Early nineteenth-century zoology in Britain has been characterized as determined by the ideological concerns of its proponents. Taking the zoologist Robert E. Grant as an exemplary figure in this regard, this article offers a differently nuanced account of the conditions under which natural-philosophical knowledge concerning animal life was established in post-Napoleonic Britain. Whilst acknowledging the ideological import of concepts such as force and law, it points to an additional set of concerns amongst natural philosophers – that of appropriate tool use in investigation. Grant's studies in his native Edinburgh relied heavily on the use of microscopes. On his arrival in London, however, he entered a culture in which a different set of objects – museum specimens – held greater persuasive power. This article relates changes in Grant's ideas and practices to the uneven emphases on microscopic and museological evidence amongst European, Scottish and English natural philosophers at this time. In so doing, it identifies the reliance of London-based natural philosophers on museology as constituting a limiting effect on the kinds of claim that Grant sought to make regarding the nature of life.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Desmond, Adrian;
Parker, Sarah E.;
(2006)
The Bibliography of Robert Edmond Grant (1793-1874): Illustrated with a Previously Unpublished Photograph
(/isis/citation/CBB000772485/)
Article
Anderson, Lyall I.;
Lowe, Mathew;
(2010)
Charles W. Peach and Darwin's Barnacles
(/isis/citation/CBB001231387/)
Article
Diarmid A. Finnegan;
(2018)
Crozier’s Penguin: An Object History of Maritime and Museum Science
(/isis/citation/CBB128811209/)
Article
Wilkins, Emma;
(2014)
Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society
(/isis/citation/CBB001421033/)
Article
Wheeler, Alwyne;
(2000)
The zoological collections of the British Museum (Natural History) evacuation of the collections during the war years 1939--1945
(/isis/citation/CBB000111933/)
Book
Wotton, Roger S.;
(2012)
Walking with Gosse: Natural History, Creation, and Religious Conflicts
(/isis/citation/CBB001550801/)
Article
Tom Quick;
(2020)
‘Challenging Incommunicability: Tool Use amongst Women Medical Practitioners in Britain, 1860–1914’
(/isis/citation/CBB194902959/)
Article
Nathan Edward Charles Smith;
(2023)
Fertile substrate: The rise, fall, and succession of popular microscopy in Great Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB730463894/)
Book
Ashby, Jack;
Chatterjee, Helen;
Lister, Adrian;
West, Celine;
(2006)
Kingdom in a Cabinet: A Guide to the Animals of the Grant Museum
(/isis/citation/CBB000774121/)
Chapter
Wolfenstein, Gabriel K.;
(2008)
“Some Wonders of the Microscope” and Other Tales of Marvel: The Popularization of Science in Late Victorian Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB000952542/)
Article
Wille, Sheila;
(2015)
The Ichneumon Fly and the Equilibration of British Natural Economies in the Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001553288/)
Book
Engelhardt, Dietrich von;
Nolte, Jürgen;
(2002)
Von Freiheit und Verantwortung in der Forschung: Symposium zum 150. Todestag von Lorenz Oken (1779--1851)
(/isis/citation/CBB000741179/)
Book
Winsor, Mary P.;
(1991)
Reading the shape of nature: Comparative zoology at the Agassiz Museum
(/isis/citation/CBB000065175/)
Chapter
Marielva Torino;
(2017)
The dismantling of the Giuseppe Saverio Poli collections and the damnatio memoriae of his scientific heir
(/isis/citation/CBB641000021/)
Article
Nadezhda V. Slepkova;
Tatiana I. Yusupova;
(2018)
The Zoological Museum of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, 1860s–1910: From an Academic Institute to a Public Museum
(/isis/citation/CBB904242909/)
Article
Feklova, T. Yu.;
(2010)
Expedition to Russian America by I. G. Voznesensky of the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB001211351/)
Book
Weidner, Herbert;
(1993)
Bilder aus der Geschichte des Zoologischen Museums der Universität Hamburg: Die Zoologischen Sammlungen in Naturhistorischen Museum zu Hamburg während seiner Kollegialverfassung, 1843 bis 1882
(/isis/citation/CBB000073489/)
Article
Anne Greenwood MacKinney;
(2022)
Duplicates under the hammer: Natural-history auctions in Berlin's early nineteenth-century collection landscape
(/isis/citation/CBB415417377/)
Article
R.Paul Scofield;
(2005)
The Supposed Macquaire Island Parakeet in the Collection of Canterbury Museum
(/isis/citation/CBB764667446/)
Book
Birkhead, T R;
Wimpenny, Jo;
Montgomerie, Robert D;
(2014)
Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001421573/)
Be the first to comment!