Abstract
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, isinglass, made from fish swim bladders, and common glue, made by boiling the hides of cattle or other animals, were put to a great variety of uses, making glue a form of ‘vital waste.’ This essay surveys the different forms and manufacturing processes of glue and glue's many uses in the arts, medicine, and the sciences. Focusing on the latter, I highlight the importance of glue for making natural knowledge, in the use of paper, bookbinding, collecting practices and instrument-making. Glue was also a subject of study, appearing in a growing number of artisanal and chemical accounts of glue-making. While the expanding use of, and knowledge about, glue made it ‘vital waste,’ it equally made the vitality of glue – its roots in animal bodies – more invisible.
The material at the heart of this special issue is ‘vital waste.’ The term is meant to signify how animal waste is not simply waste, something devoid of use to be discarded or a problem to be resolved. Rather, there have been numerous efforts in history to find new uses and meanings for substances that might otherwise be considered waste, so that animal urine, faeces and sweat, dead body parts, blood and corpses have all come to serve innumerable functions for societies and cultures around the world at different times. Recognizing these values in history may remind us of the contingency of current designations of ‘waste.’ In early modern England, ‘waste’ was a quite limited term, rarely used to designate household rubbish (Werrett, 2019: 27–29). Instead, early modern English householders tried to ‘make use’ of materials as best they could, a form of worship, because being thrifty amounted to the stewardship of a material world gifted to humans by God. Tea cups, tobacco pipes, rags, and old letters could all be ‘put into service’ beyond their ordinary uses, making the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a period of great experimentation in the household.
Historians recognize the importance of ‘waste’ materials such as rags, nightsoil, paper and metal in early modern economies, and the substantial industries devoted to their collection and transformation into commodities (Bittel et al., 2019; Fenetaux et al., 2014; Reynolds, 2024). Animal and fish glues are another such material and the focus of the present essay. Glue was ‘vital’ because it served a rich variety of uses, in crafts, arts and sciences. The aim of the essay is to identify the types of glue made with animal parts, the processes by which these parts were turned into useful products, and some of the diverse ways glues were put into service.
It would be impossible to inventory all of these uses so I focus on one area in particular: the relationship between glue and natural knowledge. Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, the material culture of natural knowledge was changing from a scholastic culture centred on books to a more experimental, observational culture using an array of books, instruments, and practical techniques (Park and Daston, 2006; Teich, 2015). Print culture shifted the availability and accessibility of natural knowledge to open up new audiences for ‘public science.’ Science was increasingly to be consumed by polite society (Stewart, 1992; Walters, 1997; Wigelsworth, 2016).
Glue, like the invisible technicians discussed by Steven Shapin who worked behind the scenes to perform experiments, held a lot of this material culture together, as a binding agent in books, instruments, herbaria and laboratory equipment (Shapin, 1989). Glue was also an object of knowledge, because, across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, knowledge of glue-making and analysis of glue's constituents became common topics in printed works. After assessing the different types and manufacturing processes of animal glues and considering some of their uses, the final part of this essay examines this scientific role of glue. I suggest glue was a material that became both more and less visible in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Noëlie Vialles (1994) Nicole Shukin (2009) and Helen Cowie (2021) have drawn attention to the commodity fetishism surrounding work with animal products. In the process of turning animal ‘waste’ into useful products, of making them ‘vital,’ the suffering of animals and workers was made invisible as delightful commodities eclipsed the visceral experiences of production. A similar story may be told of glue, which shifted from makers’ workshops to sites of consumption and enlightenment. Sarah Lowengard (2023) has shown how chemical analysis of animal fat and tallow moved it away from the animal body in the eighteenth century and a similar trajectory was applied to glue. In its journey from the abbatoir to the drawing room, animal waste was domesticated, shorn of its bodily smells and textures, to serve as a binding agent for polite society.
What was animal glue?
A range of fish and animal glues were available in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. They included isinglass, common glue, glove and parchment glue, English and Flanders glue and sizes for paper and canvas. The strongest glue available in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England was made with isinglass, the dried swim bladders of sturgeon fish, also known as Icthyocolla. First brought to England by Dutch merchants in the sixteenth century, isinglass could be purchased from apothecaries or booksellers since it was used as a glue for bookbinding (Lloyd Burnby, 1979: 262; Rylands, 1888). John Bate's Mysteries of Nature and Art (1635: 248) recorded how to prepare it, by steeping the isinglass in water until it could be ‘pulled… to pieces’ when it was ready to be heated in a pot of water on the fire until it dissolved and the water evaporated. The resulting jelly was dried and cut into strips.
