Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.332
I. Podgorny, S. V. García
In the nineteenth century, an animal from the Americas known as the armadillo offered an extraordinary subject for zoologists engaged in the study of the outer covering of four-limbed vertebrates and its components. The armadillo, a cuirassed living mammal, had excited the curiosity of European naturalists since the early sixteenth century, and their shells had thus become a common sight in collections. The armadillo’s carapace provided a structure that could be scrutinized in order to understand animal materials, one that afforded the use of microscopes and chemistry in the emerging life sciences that tried to understand the relationship between form and function and the chemical composition of animated matter. The carapace of the armadillo moved from the culture of curiosity in which it was first collected into the new field of animal chemistry, a key move that is crucial for historians to understand the emergence of the study of animal materials. Armadillos accompanied the expansion of chemistry, microscopy, and physics as they were used to study the materials that constituted the mammals’ dermal coverings. This paper mines nineteenth-century publications for episodes connected to the long story of the study of this shell’s anatomical and chemical contrivances, and the crucial role it played both in the emergence of new scientific knowledge and in the discovery of new bio-inspired materials still derived from this animal today. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.
{"title":"Armadillos under the Microscope","authors":"I. Podgorny, S. V. García","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.332","url":null,"abstract":"In the nineteenth century, an animal from the Americas known as the armadillo offered an extraordinary subject for zoologists engaged in the study of the outer covering of four-limbed vertebrates and its components. The armadillo, a cuirassed living mammal, had excited the curiosity of European naturalists since the early sixteenth century, and their shells had thus become a common sight in collections. The armadillo’s carapace provided a structure that could be scrutinized in order to understand animal materials, one that afforded the use of microscopes and chemistry in the emerging life sciences that tried to understand the relationship between form and function and the chemical composition of animated matter. The carapace of the armadillo moved from the culture of curiosity in which it was first collected into the new field of animal chemistry, a key move that is crucial for historians to understand the emergence of the study of animal materials. Armadillos accompanied the expansion of chemistry, microscopy, and physics as they were used to study the materials that constituted the mammals’ dermal coverings. This paper mines nineteenth-century publications for episodes connected to the long story of the study of this shell’s anatomical and chemical contrivances, and the crucial role it played both in the emergence of new scientific knowledge and in the discovery of new bio-inspired materials still derived from this animal today. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90577971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.221
S. Gilbert
The Atlantic oyster of Chesapeake Bay has been the focus of intense economic and ecological pressures. In the 1880s it was the main source for America’s favorite food, and the oyster was overharvested to the point of scarcity. Three scientific discoveries concerning the oyster’s material properties have been paving its way back from the brink of extinction. First, William Keith Brooks studied the embryology of this oyster and showed that its shell served as a necessary part of its life cycle. Second, Roger Newell demonstrated the prodigious water filtration properties of this oyster and linked these properties to its ability to clean the estuary. The discovery of the filtration properties of the oyster was an affordance that enabled the oyster to “partner” with governmental agencies and NGOs who were attempting to restore the bay’s clean water, fish, and birdlife. Third, Standish K. Allen, Ximing Guo, and their colleagues formulated a procedure that enabled the manipulation of oyster development to yield tasty, fast-growing, and disease-resistant triploid oysters. The disease-resistant oysters together with knowledge of the oyster’s life cycle enabled the proliferation of the oyster by conservation groups. The goal of Chesapeake Bay conservation changed from “Save the oyster” to “Plant more oysters; help save the bay.” This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.
