History of Natural History Research Papers (original) (raw)

The paper is based on the hypothesis that the Philippines was a territory colonized from New Spain and served as experience, accumulation, memory and practice for other spaces colonized from New Spain, mainly the North of Mexico and California. Although the Jesuits hegemonized the missionary-colonizing voice in those territories (the Philippines first, then the North), there were precedent ways of writing the natural history that the Jesuits knew, learned and, finally, appropriated and adapted. The paper presents one of the first attempts of writing the natural history of the Philippines, Antonio de Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas – published in Mexico, in 1609, but written between 1595 and 1603 – to compare it with the first natural history of the Philippines produced by a Jesuit, Pedro Chirino, published in Rome, in 1604.
El trabajo parte de la hipótesis de que el archipiélago de las Filipinas, territorio colonizado desde la Nueva España, sirvió de experiencia, acúmulo, memoria y práctica para la colonización novohispana de otros territorios, señaladamente el Septentrión y las Californias. Si bien los jesuitas hegemonizaron la voz misional-colonizadora en esos territorios (Filipinas primero, el Norte después), antes hubo otros estilos, formas y maneras de escribir la historia natural que los jesuitas conocieron, aprendieron y, finalmente, se apropiaron y adaptaron. Trataremos de analizar uno de los primeros textos que plantean una forma de escribir la historia natural de las Filipinas, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, de Antonio de Morga (publicada en México, en 1609, pero escrita entre 1595 y 1603) para compararla con la primera historia natural de las Filipinas hecha por un jesuita, la de Pedro Chirino, publicada en Roma, en 1604.

- by Matthew Holmes
- •
- History, Conservation Biology, History of Natural History, Environmental History

Une forêt ? Un paysage charmant. Un corbeau ? Un sinistre présage. Une rose ? L’être aimé.
Le monde vivant est à la fois omniprésent dans notre culture et décidément absent. Car percevoir le vivant comme un décor, un symbole ou un support de nos émotions sont autant de manières de ne pas le voir. Et si nous apprenions à voir le vivant autrement ? Si nous entrions dans un monde réanimé, repeuplé par les points de vue d’autres êtres que nous ? Ce livre se propose d’équiper notre œil pour saisir le vivant autour de nous comme foisonnant d’histoires immémoriales, de relations invisibles et de significations insoupçonnées. Sur le chemin de cette métamorphose, nous avons pour guides celles et ceux qui ont passé leur vie à apprendre à voir le vivant dans son abondance de signes et de sens : des artistes-peintres et des femmes naturalistes du XIXème siècle anglais et américain. Le livre enquête sur leurs arts de l’attention, différents mais complémentaires, qui ont su tisser ensemble savoirs et sensibilité. À travers cette exploration, c’est une autre disponibilité au monde qui fait surface.
Chaque jour est une occasion inouïe et renouvelée d’apprendre à voir.

| www.bmgn-lchr.nl | e-issn 2211-2898 | print issn 0165-0505 Robert-Jan Wille, Mannen van de microscoop. De laboratoriumbiologie op veldtocht in Nederland en Indië, 1840-1910 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2019, 365 pp., isbn 9789460043796). Hoe ontstaat een wetenschappelijke discipline? Om antwoord te geven op die vraag kan men enerzijds bestuderen hoe methoden, theorieën, instrumenten of onderzoeksvragen zijn samengevoegd. Anderzijds kan men zich buigen over de politieke, culturele of sociale factoren die de oprichting van onderzoeksinstellingen,-banen en-financiering in de hand hebben gewerkt.

- by Virgile Royen
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- Science Policy, History of Natural History, History of Science, Colonialism

Not everything is wrong with the idea of botanical decolonisation: science tells us that biodiversity is generally good for ecosystems. But I argue that we need to think harder, longer and in more complex ways about the chains of inference linking our thinking – from plants to animals, peoples, and territories and starting from the meaning and agency of the word “native”. This paper explores the current debate, critically addresses the idea of decolonization in the garden, and untangles the biological and symbolic threads that complicate the ways we think about plants in our backyard.

