The French botanist Michel Adanson spent five years in precolonial Senegal in the 1750s, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes. This essay follows the archival traces of Adanson’s engagement with African indigo, including experiments conducted in an ad hoc “laboratory” near the French fort of Saint Louis. A reconstruction of these experiments exposes the multifarious connections to and from the island garden-laboratory, mediated by materials and different kinds of indigo knowledge, including that of local Wolof informants. A microhistory of encounters in and around a tiny island off the West African coast merges with a transatlantic story connecting Senegal to Paris and to French colonies in the Caribbean (Saint-Domingue and Guyana). The essay explores geographies of knowledge and French imperial ambitions through close attention to the material properties of indigo, the practices associated with its cultivation and transformation from plant to dye, and the material remnants of Adanson’s engagement with it in Africa. These remnants—herbarium sheets, experimental notes, color samples on paper strips, dyed fabric swatches, sketched maps, correspondence, collection catalogues, and plant taxonomies—put various kinds of African knowledge and Caribbean plantation experience into dialogue with European botany and dye chemistry.

Previous articleNext article No AccessEarly ModernSarah Easterby-Smith. Cultivating Commerce: Cultures of Botany in Britain and France, 1760–1815. (Science in History.) xiv + 239 pp., figs., maps, bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. $99 (cloth). ISBN 9781316411339.Mary TerrallMary Terrall Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 109, Number 4December 2018 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701332 Views: 82Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2018 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019, Isis 110, no.S1S1 (Jan 2020): 21–310.https://doi.org/10.1086/707594

In the eighteenth century, natural histories of animals incorporated narratives about animal behaviour and narratives of discovery and experimentation. Naturalists used first-person accounts to link the stories of their scientific investigations to the stories of the animal lives they were studying. Understanding nature depended on narratives that shifted back and forth in any given text between animal and human, and between individual cases and generalizations about species. This paper explores the uses of narrative through examples from the work of René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur and Abraham Trembley. In all cases, narrative took the genre of natural history well beyond straightforward description and classification. Prose accounts of insect actions and mechanisms worked in tandem with visual narratives embedded in the accompanying illustrations, where artists developed strategies for representing sequences of minute changes over time. By throwing into relief the narrative sections of natural histories, the examples considered here expose the role played by these tales of encounters with the insect world in the making of natural historical knowledge.

In the eighteenth century, French extended its domain over the natural sciences at the expense of Latin, without entirely displacing it. Nor did it definitively supersede other vernaculars for scientific purposes. Scientific disputes and exchanges across language and geographical boundaries depended on a reservoir of overlapping language skills and translation strategies. These varied from case to case; this essay considers cases that illuminate the complex dynamics among languages, framed by the widespread use of French. Examples considered here show the complexity of the linguistic layering in eighteenth-century European science.

This volume had its origin in a reproach. I was visiting the Middleton family in 2007 to photograph a portrait of Francis Willughby, their ancestor, to include in a book whose title and content celebrated the contribution of John Ray to our knowledge of ornithology. 1 In conversation during lunch, I commented on Ray’s biological insight, only to be corrected by Lady Middleton who pointed out that it was Francis Willughby, not Ray, who was the genius of their joint ventures, and that Ray was simply a servant in the Willughby household. Lord Middleton made no comment and I tried to disguise my faux pas by moving the conversation on.Later that day, during the several hours that it took to drive home, I reflected on that conversation, and in a flash realized that Lady Middleton had planted a very fertile seed in my mind. Of course! Here was a history of science that was crying out be done: a detailed evaluation of Francis …

This essay makes the manipulation of objects in natural history collections a crucial part of scientific practice. It investigates the scientific uses and meanings of cabinets of naturalia using a few objects and a few collectors from the wide spectrum of natural history collecting in eighteenth-century France, looking especially at how objects were handled. How did the objects in collections enter into research agendas? They became the raw material for a variety of experimental and observational work, often pursued in the same space where objects were mounted, arranged, preserved and displayed.

In the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris (founded 1666), expressions of a masculine culture of science echoed contemporary language used to articulate the aristocracy's value to crown and state-even though the academy was not an aristocratic institution as such. In the eighteenth century, the pursuit of science became a new form of manly service to the crown, often described in terms of useful knowledge and benefit to the public good [le bien public]. This article explores the connection of academic scientific knowledge to the domestic spaces where it was made and, in particular, to the household of R.-A. Ferchault de Reaumur, an exemplary academician. Although Reaumur had neither wife nor children, a complex net of affective ties, some of them familial, linked the members of the household, which accommodated women (the artist Helene Dumoustier and her female relatives) as well as men (a series of assistants, many of whom eventually entered the academy). As head of this dynamic household, Reaumur produced not only scientific results but also future academicians.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsE. C. Spary. Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760. xi + 366 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. $45 (cloth).Mary TerrallMary Terrall Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 105, Number 3September 2014 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/679150 Views: 27Total views on this site © 2014 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.