In his Polygraphice (1685: 450–451) on the art of drawing and engraving, William Salmon repeated Bate's recipe and provided another mixing isinglass with spirit of wine or ‘common Brandy.’ Strained through a linen cloth into a vessel that could be ‘close stopt’ this ‘very strong Glew’ would melt into a ‘transparent liquor’ that ‘much exceeds the common Glew.’
The choice of which glue to use depended on many factors including cost, the type of work to be done, the ease of application, and removability (Grenda-Kurmanow, 2021: 2). Isinglass was strong but being imported from overseas was also expensive, so the principal form of glue used in early modern England was a cheaper one derived from animal parts, making use of local stocks of cattle and sheep. John Evelyn, writing in his Sylva (1670: 200), explained the difference between animal glue and isinglass. And now we have spoken of Glew, ‘tis so common and cheap, that I need not tell you it is made by boyling the sinues, &c. of Sheeps-trotters, parings of raw Hides, &c. to a Gelly, and straining it: But the finer, and more delicate Work is best fastned with Fish Glew, to be had of the Drougist by the name of Ichthyocolla.
In the eighteenth century, writers on glue inventoried different types. Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia (1728: vol. 1, 161) explained that ‘There are divers kinds of glues made use of in the divers arts; as the common glue; glove glue; parchment glue. But the two last are more properly called size.’ The best common glue, made from animals skins, was ‘that made in England, in square pieces, of a ruddy, brown colour. Flanders glue is held the next after the English.’ Chambers explained that whereas in England ‘our tanners generally make the glue themselves,’ with a ready supply of fresh animal skins available, French gluemakers, who operated separately from tanners, had to purchase parings leading to an inferior product.
The truth of Chambers's claim is hard to ascertain. Certainly, at least one person, a Mr John Cockle, worked as a ‘Tanner and Glue-Maker’ in Lincoln in the 1790s (Stamford Mercury, 1798). But for the most part in London, it seems glue-making was a separate business to tanning, albeit that both existed in close proximity. Of all the glue made in England, a very large portion is produced at Bermondsey, in the vicinity of the great leather-dressing establishments of that district. In some cases the glue-manufacturer contracts for the purchase of all the scraps and offal resulting from the dressing of leather in one or more establishments… Rough and ragged edges of skins, scrapings from skins, and scrapings from parchment, constitute the chief sources whence glue is prepared; and in some cases these refuse fragments-not only useless to the leather-dresser, but a great nuisance if he had to keep them are worth more than a thousand pounds a year to the owner of one establishment, for sale to the glue manufacturers (Anon, 1814: 6–7).
Women were also involved in the making of glue in these locations. In 1802, one John Clennell (1802: 6) recorded glue-making in a Southwark manufactory that identifies female labourers. the glue, as yet soft, is taken to a table by women, where they divide it into three pieces with an instrument not unlike a bow, having a brass wire for its string: with this they stand behind the box, and cut by its openings from front to back. The pieces thus cut, are taken out into the open air, and dried on a kind of coarse net-work, fastened in moveable sheds of about four feet square, which are placed in rows in the glue-makers field, and every one of which contains five or fix rows of netting.
How was glue used?
Those who made glue were perhaps accustomed to its smells, but the visceral features of animal waste were obviated as liquified hides turned into dried cakes of glue, to be sold to a great variety of artisans in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England. Any number of arts of course employed common glue, from furniture-making to picture-framing. Artisans purchased glue to melt down for use in their work or made their own on a small scale using clippings or parings of animal skin. ‘Glove glue,’ for example, was another term for size, the white liquid used by painters to prepare a canvas for painting, stopping it from being too absorbant. Size was made with ‘glovers’ clippings’ or leather scraps boiled in water into a liquid glue, with powdered chalk added to make it white. Water could be added to thin the mixture (Anon, 1757: 59). Parchment glue was another size made in the same way with parchment scraps. Isinglass could also be used to make size (Dossie, 1758, vol. 2, 25–26). Painters used size to seal canvas or other surfaces before painting, the glue preventing the surface from absorbing the paint or water and stiffening it to make painting easier. A ground could then be applied to create a surface on which to paint. English painters used grounds make from glue and chalk, sometimes with bone black or yellow ochre added to alter the colour (Townsend and Jones, 2020: 145).
