Descriptive science

Descriptive science

In the late eighteenth century, the work of Carl Linné (Linnaeus) was as important a model as that of Newton. He had organized natural history (most notably botany) by grouping organisms and minerals on the basis of external characters; previously, Aristotle and his successors had relied on perceiving family groups in a process like connoisseurship. Moreover, the English word ‘sycamore’ for example is applied to very different kinds of trees: Linnaeus assigned double-barrelled Latin names to plants and animals, so that everyone knew just what was meant. By 1800, his system had been improved in Paris, becoming more ‘natural’ in taking into account more characters; it was now necessary to dissect in order to classify. Zoologists caught up with botanists; and particularly Georges Cuvier emphasized Aristotle’s principle of correlation. Nature does

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nothing in vain: all the parts of an organism cohere. The carnivore will have cutting and slashing teeth, powerful shoulders, claws, forward vision and a simple digestive system: Cuvier believed that given a single bone he could determine what it came from. Naturalists had hoped to place all organisms on a single great chain or ladder, from amoebas up to humans (and maybe on up through angels); but Cuvier could not accept this even for zoology, seeing instead a great bush with four main stems from which all animals branched off. The language of families and genera implied relationships, and clearly horses, donkeys and zebras were alike; but for Linnaeus and for Cuvier, species were distinct, variability was limited and the ideal of science was to describe and place them carefully, but not speculate about evolution. Old-fashioned people like J.B.Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin had gone in for that, diverting people from sound positive science: and when as Permanent Secretary of the Academy, Cuvier came to deliver the éloge for Lamarck, he was scathing and witty.

It was striking that the fauna and flora of places with similar climates, in Europe, North America, Southern Africa and Australia for example, were very different. This had been taken as evidence of God’s delight in diversity; but by 1800 ‘acclimatizing’ had become a major enterprise, a way in which science might improve the world. The First Fleet going to New South Wales had not been expected to survive on a diet of kangaroos and witchity grubs: they took cows and sheep to breed from, and corn and vegetables to sow. Potatoes, tobacco, maize and chilli peppers had come to the Old World from the New; and with the confident and active scientific spirit of the nineteenth century the idea (alarming to us) that species should be transferred around the world gained ground rapidly. Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society from 1778 to 1820, looked after

a flock of merino sheep at Kew, and oversaw the transport of some of them to Australia to found the Botany wool industry. Under Sir Joseph Hooker, Victorian Kew became a great centre of economic botany, serving a mighty empire. He brought back and cultivated Himalayan rhododendrons, transforming Victorian gardens; and supervised the collection and smuggling of rubber and quinine trees from Latin America, which were grown in Kew’s great hothouses and then transferred to plantations in British colonies. When the London Zoo was founded in 1827 by Sir Humphry Davy (Banks’s successor as president of the Royal Society) and Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore, one of its aims was the acclimatization of animals: it was hoped that llamas for example might grace the fields of England.

In parallel with this went close studies of particular faunas and floras, in what became the science of ecology. The resources of Spanish America had long been state secrets, until Alexander von Humboldt managed under French auspices a five-year visit from 1799. A universal man, he studied all three branches of natural history, as well as magnetism, astronomy and economics: he perceived that maps can include data of physical geography like isotherms as well as topography, and realized that anyone climbing snow-capped mountains at the Equator goes through all climatic zones up to the arctic. On his return, he spent his fortune in publishing thirty volumes of reports on his discoveries: he had to move from Prussia to Paris to be able to write up his work, and became a great advocate of international co-operation. Under his auspices, the ‘big science’ of the first half of the nineteenth century, involving expensive ships, equipment and skilled manpower, has been called Humboldtian. This meant global vision, co- operating observatories working in close co-ordination and the tabulation of great

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quantities of data. Scientific voyages that had begun with Captain James Cook and his contemporaries became a feature of the nineteenth century, especially after peace in 1815. Banks, Hooker, THOMAS HUXLEY and Edward Sabine, who all learned their science on voyages, became presidents of the Royal Society; and in 1849 John Herschel,

a great admirer of Humboldt who had spent time in South Africa observing the southern stars and nebulae, edited the Admiralty Manual of Scientific Enquiry, which has among others a contribution from CHARLES DARWIN. The French, Russian and US navies also played an important part: but the dominance of Britain meant that from 1884 the zero of longitude went through Greenwich, and that the culminating voyage was that of HMS Challenger, in 1872–6, whose fifty volumes of reports were finally completed by an international team in 1895. By 1870 transoceanic telegraphy had shifted attention to the deep sea, previously supposed lifeless.