The Scientific Age

Scientific study of giraffes depended on the scientists of Europe being able to study specimens. The first of those specimens was sent to Europe not long after the establishment of a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa in 1652. Obtaining the specimens was difficult because the nearest giraffes were to be found along the Gariep (Orange) River on the northern border of South Africa with Namibia, about 1,000 km from the Cape, across arid and inhospitable terrain. The first specimens were collected by Robert Jacob Gordon and William Paterson and were sent to Holland and England, respectively. Their arrival attracted zoologists and others to southern Africa, and further specimens became available for study. In the early 1800s establishment of zoos in Europe meant that living giraffes could be studied, and the first of these were taken to France and England. Among the prominent scientists who studied giraffes were Etienne Geoffroy St.-Hilaire in Paris and Richard Owen in London. Their studies established the scientific basis for the study of giraffes.

“I would sooner die than give up”: Huxley and Darwin's deep disagreement

Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with John Stuart Mill's rejection of William Whewell's sympathy for Linnaeus. The naturalists William Sharp Macleay, Hugh Strickland, and George Waterhouse worked to distinguish two kinds of relationship, affinity and analogy. Darwin believed that his theory could explain the difference. Richard Owen introduced the distinction between homology and analogy to anatomists, but the word homology did not enter Darwin's vocabulary until 1848, when he used the morphological concept of archetype in his work on Cirripedia. Huxley dropped the word archetype when Richard Owen linked it to Plato's ideal forms, replacing it with common plan. When Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species that the word plan gives no explanation, he may have had Huxley in mind. Darwin's preposterous story in the Origin about a bear giving birth to a kangaroo, which he dropped in the second edition, was in fact aimed at Huxley.

The forgotten contribution of J. E. Purkyně to dentistry

Objectives: the name of Jan Evangelista Purkyně (Purkinje in German), born in Bohemia in 1787 and died in Prague in 1869, is mainly associated with discoveries in histology and specialist fields of Medicine like embriology, histological techniques, ophthalmology, cardiology and neurophysiology. This short article presents a brief account of his life, commemorates his achievements in biology and medicine but also in in the politics and literature of his Country (he was elected to the Diet of Bohemia but also he composed poems and important translations from German, French and Italian languages into Czech) and examines in depth his contribution to Dentistry. Materials and Methods: Purkyně’s major contributions to Dentistry, which focused on embryology and dental histology, endodontics and periodontology, are traced to two dissertations in Latin which were discussed by his pupils (Meyer Fraenkel and Isaac Raschkow), at Breslau University in 1835: we present a brief summary of each, with the major innovative findings highlighted. Results: the two dissertations contain remarkable, though often overlooked, contributions to Dentistry. Among these we can indicate the individuation of: the dental cement (substantia ostoidea), the acquired dental pellicle, the nature of optical illusion of Hunter-Schreger lines, the “enamel pulp” from which the enamel would evolve, the sub-odontoblastic nervous plexus which is the cause of tooth sensitivity, the predentine, the organic nature of the process of enamel formation, the dentine and enamel formation in opposing directions, the presence of alveolus membrane (id est: the periodontium). Conclusions: after reviewing the main innovations these two dissertations made to Dentistry, Purkyně’s personal share in both is very clear. Both the two his pupils acknowledged their debt to Purkyně and also famous contemporary Purkinje scientists such as Alexander Nasmyth, Sir Richard Owen, Sir James Paget had no doubt he is had generated the ideas expressed in the two little treatises.

Piezas owenianas en el rompecabezas darwiniano

En este trabajo discutimos la extensión de la influencia que el pensamiento de Richard Owen tuvo sobre el de Charles Darwin. Además, se intentará mostrar lo heterogéneo de tal influencia, que va desde teorías específicas a giros retóricos. Esta influencia es en muchos casos subestimada, dando la sensación de que la novedad darwiniana consistió únicamente en mirar con ojos desprejuiciados lo que los otros no habían visto. Esta visión resulta injusta con Owen, y también con el esfuerzo conceptual llevado adelante por Darwin con las piezas brindadas por sus precursores. Finalmente, este es un caso interesante para entender el tipo de novedad aportada por las revoluciones científicas y el modo sofisticado en que tal novedad se sustenta sobre el trabajo de los enfoques previos.

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Richard Owen and monotreme oviparity.

Most biologists, particularly Australian biologists, are aware that the initial description and attempts to classify the echidna and platypus were surrounded by controversy. Fewer are aware of the important roles played by two eminent scientists, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in Paris and Richard Owen in London, in the debate as to whether the platypus and echidna were really mammals, and whether they laid eggs. Geoffroy argued that they were egg-laying but could not possibly lactate; Owen argued that they lactated but could not possibly lay eggs. Because of these and many other aspects of their biology, monotremes featured prominently in debates about classification of animals and the transmutation of species, and involved many important scientists of the time. These arguments can only be understood in the context of the development of science in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, and how that was influenced by the social context. Early ideas of evolution, or transformism, were attractive to radical thinkers, whereas social conservatives were anxious to show that the boundaries between types of animals, just like the boundaries between social classes, were erected by God and could not be crossed.