- by Giovanni Aloi
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- Botany, Philosophy, History of Natural History, Visual Culture

Gysels J. 2016. Nature observation and observers in Flanders 17882014. Natuur.Focus 15(3): 96-101 [In Dutch]. In this article I describe trends in nature observation in Flanders between the late 18th and early 21st century. The second half of the 19th century was a first vital period, with the establishment of associations (‘sociétés’) where professional scientists and interested citizens held meetings and started fruitful collaborations. Some of these associations not only played a scientific role, but also contributed to the social and cultural development of the region. After WW I activities markedly declined. From the 1930s onwards, bird study provided a new impetus for nature observation and after World War II a new generation of educated, young people started to take the lead. They even laid the foundation for the institutionalization of nature conservation in the 1980s. Also, the role of non-governmental organizations became more prominent. Over the last few decades, the number of sightings rose spectacularly. Citizen science campaigns and new technologies allow more and more people to become actively involved in the study of nature.

- by Jos Gysels
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- History of Natural History

By the early 1980s, many life scientists had begun to maintain small collections of cryopreserved
tissues for their own specific research purposes. It became apparent that these materials could be
successfully reused as new techniques and research questions emerged. This realization led several
American leaders in the field of systematic taxonomy (the science of biological classification) and
conservation genetics to argue for the need to take stock of and coordinate these heterogeneous
collections. Their strategy, which they called ‘planned hindsight,’ was meant to organize the
present in a way that appeared to anticipate the needs of future scientists. In this paper I examine
how the seemingly paradoxical strategy of ‘planned hindsight’ has functioned as a strategy for
choreographing life, time, and value at two centralized biospecimen collections: The Frozen Zoo in
Escondido, CA, USA, and the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York City. I conclude that, in practice, ‘planned hindsight’ not only contributes to the
endurance of frozen tissues but also preserves widely divergent speculative visions of the many
different individuals involved with their creation, maintenance, and re-use.

A ausência de estudos sistematizados sobre a presença de teorias transformistas e evolucionistas na comunidade científica portuguesa oitocentista contribuiu, em grande parte, para circunscrever o seu impacte aos contextos social e cultural. Através do presente artigo, mostrar-se-á que diversos naturalistas portugueses compreenderam a importância científica destas teorias, leccionando-as ao nível do ensino superior. Para além da Universidade de Coimbra, onde é possível que Júlio Henriques e Albino Giraldes tenham dado a conhecer as teorias transformistas e evolucionistas que lhes eram contemporâneas, a análise das aulas de zoologia da Escola Politécnica de Lisboa mostra que estas teorias foram leccionadas por José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage desde, pelo menos, 1872. Fernando Matoso Santos e Eduardo Burnay, cuja formação superior foi efectuada na Universidade de Coimbra, e que sucederam a Barbosa du Bocage como professores de zoologia, partilhavam as concepções evolucionistas de Ernst Haeckel. Matoso Santos reestruturou inteiramente o programa da cadeira segundo uma perspectiva evolutiva em 1881, embora também leccionasse concepções características da corrente neo-lamarckista francesa. A ênfase concedida ao transformismo e ao evolucionismo na Escola Politécnica de Lisboa prolongou-se até à alteração do seu estatuto em 1911, tendo continuado a orientar as aulas de zoologia da recém-criada Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa. As investigações realizadas permitem reavaliar a importância das teorias transformistas e evolucionistas em Portugal, mostrando que elas foram, pelo menos, tão relevantes ao nível do ensino científico como nos contextos social e cultural.

- by Noé U de la Sancha and +1
- •
- Landscape Ecology, Zoology, Museum Studies, Conservation Biology
- by Joshua Ehrlich
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- Intellectual History, Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, History of Ideas
- by Nia Carter
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- History, Conservation Biology, History of Natural History, Environmental History
- by Rosalind White
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- Victorian Studies, History of Natural History, Charles Darwin

Through examining Cole’s own life and his fascination with the textual and corporeal narratives of anatomy, this paper looks to explore the merging of scientific knowledge, bibliographic expertise and narrative to perform interdisciplinary ‘readings’, simultaneously challenging both the nineteenth-century emergence of subject discipline and the twentieth-century ‘two cultures’ divide.

