
Review Endeavour Vol. 30 No. 2 June 2006 61
In drawing up these instructions, Linnaeus was
following a long tradition dating back to the Italian Luca
Ghini, who was professor for medicine and botany at the
University of Pisa during the 16th century and is usually
credited with the invention of the herbarium [9].
Compared to earlier collectors, however, Linnaeus’
instructions contained a decisive innovation. Tradition-
ally, several specimens might be glued in a decorative
arrangement on a single sheet of paper (Figure 2). These
sheets were then bound into volumes, stored in a library
and cited like books. Specimens were thus placed into a
fixed order from which they could not be removed without
destroying the herbarium or even the specimens. Lin-
naeus, by contrast, advised readers of the Philosophia
Botanica to mount just one specimen per sheet and refrain
from binding them together.
For storage of the mounted specimens, Linnaeus
suggested a purpose-built cabinet and gave illustrated
guidance on how to construct it (Figure 3). These
instructions correspond exactly to the three cabinets
that Linnaeus possessed. These are rather plain in design
– only one of them was adorned with two rows of leaf
impressions on the outside of the doors. The doors open
onto two narrow columns of shelves and it appears that at
least one of the cabinets that returned to Sweden was also
equipped with a dense, parallel series of horizontal slits
covering its inner walls, into which the shelves supporting
the herbarium sheets could be inserted at variable
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distances [10]. It is impossible to know if these were part of
the original design or were added later. However, this
detail indicates that the number of shelves and distances
between them could be changed easily, either to accom-
modate new material or to rearrange the collection as a
whole. Therefore, although the herbarium of Linnaeus
brought his specimens into an order, individual sheets
could easily be inserted at any place, removed at any time
and reinserted again anywhere in the collection: the
herbarium essentially functioned as a filing cabinet.
In contrast to the bound volumes of older herbaria, the
order Linnaeus’ herbarium cabinet brought to his
collection was not fixed and perpetual. It was designed
to accommodate the steady arrival of new material and
enabled its user, in principle at least, to repeatedly
rearrange that material. This was clearly important for
Linnaeus. While staying in the Netherlands from
1735–1738 he received several herbarium sheets from
George Clifford, a former director of the Dutch East India
Company whose vast plant collection Linnaeus was
curator of in 1737. These sheets had small prints mounted
Figure 4. The type specimen of Helianthus strumosus L. This is
one of the

specimens that reached Linnaeus’ herbarium from George
Clifford. These were
ornately decorated with the print of a vase (visible at the bottom
of the image) that
Linnaeus cut through when adapting the size of the sheets to his
herbarium cabinet.
Image (sheet no. 1024.7 of the Linnean herbarium) reproduced
courtesy of the
Linnaean Society of London.
onto them, creating the impression that the plant speci-
mens they carried grew from a vase. Linnaeus cut these
sheets down to a size that would fit into his cabinet, in
some instances cutting right through the ‘vase’ (Figure 4).
The internal mobility of his herbarium was apparently of
greater importance to Linnaeus than any aesthetic value
that the individual sheets or the collection as a whole
might possess.
The natural order of plants
How did Linnaeus use his herbarium? Some clues lie in
the Philosophia Botanica, where he described how to set
up what he called ‘natural’ definitions of plant species and
genera. Traditionally, plant species and genera had been
defined by the method of logical division: this method
consisted in assigning a species to its genus (or a genus to
its ‘order’) and establishing a single character by which it
could be distinguished from its congeners [11]. Linnaeus
believed that this method was insufficient and called the

