WITH THE PAST
5.1. A model for scientific communication, the European spreading of the polyp and the “democratic microscope”
562 Broman (1994, 139, 144) has considered that the category of the Habermasian public sphere alone --with no scientific counterpart-- enables to answer “what has happened to make science so authoritative in modern culture”.
One of the main problems on the fringes of microscopical world, dealt with poorly during the seventeenth-century, was the live transport of microscopical animals. In the case of larger animals, living, dead or stuffed, the skills and methods used for their transport had been progressively improved from the time of the Renaissance.
Quadrupeds brought alive or dead from America, Africa and Asia were usually destined to adorn museums and zoological gardens, and seldom intended for physiological inquiry.563 But still, carrying dead animals, especially overseas, raised particular problems of conservation, including decay, and being gnawed and eaten. Dead objects were less problematic. In 1703, the French scholar Puget from Lyon sent the dried cornea of several insects to Father Lamy in Paris, to be observed with the
microscope.564 Actually even in the 1720s, the journey of small live organisms was not such an easy task. Edmund Barrel, Rector of Sutton in Kent, felt unable to pack the one and two year-old specimens of mistletoe he wanted to send to the Royal Society, and had to postpone it until the next year.565 Sometimes scholars managed to send live insects, like for instance Hans Sloane, who mentioned such a souvenir in 1733. He asked Leeuwenhoek to identify an “enbane” maggot, said to be useful for toothache, and forwarded “it wrapt in silk to Leeuwenhoek, at Delph in Holland, where it arrived safe and alive”.566 The dispatching of live aquatic creatures raised particular problems of another type, since they had to be conserved in their natural environment.
Furthermore, even catching such a creature could be a real problem, and scholars were dependent on seamen. In the seventeenth-century, rare were the scholars who, like the botanist of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Paolo Boccone, went on such marine
expeditions to catch coral.567 And, in the preface to Marsigli’s 1725 Histoire physique de la mer, Boerhaave explained that if someone wanted to catch living organisms from the sea, one should take the trouble to go to the coast, ask seamen to be taken out in
563 For a list of the physiological inquiries on digestion, see Salomon-Bayet 1978, 447-450.
564 Puget 1704, 66, 74.
565 Barrel 1727, 215.
566 Sloane 1733, 100.
567 Boccone (1674, 6, 39-40) traveled to the coast of Sicily in 1670 and of Holland in 1673.
their boats, or at least ask them to fish and bring in some of these creatures for further observation.568 After Boccone, Marsigli used a simple method for observing coral in its natural environment. Immediately after gathering it, he put it in a large glass jar filled with sea-water, placed the jar in a room at the same temperature he had measured in the sea, let it settle, and could thus quietly observe the coral undisturbed. Thanks to this forerunner of the aquarium, in December 1706 Marsigli observed, within half an hour, minute things coming out of the “branches”, attached to tiny holes, which he interpreted as being the flowers of the coral.569 After considering it a mineral, Boccone for
example, coral turned out now to be a vegetable.570 If this idea was strongly criticised and progressively abandoned all over Europe between 1742 and the 1780s, the
procedure of putting the coral or other marine specimens in sea-water out of the sea became a standard appearing and improved upon for every non ichthyological research in marine zoology afterwards.571 Of course scholars also continued to travel by
themselves in order to make observations --a journey that could take between two days and a week. In 1727 Jean-André Peyssonel (1694-1759), a collaborator of Marsigli’s, sent a paper to the Paris academy in which he claimed that the flowers of coral were actually small animals.572 Réaumur required evidence for the new thesis, which probably lead to one of the first attempts at transporting live coral over a long
distance:573 “specimens had been placed in vessels of sea-water and carried to him by men walking on foot the whole way from Marseilles to Paris (more than 500 miles).
The material naturally reached him in a decayed condition and he did not see the
568 Boerhaave, Preface, in Marsigli 1725, 4-6.
569 Marsigli 1707. Baker (1952, 118) located the establishment of Marsigli’s first “laboratory” of marine zoology in Cassis, south of Marseilles, in 1706. For a detailed account based on the manuscript report by Marsigli, see McConnell 1990, 57.
570 Anita McConnell (1990, 54-55) has established that, in 1706, Marsigli did not believe the coral was a mineral, an opinion advocated by the botanist Pierre Magnol (1638-1715).
571 When I speak of marine zoology in this chapter, it usually does not include ichthyology.
572 For a detailed account of Peyssonel’s discovery and his manuscript Traité du corail, see McConnell 1990, 63-65. A former collaborator to Marsigli, François-Xavier Bon (1678-1761) claimed priority over Peyssonel for the discovery of the animal nature of the coral, see McConnell 1990, 59-61.
