Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century

Campbell Lewis Garnett William , The life of James Clerk Maxwell, with selections from his correspondence and occasional writings, new edn (London, 1884), 354.

Lovejoy Arthur O. , The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 242–87; Bynum William F. , “The great chain of being after 40 years: An appraisal”, History of science, xiii (1975), 1975–28.

E.g., O'Connell Joseph , “Metrology: The creation of universality by the circulation of particulars”, Social studies of science, xxiii (1993), 129–73; Wise M. Norton (ed.), The values of precision (Princeton, 1995); Porter Theodore M. , Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life (Princeton, 1995); Hunt Bruce J. , “Doing science in a global empire: Cable telegraphy and electrical physics in Victorian Britain”, in Lightman Bernard (ed.), Victorian science in context (Chicago, 1997), 312–33; Schaffer Simon , “Metrology, metrication, and Victorian values”, ibid., 438–74; Hess Volker (ed.)., Normierung der Gesundheit: Messende Verfahren der Medizin als kulturelle Praktik um 1900 (Husum, 1997); Gooday Graeme J. N. , The morals of measurement: Accuracy, irony and trust in late Victorian electrical practice (Cambridge, 2004); and (for literature reviews) Hessenbruch Arne , “Metrology” and ”Standardization”, in idem (ed.), Reader's guide to the history of science (London, 2000), 477–80 and 704–6.

Oxford English dictionary, s.v. “series”; Littré Emile , Dictionnaire de la langue française (4 vols, Paris, 1877), s.v. “série”; Grimm Jacob Grimm Wilhelm , Deutsches Wörterbuch, viii (Leipzig, 1893), cols 636–55.

Lovejoy , op. cit. (ref. 2), 236. On missing links in nineteenth-century culture see Beer Gillian , Open fields: Science in cultural encounter (Oxford, 1996), 115–15; and Cook James W. , The arts of deception: Playing with fraud in the age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

Lovejoy , op. cit. (ref. 2), 332.

Foucault Michel , The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (London, 1970), 150, 138, 275. See also Daudin Henri , Cuvier et Lamarck: Les classes zoologiques et l'idée de série animale (1790–1830) (Paris, 1926); Jacob François , The logic of life: A history of heredity (New York, 1982); and Lepenies Wolf , Das Ende der Naturgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1976).

Kielmeyer Carl Friedrich , Ueber die Verhältniße der organischen Kräfte unter einander in der Reihe der verschiedenen Organisationen, die Geseze und Folgen dieser Verhältniße (Stuttgart, 1793), 38–9; Lenoir Timothy , The strategy of life: Teleology and mechanics in nineteenth-century German biology (Chicago, 1982), 43.

Baer Karl Ernst v. , “Beiträge zur Kenntniss der niedern Thiere. VII. Die Verwandtschafts-Verhältnisse unter den niedern Thierformen”, Verhandlungen der Kaiserlichen Leopoldinisch-Carolinischen Akademie der Naturforscher, xiii (1827), 731–62, p. 740, translated according to “Fragments relating to philosophical zoology: Selected from the works of K. E. von Baer”, in Scientific memoirs, selected from the transactions of foreign academies of science and from foreign journals: Natural history, ed. by Henfrey Arthur Huxley Thomas Henry (London, 1853), 176–238, p. 179; Foucault , op. cit. (ref. 7), 271.

Appel Toby A. , “Henri de Blainville and the animal series: A nineteenth-century chain of being”, Journal of the history of biology, xiii (1980), 291–319.

“Observations on the nature and importance of geology”, Edinburgh new philosophical journal, i (1826), 292–302, p. 300. The author of this article is uncertain, but it is certainly not Robert Edmond Grant and may even be Jameson himself: Secord James A. , “Edinburgh Lamarckians: Robert Jameson and Robert E. Grant”, Journal of the history of biology, xxiv (1991), 1991–18; and, for discussion of contemporary ‘ultraserialism’, Desmond Adrian , The politics of evolution: Morphology, medicine and reform in radical London (Chicago, 1989), 5 n. 11, 45, 311.

