This study of observation and experiment in 18th-century natural history will reconstruct the practice of observational natural history in the Enlightenment, especially of insects and birds. Using close reading and analysis of published books and unpublished letters, it will investigate the dynamics operating in the community of people interested in observing and experimenting with living creatures in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. This community was not limited to the institutions of science, but spread far beyond to country houses, colonial outposts and urban gardens. One subject of this study is the complex web of connections among people with different degrees of specialized knowledge and institutional support, often working together to build collections and produce detailed observations of many species of insects and birds, and sometimes arguing about interpretations as well.
One of the main figures in this network of naturalists and amateurs was René- Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, who maintained extensive correspondences with other naturalists, with his many readers and admirers, and indeed with anyone who shared his many interests. Although he wrote extensively on insects and on poultry, often incorporating the observations of his correspondents from around the world, and was admired for his collections and inventions, Réaumur has hardly been studied by historians of science. One of the goals of this project is to examine Réaumur and his style of doing natural history in the context of the science and the intellectual culture of his times. The other major figures I examine in delineating the natural history community are Charles Bonnet (in Geneva) and Pierre Lyonet (in La Haye). From these three characters, I expand outward to their many correspondents and their motivations for pursuing the study of such creatures as earthworms, butterflies, snails and ant-lions. In part this is a corrective to the historiography literature, which has concentrated on a more philosophical form of natural history practiced by Réaumur's arch-rival Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. But it is also a scholarly excursion into the everyday practices of naturalists of all stripes, as they devised novel experimental set-ups and ways of displaying and portraying the objects of their attention (which were often elusive at best). The research draws on extensive unpublished correspondence that survives from this period, documenting the activities of naturalists across Europe and beyond.
The book resulting from this study will enrich the historiography of the life sciences in the Enlightenment by questioning assumptions about the primacy of theory and by developing an analytic method to explore the dynamics of a diverse and diffuse community of investigators. At the same time, it will provide an accessible account of the how science was done in the past, and what the investigation of the natural world meant for a variety of people. It will give readers a detailed look at the dynamics of science in culture in this historical setting. This kind of historical scholarship, which aims at showing the complexity of the interactions between scientists, amateurs, and the broader public, can contribute to public understanding and appreciation of science, even though the subject matter is drawn from the relatively distant past.