definitions and taxonomic systems that resulted from it
‘artificial’. Such definitions, he reasoned, needed revision
whenever a new species was discovered; there was no
guarantee that characters used to distinguish congeners
would work for newly discovered species.
By contrast, natural definitions, or ‘natural characters’
as Linnaeus also called them, were more descriptive. They
assembled all possible traits of a species or genus, not just
a few selected for their diagnostic value. The method that
Linnaeus proposed for establishing natural characters
was simple and straightforward. The botanist started with
a ‘first species’ (prima species) represented by a garden
exemplar, a herbarium specimen or a drawing, and drew
up a full description of its morphology. In a series of
further steps, additional representative specimens were
gathered one by one. Characters that deviated from the
original were then cancelled from the description. What
was left was the set of characters that had proved to be
‘constant’.
In some instances Linnaeus referred to this compara-
tive method as ‘collation’, a legal term for the word-by-
word comparison of an original document with its copy.
This metaphor can be taken literally. Garden exemplars
were seasonal, and plant drawings often unreliable. The
herbarium, on the other hand, provided a reliable source
of concrete evidence: stable and ready at hand throughout
the year. Linnaeus’ description of collation enables us to
imagine how he actually used his herbarium. In setting up
natural characters, he would first take out one herbarium
sheet, and then adduce others to compare the mounted
specimens systematically, point-by-point, as if comparing
two texts.
The design of the herbarium cabinet thus enabled

Linnaeus to put together any set of specimens at a time for
the purpose of collation. As a result, the relations among
plant forms represented by natural characters trans-
cended the local differences exhibited, say, by two speci-
mens permanently fixed on one and the same herbarium
sheet. The ‘natural system’ of plants, as Linnaeus saw it,
consisted of a two-dimensional web of relations in which
‘all plants exhibit their contiguities on either side,
like territories on a geographical map.’ Each species
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Review Endeavour Vol. 30 No. 2 June 2006 63
represented by a specimen in Linnaeus’ herbarium was
defined by the affinities it exhibited with respect to all the
other specimens in the collection. The potential for a
complete permutation of specimens, which the herbarium
cabinet offered in principle, enabled a global represen-
tation of taxonomic affinities [12]. Accordingly, it was the
herbarium in its totality, rather than arbitrary type
specimens, which served as a tool in the determination
of plant species and genera.
The social order of botany
The enormous numbers of plant specimens that Linnaeus’
three cabinets accommodated were accrued from a world-
wide network of botanists, professionals as well as
amateurs, with whom Linnaeus exchanged seeds and
specimens [13]. Two parties played a crucial role in this
network. First were the botanists presiding over major
European botanical gardens – contacts Linnaeus had
primarily established during the time he spent in The
Netherlands. They included Johann Jacob Dillen in
Oxford, Antoine and Bernard Jussieu in Paris, Adriaan
van Royen in Leyden, Albrecht von Haller in Göttingen
and Johann Georg Gmelin in St Petersburg [14]. It seems
likely that it was as curator of Clifford’s botanical garden
that Linnaeus found the inspiration for the peculiar
construction of his herbarium. None of the surviving
specimens from Clifford’s collection seems to have been
bound and there were a few other botanists in the
Netherlands that kept their specimens on loose sheets,
although this might already have been due to Linnaeus’

influence [15].
Second were collectors at the periphery of the known
botanical world that Linnaeus engaged for his purposes.
His students, in particular, were a major source for seeds
and specimens as they travelled the world with support
from the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm or the
Swedish East India Company: Per Kalm travelled North
America from 1749–1751, Daniel Solander accompanied
the first circumnavigation of the globe with James Cook
and Carl Peter Thunberg’s voyage from 1770–1779 took
him as far as Sri Lanka and Japan [16]. Linnaeus’ own
garden at Uppsala functioned as a hub in this two-tiered
system of exchange. The acquisition of ‘new species’ from
peripheral collectors strengthened his position as an
exchange partner in the European system of large
botanical gardens, whereas the material he exchanged
with these centres enabled him to compensate his
exchange partners at the periphery through the provision
of seeds and specimens of species they lacked in their own
collections [17].
The botanical garden in Uppsala thus became a place
not only dedicated to the local production of specimens,
but also to their reproduction for purposes of exchange. Its
wealth was not determined by the splendour of the
individual plants inhabiting it, but rather through the
number of identically reproducing species that could be
harvested for seeds and specimens and then offered in
exchanges with other botanists. This is reflected in the
characterization of two kinds of botanist Linnaeus
distinguished in the Philosophia Botanica – the collectors
who were ‘primarily concerned with the number of species
of vegetables’ and the systematists who ‘arranged the
plants in particular ranks’. The role of collectors was not