573 Réaumur 1729, 270-271. Réaumur presented his mémoire the 9th of August 1727 (PV AS 1727, t. 46, f° 280-287v) but Peyssonel was not quoted in it. Peyssonel corresponded with the Academy for other kind of observations, such as astronomical (PV AS 1727, t. f° 5).
polyps”.574 As a consequence, Réaumur could not reproduce Peyssonel’s observation and strongly opposed the publication of the latter’s paper in the Mémoires de
l’Académie. In the middle of the century, the controversy was common knowledge, as revealed by a report of John Ellis’ 1755 Natural history of the corallines in which the author of Journal étranger reckoned the difficulty in observing coral in its natural condition to be among the causes of the coral quarrel: “As these productions are very delicate, and the polyps wrinkle as soon as they are exposed to the air, it was not a small effort to find them in their natural condition, in order to examine them with the
microscope; which is, perhaps, partly the cause why there have been so much dispute about their true nature”.575
In such a context where almost everything had to be created from scratch for transporting living creatures, Abraham Trembley played an important role as he succeeded in preparing travelling microscopic animals whose “marvelous properties”
could hence be communicated to everyone regardless of the distance. Trembley was asked about the method for sending the live unknown creatures he had found in late 1740 by Réaumur, who requested the former to forward him the beings in a letter dated 15 January 1741: “if you were to have enough of these small bodies to deprive you of several of them, it would perhaps not be impossible for you to enable me to see them, by sending them in a very small bottle filled with water, through the post”.576 Trembley sent the first parcel with fifty polyps on the 16th of February. On the 27th, Réaumur received the bottle with the dead polyps, and suggested that the Spanish wax used to cork the bottle had deprived the organisms of any air and proposed to use just a cork.
Meanwhile he asked for Trembley’s permission to read his letter that consisted of the description of the first experiments on the polyp’s regeneration. Réaumur read it before the Académie des sciences in the course of three meetings, on the 1st, 8th and 22th of
574 Baker 1952, 119.
575 An. 1755b, 75.
576 Réaumur to Trembley, the 15th of January 1741 (CRT 1943, 17). For details of the scientific contents of the letters of this period, see Dawson 1987, 100-110.
March 1741.577 On the 16th of March, Trembley sent anew twenty polyps to Réaumur, in a larger bottle. In order to secure his packaging, Trembley had conducted
experiments on the bottle itself, by putting three polyps inside the real bottle and took them for a walk of seven leagues (25 miles).578 After having completed the
“experimental trip”, the polyps seemed fine, and Trembley could thus send them for the real journey to Paris that lasted between four and seven days. About a week later
Réaumur received the creatures alive, and that very evening repeated the experiments carefully described by Trembley. Either in the meeting of the 22nd, or between the 22nd and the 25th of March, Réaumur demonstrated the polyp to the “entire
academy”579 and, with it, to “the court and the city”.580 Spectacle, and experiment --with naturalia-- were thus combined a few years before the well-known experiments on the Leyden jar by the Abbé Nollet.581 On the 25th, having consulted Bernard de
Jussieu, who already knew a similar red species, Réaumur was able to place them in the animal kingdom and give them the definite name of Polyp. New packages of polyps by Trembley from The Hague to Paris carried on until 1743.582 During that time, Trembley continued to improve some of his procedures and to invent new experiments, on the hydra with seven heads, the swallowing of a polyp by another polyp, the graft of two different half polyps, and the turning inside out the polyp,583 an experiment he started attempting in July 1741, eventually succeeding in autumn 1742.584
The episode of the French academic demonstration was to be repeated in England two years later. Although Martin Folkes, P.R.S. had been privately informed about the existence of the polyp by Buffon in July 1741, and although Bentinck and Gronovius,
577 PV AS 1741, t. 60, fol. 76, 80, 88.
578 CRT 1943, 50-53.
579 CRT 1943, 64.
580 Fontenelle 1744, 35.
581 On Nollet’s spectacular experiments, see Licoppe 1996, 163-166.
582 The 6th of April 1741, Trembley sent anew twenty polyps to Réaumur. A new batch of polyps failed one year later (June 1742), they arrived dead (CRT 1943, 132). On the next year, the sending of the 8th of August 1743 was successful (Ibid., 174).
583 See Lenhoff 1986, 14, 20; on turning the polyp, see Dawson 1987, 122-127.
584 See the letter to Réaumur of the 1st of November 1742 (CRT 1943, 134-135).
who were sent polyps in 1742, had published on the subject two small papers in Philosophical Transactions, the issue was left largely untouched in England until March 1743. All the same, standard criticisms, jokes and pungent irony were already inspired by these animals “which, being cut into several pieces, become so many perfect animals”,585 especially from certain poets in Cambridge. Imagine a fish cut...
