Science in the Field: Introduction

In the field, science’s claims to establish truths about the natural world face multiple challenges. As the editors of a 1996 issue of Osiris observed, the controlled conditions of the laboratory are emblematic of science’s claim to accuracy and truthfulness.[1] Scholars wanting to make definitive statements about what science is and how it works steer well clear of the field. Historians like Thomas Kuhn, in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for instance, choose a science expressed in the highly abstract language of mathematics as their paradigmatic science. While laboratory conditions are predictable, clean, and controlled, the conditions under which scientists work in the field appear compromised from the start.

Those compromises, however, are central to the papers in this forum on French natural history in the era of the Revolution. The authors of these articles show us scientists investigating the natural world under difficult, messy, and unpredictable circumstances – unstable political, social, even meteorological conditions are what attract these scholars to the topic of field science. The naturalists in these articles relied on a wide range of non-scientist actors, including native informants, enslaved guides, merchants, and women. In these papers we read about naturalists dissecting animals in a race against time as the dead flesh rotted in the tropical heat. Weather conditions made travel and storage of their specimens difficult. Revolutions intervened, and police occasionally mistook botanists for spies. Doing science in the field required equanimity and flexibility.

Writing the history of scientific fieldwork requires a similar range of talents because the field is often where the history of science encounters the rest of the historical discipline. These papers demonstrate that an analysis of science in the field needs the insights of scholars of gender, imperialism, consumerism, and more. These papers, then, draw on common themes that are not exclusively the purview of historians of science.

Dena Goodman’s analysis of natural history fieldwork, for instance, relies on the research of a generation of scholars interested in gender. The story here is not simply about the exclusion of women, because eighteenth-century botany was in fact an appropriate occupation for both men and women. Rather, Goodman tracks the gendering of different styles of fieldwork, revealing that botany had both “masculine” and “feminine” versions. Although gender is less central to Elizabeth Hyde’s account of André Michaux’s exploration of north American botany, Michaux’s descriptions of his search for new specimens nonetheless resonate with Goodman’s account of a masculine fieldwork. Michaux’s media savviness emphasized heroic and disinterested qualities like his willingness to confront bad weather and dangerous animals in order to identify plants that might be useful to his fellow man. Whitney Walton, similarly, examines an intrepid, solo naturalist, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, whose fieldwork took him to four continents. Walton argues that his career never quite took off as he hoped, and, indeed, his best work was in natural history illustration, a discipline that was tipping from the category of science for men to science for women.

Lesueur’s career raises questions about the intersection between scientific neutrality and political interests. Lesueur spent part of his career as a member of the utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana, and Walton asks how his interest in natural history shaped his encounter with socialist politics. He had seen many kinds of political communities in different parts of the world, not least the tension-ridden worlds of scientists and sailors confined for weeks to ships on scientific expeditions, and his experience in the field influenced his assessment of political ideologies. Politics were also central to the young men whose scientific associations Goodman studies. They explicitly presented their fieldwork as training for citizenship in the new revolutionary polity. The field, then, is a space where the traffic between science and political ideologies moves in both directions.

Natural history fieldwork has been a particularly fruitful space of encounter for historians of science and of empire, and all three of these papers address this intersection. In the field, natural history knowledge could contribute to – or at least create the impression of — sovereignty over territory. The young men of Goodman’s natural history societies were undertaking just such a project as they fanned out across the Paris basin: identifying the territory’s flora and fauna was an important step toward the revolutionary assertion of the sovereign citizen. These articles also raise questions about disconnections between intellectual imperium and colonialism, however. No matter how much Michaux and Lesueur learned about the natural resources of the United States, they hardly expected to expand French dominion over them.[2] Their goals were encyclopedic without being colonial: they wanted to know the world, but not necessarily to rule it.

The kind of knowledge that naturalists aspired to required more than just possession. They wanted to see the world’s flora and fauna in situ, and collecting was as important to them as owning. Herbaria and gardens were not enough for the naturalists of these articles – they needed to be on the ground. The field, for naturalists like these, was more than simply the site where specimens happened to be located: field knowledge was an intrinsic part of scientific knowledge. As scholars of their contemporary, naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, have observed, we can think of them as early ecologists, committed to a scientific practice that valued equally the specimen and its environment. [3]

In their insistence on the importance of place and of experience in the field, however, these naturalists were at the end of an era of natural history. Even as men like Michaux and Lesueur scoured the globe for unknown plants and animals, biologists were transferring their goals elsewhere – primarily to the lab. The leading biologists of the era – men like Georges Cuvier – increasingly avoided fieldwork. Cuvier’s comparative anatomy was a product of hours spent in a laboratory, examining samples brought back from the far corners of the globe. In Cuvier’s view, the men who had collected, preserved, and transported the raw materials of his research were not scientists; they were technicians. Their fieldwork, however intrepid it might have been, was merely a prelude to science, and their tales of risk, of dedication, and of obstacles overcome in the search for specimens were entertaining enough, but not science. In the decades following the French Revolution, the encyclopedic ambitions of natural history reached their zenith at the same time as the natural sciences began to leave the practices of natural history behind.

The laboratory sciences have often sought to generate a sense of being exempt from history – insulated from the kinds of political and social influences that lie at the center of the papers in this forum. Cuvier’s insistence that biology was a laboratory science was just such an assertion. The openness of the field – to the vagaries of the environment and the participation of non-scientific actors — reminds us of the artificiality of this claim. As the naturalists in these essays navigated the openness of their fields of study, they revealed a great deal about late-Enlightenment and revolutionary ambitions, and the essays presented here invite us to share their subjects’ appreciation for the unexpected encounters of natural history fieldwork.

Notes

1. Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, “Introduction” in “Science in the Field,” edited by Kuklick and Kohler. Osiris 11 (1996): 1-14.

2. The case of the Australian expedition in which Lesueur participated is less clear, but he and his colleagues did not imagine themselves as the vanguard of French imperial expansion: Carol E. Harrison, “Planting Gardens, Planting Flags: Revolutionary France in the South Pacific,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 2 (2011): 243-277.

3. Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York, 2015).