Desmond , op. cit. (ref. 11), 263–4.

Herschel William , “Astronomical observations relating to the sidereal part of the heavens”, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, civ (1814), 248–84, p. 248.

Herschel John , “Account of some observations made with a 20-feet reflecting telescope”, Memoirs of the Astronomical Society, ii (1826), 459–97, p. 488; [ Nichol John Pringle ], “State of discovery and speculation concerning the nebulae”, Westminster review, xxv (1836), 1836–409, pp. 404–5; Hoskin Michael , “John Herschel's cosmology”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xviii (1987), 1987–34, p. 8; Brush Stephen G. , Nebulous Earth: The origin of the solar system and the core of the Earth from Laplace to Jeffreys (Cambridge, 1996), 40–2.

Schaffer Simon , “The nebular hypothesis and the science of progress”, in Moore James R. (ed.), History, humanity and evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge, 1989), 131–64, pp. 150–1.

Barsanti Giulio , La scala, la mappa, l'albero: Immagini e classificazioni della natura tra Sei e Ottocento (Florence, 1992).

On the transformation of maps, see Laudan Rachel , From mineralogy to geology: The foundations of a science, 1650–1830 (Chicago, 1987), 168–9; Rudwick Martin J. S. , Bursting the limits of time: The reconstruction of geohistory in the age of revolution (Chicago, 2005); idem, “The emergence of a visual language for geological science, 1760–1840”, History of science, xiv (1976), 1976–95.

Fischer-Homberger Esther , Medizin vor Gericht: Gerichtsmedizin von der Renaissance bis zur Aufklärung (Bern, 1983), 249–50; Duden Barbara , “Zwischen ‘wahrem Wissen’ und Prophetie: Konzeptionen des Ungeborenen”, in Duden Jürgen Schlumbohm Veit Patrice (eds), Geschichte des Ungeborenen: Zur Erfahrungs- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Schwangerschaft, 17.–20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2002), 11–48; Buklijas Tatjana Hopwood Nick , “Development”, in Making visible embryos (2008; http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/s2.html). see further Hagner Michael , “Enlightened monsters”, in Clark William Golinski Jan Schaffer Simon (eds), The sciences in enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 175–217; Wellmann Janina , “Keine Ikone der Entwicklung: Die Icones embryonum humanorum von Samuel Thomas Soemmerring”, in Schneider Ulrich Johannes (ed.) Kulturen des Wissens im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2008), 585–94; and idem, “Die Metamorphose der Bilder: Die Verwandlung der Insekten und ihre Darstellung vom Ende des 17. bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts”, N. T. M., xvi (2008), 2008–211.

Gooding David , “Experiment and concept formation in electromagnetic science and technology in England in the 1820s”, History and technology, ii (1985), 151–76; Faraday Michael , Experimental researches in electricity (London, 1839), pp. iii–iv; Morus Iwan , Frankenstein's children: Electricity, exhibition and experiment in early nineteenth-century London (Princeton, 1998), 23–41.

Hopwood Nick , “Visual standards and disciplinary change: Normal plates, tables and stages in embryology”, History of science, xliii (2005), 239–303.

Gowan Dawson is currently completing work on forms of publication in Victorian palaeontology. On Cuvier and Laplace, see Outram Dorinda , Georges Cuvier: Vocation, science and authority in post-Revolutionary France (Manchester, 1984); and Charles Coulston Gillispie (with the collaboration of Fox Robert Grattan-Guinness Ivor ), Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A life in exact science (Princeton, 1997). For serial publication of novels see Hughes Linda K. Lund Michael , The Victorian serial (Charlottesville, VA, 1991); Poovey Mary , Uneven developments: The ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988); Feltes Norman N. , Modes of production of Victorian novels (Chicago, 1986); and several of the essays in Jordan John O. Patten Robert L. (eds), Literature in the marketplace: Nineteenth-century British publishing and reading practices (Cambridge, 1995).