- by Verity Burke
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- History, Cultural History, Comparative Anatomy, Epistemology
- by giuseppe olmi
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- History of Natural History, Renaissance Epistolarity

A view from 2008 of the way the internet had changed American birding thus far.

- by Rick Wright
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- History of Natural History, The Internet, Birdwatching, Birds

What has natural history done for physics? The eighteenth century is an important source of answers to this question, since it witnessed the emergence of experimental physics and systematic natural history as distinct branches of science. Much existing literature suggests that these two traditions were opposed in the eighteenth century or that they rarely made contact. The main aim of this dissertation is to show that natural history made an important contribution to the experimental method of the French scientist Charles-François de Cisternay Dufay (1698–1739). This contribution took the form of systematic experimental history. To do systematic experimental history is to apply the same experimental operation to a large number of animal, plant or mineral species, with the aim of comparing the outcomes of these trials. An analysis of Dufay’s articles and correspondence shows that he possessed a large gem collection and that he was in contact with some of the most prolific collectors of his day. His systematic experimental history of gems informed his pioneering papers on electricity, luminescence and double refraction. In this form natural history helped him to discover new phenomena, generalise known phenomena, optimise known phenomena, and discern taxonomic rules, ie. rules expressing contrasts between the observable behaviour of different kinds of material. Dufay’s rules about the electrical behaviour of conductors and non-conductors are of particular interest. These rules were the basis for an absorption theory of electrics that sheds new light on Dufay’s electrical research and on that of his immediate French successors. These reinterpretations of Dufay’s experimental papers are supported by two further claims. The first is that there was a continuous tradition of systematic experimental history at the Académie Royale des sciences in the seventy years before Dufay began his electrical research. The second is that Dufay’s relationship with René Réaumur, the leading naturalist in France at the time, was richer than historians have supposed. This study opens up new lines of research on the role of materials in the qualitative physics of the eighteenth century, the role of naturalists in the quantification of physics around 1800, and the interaction between physics and mineralogy at the Jardin du Roi and, in the nineteenth century, at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.

The rosy periwinkle, a plant originating in the rainforest of Madagascar, is best known for its use in modern biomedicine as a cancer therapy and as a symbol of the importance of biodiversity conservation. Yet images of the plant as a novel therapeutic and an endangered exotic obscure its commonness, for it is both naturalised in many parts of the world as a weed and has long been used as an ornamental plant in greenhouses and gardens. This seeming contradiction is the result of the rosy periwinkle's long history as a horticultural variety, especially its transition over a two-hundred-year period from being understood as a hothouse exotic to being seen as native and commonplace. Horticultural practices generated changes in the distribution and biology of the rosy periwinkle and this in turn generated changes in people's valuation of the species. Through a horticultural history of the rosy periwinkle, this paper explores how ideas about what constitutes an exotic or naturalised species, and the value attached to these, can dramatically shape and then reshape the natural history of a species. It suggests why such attention to such plasticity is important both for historians and for conservation.

The Geneva surgeon and naturalist Louis Jurine (1751-1819) wrote around the 1810s a history of Swiss fishes that was published posthumously. The paper reconstructs the way this work was influenced both by popular practices and scientific... more

- by MARC J. RATCLIFF
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- Ichthyology, Popular Culture, History of Natural History, Scientific methodology
- by Matti Masing
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- History of Natural History, Bats, Chiroptera
- by Lukas Rieppel
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- Paleontology, Museum Studies, History of Natural History, Dinosaurs

Chapter 10 [in:] Treasure Hunting? The Collectors and the Collecting of Indonesian Artefacts. (Reimar Schefold and Han Vermeulen, eds.) Leiden: Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), University of Leiden. Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, no. 30, pages 221-239.
This chapter offers one reading of the Smithsonian’s collections assembled by William Louis Abbott (1860-1936), focusing especially on Abbott’s motivation as a collector, and the dialectic that developed between the collector (Abbott) and the collecting institution (Smithsonian). By drawing upon correspondence between Abbott and museum scientists, and upon Abbott’s letters to his family, a portrait emerges of Abbott’s self-imposed mission, his methods and criteria for selection, and the extent to which they corresponded to the needs and desires of a collecting institution. By placing Abbott and his collections in the context of museum (especially Smithsonian) anthropology from the 1890s to today, we discover why Abbott’s collecting activity was so important to turn-of-the-century Smithsonian anthropologists. Yet we also find that his ethnological collections were later relatively neglected, due to the decline in the importance of material culture studies from which anthropology suffered until quite recently.