Animal glues were ‘virtually the only adhesives employed in furniture construction’ before the twentieth century, proving to be extremely secure and long-lasting (Rivers and Umney, 2003: 171). Twenty-first-century conservators explain the advantages of animal glues: ‘They do not stain wood or impede the application of stains or coatings, are non-toxic and easily cleaned’ (Rivers and Umney, 2003: 171). However, they were also moisture-sensitive, being made from water, and could only be worked with for a short time before drying. Glue was not only used to join two surfaces together but also as a kind of plastic, formable substance. In the late eighteenth century, the Adam brothers used animal glue mixed with rosin and linseed oil to create moulded sculptural ornamentations that replaced more expensive carved wood in interiors or on furnishings (Rivers and Umney, 2003: 128; Stols-Witlox, 2014).
The right to use glue was actually decisive in some trades. Following the 1632 decision of the London Court of Aldermen, carpenters could only work with nails and boards whereas joiners were permitted to use glue and certain joints to work with wood (Kilburn-Toppin, 2013: 303).
Glues also found many uses in medicine and the related field of cosmetics. In 1634, the physician and schoolmaster Philemon Holland recorded medical and cosmetic uses of isinglass in his first English translation of Pliny the Elder's Natural History. A fish named ‘Icthyocolla’ could take away ‘night foes’ and was ‘held to be soueraigne for the head ach: and a good thing to enter into those medicines or compositions which are deuised to smooth the skin & rid away the wrinkles’ (Holland, 1634: 438–439). Isinglass continued to be used for such purposes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thomas Jeamson's Artificiall Embellishments (1665: 136), a treatise on make-up, explained how one could give ‘a very amiable redness to pale or blue parts, whether lips or cheeks’ using red berries, Brazil nut shavings, water, and ‘six drams of icthyocolla or fish glew bruised and minc’d.’ John Moyle advised maritime surgeons to have sailors suffering from the clap to drink a warm decoction of icthyocolla and water to prevent gleeting, or discharges (Moyle, 1686: 91). Robert Boyle (1712: 152) recommended a mixture of ale and isinglass to treat ‘White Fluors,’ a disease of the uterus, and Robert James's medical dictionary of the 1740s (James, 1743, vol. 2 ‘Icthyocolla’) explained that isinglass was to be used in plasters, and ingested it ‘inspissates the Blood, and is of an anodyne Nature: It is used in Exulcerations of the Lungs, and Fauces; and, in a Fluor Albus, it is exhibited with Success: Some, also, prescribe it in Dysenteries.’ It seems that Isinglass, made from swim bladders, and fish glue, made from other parts, were conflated at this time. James's dictionary supposed that ‘Isinglass is drawn from the Entrails, Fins, and Tail, of a large Fish… found in the Volga, Danube, and some other great rivers… It is prepar’d of the Skin, Intestines, Stomach, Fins, and Tail’ (James, 1743, vol. 2 ‘Icthyocolla’). As the next section will show, identifying the real nature of isinglass was a laborious process.
Not all glues in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England were based on animals or fish. Flour and water pastes could serve well in some instances, and cements containing powdered glass or ceramics might be used to mend china (Pennell, 2010). Chemistry and artisanal crafts such as distilling depended on an assortment of lutes and cements to seal pipes or retorts together in chemical operations, making an air-tight joint or protecting vessels from being damaged by heat. Recipes for these substances varied greatly. An alchemical treatise of 1651 recommended luting together an alembic and concurbit with a lute, ‘made with meale, sifted ashes, white of an Egge, &c. or one part of meale, one part of calx vive, tempered with the white of Egges, which you must lute withall quickly; lute it well, that no spirits may get away’ (HP, 1651: 50). Another insisted the best lute was made with loam, sand, salt water, iron scales and the caput mortuum of vitriol, to which might be added ‘Flax, beaten Glasse, and Pots, and flint, &c’ (French, 1653: 4). Artisans published various recipes for cements to mend broken china or glass. It is not clear how effective these were because china-rivetting, using staples to hold together the broken parts of a china vessel, remained common into the nineteenth century (Werrett, 2019: 116). Lutes were also used in horticulture. Robert Sharrock (1659: 68) luted together tree grafts with ‘horse-dung & stiff clay well mix’d together.’ Surgeons used an assortment of ingredients to seal wounds, usually ‘sticking plaster,’ strips of cloth soaked with a mix of common plaster, pitch or rosin (Theobald, 1756: 48–49).