Herschel John , “Sound”, Encyclopaedia metropolitana, iv (London, 1830), 763–824; and Cannon Susan Faye , Science in culture: The early Victorian period (New York, 1978), 180–1. On the debates about transmutation, see Corsi Pietro , “The importance of French transformist ideas for the second volume of Lyell's Principles of geology”, The British journal for the history of science, xi (1978), 1978–44, pp. 227–9.

On periodicals, see Crosland Maurice , In the shadow of Lavoisier: The Annales de chimie and the establishment of a new science (Oxford, 1994); Brock W. H. , “The development of commercial science journals in Victorian Britain”, in Meadows A. J. (ed.), Development of science publishing in Europe (Amsterdam, 1980), 95–122; Broman Thomas H. , “Periodical literature”, in Frasca-Spada Marina Jardine Nick (eds), Books and the sciences in history (Cambridge, 2000), 225–38; Secord James A. , “Science, technology and mathematics”, in McKitterick David (ed.) The Cambridge history of the book in Britain, vi: 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 2009), 443–74, pp. 451–9; and Bynum W. F. Lock Stephen Porter Roy (eds), Medical journals and medical knowledge: Historical essays (London, 1992). The significance of general periodicals for the sciences is brought out in the work of the SciPer Project at Leeds and Sheffield, especially Dawson Gowan Noakes Richard Topham Jonathan R. , “Introduction” to Cantor Geoffrey (eds), Science in the nineteenth-century periodical: Reading the magazine of nature (Cambridge, 2004), 1–34.

Schaffer Simon , “Scientific discoveries and the end of natural philosophy”, Social studies of science, xvi (1986), 387–420. On the ‘spirit of the age’, see Chandler James , England in 1819: The politics of literary culture and the case of Romantic historicism (Chicago, 1998).

Secord James A. , “How scientific conversation became shop talk”, in Fyfe Aileen Lightman Bernard (eds), Science in the marketplace: Nineteenth-century sites and experiences (Chicago, 2007), 23–59. For aspects of the French case, Dorinda Outram, “Before objectivity: Wives, patronage, and cultural reproduction in early nineteenth-century French science”, in Abir-Am Pnina G. Outram Dorinda (eds), Uneasy careers and intimate lives: Women in science, 1789–1979 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), 1–30.

These issues have recently been extensively discussed, e.g., in Bayly C. A. , The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004); Winseck Dwayne R. Pike Robert M. , Communication and empire: Media, markets, and globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC, 2007); and the focus section edited by Sivasundaram Sujit , “Global histories of science”, Isis, ci (2010), 2010–158.

Greenhalgh Paul , Ephemeral vistas: The expositions universelles, great exhibitions and world's fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, 1991); Rydell Robert W. Gwinn Nancy (eds), Fair representations: World's fairs and the modern world (Amsterdam, 1994); Georgel Chantal (ed.), La jeunesse des musées: Les musées de France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1994); Fuchs Eckhardt (ed.), Weltausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1999); Yanni Carla , Nature 's museums: Victorian science and the architecture of display (London, 1999).

For Salter: Secord James A. , “The Geological Survey of Great Britain as a research school, 1839–1855”, History of science, xxiv (1986), 223–75, p. 260; for Neumayr: Rudwick Martin J. S. , The meaning of fossils: Episodes in the history of palaeontology (Chicago, 1985), 255.

Rudwick , op. cit. (ref. 28), 252–4; Desmond Adrian , Huxley: From devil's disciple to evolution's high priest (London, 1998), 471–3; Clark Constance Areson , God — Or gorilla: Images of evolution in the jazz age (Baltimore, 2008).