merely to accumulate, however, and nor were the
systematists just passively ordering material. When
Linnaeus discussed the way in which natural characters
of plant genera should best be set up, he curiously
conflated both the role of collector and systematist: it is
only ‘the most accomplished botanist, and he alone [who]
achieves the best natural character; for it will be made by
the agreement of the greatest number of species; for every
species excludes some superfluous feature’ [18].
This enigmatic statement, typical of Linnaeus’ con-
densed style of writing, begins to make sense when we
recall his method of collation. This consisted of the
comparison of two or more specimens and the removal of
all varying characters from a description produced from
some ‘first species’. Each ‘new’ species entering collation
would thus indeed ‘exclude superfluous features’ from the
natural character, and the latter would only collect those
traits that enable diverse specimens to stand in for each
other, or by which they could be judged to be copies or
duplicates. The ‘most accomplished botanist’ – in his usual
self-confident way, Linnaeus was clearly thinking of
himself – was thus not simply the botanist with the
largest collection but also the one who, by collation, could
determine the specimens that were ‘duplicates’ and
therefore free to be exchanged [19]. Managing a large
collection for the purposes of comparison and exchange
was a complex task. Linnaeus’ herbarium cabinet,
designed for the flexible realization of any set of
exemplars, was clearly an effective tool for quickly
checking which species were already represented in his
collection, and which were not and thus (to him at
least) new.
Another feature of the herbarium cabinets emphasizes
their function. The shelves were arranged according to

Linnaeus’ famous sexual system, which divided the plant
realm into 24 classes according to the number and position
of stamina and pistils. Although this might appear to
embrace a relatively fixed arrangement of the collection,
Linnaeus made it clear that this enabled him to ‘pull out
and produce [any plant] without delay’. The methodical
arrangement of specimens according to the sexual system
served as a retrieval system for previously gathered
information, and was therefore an arbitrary device that
did not represent any natural order. ‘Others’, as Linnaeus
therefore emphasized in the Philosophia Botanica, ‘may
arrange [their herbarium] according to any other system,
observing what should be observed’.
The agitated background of 18th century taxonomy
According to some famous remarks that Michel Foucault
made in his Order of Things, 18th-century natural history
was profoundly shaped by ‘herbaria, natural history
cabinets, and botanical gardens.’ These institutions
formed the ‘timeless rectangle’ of 18th century taxo-
nomies, in which ‘beings presented themselves side by
side with their visible surfaces, without any commentary
and surrounding language, approaching each other by
their common traits, and thus virtually analyzed, bearers
of their sole names’ [20]. To some, this might suggest an
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18th-century mentality that preferred order and stability
above diversity and variation, measurement above experi-
ment: a static and tendentiously conservative outlook.
Indeed, Carl Linnaeus has often enough been portrayed as
the prototypical protagonist of this mind-set [21].

However, Linnaeus’ preoccupation with a taxonomy of
‘constant’ characters resulted from his engagement in a
dynamic practice of transplantation and exchange, which
had deep roots in the rapid and ongoing globalization of
European economies [22]. Furthermore, it should not be
ignored that his taxonomic works were published in
several editions: Linnaeus authorized two editions of the
Species Plantarum during his lifetime; the Genera
Plantarum went into six; and the Systema Naturae
into 12, growing from a 12-paged folio volume into
three octavo volumes of approximately 1500 pages.
Taxonomy had become the art of revising prior classifi-
cations in the light of ‘new’ species, and Linnaeus’
herbarium cabinet was perfectly designed to accommodate
this progressive movement.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on my contribution to Anke te Heesen’s
and Emma
Spary’s edited volume Sammeln als Wissen: Das Sammeln und
seine
wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung. I am grateful to Gina
Douglas –
librarian of the Linnean Society of London – and Eva Björn –
from
Linnémuseet in Uppsala – for information on the history of
Linnaeus’
cabinets; and to Charlie Jarvis – of the Linnaean Plant Name
Typification
Project at the Natural History Museum in London – who pointed
me to
Clifford’s specimens in the Linnaean collection.
References