Through the channel of Bentinck, Trembley sent Folkes, at his request, polyps which he received the 10th of March 1743, and the following day he demonstrated “before the lens and the microscope” the polyps at his home in front of twenty Fellows of the Royal Society. During this time he began performing the experiments on regeneration
indicated by Trembley’s instructions. At the meeting of the 17th of March, Folkes exhibited the regenerating polyps, and more than 150 people saw them.586 Two years after Réaumur’s demonstration in Paris, on the 24th of March 1743, along with Baker, Parsons, and an “optician” --probably Cuff-- who brought “a good microscope”, Folkes again demonstrated the regeneration of the polyps before an astonished public. In March 1743 Bonnet issued a 20 page account of his experiments on the regeneration of water worms, rapidly published in Philosophical Transactions, which had the effect of increasing the sense of wonderment, if possible, and the same year other fellows vouched for the budding and regeneration of polyps, including Bentinck, Richmond, Baker and Thomas Lord.
Folkes’ report of the March meeting to Trembley mentioned that the “unbelievers” --in French les incrédules-- were silenced, and no one ventured any more to joke about the
“marvelous animal”. Indeed, among the main reasons set forth by Réaumur, Trembley, Folkes, Gronovius and Bentinck to experiment on live polyps --which legitimated the shipments-- the issue of the unbelievers emerged several times. Réaumur wrote a few pages on the polyp in the preface to the sixth volume of his 1742 Histoire des insectes, in order to “have a ready answer to the questions from the unbelievers, which I am
585 This passage is taken from the title of Gronovius 1742.
586 CRT 1943, 166.
bombarded with”.587 In March 1743, Folkes was deeply astonished to see how the unbelievers’ protests were cancelled out by the demonstrations, and Trembley saw both Réaumur’s and Folkes’ notes on the polyp as the best “credentials” to be heard from the naturalists, and as the strongest evidence to which to refer for the unbelievers.588 In Leyden, in particular, many people did not give credence to the budding and
reproduction of the polyp after it was cut. The summer of 1742 actually marked the beginning of the systematic “strategy of generosity” adopted by Trembley, who started giving and dispatching polyps and correlative instructions to everyone who asked him for the animals in order to repeat his observations. Sending live polyps was by then understood as a good way to silence the unbelievers. In Leyden, the doubters or skeptics had been defeated by the experiments carried out in 1742 by Albinus, Musschenbroek and a Genevan friend of Trembley, Jean Nicolas Sébastien Allamand, and reported by Johann Friedrich Gronovius in Philosophical Transactions.589 Still in 1744, Albinus, and Gaub, who had succeeded Haller’s professorship in Leyden, were solicited as witnesses for a repetition of some of Trembley’s experiments. It is worth noting that there are two kinds of unbelievers, which can be distinguished as skeptics and
unbelievers. Historically speaking, the first were those whom the polyp awakened, and whose skepticism exclusively concerned the truth of certain scientific facts, which can be viewed as skeptics. Like many other scholars who experimented on regenerating creatures, Ginanni and Ellis also wanted to “convince the unbelievers” of the truthfulness of their facts.590 No particular antimaterialistic or metaphysical
assumptions was involved in the method --experiments and observations-- used by scholars to establish the phenomena. The first skeptics did not claim particularly materialistic sympathies, but they largely did not believe that an animal could regenerate when cut, or that coral could be an animal. These skeptics were simply
587 Réaumur to Trembley, the 25 June 1742 (CRT 1943, 130).
588 Trembley to Réaumur, the 11th of January 1743 (CRT 1943, 153). Trembley to Folkes the 31st of May 1743 (Royal Society, Ms Folkes, Vol. IV, letters 17, 34).
589 Gronovius 1742, 218. On the Leyden scholars, see Dawson 1987, 124.
590 Ginanni 1747, 255; Ellis 1755, xiv.
skeptics, but perhaps, by these days, this word too much recalled Pierre Bayle’s
relativism, and the words “unbelievers” and incrédules were free for usage. The second type of unbelievers which appeared during the late 1740s stemmed mainly from the French materialist or antireligious scholars and philosophers. Aram Vartanian has shown that the debate over the material soul was carried out through clandestine
literature in France and Holland in the 1740s.591 Proposing materialistic explanations of life and soul, with plastic and vital forces, spontaneist issues, random combinations of atoms, and theories of heredity, certain scholars and philosophers --La Mettrie,
Maupertuis, Diderot-- resuscitated something of the old democritean tradition, and made particular use of the polyp and of Needham’s spontaneist claims to ground their theses.592 Among them, the materialist or antireligious unbelievers of the 1760s-1770s which Needham and Bonnet focused on had nothing to do with the first skeptics.593 Still similar words were used to deisng them , as shown by the experiments Spallanzani carried out on the regeneration of the head of the snail.594 Between 1768 and 1772, the whole of Europe was divided into two camps each of which had performed thousands of experiments on snails in order to decide whether regeneration of the head occurred or not. And the scholars whose experiments were not successful were described as
skeptics or unbelievers by the other party.