Hopwood Nick , “Pictures of evolution and charges of fraud: Ernst Haeckel's embryological illustrations”, Isis, xcvii (2006), 260–301; Voss Julia , Darwins Bilder: Ansichten der Evolutionstheorie 1837–1874 (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), 190–7.

E.g., Theunissen Bert , Eugène Dubois and the ape-man from Java: The history of the first missing link and its discoverer (Dordrecht, 1989).

Huxley Thomas Henry , Lay sermons, addresses and reviews (London, 1870), 117; Desmond , op. cit. (ref. 29), 367–8.

Davis E. A. Falconer I. J. , J. J. Thomson and the discovery of the electron (London, 1997), 47–52, 73–6.

Everdell William R. , The first moderns: Profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought (Chicago, 1997), 75–6.

van Keuren David K. , “Museums and ideology: Augustus Pitt-Rivers, anthropological museums and social change in later Victorian Britain”, in Brantlinger Patrick (ed.) Energy and entropy: Science and culture in Victorian Britain (Bloomington, 1989), 270–88, p. 277; Fox A. Lane [Pitt Rivers], “On the principles of classification adopted in the arrangement of his anthropological collection”, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, iv (1874), 1874–16, p. 3; Chapman William Ryan , “Arranging ethnology: A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers and the typological tradition”, in Stocking George W. Jr (ed.), Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture (Madison, 1985), 15–48, p. 41.

Zimmerman Andrew , Anthropology and antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001), 172–98; Penny H. Glenn , Objects of culture: Ethnology and ethnographic museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, 2002).

See also Clark , God — Or gorilla (ref. 29).

Christie J. R. R. Golinski J. V. , “The spreading of the word: New directions in the historiography of chemistry, 1600–1800”, History of science, xx (1982), 235–66; Cohen Benjamin R. , “The element of the table: Visual discourse and the preperiodic representation of chemical classification”, Configurations, xii (2004), 2004–75.

Ampère André-Marie , “Essay towards a natural classification of simple bodies”, Philosophical magazine, xlvii (1816), 438–46, p. 444. For chemists and the chain of being see Knight David M. , The transcendental part of chemistry (Folkestone, 1978), 248–54.

Gordin Michael D. , A well-ordered thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the shadow of the periodic table (New York, 2004), 26.

Scerri Eric R. , The periodic table: Its story and its significance (Oxford, 2007), 251.

Eliot Simon , Some patterns and trends in British publishing, 1800–1919 (London, 1994); Magee Gary Bryan , Productivity and performance in the paper industry: Labour, capital, and technology in Britain and America, 1860–1914 (Cambridge, 1997).

Müller-Wille Staffan , “Early Mendelism and the subversion of taxonomy: Epistemological obstacles as institutions”, Studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, xxxvi (2005), 465–87; Rheinberger Hans-Jörg Müller-Wille , Vererbung: Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts (Frankfurt am Main, 2009), 160–5, 175–81.

Foucault Michel , Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. by Senellart Michel (Basingstoke, 2007), 315.

Hacking Ian , The taming of chance (Cambridge, 1990), 35–6, 123; Porter Theodore M. , The rise of statistical thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986), 86.

Lyell Charles , Principles of geology (London, 1833), iii, 31; Rudwick M. J. S. , “Charles Lyell's dream of a statistical palaeontology”, Palaeontology, xxi (1978), 1978–44; and idem, “Transposed concepts from the human sciences in the early work of Charles Lyell”, in Jordanova Ludmilla Porter Roy (eds), Images of the Earth: Essays in the history of the environmental sciences (Chalfont St Giles, 1979), 67–83.

Secord , op. cit. (ref. 28), 250; idem, Controversy in Victorian geology: The Cambrian—Silurian dispute (Princeton, 1986), 243.

Perkins Maureen , Visions of the future: Almanacs, time, and cultural change, 1775–1870 (Oxford, 1996), chap. 6; Levitt Theresa , The shadow of enlightenment: Optical and political transparency in France, 1789–1848 (Oxford, 2009), 91–8, 101.