- by Rui Manuel Loureiro
- •
- History of Natural History

Os herbários são coleções biológicas que incluem o material de referência para todos os que precisem de identificar ou preservar plantas, fungos ou algas. Estas coleções foram usadas inicialmente pelos professores/médicos/herbalistas no século XVI e mais tarde, nas primeiras viagens de exploração científica, tornaram-se uma ferramenta essencial para todos os coletores e botânicos. A contextualização dos herbários do ponto de vista da história das ciências pode ampliar os usos de um herbário e reforçar a sua versatilidade. Desta perspetiva, os herbários transcendem a sua função de repositório, refletindo contextos para além dos da esfera científica, espelhando as políticas de desenvolvimento governamental, educacional e económico de um país. O Herbário do Museu de História Natural e da Ciência da Universidade do Porto é uma coleção reconhecida mundialmente como o Herbário da Universidade do Porto (PO) e é uma coleção de referência da flora Portuguesa, contendo coleções históricas, privadas e académicas constituídas desde o século XIX. Tomando como ponto de partida o herbário (coleção botânica desidratada entre papel) e o Herbário da Universidade do Porto (como instituição responsável da organização e conservação de vários tipos de coleções botânicas), este trabalho mostra como os herbários e os Herbários são veículos para a compreensão de assuntos de várias esferas e materializam a sua interconexão, promovendo uma aprendizagem de carácter global, fomentando a sua consciência histórica e cívica.

Following the extirpation of the red squirrel from much of Scotland by the end of the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century naturalists strived to find evidence of its native Scottish status. As medieval accounts and Gaelic place names proved ambiguous, the true extent of the squirrel’s former habitat was a matter of some debate. While numerous reintroductions of the species were made from the late eighteenth century, general enthusiasm for the return of squirrel quickly turned to dismay, ultimately followed by persecution. If the squirrel originally represented a symbolic mission to rediscover a lost species, the physical animal itself fell below expectations. It became publically perceived as both economically and ecologically destructive. The squirrel was despised by foresters and landowners for damaging trees, while naturalists condemned the species for the destruction of bird’s eggs and nests. This article will investigate naturalist’s quests to rediscover the red squirrel, before examining changing attitudes to the species upon its reintroduction and gradual proliferation. This narrative will emerge through the works and correspondence of Scottish naturalist John Alexander Harvie-Brown (1844-1916) and The New Statistical Account of Scotland (1834-1845). The argument will be made that the red squirrel as an object of antiquarian curiosity initially made the species endearing to natural historians, as part of a wider fascination with extinct British fauna. However, the clash between naturalists’ established ornithological interests did little to endear the species to that community, leaving the red squirrel open to a policy of general persecution on economic grounds.

This book explores the life and work of the celebrated eighteenth-century English naturalist, explorer, artist and author Mark Catesby (1683-1749). During Catesby’s lifetime, science was poised to shift from a world of amateur virtuosi to one of professional experts. Working against a backdrop of global travel that incorporated collecting and direct observation of nature, Catesby spent two prolonged periods in the New World – in Virginia (1712-19) and South Carolina and the Bahamas (1722-26). In his majestic two-volume The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731-43), esteemed by his contemporary John Bartram as ‘an ornament for the finest library in the world’, he reflected the excitement, drama and beauty of the natural world. Interweaving elements of art history, history of science, natural history illustration, painting materials, book history, paper studies, garden history, and colonial history, this volume brings together a wealth of unpublished images as well as newly discovered letters by Catesby, which with their first-hand accounts of his collecting and encounters in the wild bring the story of this extraordinary pioneer naturalist vividly to life.
The volume was published by the Paul Mellon Centre/Yale, London, on 22 June 2021. It won the 2022 Award of Excellence in Biography from the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries; the Historians of British Art award for a single-author book with a subject between 1600 and 1800 (2022); and the Society for the History of Natural History, John Thackray Medal (2023).

