Horst Bredekamp. Darwins Korallen: Die frühen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition derNaturgeschichte .Darwins Korallen: Die frühen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition der Naturgeschichte byHorst BredekampReview by: By Marsha RichmondIsis, Vol. 100, No. 4 (December 2009), pp. 917-918Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/652066 .

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public but also a very significant behind-the-scenes role in promoting the distinctive institu-tion, shaping an ambitious plan that made hiseffort a lightning rod during debates about sci-entific schools and polytechnic institutions.

The son of a professor, Rogers spent his lifethinking about education. After a stint as direc-tor of his own school and giving public lecturesin Baltimore, Rogers returned to William andMary College, from which he had graduated, asa faculty member in 1828. Keenly interested inthe issue of curriculum and seeking to ensurethat students could study science, he was hiredto teach natural philosophy and to help establisha School of Engineering at the University ofVirginia in 1835. Over the next decade, andwhile leading the state geological survey, Rog-ers remained actively involved in both shapingthe practical arts curriculum at Virginia and dis-cussing developments elsewhere in the UnitedStates and in Europe.

Angulo argues that Rogers was able to buildMIT because he so effectively articulated theimportance of bridging theory and practice.Contemporaries like Joseph Henry shared thisoutlook, but the problem was how to establishand integrate them in higher education. Posi-tioned between polytechnic schools like WestPoint and Rensselaer and the new scientificschools at Harvard (Lawrence) and Yale (Shef-field), MIT represented a fresh effort to integratepractical training with more abstract concepts,primarily by utilizing well-equipped laborato-ries for students rather than relying on demon-strations. According to Angulo, Rogers was ableto implement his plans, presented informally inletters and more formally in published state-ments, because MIT, not already captured byestablished tradition or an overseer university,gave Rogers and his colleagues the freedom toexperiment.

Challenges came from those battling to main-tain the classic collegiate curriculum as well asfrom an emerging group who argued for “purescience” in higher education. Nonetheless, MITtried various programs, including evening lec-ture courses as well as a standard day curricu-lum with laboratory work. Some of the womenwho had attended the evening classes, includingEllen Swallow Richards, asked for permissionto take day classes. The result was a separateWomen’s Laboratory. While this was admit-tedly a backdoor entry for women, Richardscommented, “The only separation of the sexes isin the lab work. I believe no other scientificschool in the world can say as much” (p. 142).Rogers showed a decidedly democratic outlook,actively recruiting promising students from the

laboring classes to attend the regular programwith sponsorship from local philanthropists.

This same outlook was evident in his deliberateyet remarkably careful challenges to the more con-servative members of the AAAS and the NAS,men often identified with the self-defined Lazz-aroni. His standards were high, but he defied elitisttendencies to limit membership in the AAAS ar-bitrarily and to establish lifelong offices in theNAS. Fiercely determined in these circumstances,he typically prepared thoroughly and presented hisopinion and documentation calmly. His astute ac-tions and professional demeanor advanced his owncareer and the institutions he represented. Whenpromoting the geological survey in Virginia, forexample, he was careful to address the agriculturalinterests of planters by doing soil analyses andresearch on the effect of marl on the exhaustedfarmlands, even as he investigated mineral andother deposits more attuned to mining and indus-trial interests. Rogers exercised similar interper-sonal skills in working with local philanthropistsas well as politicians to gain basic support andfunding for MIT, including the acquisition of landin Back Bay and a third of Massachusetts’s fundsfrom the Morrill Land Grant Act for state univer-sities. A serious stroke and other ill health limitedhis two stints as president of the institute, but hecontinued to host visitors in his home and workedindirectly through his MIT successors, John D.Runkle and Francis Amasa Walker, as they movedhis ideas forward and successfully fended off take-over plans by Harvard.

There is little here on Rogers’s family life,including his close relationship with his threebrothers who also had careers in science andmedicine, but Angulo’s detailed attention to thepersistent yet flexible “idea of MIT” is a signif-icant contribution. Well documented, this fo-cused account of William Barton Rogers indi-cates how science and the practical arts wereintentionally integrated into higher education inthe middle years of the nineteenth century.

SALLY GREGORY KOHLSTEDT

Horst Bredekamp. Darwins Korallen: Die fru-hen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition derNaturgeschichte. 112 pp., figs. Second edition.Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2006. €18.50 (paper).