Knowledge of glues
The animality of glue, its foundation in the skins and hides of dead animals, was partly obscured by the time it reached the artisans’ workshop, where it existed as cakes of a hard, brown substance ready to melt down for use. Heating it up must have still been smelly work, and some artisans used quantities of animal skins and leather to make glue themselves. But as glue became vital to trades, so the vitality of its origins in living animals became less apparent. This distance increased once glue became an ingredient in the innumerable items of furniture, art, decorations, and structures that shaped the material world of seventeenth and eighteenth-century England. Without it, one supposes, a significant portion of early modern England might have fallen apart.
This section focuses in on one area where glue was important, the making of natural knowledge. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century England witnessed dramatic transformations in the sciences, as Baconian ‘experimental philosophy’ and Newton's system of the world grew fashionable and influential, inspired in part by the practical knowledge of artisanal crafts and engagement with their practitioners (Hunter, 2013; Long, 2011; Smith, 2004). In this period, the sciences not only shifted from the bookish scholasticism of previous centuries to a more experimental approach but also extended beyond universities and academies to a new public constituted of persons with enough leisure and money to consume the new science. Glue was both a material that played a part in this process and a subject of analysis and knowledge in the many books now purchased by experimentalists and polite society. In this culture, glue was further distanced from its gory animal origins into an invisible or abstract commodity serving enlightened and polite tastes.
Glue was essential to a variety of scientific and experimental endeavours in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England. As Elizabeth Yale (2016) has shown, seventeenth-century English naturalists built a community and a body of knowledge by accumulating, revising, and sharing texts routinely reorganized by cutting and glueing fragments in diverse ways. Glue was critical in preparing herbaria. In 1666, Jacob Bobart the Younger, praefect of the Oxford Botanic Garden, prepared an extensive catalogue, the Hortus Siccus, of plant specimens fixed onto paper with glue (Harris, 2006). Fish glue was used to secure dried specimens of fish, and insects were also collected and pressed for mounting with glue (Svensson, 2017: 41). Naturalists debated the best ingredients for these glues, since their composition could alter the colour and durability of preserved specimens (Grenda-Kurmanow, 2021: 1–2).
Publishing also depended on glue. Paper had to be sized before it could be written on or printed on to avoid the ink spreading and blotting in the paper's fibres. Like the size used for painting paper sizing was made with animal glue, a watery solution made from jelly rendered out of animal bones and hides. Joshua Calhoun (2020: 101–126) argues that sizing was critical to literary culture in the seventeenth century, enabling readers to annotate printed works with marginalia, preserving the pages so that annotation could occur over a long time. Books were also made with glue. English bookbinders first used it in the early sixteenth century to ‘glue up’ the spines of books before rounding and backing, the process of rounding the spine so that the pages did not ‘swell’ at the spine after they were sewn into sections. This was most commonly done with glue made from animal hides, but this dried fairly quickly and became brittle, so the rounding had to be done promptly after applying the glue (Middleton, 1978: 54–55). Leather was attached to boards using paste made with water and flour, which dried more slowly and so gave binders more time to work the leather which was also softened by the paste (Middleton, 1978: 150). Cheap books might be bound with glue alone, without sewing the sections, a practice that gave some bookbinders – and their books – a bad reputation (Day, 2018: 12–13).
As the material means of studying nature diversified and proliferated so too did their dependencies on glue. To view specimens in the earliest microscopes an object needed to be glued to a silver point beneath the lens (Folkes, 1722–1723: 450). Paper parts were glued to instruments. A cheap form of sundial was constructed from paper dials glued to wooden pillars (Schechner, 2001: 212). In the eighteenth century scales for thermometers were drawn on slips of paper glued to the thermometer's glass tube (Cavallo, 1780: 596). In North America, Benjamin Franklin recommended a simple flour and water paste to fix tinfoil onto glass Leyden jars for electrical experiments (Schechner, 2015: 5). Natural philosophers also sought out recipes for stronger glues. In 1729, for example, Cambridge professor of Botany Richard Bradley recommended (1729: 190) the use of ‘shavings of horn’ to make glue, ‘It will be as hard as the horn itself when it is cold and dry.’ In 1734, William Barlow wrote to the Royal Society with news of a glue made from a Sun-Fish that had washed up on the coast of Devon (Barlow, 1739–1741).
