GOOD MICROSCOPICAL OBJECTS
3.3. The microscope in the arena of the court
The next episode that helped determine the microscope as a research tool occurred in the late 1720s and involved people from Holland, Spain and Mexico. A Dutchman, Melchior de Ruysscher had precisely the same argument which Leeuwenhoek had had previously with a friend regarding the nature of the cochineal. Ruysscher held that the cochineal was an insect and his friend claimed it to be a vegetable seed. The point of contention turned, from a bet, into a trial. Every possible means was employed to obtain proof for the truth, so as to appeal to the highest authorities. The disagreement reached Spain, which appointed someone as a representative in order to inquire as to whether the Mexican cochineal was of animal or vegetable nature, in front of notaries and other witnesses. As an outcome, three notarial certificates “made before judiciary”347 and vouched by eight persons employed in the handling of cochineal in new Spain, were sent to Europe. They testified that cochineal were living animals which walked and climbed, fed, had offspring, eyes, beaks and legs, and they also reported the methods of breeding and the timing of the three annual gatherings. Ruysscher’s paper ended by saying that the cochineal was neither a fruit nor a seed, but a mere insect that did not undergo metamorphosis.348 A notarial translation, supplied by standard guarantees, was provided and the whole was issued in a small bilingual pamphlet --in French and Dutch-- in Amsterdam and released in 1729 by Ruysscher. The microscope, brought to the trial, probably held a less important place within the juridical apparatus employed than in the whole demonstrative strategy. It actually complemented the formal
testimonies by providing an indispensable and very convincing set of iconographic
347 Ruysscher 1729, 7.
348 Ruysscher 1729, 21.
proofs that demonstrated with morphological evidence the animal nature of the
cochineal. Thus the microscope appeared in the court of law around 1728, probably for the very first time in its history. The episode of the moral extradition of cochineal marked the scholars of the time mostly for this reason and was remembered as such an event by several scholars, such as Johann Philip Breyn (1680-1764) and Réaumur, and by certain journalists who wrote in the Bibliothèque françoise in 1742: “in order to decide that question, there was a need not only for observations made through the microscope, but even to ask for juridical evidence”.349 The history did not escape the authors from Trévoux who reported similarly in 1739.350 Also in 1763 the champion of German microscopical research Martin Frobenius Ledermüller recalled what had been
349 Réaumur 1740 IV, 116; An. 1742a, 193.
350 An. 1739, 2507.
judiciously written by Réaumur: “This is perhaps the first case of the natural history
that had been examined by the way of law”.351 He provided an illuminated plate with magnified figures of cochineal and images of the Mexican gathering summing up the whole history (Fig. F).
As for microscopes, a consequence of this entomological trend was that the microscope was established as a reliable research tool, and followed a strict discipline of use with adapted objects, like insects. Such a strong requirement of suitability between the object and the microscope consequently led scholars to ignore earlier research of the
seventeenth-century, not because it had been particularly poorly done, but mainly because it was unsuited to being repeated by everyone. Leeuwenhoek and other microscopists of the seventeenth-century were not rejected from parts of the field of natural research because of the change in ideas, or because of the passage of time, or due to the fact that using the microscope did not exist any more. In the first half of the century scholars had to reconstruct their scientific object in accordance with the
potentiality of repetition offered by democratic microscope texts accessible to everyone, as opposed to the elitist microscope texts of which Leeuwenhoek remained a symbol.
Traditions existed that screened methods, observations, names and results, being judged as whether they belonged or not to it, in line with the scientific standards of the time.
And for many reasons, probably also because Leeuwenhoek’s work was representative of work done without consulting previous studies, the judgments of the tradition immediately afterwards turned out to exclude him. Indeed the book of Ruysscher was soon reviewed in Philosophical Transactions by the secretary W. Rutty, who concluded in 1730 that “the curious may be now assured of a thing which has been very uncertain for so many years, and indeed known but very superficially, even by those who have embraced the opinion, that the cochineals were really little animals”.352 Curiously enough Leeuwenhoek was not quoted on this occasion, though Martin Folkes had
351 Ledermüller 1764, 73: “Voilà bien peut-être le premier cas de l’histoire naturelle que l’on ait examiné par les voies du droit”. Réaumur 1740 IV, 116: “C’est peut-être la première fois qu’une question d’histoire naturelle a été traitée et décidée juridiquement”.