1 White, P. (1999) The purchase of knowledge: James Edward
Smith and
the Linnaean collections. Endeavour 23, pp. 126–129
2 On the history of the cabinets see Gage, A.T. and Stearn,
W.T., eds
(1988) A Bicentennary History of the Linnean Society of
London,
Academic Press of the Linnean Society (London, UK), p. 177;
and
Ramsbottom, J. (1938) President’s address: Linnaeus and the
Species Concept. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London
150,
pp. 192–219 (op. cit. p. 219)
3 McOuat, G.R. (1996) Species, rules and meaning: the politics
of
language and the ends of definitions in 19th century natural
history.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 27, pp. 473–519
4 Daston, L. (2004) Type specimens and scientific memory.
Critical
Inquiry 31, pp. 153–182 (op. cit. p. 158)
5 See The Linnaean Plant Name Typification Project
(http://www.nhm.
ac.uk/research-curation/projects/linnaean-typification/, last
accessed
20 January 2006). The Linnaeus Link Project, which aims to
produce a
union catalogue of Linnaean collections worldwide, must also
be seen
in this context (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-
curation/projects/lin-
naeus-link/index.html, last access 23 January 2006)

6 Lefèvre, W. (1999) Natural or artificial systems? The 18th-
century
controversy on classification of animals and plants and its
philoso-
phical contexts. In Between Leibniz, Newton, and Kant
(Lefèvre, W.,
ed.), pp. 191–209, Kluwer (Dordvedct, Germany)
7 Müller-Wille, S. (2001) Gardens of paradise. Endeavour 25,
pp. 49–54
8 For a recent translation of this textbook see Linnaeus, C.
(Freer, S.,
trans) (2003) Philosophia Botanica, Oxford University Press
(Oxford,
UK). The instructions on how to make a herbarium are on p. 18
and
pp. 329–330 of this edition
9 There is no modern history of the herbarium. Detailed
descriptions of
some of the oldest herbaria, including those of Ulysse
Aldrovandi (1522–
1605) and Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603) – both students of
Ghini, can be
found in Saint-Lager, J-B. (1886) Histoire des herbiers. Annales
de la
Société Botanique de Lyon: Notes et Mémoires 13, pp. 1–120
10 See the photograph of the cabinet reproduced in Dahlgren,
K.V.O.
(1951) Philosophia botanica, ett 200-årsminne. Svenska
Linnesälls-
kapets Årsskrif 33–34, p. 23. Today the cabinets lack this
feature, so it

must have been removed during some later restoration work,
indicating that it was judged to be a post-Linnaean addition
11 Larson, J.L. (1971) Reason and Experience: The
Representation of
Natural Order in the Work of Carl Linnaeus, University of
California
Press (Berkeley CA, USA)
12 Müller-Wille, S. (2003) Joining Lapland and the Topinambes
in
flourishing Holland: center and periphery in Linnaean botany.
Science
in Context 16, pp. 461–488
13 The fullest account of the provenance of the plant material
collected in
Linnaeus’s herbarium is provided by Stearn, W.T. (1957) An
introduction to the Species plantarum and cognate botanical
works
of Carl Linnaeus. In Carl Linnaeus, ‘Species plantarum’: A
Facsimile
of the First Edition 1753 (Vol. 1) (Ray Society, ed.), pp. 103–
114, Ray
Society (London, UK)
14 An account of Linnaeus’ political skills in building up a
correspon-
dence network is given in Sörlin, S. (2000) Ordering the world
for
Europe: science as intelligence and information as seen from the
northern periphery. In Nature and Empire: Science and the
Colonial
Enterprise (MacLeod, R., ed.), pp. 51–69, University of Chicago
Press
(Chicago, IL, USA); for an edition of letters to and from

