Commentarius de formatione cordis in ovo incubato (review)

Albrecht von Haller. Commentarius de formatione cordis in ovo incubato. Annotated edition by Maria Teresa Monti. Studia Halleriana, no. 6. Basel: Schwabe, 2000. clxxvii + 677 pp., with accompanying CD-ROM. Ill. FF 98.00; DM 118.00; öS 860.00; E 59.00 (3-7965-1324-7).

Previous volumes in Studia Halleriana were devoted to Haller's correspondence and to the Paris diary by his friend Johann Gessner. The volume under review is the first in the series devoted to Haller's own works, and the first issued in both a handsomely bound volume and a CD-ROM. Haller's published works on generation--notably Sur la formation du coeur dans le poulet; sur l'oeil; sur la structure du jaune etc. (1758) and Commentarius de formatione cordis in ovo incubato, in Opera Minora, vol. 2 (1676)--represent a small portion of the extant material on the subject. This material, including a large and extremely detailed body of manuscripts preserved at the Burgerbibliothek in Bern, has now been thoroughly studied and transcribed for this edition.

Traditionally, detailed critical editions of laboratory notes and manuscripts provide historians with valuable tools for investigating their subjects' day-to-day research. In this case the extensive manuscripts left by Haller are of exceptional interest in that they document with remarkable detail his shifting support from epigenesis to preexistence. From his laboratory notes and drafts we can now reconstruct in most cases the time and nature of Haller's observations, some of the techniques he employed, the doubts and problems he encountered, and the literature he was regularly consulting and criticizing.

The extensive introduction by Maria Teresa Monti provides an indispensable background for studying Haller's manuscripts. Published both in the original Italian and in English translation, the introduction covers a number of themes, bringing together Haller's notes with his many publications touching on generation, his correspondence, and his debates with contemporaries. I found Monti's style challenging but rewarding, and regret that extensive and numerous passages in French and Latin have been left untranslated.

There are several interesting features of Haller's research on generation. As Monti ably elucidates, it is possible to detect a tension among eighteenth-century scholars between their detailed investigations and their broader philosophical affiliations with epigenesis or preexistence--a tension that emerges especially from Haller's correspondence with Charles Bonnet at Geneva and in the exchanges with Caspar Friedrich Wolff at Berlin. Another important aspect of his research concerns the problematic links between the visibility of minute parts and investigative techniques: Haller relied on microscopy, insufflation, and chemical substances, such as alcohol and vinegar, and at times some of his techniques, notably treatment with vinegar and alcohol in order to make opaque structures visible and to preserve his samples, contributed to creating artifacts rather than revealing minute parts, as Wolff had already suspected at the time. Lastly, terminology and iconography emerge as crucial aspects of Haller's work. As Monti emphasizes and the texts amply show, Haller paid considerable attention to these issues and struggled toward the creation of an effective and unequivocal terminology. The CD-ROM version allows readers to enlarge to some extent the many small illustrations reproduced from the manuscripts and to search for specific terms and notions.

"Painstaking" is the first word that springs to mind in describing Monti's editorial work. Her care and attention to detail shine forth from the more than six hundred pages of this heavily annotated critical edition. She has created three sets of annotations: the first contains the notes written by Haller himself; the second relates to the establishment of the text and deals with variants and marginalia; and the third set provides references to relevant primary and secondary literature, biographical and bibliographical data on the authors cited, and assessment of the intellectual significance of the texts. The editor deserves to be congratulated for having brought this major work...