352 Rutty 1730, 268.
expressed the wish in 1723 that his work be carried on.353 Leeuwenhoek embodied a dramatic element of the status of microscopy at the beginning of the century, because ever since Hooke’s time only a few scholars were able to reproduce his observations,354 so that what was at stake with Leeuwenhoek was not the truth of his observation, but his good faith. Leeuwenhoek was in good faith, pro or contra, and this authoritarian conclusion obstructed any possible foundation of a scientific field.355
Ruysscher’s confirmation of a controversial idea debated in the universities, which had been accepted by certain people in the academies since the 1671 paper by Lister, signaled new research on the European cochineal, Coccus and Kermes. These organisms had been partly known because they sometimes seemed to straddle the border between the vegetable and animal kingdoms, an ambiguity resolved by Ruysscher, who eventually presented positive --and legal-- proofs of their animal nature.356 As a demonstration of the link between heuristic repetition and classificatory-morphological knowledge, once their animality had been well established, new research could then be carried out, and the typical entomological issues of the time
--parthenogenesis, metamorphosis, the cycle of life-- previously touched by several authors, came into focus. In 1731, the Danziger physician Johann Philip Breyn published in Latin his Natural History of the Coccus where he provided evidence showing the metamorphosis of the Polish species of coccus, which was also used to dye textiles. He described the metamorphic cycle in the female and made clear its method of
353 See chapter 3 on this topic.
354 For instance, an. 1703, C.H. 1703.
355 Folkes 1723, 452.
356 While Stafford (1997, 233-235) ascribed the emergence of ambiguous animals to Joblot’s 1718 book, later developed by John Ellis’ 1755-1786 works, (ibid. 1997, 239-250), Barsanti (1997, 68-70) considered ambiguity of organisms an issue that was awakened after Bonnet’s and Trembley’s discoveries of the 1740s. But investigation of ambiguous organisms --organisms for which animal or vegetable status was not clear-- especially made with the microscope, dates at least back to the end of the seventeenth-century. Ruysscher’s work treats but one among many other ambiguous organisms that were dealt with such as coral, mushrooms and “vegetable fly”, already discussed by Marsigli in 1711, 1725, and by Réaumur in 1726 (see Delaporte 1977, 52-55).
reproduction.357 The book diffused widely, being published also in the Nuremberg Acta
357 Breyn 1731, Middleton-Massey 1731, 218.
Physico-Medica, and reviewed in two important journals of Germany, the Acta Eruditorum and the Commercium litterarium released in Leipzig and Nuremberg, as well as in Philosophical Transactions of the same year.358 The book was followed during the next two years by amendments in the same journals, which supplied an accurate description of the metamorphic cycle of the coccus. As a matter of fact, the author had changed his mind about the Coccus being hermaphroditic.359 Indeed Breyn had observed the whole cycle of the coccus in both sexes over the course of a year, and had represented it in a table (Fig. G)360 which gave him the occasion to invalidate the hermaphrodite thesis he credited to Cestoni, with which he had agreed in the
beginning.361 In fact, Breyn had already exchanged some letters with Vallisneri since at least 1705.362 The Nuremberg Leopoldian Academy of the Curious of Nature took the opportunity of Breyn’s amendment to dedicate a full supplement of the journal, Acta Physico-Medica, to the issue, and on that occasion some of the most significant papers that had acknowledged the animality and cycle of Kermes and Coccus were published anew. 1711 Marsigli, 1714 Nissole, and 1714 Geoffroy papers were translated into Latin and edited with Breyn’s whole Natural History of Coccus. Breyn synthesised many traditions in his book: the botanical history of the Kermes, the Polish and German entomological traditions including Johann Leonard Frisch, the Monspelieran tradition, including Pierre Garidel and Nissole, the British works by Sloane on cochineal, the Italian works by Cestoni, Redi, Marsigli and Vallisneri, and the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences tradition of works by La Hire, Sedileau, and Geoffroy.
Following Vallisneri, Cestoni and many other authors,363 Breyn inserted thus the coccus into the large Latin natural history tradition that dated back to the Renaissance and to seventeenth-century authors. He definitively grouped several sorts of coccus and
358 Breyn 1733a, An. 1731a, An. 1731b, Middleton-Massey 1731.
359 Breyn 1733b, 1733c, 1733d.
360 Breyn 1732, 445-446; Breyn 1733b, 28.
361 Breyn 1732, 444.
362 Breyn 1705, 2052. See the letter from Vallisneri to Johann Jakob Scheuzer of the 22th March 1704 (Generali 1991, 264).