Darwin mania is in full force this year, as wecelebrate the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth andthe 150th anniversary of the publication of Or-igin of Species. In addition to numerous world-wide festivities marking this occasion (dwarfingthe celebrations of 1909), many books are ap-pearing that focus on various aspects of Dar-

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 4 (2009) 917

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win’s biography or scientific work. It was pub-lished several years ago, but Darwins Korallen:Die fruhen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tra-dition der Naturgeschichte should not be over-looked among this new literature. Although aslight book—only seventy-nine pages of text,accompanied by numerous illustrations—Dar-wins Korallen nonetheless conveys a significantand notable message: that the diagrams andother forms of pictorial visualization accompa-nying scientific works convey critical aspects ofa scientist’s conceptualization of nature thatcannot be expressed in text. While this may notbe a novel idea, it is nonetheless a welcomereminder, particularly as we revisit Darwin’stheory of evolution and contributions to naturalhistory.

Horst Bredekamp, a professor of art history atHumboldt University in Berlin, presents thisthesis on the basis of a thorough and thought-fully nuanced critique of Darwin’s changing vi-sual representation of species transmutation. Hebegins with an analysis of Darwin’s iconic 1837“tree of life” diagram as it appeared in NotebookB and then traces variations introduced in sub-sequent pictorial representations of evolutionarychange, including various sketches and jottingsdating from the 1840s and early 1850s that arepreserved in the Darwin archive at CambridgeUniversity Library. The extreme attention to de-tail that characterizes Bredekamp’s methodol-ogy can be seen in the careful analysis he pro-vides of the schematic diagram of evolutionintended for Darwin’s original “big book” onspecies (written between 1856 and 1858 andsubsequently published by Robert Stauffer in1975 under the title Natural Selection). He me-ticulously compares the draft with the printedversion, noting the different “layers” of meaningimparted by Darwin’s use of pen, pencil, andfeather (used to fan out the series of dotted linesmeant to present symbolically different genera-tions of species) to suggest how natural selectioncan lead to species diverging with modificationfrom an original progenitor or, alternatively, be-coming extinct. Bredekamp cites Darwin’s in-structions to the compositor, for example, to illus-trate how important the precise structure of thisdiagram was for Darwin. Even more interestingwere the substantive revisions Darwin made to thisfigure prior to publishing the “Abstract” of hisviews in Origin of Species, only two years later.Again, Darwin’s deep thinking about how to con-vey a visual conception of the process of evolutionby natural selection clearly emerges.

But, as suggested by the book’s title, the au-thor’s intentions are not simply to draw attentionto Darwin’s use of diagrams and the artistic

conventions that reveal his conceptual imagina-tion. Rather, Bredekamp confronts the referenceto such diagrams as representing a tree of life.He argues that it is more accurate, both histor-ically and conceptually, to reference the coralsas their model. Not only was Darwin thoroughlyfamiliar with corals and coralline algae—havingcollected, sketched, and classified them onboard the Beagle and written a book on theformation of coral reefs—but, more important,he must have recognized that the form of coralsprovides an appropriate visual representation ofhis evolutionary theory based on selection.Their branching illustrates divergence whileavoiding a notion of hierarchy, while living an-imals building on a foundation of dead and cal-cified individuals more accurately depict the ex-tinction at the base of evolutionary lines. Ofcourse, such speculation must remain purely sug-gestive, even when bolstered by the author’s eru-dite and evocative exposition of the long and well-established aesthetic conventions that drew on thecoral to depict change and transformation. None-theless, this book is intriguing and instructive, awelcome complement to other recent works, mostnotably Jonathan Smith’s Darwin and VictorianVisual Culture (Cambridge, 2006), that seek toheighten our awareness of the role visual represen-tation played in Darwin’s writings.

MARSHA RICHMOND

Victoria Carroll. Science and Eccentricity:Collecting, Writing, and Performing Science forEarly Nineteenth-Century Audiences. (Scienceand Culture in the Nineteenth Century, 4.) x �254 pp., illus., bibl., index. London: Pickering &Chatto, 2008. $99 (cloth).

Victoria Carroll’s book takes a broad descriptivecategory—eccentricity—and subjects it to rig-orous historical and theoretical analysis. Herstarting question is straightforward and notable,particularly, for not having yet been asked byhistorians of Victorian science. Why, she wantsto know, was eccentricity established in theearly nineteenth century, and what can the studyof this category tell us about the ways in whichmodern ideas of science were defined? Carroll’squestion rests on the assertion, clearly made atthe outset of the work, that eccentricity is ahistorically and culturally specific phenomenonand one for which science is a specific focus.She argues that the emergence of the modernprofessional scientist is historically linked toscientific practitioners who were explicitly la-beled (by others) as eccentric. Through the studyof eccentricity, which she explores through case

918 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 4 (2009)

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