{"title":"Shells, Gills, and Gonads","authors":"S. Gilbert","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.221","url":null,"abstract":"The Atlantic oyster of Chesapeake Bay has been the focus of intense economic and ecological pressures. In the 1880s it was the main source for America’s favorite food, and the oyster was overharvested to the point of scarcity. Three scientific discoveries concerning the oyster’s material properties have been paving its way back from the brink of extinction. First, William Keith Brooks studied the embryology of this oyster and showed that its shell served as a necessary part of its life cycle. Second, Roger Newell demonstrated the prodigious water filtration properties of this oyster and linked these properties to its ability to clean the estuary. The discovery of the filtration properties of the oyster was an affordance that enabled the oyster to “partner” with governmental agencies and NGOs who were attempting to restore the bay’s clean water, fish, and birdlife. Third, Standish K. Allen, Ximing Guo, and their colleagues formulated a procedure that enabled the manipulation of oyster development to yield tasty, fast-growing, and disease-resistant triploid oysters. The disease-resistant oysters together with knowledge of the oyster’s life cycle enabled the proliferation of the oyster by conservation groups. The goal of Chesapeake Bay conservation changed from “Save the oyster” to “Plant more oysters; help save the bay.” This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78457569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.256
K. Ericson
This article takes animal materials as contested elements of ecological knowledge production. The focus is on Ago Bay, a Japanese inlet at the mid-twentieth-century global epicenter of demand for “cultured” pearls that formed inside surgically manipulated shellfish. In 1950s Ago, long-established pearl cultivators complained that their pearls had thinner outer coatings than they expected. Tracing shifting ideas about shellfish stocking densities, smallholder aquaculture, rates of pearl formation, and the accumulation of organic wastes in water over time, this article reconsiders the puzzle of the thinly coated pearl. In its guise as host to thousands of working pearl farms and a network of researchers studying the effects of intensive pearl cultivation, Ago Bay is a rich site from which to think about aquaculture’s ecological and infrastructural limits. The bay was not simply a natural receptacle that housed pearl cultivation. The shore, water, seafloor, and floating pearl oyster raft-and-cage systems could be—and were—defined as infrastructure that could undergo regulation and rearrangement. Pearl cultivation did not just happen in the bay; it was part of the bay—and it reshaped ideas about the bay. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.
{"title":"The Puzzle of the Thinly Coated Pearl","authors":"K. Ericson","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.256","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes animal materials as contested elements of ecological knowledge production. The focus is on Ago Bay, a Japanese inlet at the mid-twentieth-century global epicenter of demand for “cultured” pearls that formed inside surgically manipulated shellfish. In 1950s Ago, long-established pearl cultivators complained that their pearls had thinner outer coatings than they expected. Tracing shifting ideas about shellfish stocking densities, smallholder aquaculture, rates of pearl formation, and the accumulation of organic wastes in water over time, this article reconsiders the puzzle of the thinly coated pearl. In its guise as host to thousands of working pearl farms and a network of researchers studying the effects of intensive pearl cultivation, Ago Bay is a rich site from which to think about aquaculture’s ecological and infrastructural limits. The bay was not simply a natural receptacle that housed pearl cultivation. The shore, water, seafloor, and floating pearl oyster raft-and-cage systems could be—and were—defined as infrastructure that could undergo regulation and rearrangement. Pearl cultivation did not just happen in the bay; it was part of the bay—and it reshaped ideas about the bay. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84803653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.242
S. Lowengard
This essay explores the uses of animal fat from domesticated livestock (cattle, swine, and sheep) in three separate, albeit closely related situations: as a substance harvestable from within the animal body, as a commodity reconfigured from its original form, and as a tool for scientific understanding in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using the concept of affordances, as initially described in the 1970s by James Jerome Gibson, and subsequentially amended by anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, as well as material culture or design historians, I trace animal fat across multiple stages of time and processing to show that while certain affordances remained constant throughout the period under consideration, material references to its origin within the animal body receded and ultimately disappeared. I explore the different forms of use and expectations that occurred in relation to animal fats within the cultural environments of the slaughterhouse, tallow chandlery, and soap-manufacturing facility. I conclude with the fundamental shift in ways of understanding animal fat that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, transformed a substance once highly specific and linked directly to a particular animal’s body into something that was subject to chemical analysis and ultimately synthetization. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.