What’s your dinosaur? Or, imaginative reconstruction and absolute truth in the museum space

For the first half of the nineteenth century, objects in the British Museum were largely unlabeled, uncatalogued, and unexplained. Nevertheless, the idea that the object could evoke a ‘larger world’ was current in discussions of the pedagogical use of the museum. The popular understanding of the museum as a place of education foregrounded the idea that engagement with the thing itself, rather than any wider context or paratext, was enough to allow access to an object’s ‘realm of significance’ (Bennett, 1994), which was figured as Absolute Truth in Kantian terms embedded within each museum object. The fantasy of knowledge that could be gained from a mere glimpse reached its heights in the feats of identification and reconstruction performed by naturalists of the period like Georges Cuvier or Richard Owen. It encouraged the conception of the museum encounter as an act of instantaneous imaginative reconstruction, in which the fragmentary or uncontextualized part could be reassembled into an ideal, accurate whole. This attitude can still be seen in today’s responses to palaeoart, a discipline heavily associated with the experience of natural history museums which proposes to evoke a world to which its practitioners have only very partial access. With dinosaur palaeoart as its chief case study, thinking in particular about Owen and Waterhouse Hawkins's famous Crystal Palace dinosaurs (1854) and Ann Coates's rather less famous children's book about them (1970), this essay stresses the tenuous relationship between interpretation and reality. It argues that the universal truth implicitly promised by the museum encounter is deceptive, but also that there is a virtue in acknowledging the creativity which underpins these impressions of a world beyond the self.

“GIANT BIRDS OF OLD”: AN 1837 POEM BY JAMES DWIGHT DANA (?) ON THE SUPPOSED MAKERS OF THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY'S FOSSIL TRACKWAYS

ABSTRACT An 1842 letter from Benjamin Silliman, Jr., to Edward Hitchcock contains the only known text of a poem that was reportedly composed five years earlier by an anonymous ‘tutor’ at Yale College. The poem's light-hearted verses depicted how the recently-described three-toed fossil footprints (now known to have been produced by theropod dinosaurs) were supposedly made by “giant birds of old”, as Hitchcock's recent investigation had concluded. The poem's lines offered a verbal ‘reconstruction’ of that ancient scene, along with suggesting the existence of two marsupial animals which may have borne witness to the passage of the trackmakers; one of which was plausible while the other was not. These ‘witnesses’ provide evidence that the poem's author was well informed upon contemporary geology and paleontology in a manner far beyond that of the common person. This article first reviews Hitchcock's inferences derived from the fossil evidence that the footprints had been made by multiple species of extinct birds, one of which attained enormous size, and the subsequent controversies regarding those claims that arose in America and Europe. Description by comparative anatomist Richard Owen of fossil bones of the much younger Moa or Dinornis from Recent strata in New Zealand seemingly vindicated Hitchcock's arguments and brought those disputes to a close. While the true identity of the poet remains inconclusive, internal evidence from the poem itself points to it having been composed by Yale graduate James Dwight Dana. His placement as an ‘assistant’ within the chemistry laboratory under Benjamin Silliman, Sr., at that time appears to support Silliman, Jr.'s assertion regarding the poet's identity. Probable reasons for the apparent suppression of the poem's existence and its authorship are likewise explored. The former was finally eased after Dana's return from the U.S. Exploring Expedition in 1842, but the latter was not.

New information on the first vertebrate fossil discoveries from Lesotho in 1867

In the 1870s, Richard Owen of the British Museum received a consignment of vertebrate fossils from Basutoland (Lesotho), which were sent to him by Dr Hugh Exton from Bloemfontein, and he published an illustrated catalogue of these in 1876. In 1884, he described from this collection a “Triassic mammal”– Tritylodon longaevus (an important cynodont therapsid or mammal-like reptile). New information has been found concerning the discovery, locality, stratigraphic position and discoverers of the Basutoland vertebrate fossils. The information is contained in two letters sent to Dr Alexander Logie du Toit by David Draper, in 1929. Draper revealed in these letters that the fossils were found during a raiding party by horse commandos from the Orange Free State during the Basuto War of 1867. Draper then was an 18-year-old, and he had assisted Exton with collecting vertebrate fossils from the “Upper Red Beds” (of the Karoo Supergroup) at a site whose location he pointed out on a map (the present day Thaba Tso'eu). The discovery of fossils by Exton and Draper in 1867 was the first find of any fossils in Basutoland.

Science

Chapter 6 considers how Blavatsky constructed science as a category and situates this construal within a world in which the boundaries of ‘legitimate’ science were more contested than they are today. The chapter demonstrates that Blavatsky’s conceptualisations of rebirth owe a considerable debt to the scientific theories under discussion at her time of writing. It explores her debt to the controversial physicists Balfour Stewart (1828–1887) and Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1909), her hostility towards the popular materialist monism of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), her hatred of Darwinism, and her preference for theories of evolution influenced by German Romanticism, such as the theories of orthogenesis proposed by Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817–1891), Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), and Darwin’s nemesis, Richard Owen (1804–1892).