Anderson Katharine , Predicting the weather: Victorians and the science of meteorology (Chicago, 2005), 58–63.

Ibid., 207–8.

Ure Andrew , The philosophy of manufactures; or, an exposition of the scientific, moral and commercial economy of the factory system of Great Britain (London, 1835), 13; Farrar W. V. , ” andrew Ure and the philosophy of manufactures”, Notes and records of the Royal Society, xxvii (1973), 1973–324; Berg Maxine , The machinery question and the making of political economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge, 1980), 199.

Berg , op. cit. (ref. 51), 282, cites a socialist journal of 1836; Kufahl (1844) is cited in Biernacki Richard , The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914 (Berkeley, 1997), 139. For rival systems of serial factory layouts see Markus Thomas A. , Buildings and power: Freedom and control in the origin of modern building types (London, 1993), 261–70.

Marx Karl , Capital: A critique of political economy, i (London, 1976), 463–5, 500–2, 544–5. Giedion Compare Siegfried , Mechanization takes command: A contribution to anonymous history (New York, 1969), 99–100; Hughes Thomas P. , “The order of the technological world”, History of technology, v (1980), 1–16, pp. 5–7; and Panzieri Raniero , “The capitalist use of machinery: Marx versus the ‘objectivists’”, in Slater Phil (ed.) Outlines of a critique of technology (London, 1980), 44–68.

Babbage Charles , The ninth Bridgewater treatise: A fragment, 2nd edn (London, 1838), 41–42, 66; idem, Passages from the life of a philosopher (London, 1864), 387; Schaffer Simon , “Babbage's intelligence: Calculating engines and the factory system”, Critical inquiry, xxi (1994), 1994–27; Dolan Brian P. , “Representing novelty: BabbageCharles, Charles Lyell, and experiments in early Victorian geology”, History of science, xxxvi (1998), 1998–327.

For serial production and artful variation in commodity culture see Briggs Asa , Victorian things (Harmondsworth, 1990), 20–4, 370–4; Richards Thomas , The commodity culture of Victorian England: Advertising and spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, 1990); Kriegel Lara , Grand designs: Labor, empire and the museum in Victorian culture (Durham, NC, 2007). These debates about standards and adaptations in serial production had major scientific and moral aspects. Natural theology often used the minute adaptations of natural entities to argue for their divine origin. But in the 1870s, for example, Clerk Maxwell and his colleagues used magazines, encyclopaedia articles and sermons to debate whether molecules' uniformity made them resemble “manufactured articles” like mass-produced screws or shoes, and whether this uniformity was better evidence of molecules' divine manufacture than was ingenious adaptation. See Campbell Garnett , op. cit. (ref. 1), 300–2; Theerman Paul , “James Clerk Maxwell and religion”, American journal of physics, liv (1986), 1986–17.

Giedion , op. cit. (ref. 53), 17–30, 101–13; Sternberger Dolf , Panorama of the nineteenth century (New York, 1977), 39–40; Schivelbusch Wolfgang , The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the 19th century (Berkeley, 1986), 61–4. For panoramic vision in nineteenth-century sciences, see Bigg Charlotte , “The panorama, or la nature à coup d'oeil”, in Fiorentini Erna (ed.) Observing nature — Representing experience: The osmotic dynamics of Romanticism, 1800–1850 (Berlin, 2007), 73–95.

Seiberling Grace , Monet's series (New York, 1981), 29–35.

Rabinbach Anson , The human motor: Energy, fatigue and the origins of modernity (Berkeley, 1992), 103, 116. Brain Compare Robert M. , “Representation on the line: Graphic recording instruments and scientific modernism”, in Clark Bruce Henderson Linda Dalrymple (eds), From energy to information: Representation in science and technology, art, and literature (Stanford, 2002), 155–77.