Experiments and Evolving Frameworks of Scientific Exploration: Jean-André Peyssonnel’s Work on Coral

Abstract

The Enlightenment naturalist Jean-André Peyssonnel had a lifelong connection both to expeditions and corals in three parts of the world: Provence, North Africa and the island of Guadeloupe. The central question of this chapter is how the relationship between travel and experiment functioned in the case of a momentous investigation that ultimately would prove that coral belongs to the animal kingdom. This study relates experiments to three evolving frameworks of exploration: the trip, the expedition and the colonial mandate. It confronts observations at sea with experiments in the laboratory. The case shows that the production of knowledge on the natural history of the sea was a process in which experimentation received growing attention in the course of the eighteenth century, especially when chemistry intervened.