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Styles of Reasoning in Early to mid-Victorian Life Research: Analysis:Synthesis and Palaetiology

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Abstract

To better understand the work of pre-Darwinian British life researchers in their own right, this paper discusses two different styles of reasoning. On the one hand there was analysis:synthesis, where an organism was disintegrated into its constituent parts and then reintegrated into a whole; on the other hand there was palaetiology, the historicist depiction of the progressive specialization of an organism. This paper shows how each style allowed for development, but showed it as moving in opposite directions. In analysis:synthesis, development proceeded centripetally, through the fusion of parts. Meanwhile in palaetiology, development moved centrifugally, through the ramifying specialization of an initially simple substance. I first examine a community of analytically oriented British life researchers, exemplified by Richard Owen, and certain technical questions they considered important. These involved the neurosciences, embryology, and reproduction and regeneration. The paper then looks at a new generation of British palaetiologists, exemplified by W.B. Carpenter and T.H. Huxley, who succeeded at portraying analysts’ questions as irrelevant. The link between styles of reasoning and physical sites is also explored. Analysts favored museums, which facilitated the examination and display of unchanging marine organisms while providing a power base for analysts. I suggest that palaetiologists were helped by vivaria, which included marine aquaria and Wardian cases. As they became popular in the early 1850s, vivaria provided palaetiologists with a different kind of living and changing evidence. Forms of evidence, how they were preserved and examined, and career options all reinforced each other: social and epistemic factors thus merged.

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Acknowledgments

For Polly Winsor. I thank Katherine Anderson, John Beatty, Elihu Gerson, Michael Ghiselin, Ian Hacking, Bernard Lightman, Gordon McOuat, Lynn Nyhart, John Pickstone, and the anonymous referees of the Journal of the History of Biology. I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the President and Council of the Royal College of Surgeons of England to quote from the Richard Owen Papers, and Tina Craig’s assistance there; the permission of Imperial College London’s Library Archives and Special Collections to quote from the Thomas Henry Huxley Papers and Manuscripts, and the assistance of Anne Barrett and Hilary McEwan there; and the permission of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum (London), to quote from the Richard Owen Correspondence and Collection, and Paul Cooper’s assistance there. This research and writing was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a grant from the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, University of Toronto.

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    James Elwick

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Elwick, J. Styles of Reasoning in Early to mid-Victorian Life Research: Analysis:Synthesis and Palaetiology. J Hist Biol 40, 35–69 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-006-9106-4

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