Just as artisans fashioned decorations with glue as a form of plastic, so it served natural philosophers who took advantage of its capacity to be moulded. In the 1680s, Robert Hooke (1726: 111; Birch, 1757: vol. 4, 227) used icthyocolla glue to copy prints and take impressions of antique medals and coins. In 1755, the Newtonian experimentalist Benjamin Martin (1755: 7) noted that isinglass dissolved in brandy and poured onto the surface of a medal would dry to form a lamina or impression of the medal. Martin developed these techniques of ‘typographia naturalis,’ publishing a short work on the topic in 1772. He reckoned isinglass glue ‘the strongest in Nature’ and explained how to use it to make impressions of coins, medals, leaves, shells and insect wings (Bernasconi, 2007; Cave, 2008; Martin, 1772).
Glue was not only a vital ingredient in diverse scientific enterprises but also an object of analysis and knowledge itself. While most knowledge of how to make and use glue was not written down, a growing number of published works described the basics of glue-making for an expanding market of polite consumers. In this process, glue was again abstracted from its messy origins in animal waste.
Undoubtedly much of the knowledge around glue in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England was tacit, a form of what Pamela Smith (2004) has called ‘artisanal epistemology’ or an embodied knowledge of the nature of materials. Artisans understood how glue was made and behaved by working with it on a regular basis and at least one of them supposed details of how to make glue were unnecessary to write down. In his 1701 manual on oil painting, John Smith (1701: 57–58) omitted a recipe for making glue because ‘in these parts… few Men that work in Timber, can be ignorant of it.’ Pamela Smith has used the method of recreating early modern recipes to learn about materials and a similar approach has been applied to glue. Brandon Oswald (Townsends, 2022), for example, has made glue using cowhide following Joseph Moxon's advice in Mechanick Exercises (1693: 101–103).
Reworking in this manner reveals details otherwise overlooked or assumed in written recipes (Havard, 2020). Making glue evidently required softening the hide in water before cutting it into small parts to improve its release of collagen into the water it was heated in. The degree of stirring, temperature and eveness of heating would effect this release in addition to the time the hide was in the water. The stickiness of the glue could be ascertained by dipping a finger into it and then pressing the finger and thumb together to sense the stickiness. It was also necessary to judge when the liquid had cooled to be sufficiently solid to be transferred to a net or cloth for hanging in the sun to fully dry, and it was notable how much the final product shrank through drying from the initial volume of water and hide. Transferring sticky glue from a vessel into skillets or nets must have been difficult. Reheating dried glue to make it ready for use also required time, judgment and much stirring. Animal glue had to be kept hot to keep it liquid, a quality easily overlooked by readers today for whom glue is always applied cold.
All of these tacit features were scarcely remarked upon in printed works describing the methods of glue-making. But through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an increasing number of printed works recorded basic details of the process, aiming to appeal to a growing readership. Glues appeared in the seventeenth century in ‘books of secrets,’ compendiums of curious and extraordinary recipes and techniques (Eamon, 1996). Thomas Lupton's sixteenth-century Thousand Notable Things of Sundry Sorts ran through many editions into the eighteenth century and included recipes ‘To make a Glew to hold or joyn things together, as hard or as fast as a Stone, an excellent Secret’ (Lupton, 1706: 147). Books of secrets, aimed at an audience of virtuosi gentlemen, sought to make smelly glue more polite. Bate (1635: 248) gave instructions on how to sweeten the smell of isinglass glue, If you would have it of a dainty smell, and aromaticall taste, put into it a little cinamon bruised, and a little marjerom, and rosemary flowers, while it is dissolving, and if you please, a small quantity of brown sugarcandy, to give it a sweetish smatch.
The clearest, driest, and most transparent Glew is the best: when you boil it, break it with your Hammer into small pieces, and put it into a clean Skillet, or Pipkin, by no means greasie, for that will spoil the clamminess of the Glew, put to it so much Water as is convenient to dissolve the Glew, and to make it, when it is hot, about the thickness of the White of an Egg.
