After the Dutch East India Company (VOC) gained dominance over the coastal areas of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from the middle of the seventeenth century, the company started to exploit one of the natural resources on the island, elephants, for its own commercial and diplomatic purposes. With the help of local people, the VOC captured elephants and stabled them systematically. Historians have seen this practice as part of European imperial and trading enterprises rationally valuing material knowledge of the natural world over the symbolic. However, by reading VOC documents alongside other Asian and European sources on elephants, it is evident that VOC empirical knowledge and material management of elephants in Ceylon were compatible with symbolic systems of various elephant traditions in South and Southeast Asia and also in Europe. These traditions valued elephants not only for their material capabilities but also their symbolic significance considered through their bodies as a whole as well as interpreted through their specific physical characteristics. The union between the material and symbolic in the case of Dutch elephant knowledge and management in Ceylon reveals global entanglements in which Europeans internalized Asian cultural values and incorporated non-Western knowledge into their own schemata and philosophies. These entanglements bring to light a non-Western diffusionist view on the history of natural history of the elephant.
Natural history grew in popularity in Britain among the middle class during the nineteenth century in large part due to the proliferation of cheap books and periodicals that featured illustrations of plants and animals. Prior to this period, books that featured hand-coloured plates were considered a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford. This article examines production of The Naturalist's Library, a popular forty-volume book series published in Edinburgh from 1833-1843 by William Home Lizars (1788-1859) and Sir William Jardine (1800-1874). Each volume cost six shillings and included over thirty hand-coloured steel engravings of animals. Lizars and Jardine were able to coordinate the labour of writers, artists, engravers, printers, and colourists to cheaply produce tens of thousands of volumes during its original print run. The hand colouring of the millions of steel engravings was achieved through a team of women working at Lizars' printing firm.
Ferdinand Bauer (1760-1826) was one of the few eighteenth-century natural history illustrators, who used a numerical code to document the colouring of organisms while sketching them in the field. He used this on two major expeditions, one to the Mediterranean, resulting in Flora Graeca (ten volumes, 1806-1840) and 'Fauna Graeca' (mostly unpublished), the other to Australia as part of the Flinders expedition. The latter was supposed to result in a flora of New Holland, but this was never completed. Bauer's colour system became ever more complex and included up to 1,000 numbers for his Australian work. This method gave an extremely nuanced richness of data points for recording the colouring of plants, fungi, and animals; Bauer's finished illustrations are astonishingly accurate when compared with the living organisms. Illustrations are particularly important for our knowledge of the appearance of now extinct species. Bauer spent several months in the Norfolk Island group (Australian external territory), whose flora includes many species that only occur there and are now threatened or extinct. His specimens and drawings were the basis for the first flora of Norfolk Island by the botanist Stephan Endlicher (1804-1849). Bauer's collections and field sketches are now housed at the Natural History Museum Vienna. The drawings are in urgent need of digitization for documentation and cross-referencing with other parts of Bauer's work archived elsewhere, so as to become more widely accessible to artists, botanists, and others who rely on these materials.
In 1826, the University of Oxford purchased a collection of 930 watercolour drawings of birds bound in 12 volumes. They had been obtained by the bookseller Joseph Harding (1783-1843) of London at an auction of the effects of Joan Raye van Breukelerwaard (1737-1823) in Amsterdam in 1824 or 1825. Here called the 'Radcliffe Collection', these drawings have a close connection with the French ornithologist Fran & ccedil;ois Levaillant (1753-1824), well-known for his travels to South Africa (1780-1784) and for his authorship of five splendidly-illustrated ornithological works. The history and contents of this collection are described. Of the 752 birds depicted, 420 species also feature in the auction catalogue of Raye's cabinet dated 1827. About half of the drawings in the Radcliffe Collection depict species described and figured on the engraved plates in Levaillant's published works. The drawings often include two captions in French, one probably written by Levaillant, the second possibly by Joan Raye or his curator. None of the drawings was signed by an artist. They depict many type specimens of species first described by Levaillant, which were given binomial names by others in the early nineteenth century. They provide a rare glimpse into private cabinets of natural history at a time when many new species of birds were brought to Europe from across the world.