Another consequence of Trembley’s strategy of generosity was that, within a few years, models based on the journey of the polyp were put into general use throughout Europe, and extended to other microscopic animalcules. Being reserved for specialists such as
591 Vartanian (1960, 68-74) has highlighted this debate in the materialistic works of Saint-Hyacinthe’s Recherches philosophiques (1744), Jacques Perretti’s Lettre philosophique sur les physionomies (1746), La Mettrie’s L’homme Machine (1747) and other anonymous writings.
592 Maupertuis 1745, 84-87, 102-105; La Mettrie 1748, Buffon 1749, Diderot 1753, Helvetius 1755, d’Holbach 1770. On the relation of materialism with the polyp, see Dawson 1994, 84-85 and Vartanian 1950, 253.
593 On these unbelievers, see M&R 1986, 62-76.
594 On the debate, and particularly on Spallanzani and Lavoisier correspondance related to regeneration, see Beretta 2000.
Réaumur and his circle of disciples up until 1742,595 the shipping of live creatures became the standard from 1743 onwards. The method was soon adopted by the
naturalists in England. On the 2nd of March 1743 Folkes received polyps from a fellow who lived in the countryside, and on the 8th of June, he received cut worms. Henry Baker, likewise, asked for microscopic creatures from his countrymen and received, on the 10th of March 1743, a new live animalcule in a bottle from one of his British correspondents the Reverend Henry Miles.596 Baker was to frequently acknowledge the receipt of other parcels from numerous correspondents in the same decade. Aside from Count Bentinck, --one of Trembley’s mentors-- Gronovius and Lieberkhun in Berlin, many other unknown scholars received polyps from Trembley,597 who wrote to Folkes in July 1743, “I am entirely taken up with dispatching polyps to a place or another”.598 On the 28th of September Needham sent mildew to Folkes, who had himself distributed the animals to a large number of people, notably to Baker and Parsons, and complained already in April 1743 about lacking polyps, having handed out almost all his specimens.
To fill up his jars, Trembley once more forwarded him, in June, a species of polyps different from the first. The 14th of November Folkes passed on polyps and the inevitable instructions to the mathematician Mac Laurin in Edinburgh for the
demonstration of regeneration in Scotland. One year later, in October 1744, polyps still travelled across England, addressed from Norwich to Folkes. Although these are only a few hints that manifest the existence of this practice, the parcels themselves constituted a veritable relay race that continuously expanded and provided a standard method for the exchange of minute and aquatic creatures to be observed through the microscope.
Particularly in the case of Britain, the data allowed important corrections to be made to two distorted interpretations of the polyp’s fate in England by Gerard Turner and Brian
595 In addition to the shipment of Trembley, Bonnet also sent Réaumur many insects and worms, dead and alive, and notably his regenerating worms in February 1742 (BPU: Ms Bo 42 f° 35, Letter of Réaumur to Bonnet of the 28 February 1742).
596 Miles 1742, 418.
597 Gronovius received the polyps during the Summer of 1742, and Lieberkhun received them in May or June 1743.
598 Trembley to Folkes, the 16th July 1743 (Royal Society, Ms Folkes, vol. IV, letter 66).
Ford. First the above data rectify Turner’s description of the reception of the polyp by the British “in 1742”. Apart from public rumor and joke on the polyp, virtually nothing took place in London in 1742, because the polyps were not received in England before the successful shipment of March 1743 by Trembley. In addition, Turner neglected the crucial point, by mentioning neither that the polyps nor the instructions had been sent to Folkes, the event that actually enabled the Royal Society to repeat the experiments.599 Contrary to what was implied by Turner and stated by Brian Ford, Henry Baker did not by any stretch of the imagination invent the experiments on the polyp by himself. How
Ford. First the above data rectify Turner’s description of the reception of the polyp by the British “in 1742”. Apart from public rumor and joke on the polyp, virtually nothing took place in London in 1742, because the polyps were not received in England before the successful shipment of March 1743 by Trembley. In addition, Turner neglected the crucial point, by mentioning neither that the polyps nor the instructions had been sent to Folkes, the event that actually enabled the Royal Society to repeat the experiments.599 Contrary to what was implied by Turner and stated by Brian Ford, Henry Baker did not by any stretch of the imagination invent the experiments on the polyp by himself. How