The concept of ’natural heritage’ has become increasingly significant with the threat of dwindling resources, environmental degradation and climatic change. As humanity’s impact on the condition of life on earth has become more prominent,... more

- by Ross Wilson
- •
- History, Geology, Television Studies, Museum Studies

Off icially est abl ish ed in 1878, the natural history collection—originally housed at the Raffles Museum—now has more than 560,000 specimens in its care, one of the largest collection of Southeast Asian plants and animals. Dedicated to scientific research and education, the museum was reincarnated as the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum in 2015, closing the loop on its remarkable 127-year history. But beneath the sleek exterior of the museum’s new, modern building lies a saga of struggle and change. That the collections survived at all—through the multiple challenges of the nineteenth
century, the disruption of World War Two, and its potential disintegration in the face of Singapore’s modernization—is nothing short of miraculous. This book is not only an institutional history of the museum but also recounts the frustrations, tenacity, and courage of the numerous individuals
who battled officialdom, innovated endlessly, and overcame the odds to protect Singapore’s natural history heritage

- by Kevin Tan
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- History, History of Natural History, History of Museums, Singapore

For 250 years, the vernacular spelling of the family name of the polymath Conrad Gessner of Zurich (1516-1565) has been in doubt, owing to an erroneous analogy with the Latin spelling, which does not require a double s. The history of this error is presented, followed by an examination of Gessner's own usage throughout his life, as it appears in autograph documents and works printed under his direction. Posthumous evidence and evidence from other members of the family and the community are also adduced to demonstrate consistency in the vernacular spelling of Gessner's name.

- by C. M. Pyle
- •
- Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, Conrad Gessner

Diderot's 1772 text Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (Supplement to Bougainville's 'Voyage around the World') is a 'riff', as Lynn Festa puts it, on the explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville's memorable account of his landfall on Tahiti.1 The final text within a trilogy of moralising tales that includes Ceci n'est pas un conte (This is Not a Story) andMme de La Carlière, Diderot's Tahitian fable targets his era's constricting jealousies, petty passions and denatured conventions by juxtaposing Tahiti's 'natural society' with a series of European notions and customs.2 The overall structure of this clash of cultures is worth recalling. In the opening pages of the Supplément, Diderot stages a discussion between the witty and inquisitive interlocutors A and B, both of whom are enlightened relativists. In this initial part of the text, the two friends jump quickly from topic to topic, speculating on continental drift, the mores of ancient peoples on isolated lands and the seemingly contradictory psychology of Bougainville himself. In the ensuing section, A and B 'read' together the hidden manuscript ostensibly found within Bougainville's original text. This first Tahitian section begins, as it were, with a forceful, regressive view of history delivered by an old Tahitian man who enumerates the inevitable consequences of colonisation: contamination, enslavement and perhaps the eventual extermination of the Tahitians. The subsequent portion of the text shifts to a different era, where we witness more fruitful contacts between Tahitians and Europeans. In particular, we meet the very philosophically minded patriarch and chief, Orou, who begins a discussion with an aumônier (chaplain) regarding the backward and unnatural sexual restrictions imposed on the Catholic clergy. (This is also the section where B recounts the story of Polly Baker's incarceration for having had five children out of wedlock.) The suite (continuation) to this section relates Orou's later interactions with the aumônier after the clergyman has succumbed to the charms of Orou's daughter, Thia. At this point, the two men discuss the logic of the Tahitian sexual economy (where children have a greater value than any other 'commodity') at the same time as they deconstruct supposedly sinful notions such as adultery and fornication. The final section of the text brings back A and B, who speak about the 'denaturing' of humankind as well as the feasibility or non-feasibility of creating nature-based institutions in Europe, such as a more natural version of marriage. The final assessment of the text as supplied by A andB– that one should 'prendre le froc du pays où l'on va, et garder celui du pays où l'on est' ('wear the dress of the country to which one goes, but keep that of the country where one is')3 – seems to be a synthesis of cultural relativism and, on a certain level, pragmatic conservatism. Long considered something of an outlier among Diderot's major contributions to eighteenth-century thought, this short text is now among the philosophe's most taught and perhaps even most studied texts. While this