Linnaeus see
The Linnaean Correspondence Project
(http://www.linnaeus.c18.net/,
last accessed 24 January 2006)
15 I owe this information to Charlie Jarvis who works in the
Linnaean
Plant Name Typification Project, Natural History Museum,
London,
UK
16 Sörlin, S. (1989) Scientific travel: the Linnaean tradition. In
Science in
Sweden. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 1739–1989
(Frängsmyr, T., ed.), pp. 96–123, Science History Publications
(Canton, MA, USA)
17 Müller-Wille, S. (2005) Walnuts at Hudson Bay, coral reefs
in Gotland:
the colonialism of Linnaean botany. In Colonial Botany:
Science,
Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World
(Schiebinger,
L. and Swan, C., eds), pp. 34–48. University of Pennsylvania
Press
(Philadelphia, PA, USA)
18 Freer’s translation has ‘includes’ for ‘excludit’ in the Latin
original,
which is clearly incorrect; the original is in Linnaeus, C. (1751)
Philosophia botanica, Kiesewetter (Stockholm, Sweden), p. 131
19 Müller-Wille, S. (2003) Nature as a marketplace: the
political economy
of Linnaean botany. In Oeconomies in the Age of Newton (De
Marchi,

N. and Schabas, M., eds), pp. 155–173, Duke University Press
(Durham, NC, USA)
20 Foucault, M. (1966) Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie
des sciences
humaines, Gallimard (Paris, France), p. 143; the translation is
my
own
21 Lesch, J.E. (1990) Systematics and the geometrical spirit. In
The
Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Frängsmyr, T. et
al.,
eds), pp. 73–112, University of California Press
22 Koerner, L. (1999) Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, Harvard
University
Press (Cambridge, MA, USA)
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/linnaean-
typification/
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/linnaean-
typification/
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/linnaeus-
link/index.html
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/linnaeus-
link/index.html
http://www.linnaeus.c18.net/
tiagosaraiva
HighlightLinnaeus herbarium cabinet: a piece of furniture and
its functionIntroductionMaking a herbariumThe natural order of
plantsThe social order of botanyThe agitated background of
18th century taxonomyAcknowledgementsReferences

1
2
History 281: History of Science
Midterm Examination
Spring 2015
Read and follow the instructions carefully.
Write your answers in essay form. Draw specifically on the
lectures, readings, and discussions in writing your answers.
Write a brief introduction and conclusion and be sure to answer
all parts of the question. Be sure to answer the question
actually asked, not one you wish had been asked. Your answers
will be graded on organization, clarity, specificity, and creative
insight.
Group I (50%)
Answer one of the following questions.
1. Historians of Science have compared the role of science in
the French Revolution to the mobilization of physicists during
World War II to the Manhattan Project leading to the first
atomic bomb. Do you think such comparison is reasonable?
How did the involvement of scientists and engineers with the
state during those revolutionary years contributed to mold the
engineering profession in France in the following decades?
2. What material resources did Linnaeus need to undertake his
studies in Botany? What do we learn from looking in detail at

the spaces Linnaeus worked in? In particular what does
furniture have to tell us about botany as practiced by Linnaeus?
Group 2 (50%)
Answer one of the following questions.
1. Consider the following painting by F. E. Church. How is the
image of nature here represented related to the figure of the
romantic scientist Alexander von Humboldt? Why were people
in the Americas so interested in Humboldt’s views on nature?
Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859

2. Consider the following picture of a laboratory in the Lisbon
Bacteriological Institute. Why were scientists using rabbits in
their experiments? How can one relate the growing use of non-
human animals in bacteriology with the rise of the laboratory as
a crucial space for the life sciences? Can you refer to other non-
human animals present in a bacteriological institute?
Lisbon Bacteriology Institute, 1900
1

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