{"title":"On the Disappearance of the Animal Body","authors":"S. Lowengard","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.242","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the uses of animal fat from domesticated livestock (cattle, swine, and sheep) in three separate, albeit closely related situations: as a substance harvestable from within the animal body, as a commodity reconfigured from its original form, and as a tool for scientific understanding in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using the concept of affordances, as initially described in the 1970s by James Jerome Gibson, and subsequentially amended by anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, as well as material culture or design historians, I trace animal fat across multiple stages of time and processing to show that while certain affordances remained constant throughout the period under consideration, material references to its origin within the animal body receded and ultimately disappeared. I explore the different forms of use and expectations that occurred in relation to animal fats within the cultural environments of the slaughterhouse, tallow chandlery, and soap-manufacturing facility. I conclude with the fundamental shift in ways of understanding animal fat that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, transformed a substance once highly specific and linked directly to a particular animal’s body into something that was subject to chemical analysis and ultimately synthetization. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75209125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.2.189
Gloria B. Yu
{"title":"Addiction Beyond a Cure","authors":"Gloria B. Yu","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.2.189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.2.189","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87290386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.2.109
Pieter T. L. Beck
In this article, I discuss Petrus van Musschenbroek’s research on the strength of materials in relation to his methodological views. In the latter, van Musschenbroek emphasizes the importance of repeating and varying experiments. This is related to his views on the complexity of nature, which play a role in his views on mathematics, laws of nature, causes, and experimental method. In each case, the construction of an (experimental) history is presented as a first step in experimental philosophy, necessary to deal with the complexity of nature. The experimental research on the strength of materials can likewise be seen as aimed at the construction of an (experimental) history. His experimental practice takes the form of a systematic variation of parameters and the performance of an extensive series of experiments on different kinds of substances. In his experimental reports, van Musschenbroek repeatedly points to the utility of his experimental results. This utilitarian attitude is typical for the experimental history literature as discussed by Klein. Van Musschenbroek himself also presents his work as an experimental history. However, unlike the examples discussed by Klein, van Musschenbroek’s experimental history is characterized by a systematic experimental method. I argue that this method can be seen as an example of exploratory experimentation in Steinle’s sense. Finally, I suggest that with its emphasis on the nature and properties of specific materials, it could be fruitful to read van Musschenbroek’s experimental history in light of the emergence of engineering as a discipline in the eighteenth century.
在这篇文章中，我将讨论Petrus van Musschenbroek关于材料强度的研究及其方法论观点。在后者中，van Musschenbroek强调了重复和变化实验的重要性。这与他对自然复杂性的看法有关，这在他对数学、自然规律、原因和实验方法的看法中发挥了作用。在每种情况下，(实验)历史的构建都是实验哲学的第一步，是处理自然复杂性所必需的。对材料强度的实验研究同样可以被视为旨在构建(实验)历史。他的实验实践采取了系统变化参数的形式，并对不同种类的物质进行了一系列广泛的实验。在他的实验报告中，范·穆申布鲁克反复指出他的实验结果的实用性。这种功利主义的态度是克莱因所讨论的实验历史文学的典型。范穆申布鲁克本人也将他的作品描述为一个实验史。然而，与克莱因所讨论的例子不同，范·穆申布鲁克的实验史具有系统实验方法的特点。我认为这种方法可以被看作是斯坦勒意义上的探索性实验的一个例子。最后，我建议，鉴于其对特定材料的性质和特性的强调，鉴于18世纪工程作为一门学科的出现，阅读范·穆申布鲁克的实验史可能是富有成效的。
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.2.147
Thomas M. Lekan