Printed accounts of glue-making followed this vein for the next century. William Salmon's Polygraphice (Salmon, 1701: Preface, 767–768, 938), addressed to ‘young Artists’ included recipes for glues and cements used to repair ceramics, fix pipes and aquaducts together, or glue boards and planks together. Other works were addressed to a much broader audience. Books on painting included instructions for making glue, not, as John Smith's Art of Painting in Oyl noted (1701: To the Reader, 58–59), because professionals needed to know but ‘in order to instruct such ingenious persons as are desirous of some insight into the nature of working in Oyl colours.’ In the eighteenth century, many encyclopedias such as Chambers’ Cyclopedia or John Harris's Lexicon technicum (1708) included recipes for glue. Such works were typically addressed to the ‘curious’ or persons seeking out new knowledge, rather than practicing artisans. They served a growing commercial literary culture and increasing levels of literacy (Hunt, 1996: 166–188). Reading took place in public venues and at home. With his journal The Spectator Joseph Addison sought to take reading ‘out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses’ (quoted in Williams, 2017: 10). The tea-tables, and all the other furnishings of these new polite and sociable places, were held together with glue. The books laid upon them might reveal artisanal secrets of glue-making for an audience who were now quite distant from the stenches of Bermondsey glue-makers. Indeed, multivolume encyclopedias were just as likely to end up as furniture, scarcely consulted but displaying the wealth and education of their owners on a bookshelf (Loveland, 2019: 323).
Glue was not the only material object being domesticated at this time. Werrett (2007) has shown how polite society in eighteenth-century England came to disdain the soot and smoke of pyrotechnics, replacing them with more fashionable ‘philosophical fireworks’ made with mirrors and light or the cleaner flames of new airs like hydrogen. The switch led to the invention of gas-lighting. The sanitization of glue similarly continued in the chemical literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. A number of publications appeared in England during this period, some by English authors and others translated, that sought to analyze the components of glue. Lissa Roberts has noted how eighteenth-century chemists gradually distanced themselves from a sensuous engagement with materials, in favour of a more abstract approach based on analysis and measurement, which distinguished them from their predecessors and from common or artisanal forms of knowing (Roberts, 1995). Hence Antoine Fourcroy, whose Elements of Natural History and Chemistry was translated and published in English in 1790, reduced animal glue to its constituents (1790: vol. 3, 254–255). He did this by analysis, breaking down animal hide into a jelly, just as artisans did to make glue. But Fourcroy, the chemist, went further, extending the process by melting hard glue until liquid and then continuing to heat it until it burned, yielding a black smoke. He also distilled the glue to yield ‘an alkaline phlegm, an empyreumatic oil, and a little ammoniacal carbonate.’ A ‘coal’ remained of muriate of soda and calcareous phosphate. Chemistry's dependence on artisanry was manifested in these heating techniques, but also its desire for independence and distinction, achieved by transforming glue into materials distinctively known to the chemist alone. Lowengard (2023: 250–254) has shown the same process at play with regard to animal fats, moving away from the animal body into a language and practice that only chemists could control. This was also the approach of the Stockton-on-Tees chemist and Royal Society Fellow Humphrey Jackson (1717–1801). In the 1750s Jackson journeyed to Russia to find the true source of isinglass and learn how it was prepared (Appleby, 1986; Romaniello, 2022). He subsequently published An Essay on British Isinglass (1765, 1773) in which he presented an analysis of isinglass, determining the essential features that made it an effective means for fining or clarifying beer and wine. Jackson argued that the same effect could also be obtained from cheaper American sturgeon and established a factory to this end, receiving a premium from the Society of Arts for this work in 1766. When Captain Cook undertook his second and third voyages in the 1770s, it was beer refined by Jackson's isinglass that he used as an antiscorbutic. Jackson insisted (1765; 90) that chemistry, not artisanry, was best placed to manage isinglass. Theory was ‘indespensably necessary to the perfecting of all Arts.’ The arts should be ‘conducted by Rule, and not left to accidental Trial or casual Experiment.’
Conclusion
Writing of the nightsoil men who cleared the privies of cities across the early modern world Dean Ferguson notes the ‘critical’ role their work with waste played for economies around the globe (Ferguson, 2014: 379). The same might be said of the now largely invisible labourers who made and used glue, not to mention the myriad bonds they secured that literally held parts of early modern England together. This essay has examined the different types of glue available in early modern England and the processes by which they were made and put into service. Animal glue was ‘vital waste’ insofar as it transformed skins and hides into substances made use of in a great variety of skilled trades. Focusing on the uses of glue for the sciences reveals how glue was both a critical element in the production of knowledge and an object of study in its own right. Glues and sizes were essential to papermaking, bookbinding, natural history and recipe collecting, experimental instruments and ‘nature printing,’ not to mention having a variety of uses in medicine.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Tamar Novick and Maria Pirogovskaya for their comments on this paper and to comments from all the participants in workshops on ‘Animal Waste’ held in Berlin. My thanks also to Dagmar Schäfer and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Anna Maerker, Ian Stone, Stuart Henderson, and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the author wishes to acknowledge the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for generous support that enabled some of the research for this article.