- by Andrew Curran
- •
- History of Natural History, Post-Colonialism, Natural History, Bougainville

ISIS—Volume 109, Number 3, September 2018, pp. 616-17

This chapter provides an overview of Kant’s conception of the animality (or Tierheit) of human beings. Though human animality is treated in a wide range of Kant’s writings, it has received relatively little attention from scholars, perhaps because Kant wrote no text principally devoted to the subject. With the aim of establishing its systematic unity, I track the status and role of animality across three distinct but interrelated domains of Kant’s theory of human nature—his account of animality as one of three basically good original human predispositions in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, his account of animality as the target of discipline in the pedagogy lectures, and his account of animality as simultaneously a driver of and hindrance to the progress of history in ‘Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim’. I argue that these accounts, taken together and in light of the teleological vision of human development that connects them, manifest a distinctively Kantian vision of the human as an actively rational, but at the same time ineliminably animal, being. Far from denying that humans are animals or seeking to repress human animality wholesale, Kant in fact offers a nuanced and robust, though still problematic, defence of the necessity, innocence, and originality of the human’s animal side.

- by David Baumeister
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- Intellectual History, Geography, Anthropology, Philosophy

El estudio de la fauna entomológica de la Península Ibérica empieza tarde, a principios del siglo XIX. Sus promotores son naturalistas alemanes, franceses y británicos, seguidos por españoles a partir de mediados del siglo. Basándose en el ejemplo de una familia de Coleópteros (los Carabidae, con 305 especies ibéricas descritas entre 1801 y 1914), este estudio hace hincapié en las prácticas sociales relacionadas con la producción del saber científico en la Europa del siglo XIX: papel de los aficionados y coleccionadores, del comercio de historia natural y de las sociedades científicas, funcionamiento de las redes de sociabilidad internacionales.

- by Pierre Moret
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- Entomology, History of Natural History, History of Entomology

Exhibition catalog, Gallerie degli Uffizi, 2020. Contains 98 catalog entries and 10 essays: "The Universe of Giovanna Garzoni. Art, Mobility, and the Global Turn in the Geographical Imaginary" by Sheila Barker."“E scrittrice, e pittrice”: Giovanna Garzoni and the Art of Calligraphy" by Aoife Cosgrove. "Art in the Service of Botany: Giovanna Garzoni’s Piante varie at Dumbarton Oaks" by Sheila Barker and Anatole Tchikine. "“La Miniatrice di Madama Reale”: Giovanna Garzoni in Savoy" by
Sheila ffolliott. "Miniature Painters at the Medici Court in the Seventeenth Century" by Elena Fumagalli. "The Not-So-Still Lifes of Giovanna Garzoni" by Mary D. Garrard. "Giovanna Garzoni at the Crossroads of Art and Science:
Floral and Floristic Aspects of the Cultural Landscape of Her Times" by Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi. "An Exotic Liaison. China, the Medici and Giovanna Garzoni" by Francesco Morena. "Giovanna Garzoni, “Accademica”" by
Peter M. Lukehart. "Vittoria della Rovere’s Homage to Giovanna Garzoni: The Stanza dell’Aurora in the Villa del Poggio Imperiale" by Pasquale Focarile.

This is a pdf of the whole monograph.
The World of Carolus Clusius. Natural History in the Making, 1550-1610 explores how natural history in Europe, and in particular the knowledge of plants, was transformed during the late 16th and very early 17th centuries into a field of professional expertise, a budding scientific discipline. This book presents not a history of ideas, publications or institutions, however, but a cultural and social history of people’s fascination with nature and the transformation of knowledge during this period. The formation of expertise is studied through its practical manifestations – gardening, collecting plants and animals, botanical field research, and exchanging knowledge – and the personalities involved in them.

- by Florike Egmond
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- History of Natural History, Exotic Species, Medicinal Plants, Visual History