This article examines the intertidal ecological research of the commercial lab owner and popular science writer Edward F. Ricketts, best known as the prototype for John Steinbeck’s character “Doc” in the novel Cannery Row (1945). Ricketts’s friendship with Steinbeck and unconventional philosophical style have regrettably overshadowed his scientific work, particularly his novel faunal zonation surveys of the North American Pacific littoral in the 1930s and 1940s. These surveys resulted in a landmark handbook, Between Pacific Tides (1939), designed for novices and specialists alike. Ricketts’s work demonstrates how the place of ecological investigation (Billick and Price)—here Monterey Bay’s pounding surf, storm-tossed debris, eclectic bohemianism, and the collaborative energies at Hopkins Marine Station—“imprinted” West Coast animal ecology. At first, Ricketts adopted the physiological methods and conceptions of ecological holism he had learned at the University of Chicago under mentor Warder C. Allee in the early 1920s. Allee had conducted his investigations of intertidal organisms in the relatively placid bays and estuaries at the Woods Hole research center on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Allee envisioned animal aggregations as higher-order societies guided by “unconscious cooperation” and evolving toward a climax state. Yet Ricketts found that physiochemical factors, such as temperature and salinity, could not explain the distribution of organisms amid the Pacific’s far more precarious rough-and-tumble surf, nor could they account for fierce competition among organisms. Rejecting Allee’s cooperative metaphors, Ricketts came to see community structure as an unintended result of tidepool invertebrates’ Darwinian struggle to occupy resource niches—a “set of sieves” that transferred nourishment from one part of the aggregation to the next, binding it together in interlocking food webs. Through dialogue with Steinbeck about the implications of modern physics during their Sea of Cortez voyage (1940), Ricketts developed a “unified field hypothesis” to conceptualize the dynamic interwovenness created by transfers of metabolic energy. Yet Steinbeck ultimately held fast to a super-organismic understanding of ecological holism—a hierarchical relationship between constituents and the whole that underlays the novelist’s idea of the human “phalanx” in Grapes of Wrath and other works. The article offers new insights about the ecological origins of Steinbeck and Ricketts’s disputes over “non-teleological” reasoning and the pair’s divergent understandings of nature, society, and progressive politics.
本文考察了商业实验室老板、科普作家爱德华·f·里基茨(Edward F. Ricketts)的潮间带生态研究，他因约翰·斯坦贝克(John Steinbeck)小说《罐头厂街》(Cannery Row, 1945)中角色“博士”(Doc)的原型而闻名。令人遗憾的是，里基茨与斯坦贝克的友谊和非传统的哲学风格掩盖了他的科学工作，特别是他在20世纪30年代和40年代对北美太平洋沿岸进行的新颖的动物分区调查。这些调查产生了一本具有里程碑意义的手册，《太平洋潮汐之间》(1939)，专为新手和专家设计。里基茨的作品展示了生态调查的地点(比利克和普莱斯)——这里的蒙特利湾汹涌的海浪、风暴肆虐的残骸、不拘不躁的波西米亚风格，以及霍普金斯海洋站的合作精神——如何“烙印”了西海岸的动物生态。起初，里基茨采用了他20世纪20年代初在芝加哥大学师从导师沃德·c·阿利(Warder C. Allee)学到的生理学方法和生态整体论的概念。Allee在马萨诸塞州科德角的伍兹霍尔研究中心对相对平静的海湾和河口的潮间带生物进行了调查。Allee将动物群体设想为由“无意识合作”引导的高级社会，并向高潮状态进化。然而，里基茨发现，物理化学因素，如温度和盐度，不能解释生物在太平洋更不稳定的汹涌海浪中的分布，也不能解释生物之间激烈的竞争。里基茨拒绝了阿利的合作隐喻，他认为群落结构是潮池无脊椎动物争夺资源利基的达尔文式斗争的意外结果——“一套筛子”将营养从聚集体的一个部分转移到另一个部分，将它们结合在一起形成连锁的食物网。在1940年的科尔特斯之海航行中，里基茨与斯坦贝克就现代物理学的含义进行了对话，他提出了一个“统一场假说”，将代谢能量转移所产生的动态相互交织概念化。然而，斯坦贝克最终坚持了对生态整体的超有机体理解——在《愤怒的葡萄》和其他作品中，组成部分与整体之间的等级关系奠定了小说家关于人类“方阵”的想法。这篇文章为斯坦贝克和里基茨关于“非目的论”推理的争论以及两人对自然、社会和进步政治的不同理解的生态起源提供了新的见解。
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.102
Ashanti Shih
{"title":"Talking Story with the Archives","authors":"Ashanti Shih","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.102","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79552465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.82
E. A. Mitchell
{"title":"On Slavery, Medicine, Speculation, and the Archive","authors":"E. A. Mitchell","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.82","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.82","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"112 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79555470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.94
Zoé Samudzi
{"title":"Haunted by Denial","authors":"Zoé Samudzi","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.94","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.1.94","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89919057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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