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Voyaging and the Scientific Expedition Report, 1800–1940
- University of Wisconsin Press
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65 Voyaging and the Scientific Expedition Report, 1800–1940 lynnk.ny hart From June to November 1889, the German steamer National traversed some sixteen thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean in a gigantic figure eight, carrying along with its sailing crew a team of six scientists and an artist (see figure 9). Their object was to collect samples of plankton—the tiny organisms that float in the sea and serve as the ultimate food source for most marine creatures—to determine their vertical and horizontal distribution. Led by the Kiel physiologist Victor Hensen, the Plankton Expedition used novel physical and mathematical sampling methods to study the geographical distribution of a new scientific object, the collectivity of floating forms that Hensen had dubbed “plankton.” The information gleaned would not only provide new information and insights about life in the ocean but also promised help for the ailing German fisheries industry. If scientists could determine where the plankton were, perhaps they could reliably locate fish as well. With these goals in view, the German government and the various foundations it controlled devoted more funds to this project than had been given to any previous biological study in Germany’s history as a unified nation.1 To the extent that the history of the Plankton Expedition has been told, it has usually emphasized the controversies over Hensen’s self-consciously modern, statistical approach, especially its contrast to the qualitative taxonomic approach of the famous evolutionary morphologist Ernst Haeckel, a specialist in a number of planktonic groups, who bitterly opposed Hensen’s enterprise and the funds poured into it. Virtually all the attention given to the publications Figure 9. Route of the German Plankton Expedition in the Atlantic Ocean, 1889. From Otto Krümmel, Reisebeschreibung der Plankton-Expedition, vol. 1A (1892), plate 1. (Courtesy University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries) [18.117.182.179] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:31 GMT) Voyaging and the Scientific Expedition Report, 1800–1940 67 resulting from the Plankton Expedition has focused on the methodological volume Hensen produced, which became the programmatic foundation for several decades of quantitative plankton studies. But the Plankton Expedition project was much more than simply an expression of Hensen’s vision. In fact, the project came to involve thirty-six scientist-authors, ranging from neophytes to prominent zoologists, who produced more than five dozen separate reports under the title Results of the Plankton Expedition of the Humboldt Foundation. These Results appeared serially over the course of twenty-one years, from 1892 to 1913 (with two laggard reports extending the final publication date to 1926). It was thus a collective project of considerable magnitude and duration, one that spilled over beyond Hensen’s own ambitions.2 I propose to consider the Results from a new perspective, looking beyond the intellectual particularities of Hensen’s program to the larger culture of biological knowledge and print production of which it was a part. I argue that multiauthored, serially produced expedition reports such as the Results constituted a particular print genre that embodied a prominent form of science in the nineteenth century. What made these reports not merely printed products but significant for our concept of a “print culture” in science is that their production became an integral part of an entire social system of scientific work. Moreover , as this chapter shows, that system evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, shifting in content and growing dramatically in scale. Maintaining the commitment to publish, I would suggest, was in fact what made these projects successful and important as science. (Conversely, the lack of a strong commitment to publish following many voyages often resulted in the collected specimens languishing in boxes for years without ever being analyzed.)3 The serial trickling out of results, increasingly over decades, meant that the questions asked by the initiators of these projects, and their modes of answering them, were repeatedly placed before the zoological community, thereby shaping the ongoing intellectual substance of zoological science. An understanding of the ways in which scientific knowledge production was enmeshed with the production of the serial expedition report thus deepens our understanding of the character of science in the period. The history of science and the history of print culture have recently enjoyed considerable mutual support, especially with the growth of interest in the history of popular science in nineteenth-century Britain. James Secord’s well-known Victorian Sensation, which focused especially on the range of readers for one popular science work, the 1844 Vestiges...