363 Breyn 1733a, 7-9, 20, 28.
the cochineal into a family. Characteristic of the series of botanists and entomologists cited by Breyn and by his reviewers,364 was the omission of Leeuwenhoek, made while quoting Ruysscher.365 Curiously, the elimination of Leeuwenhoek did not lead to any particular reaction in the Royal Society. The two reviews on the works by Ruysscher and Breyn, written by W. Rutty and a member of the College of Physicians, Richard Middleton-Massey, did not mention Leeuwenhoek, who in 1704 had been claiming both the existence of a metamorphosis and the absence of mating in the genus of insect, in Philosophical Transactions. Leeuwenhoek had not observed the cycle of
development and generation, but he had deduced from his microdissections of the insect and of the eggs, that there was a metamorphosis. On the contrary, Breyn had included the microscope within a long-term observation of the metamorphic cycle of the coccus, using a much more “ecological” approach. He even described the annual cycle of reproduction and development, bringing in the microscope at different steps for the description of the insect, the minute eggs and the small worms hatched from them.
In addition to the elitist microscope, several reasons could account for Leeuwenhoek’s omission from the tradition. Perhaps the Leeuwenhoekian microdissections did not satisfy the requirements of a demonstration in the field, and the discrepancy between the la Hire-Leeuwenhoek thesis of a trunk and the whole insect, helped to dismiss the theory. Such a small difference in the procedure was also part of the larger competition between methodological models, as was later acknowledged by Réaumur who wrote, concerning mating and parthenogenesis, that observations and similar methods were
“too light to establish an exception to a rule of such acknowledged generality”.366 Breyn’s model was closer to the Italian model of Redi and his school than to the Dutch model of the microdissection. The Redian model made inquiries which integrated the microscope and time categories, such as the cycle of life, the development of organisms
364 Breyn 1733a, 3; An. 1731a, 407 in Acta Eruditorum; Middleton-Massey 1731 in Philosophical Transactions.
365 An. 1731a, 408; Breyn 1733a, 21.
366 Réaumur 1742 VI, 525-526. See Baker 1952, 20.
and their generation. Also using the microscope, Redi and his pupils had systematically followed the hatching of many species of insects in the 1660s, beginning with the egg and going right up to the transformation into insect. Swammerdam and Merian who had used the same kind of method, dissection and close observation of metamorphosis, were also quoted by Breyn.367
As Bonnet would recall in his Treatise on Insectology,368 Breyn was in tune with the exigencies of the natural experimental tradition of which an important methodology was to follow things accurately, and, one could add, to refer to a previous tradition of entomological studies, skills of which Leeuwenhoek was considered inept. To be ignored can be worse than to be rejected, for in the latter case one still belongs to the story. Probably the main reasons for which Leeuwenhoek was discarded from this group of authors lie both in his being symbolic of non-repeatable microscope use, and in his lack of reference to the natural history tradition. Indeed, even someone like Cestoni, who published almost nothing under his own name, not only belonged to the story, but found a prominent place within it. As a matter of fact, publication was far from being the only recognisable means of influencing the scientific community. The world of microscopical research still provided the ideal milieu for this concealed type of activity --correspondence, tutoring and private collaboration-- and to procuring a
respectable place among other scholars. Such a way of proceeding --an imbalance between published work and visibility-- is not far from being paradigmatic of using the microscope in the eighteenth-century.369 Nevertheless, in the case of Cestoni, another reason explains his occult activity. He needed to be allied with physicians like Redi, Bonomo and Vallisneri, so as to include his publications in their works or under their name.370 This was notably because of the social perception of his own professional
367 Breyn 1733a, 3.
368 Bonnet 1745, 99-100.
369 A representative case in this respect is the discovery by Saussure of the division of infusoria, see chapter 8.4.
370 The works by Redi, Bonomo (1687), and Vallisneri (1733) contained each mention of Cestoni as the author of several discoveries.
status of apothecary, inadequate, in his eyes, for confronting the antispontaneist party made up of physicians, professors and religious men.371 Though a seventeenth-century Italian apothecary could not enter into public dialogue with physicians and professors, some of the important lines of research followed by eighteenth-century scholars formed however a development of Cestoni’s works.372 In this respect, we are lead to
acknowledge the importance of a social imprimatur of which the actors were the first to internalise the contents, and perhaps, this was also a norm of which Leeuwenhoek did not gauge the extent.373 Thus contrary to the tradition of the natural experimental
history to whom Redi, Cestoni, Vallisneri, Breyn and Réaumur belonged, Leeuwenhoek was rejected from this line of research, expelled from a process of cumulative
referencing, even by members of the main society to whom he had offered the best of his works.