The notable Dutch botanist and art collector, Agnes Block (1629-1704) created a remarkable garden at her country estate Vijverhof near Utrecht. She commissioned many artists to record her plants in watercolour and often annotated her drawings on the verso with information including the plant's name, the date the seed was sown, when the plant bloomed and intriguingly, the alchemical symbols for the sun and mercury. From a close study of drawings from Block's collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge and the Derby Collection, Knowsley Hall, it is clear to see that they were not static but 'live' studies, updated over the years to include seeds, seedpods and fruits as and when they became available to paint. These later additions may also have been in response to the classification of plants according to fructification, a system used by Robert Morison in Oxford and advocated by Block's friend and advisor, Paul Hermann in Leiden that championed a plant's seeds and fruits over any other characteristic. As is demonstrated in this paper, seeds were hugely valuable to Block as well: becoming almost like a currency, they gave her a reason to strike up exchanges with reputable and learned botanists of her day as she offered and requested seeds that were especially rare while her efforts to ensure they were recorded in her drawings tells us a great deal more about her inquisitive nature and botanical knowledge.
The answer to the enduring puzzle of the enigmatic colour code used by Ferdinand Bauer, when making his exceptional illustrations for John Sibthorp's 'Flora' and 'Fauna Graeca', suggested that each of his notations directed him to a particular pigment in his paintbox, and also provided directions about the consistency of the paint, and how it should be applied. These discoveries are the foundation of this further discussion which re-appraises the code's reach and subtlety, in new revelations about how Bauer used his annotations in combination, to accommodate his working method. Also included are further insights into Bauer's conception, identification, and recall of colour and texture, independent confirmation of the structure identified in Bauer's mnemonic, and some refinements in the interpretation of codes.
Several illuminated copies of Herbarum vivae eicones (1530-1536) and its free German version, Contrafayt Kre & uuml;terbuch (1532-1537), by Otto Brunfels with images by Hans Weiditz, stem from Johann Schott's printshop. In these copies the hand-colouring occasionally introduces peculiar features, such as leaf maculation, which for us represent a different species. The survival of an in-house illuminated copy of the first two volumes of Herbarum vivae eicones purchased by Johannes Ralla in 1532 indicates that these coloured copies were for sale. Ralla was a noted Leipzig apothecary figuring prominently in Euricius Cordus's Botanologicon (1534), a work in the form of a conversation between five characters during a botanical excursion. The extensive discussion of Herbarum vivae eicones in Botanologicon provides early documentation of how the herbal was used. Lastly, a brief reassessment of De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (1542) and its German version, New Kre & uuml;terbuch (1543), by Leonhart Fuchs, casts doubt on the standard characterization of those works and argues that there were closer connections with Brunfels's herbal than has been recognized.
The history of science remembers Henry Baker Tristram (1822-1906) as an early adopter of Darwinism whose interests as a clergyman overtook his commitment to science following the 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce debate on evolution. Yet Tristram's most notable contributions to natural history and to the relationship between religion and science came after the 1860 debate, through his research on the fauna of Ottoman Palestine and his founding role in the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). This article draws on published works and the unpublished correspondence of Tristram and his fellow naturalists of the PEF to shed much needed light on the history of natural history in the nineteenth-century Levant. Reproducing debates on the identity of biblical mammals - the 'conies' and 'deer' of the King James Bible - the article assesses the role of biblical natural history in late Victorian clerical and scientific debates. It argues that the primary target of Tristram's Christian science was not Darwinism, but the 'higher criticism' of Bishop John Colenso (1814-1883). By applying contemporary zoology and philology toward the interpretation of scripture, Tristram and his colleagues defended the authorial authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the enduring relationship between Christianity and science. Despite the varied priorities of the PEF's founders, the institution's naturalists united to accurately identify biblical mammals in the contemporary fauna of Ottoman Palestine, thereby creating an evidentiary terrain on which Christian scripture was corroborated, and the relationship between Victorian science and religion was negotiated.
Edinburgh in the opening decades of the nineteenth century was a vibrant centre of ornithological enquiry and image-making. Most prominent among the city's 'tribe of ornithologists' were Sir William Jardine (1800-1874) and Prideaux John Selby (1788-1867), whose Illustrations of ornithology (1826-1843), published in parts, spanned nearly two decades. Containing over two-hundred hand-coloured plates depicting mostly rare or newly-discovered bird species, the Illustrations comprised two series, four volumes and nineteen parts. This article explores the different mechanisms for chromatic depiction, description and standardization employed in Jardine and Selby's work. It approaches Illustrations of ornithology as a collection of elaborately-coloured and aesthetically-motivated units of image and text, whose commercial success depended on both chromatic accuracy and life-like execution. Excavating the various iterations of the work, including manuscript pages and the preserved specimens themselves, the discussion unpicks the different iterations of colour embodied in its letterpress and plates. In doing so, it reveals the scientific, aesthetic, commercial and imperial agendas underpinning Jardine and Selby's Illustrations.
